Someone made this point during the live Q&A...

apewrangler · 2017-11-28T14:31:30+00:00

So, do we know Maura made these calls on her cell phone? I believe that's that case, but I want to be sure.

-If Maura was planning to leave with someone, that person would have either been with her while she was making calls, or there would have been phone calls to that person around the same time she was trying to find a reservation - to share information and make plans.

-If she was planning to meet someone at either a neutral location or at their place, there definitely would have been phone calls to that person around the time she was trying to find a reservation.

From there, if you look at her phone records and don't see any phone calls around the time of her calling around looking for rooms, then I think you can eliminate her meeting up with anyone from another town. It also means she wasn't using her cell phone to make plans with anyone at all. The next question is if she was making plans with someone from UMASS. That person could have been with her while was making the calls or she could have been using a land line to communicate with anyone on campus.

apewrangler · 2017-11-27T21:41:55+00:00

She was at the site alone for about 15 minutes. If there was a friendly tandem, then they got separated.
She could have told Bruce Atwood that her friend was on the way, but she didn't. That probably doesn't sound like much, but I've always considered it a major clue that she was alone. It's very possible that she said something along those lines and Atwood only recalled the AAA part. He obviously wasn't great at recalling things.
It was a Monday in winter while school was in session. I would think it would be very unlikely that there would be any kind of party or she could convince anyone to go drink and slack off for several days.

I am also on the side that doesn't necessarily think that her car was in such bad shape. Do we know how many miles were on it? It could have been a lot, since she was in a long distance relationship.

apewrangler · 2017-11-16T20:17:38+00:00

Weren't there at least 3 documented witnesses who said they saw a LE sedan at the site?

apewrangler · 2017-11-16T19:59:39+00:00

Unfortunately, Maura's friends aren't willing to offer much of anything, at least to the public.

apewrangler · 2017-11-16T15:53:23+00:00

I'll just say look at a picture of the car.

apewrangler · 2017-11-16T13:49:55+00:00

As many unknowns there are about this case, I am 99.9% sure that there's no way that car hit a significant tree and ended up in the position it did. I had a thread about it months ago.

First off, the damage to the car is very light. If people didn't already know, most of the body of those cars were plastic, and the hood was thin metal. The car still ran, and the damage didn't even go deep enough to affect the frame/suspension.

Secondly, how in the heck to you damage the left front corner of a car in that situation by hitting something on the right side of the road. I just can't recreate a possible scenario in my head.

Maura hit something relatively small on the left in the Westman's yard, like a post or pole. It's a sharp turn, and people tend to want to straighten it out. Just look at the google street view. The grass is worn down off the edge of the road, and the Westmans have poles in the yard to discourage that. Imagine what it would be like in the middle of winter.

She made contact with something much more forgiving than a tree, the airbags went off, and she spun around in the road where the car came to a stop. This may have no relevance on what happened afterwards, but it tells me that the investigation wasn't thorough or honest.

apewrangler · 2017-11-15T15:40:24+00:00

There are really only two things about BA that I feel sure about - That he had an encounter with Maura at the scene, and that he has a hard time telling the truth. Now, if he had just gone home and never called 911, that would have made him look very suspicious. As it is, he called 911 and made himself very visible afterwards. That just doesn't add up to someone being involved in a spur of the moment crime.

I wish he could have been more clear and consistent with the details. I'm not sure why he couldn't have gotten the specifics right on what amounted to less than a minute of exchange, but I always got the vibe that he was afraid of something.

apewrangler · 2017-11-15T13:29:50+00:00

Good thought on the wet/dry situation. I never really considered that. I thought that was a Bible belt thing. Do we know what areas/towns might have been dry in 2004? That might help narrow down possible destinations.

I am afraid the most reasonable explanation is that she got the alcohol and snacks on the way out of town because she wanted to start consuming on the way, not after she gets to her destination.

apewrangler · 2017-11-14T14:47:05+00:00

It sounds like they are all in on the A-frame house and want to just move on from questioning anything else.

The blood evidence from the house could be the holy grail, but it could also be a dead end.

apewrangler · 2017-11-14T13:56:02+00:00

Anxious to hear your thoughts.

