Charlie are the above facts cited by you part of the court testimony?
Meredith had a dessert of apple crumble midway through watching the movie (after the dinner meal of pizza). How would this affect the time of death?
The stomach is actually a very clever and advanced organ. It churns the food up, mixing it with stomach acids and enzymes to break everything down into a thick liquid called chyme. The stomach is capable of manipulating food products which are at different levels of primary digestion, making it able to cope with a "grazing" ingestion as well as large "meal"-type feeding.
So, in answer to your question, the mid-movie dessert of apple crumble would have made pretty much no difference to the way in which the pizza would have been treated in the stomach. The stomach would have recognised the additional food intake, and would have released additional acid/enzymes to break down this new food. But the breaking down of the pizza would have continued at the same rate. As soon as the pizza was converted into chyme, the stomach would have recognised this, and it would have passed the chyme down through the duodenum (the very first part of the small intestine), then into the small intestine proper.
But what we appear to know of the autopsy report is that there were still recognisable pieces of the constituents of the pizza in Meredith's stomach, and that there was no chyme matter in the duodenum or the top of the main small intestine. This therefore implies that a) the stomach acid/enzymes had not yet broken down the pizza fully into uniform unrecognisable chyme, and b) none of the chyme from the pizza meal had yet passed out of the stomach into the duodenum.
And this in turn implies that Meredith's time of death was within 3 hours (maximum) of her eating the pizza meal - regardless of the apple crumble she may have eaten mid-movie. Since the other girls testified that Meredith ate the pizza at around 6pm, and we know that Meredith was still alive just before 9pm, this implies a time of death at around 9pm (or 9.30pm at the very latest).
My current thinking is actually that Meredith was killed very shortly after the aborted phone call to her parents in the UK, which took place just before 9pm. I think that Meredith may have arrived home (with her phone still linked to a base station that she had passed on her route home), and called her parents as she was going into her room. I think she may have intended to have a leisurely chat with them from her bedroom, before doing a little work and getting an early night. I think that either she may have terminated the call herself because she heard/saw someone in the house, or the assailant may have forced the termination of the call. I think that the attack may have ensued quickly, meaning that Meredith was dead by 9.05-9.10pm.
And, of course, this theory implies that someone was already inside the house when Meredith arrived home. I think that this someone may have been Rudy Guede, who I think may have been in the large bathroom when Meredith arrived home. I think Guede may have tried unsuccessfully to leave quietly via the front door (unsuccessfully since Meredith would have locked the door behind her with her key after entering the house). I think that the confrontation between Guede and Meredith may have occurred as a result of Guede being unable to leave the house silently. Once Meredith saw and identified Guede, I think his demeanour would have changed. He now had a witness who could identify him, whose keys he wanted, and whom he was sexually attracted to......
