Maybe we should rename both camps from PIP and PGP to the Pro-duodenum- and Anti-duodenum camps respectively.
I think that's what all the arguments about all the evidence "speculative to factual" rest on. At least here in the JREF anyway.
If you trust the duodenum conclusions, all the other guilty stuff is irrelevant. If you think you've explained away the duodenum evidence, then the totality of all the other evidence immediately has more weight.
It's a hell of a conundrum. How do you break through that kind of wall?
What kind of evidence needs to be out there to prove that the duodenum conclusions overides everything else? Is there any place out there that keeps records on this sort of thing? And where do you even start?
Where do you start? That's what I'm going to be doing the rest of today, thinking about that. Any advice would be most welcomed,
It's not a question of overriding everything else. There really isn't much else. It's a question of the duodenal contents being in accordance with pretty much everything else that tells us about time of death.
Meredith didn't phone her Mum. She didn't take her jacket or her shoes off. She didn't use her computer that we know of. There is nothing in the cottage that speaks to her having been alive and doing stuff in there for any period at all after she returned.
Rudy said she screamed at about 9.20, and while Rudy is a lying murdering scumbag, he is likely to have said that because he suspected the scream might have been heard. He is the only one who knows when she died, but unless he is an idiot (as well as a lying murdering scumbag) he will know that forensics can usually gauge time of death. So he would want to make his story fit the facts he thought could be proven.
I don't know what we'd do if we had some conclusive proof that Meredith was still alive at 11.30. I mean, it's insane. There's no way on earth that meal could still have been in her stomach then, especially not with recognisable bits of pizza and crumble. And if we had to assume that she are a second, identical meal just after she arrived home (really??), then where's the first one? Her jejunum was almost empty, but the first meal should have been there.
But we have no solid evidence she was alive then. The scream and the running footsteps are nothing. We don't have to find some crazy way either physiology or the progression of time itself are wrong.
The question may be, how late could we place the murder, given the digestive findings. I'd say about 9.30, though others have argued for ten. But then you run into other things.
The broken down car shows the murder must have taken place before 10.15 - is that the time the break-down happened? Because the people with the car saw nothing, and Meredith was certainly not alive by the time the car was towed away.
The 10.15 connection of her phone to a different tower is extremely strong evidence the murderer (Rudy) was already out of the house with the phone in his possession. The "fiddling with the phone" calls to Abbey were almost certainly made by Rudy trying to turn it off. This lot argues for an earlier time of death, rather than the 9.45 to 10.15 some people have been speculating about. Meredith was idly playing with her phone at ten, but the whole murder and its aftermath were over by 10.15? I don't think so.
So where is the positive evidence we have to deal with that's so strong we
must conclude that Meredith was alive, lounging quietly on her bed doing nothing in particular until after the break-down truck pulled away, and then was murdered later? There's nothing. Just nothing.
The problem is that the cops didn't wait to figure this out before they pulled in Amanda because they didn't like her attitude, and then they preferred to fit her up to save face over a quick acknowledgement that they'd been a bit hasty.
Rolfe.
