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I've recounted this personal story very briefly before, but it is uppermost in my mind when considering the Witness Statements in the JtR case.
Do YOU have any stories like this to recount ?
The first story concerns my two stepdaughters who went on holiday to Poland, where they stayed in a Youth Hostel:
They went out one evening to a bar and met two or three young Polish men, with whom they spent the evening chatting in a bar. When the evening ended about midnight, the Poles walked the girls back to the Youth Hostel, saying 'goodnight' outside, and arranging to meet them again the next evening. As the girls went into the Hostel, they were accosted by a totally rat-arsed drunken Australian on the staircase , who tried to 'chat them up' and wanted to come back to their dormitory with them -the girls categorically refused (! vocabulary left to your imagination) , and left him slumped on the staircase, going back to their communal room where everyone was asleep.
In the early hours of the morning, the Polish Police burst into the room and dragged out one of the sleeping men, accusing him of 'murder' ; In fact the Australian guy had been found stabbed to death next to the Youth Hostel.
It soon became apparent that the two girls had been the last people to see the Australian alive, and so they were taken off to the Police Station, where the Police questioned them as to their movements the night before (and tried to invent a 'scenario' involving the supposed 'jealousy' of the guy sleeping in a bunk in the same room). The Police then decided to implicate the young Poles in the drama, and asked the girls to help make up Robot Portraits of their companions of the evening before.
My stepdaughters said that it was the most incredibly hard thing to do, even though they had spent HOURS with the guys in a lighted bar ; in the event, they even 'forgot' that one of the Poles actually had a whispy beard, which hadn't registered at all !! When the Robot Portraits were compared to the real men the next evening, they only sketchily corresponded.
In the event, the autopsy eventually showed that the Australian had simply sat himself on a wide window ledge, where the young tourists habitually perched themselves to get 'air', and had probably nodded off -infact, he had been stabbed 'from the inside' by a broken hip bone.
In an interesting follow on from this story, a year or so later I received a Short Story from my brother, who fancies himself as an Author -low and behold, it was the exact same story from a different point of view, with some details changed !! Although I obviously thought that it must have been I who had recounted the history in the first place, it was subsequently established that my brother had a friend who had gone to the exact same Hostel, just one week later, and had heard the story second hand -and had then told my brother !
There are lots of morals to this story to bear in mind ( don't sleep in Youth Hostels frequented by Australians ??)
-Witness statements can be totally unreliable, even if the witness talked to the suspect for some time
So what value can we place upon people like Lawende et al who saw a suspect, in the dark, for a few minutes ?
-Police Reports at the scene of a crime don't mean that much (and I'm not talking about after Autopsy)
-Amazing coincidences 'happen' in life
(please feel free to add lots of others) (bad things can happen if you're drunk and vulnerable in the middle of the night ?)
Do YOU have any stories like this to recount ?
The first story concerns my two stepdaughters who went on holiday to Poland, where they stayed in a Youth Hostel:
They went out one evening to a bar and met two or three young Polish men, with whom they spent the evening chatting in a bar. When the evening ended about midnight, the Poles walked the girls back to the Youth Hostel, saying 'goodnight' outside, and arranging to meet them again the next evening. As the girls went into the Hostel, they were accosted by a totally rat-arsed drunken Australian on the staircase , who tried to 'chat them up' and wanted to come back to their dormitory with them -the girls categorically refused (! vocabulary left to your imagination) , and left him slumped on the staircase, going back to their communal room where everyone was asleep.
In the early hours of the morning, the Polish Police burst into the room and dragged out one of the sleeping men, accusing him of 'murder' ; In fact the Australian guy had been found stabbed to death next to the Youth Hostel.
It soon became apparent that the two girls had been the last people to see the Australian alive, and so they were taken off to the Police Station, where the Police questioned them as to their movements the night before (and tried to invent a 'scenario' involving the supposed 'jealousy' of the guy sleeping in a bunk in the same room). The Police then decided to implicate the young Poles in the drama, and asked the girls to help make up Robot Portraits of their companions of the evening before.
My stepdaughters said that it was the most incredibly hard thing to do, even though they had spent HOURS with the guys in a lighted bar ; in the event, they even 'forgot' that one of the Poles actually had a whispy beard, which hadn't registered at all !! When the Robot Portraits were compared to the real men the next evening, they only sketchily corresponded.
In the event, the autopsy eventually showed that the Australian had simply sat himself on a wide window ledge, where the young tourists habitually perched themselves to get 'air', and had probably nodded off -infact, he had been stabbed 'from the inside' by a broken hip bone.
In an interesting follow on from this story, a year or so later I received a Short Story from my brother, who fancies himself as an Author -low and behold, it was the exact same story from a different point of view, with some details changed !! Although I obviously thought that it must have been I who had recounted the history in the first place, it was subsequently established that my brother had a friend who had gone to the exact same Hostel, just one week later, and had heard the story second hand -and had then told my brother !
There are lots of morals to this story to bear in mind ( don't sleep in Youth Hostels frequented by Australians ??)
-Witness statements can be totally unreliable, even if the witness talked to the suspect for some time
So what value can we place upon people like Lawende et al who saw a suspect, in the dark, for a few minutes ?
-Police Reports at the scene of a crime don't mean that much (and I'm not talking about after Autopsy)
-Amazing coincidences 'happen' in life
(please feel free to add lots of others) (bad things can happen if you're drunk and vulnerable in the middle of the night ?)
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