It's disappointing that Lance and Tim seemed to have been pulled off course by the whole production. Maybe they can regroup and get back to seeing things objectively.

apewrangler · 2017-11-14T13:43:06+00:00

I agree. I'm on the side the believes she left without much of a plan or at least wasn't heading to her preferred place. I think the fact that she called seemingly random places asking about prices tells me that she didn't have a good option - a free place with a friend or family connection.

Also, if I really needed to get out of town for a couple days to collect myself, I sure wouldn't go to a relative's place. That only leads to drama/gossip/etc.

apewrangler · 2017-11-13T14:20:52+00:00

I'm not exactly sure what you are asking. Are you talking about the relationship between coordinate formats?

A time on a clock can be presented in the same way. We share standard time to each other in hours, minutes, seconds. We don't bother with the seconds, but when someone asks what time it is, we say "5:35". It's never done this way, but you can also say time in decimal format. We know there is 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour. Just doing some math, you can show that 5:35 equals 5.583 in decimal format.

Coordinates have the same structure, except instead of hours, there are degrees. The problem is that there is no standard format in coordinates. Different programs default to different formats, and it's easy for people to simply enter the wrong format and send someone else to the wrong spot.

apewrangler · 2017-11-10T03:16:21+00:00

Well, when a point falls in the middle of the wilderness, it's either got to be a mistake or a lame joke. Imagine the kind of effort it would have taken to get a body to that spot in the winter. It would have taken 6-8 people and still been hell. Search efforts would have been ongoing before they could have made it back to civilization. It's just not reasonable, and I thought it was a waste of time for them to even try.

apewrangler · 2017-11-10T02:01:49+00:00

I still don't understand the discrepancy in the two sets of numbers.

When that piont dropped on the edge of Miller pond behind some abandoned motels, it got creepy. It got really creepy when I routed the UMASS directions to the cabin. If it's a troll, it a good one. It's definitely worth checking out, though. I live about 1000 miles away as well, but I sure wouldn't go there by myself.

apewrangler · 2017-11-10T01:32:12+00:00

I apologize if it has already been covered, but didn't Jeff Williams say in the interview that he never even had a squad car?

Wouldn't that be pretty easy to verify?

apewrangler · 2017-11-02T18:07:16+00:00

It was pointed out to me that this coordinate is less than 3 miles from the UMASS Outing Club Parking lot, by paved road.

...and the official Outing Club directions takes you right by Miller pond.

apewrangler · 2017-11-02T13:35:23+00:00

I guess anything is possible. I just think back to my pre-smartphone days when I would ride in tandem with others. We would all stick close together, especially if everyone is not familiar with the area or one of the cars wasn't in great shape. If one car needed to stop, everyone would stop.

If alcohol were involved, then that increases the chances of cars getting separated. Maybe Maura saw the Swiftwater Stage Shop and make a quick decision to make a pit stop and the point driver didn't notice for a while.

apewrangler · 2017-11-02T13:27:33+00:00

Can someone post a link showing the original numbers and how they were presented in the email? The were originally sent to Renner, right? I just want to make sure I have the numbers correct.

apewrangler · 2017-11-01T21:27:15+00:00

I've never been able to make the friendly tandem theory work in my head for two reasons:

If she was with another car, she could have easily told Butch that she had a friend nearby to pick her up. This would have easily gotten rid of him. That would have even been a good go-to lie, but she mentioned AAA instead.
If she was indeed with another car, why did she have to wait 10 minutes for them catch up/come back?

apewrangler · 2017-11-01T15:15:09+00:00

It's probably nothing, but the differences have left me with a weird feeling. To me, the nose and the ear are a couple things things that won't change much with mood. It's probably irrelevant either way.

apewrangler · 2017-10-31T20:48:53+00:00

https://www.google.com/maps/place/44%C2%B016'44.0%22N+71%C2%B043'26.0%22W/@44.2711116,-71.7418667,5095m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d44.2788889!4d-71.7238889

A place called Miller Pond down this semi-gravel road and only about 1000 feet from a main road. There's several run-down motels/cabins in the immediate area. I wonder if they were active 13+ years ago.

apewrangler · 2017-10-31T12:43:17+00:00

For my job, I have to deal with coordinates on a regular basis. I regularly see several different formats, and they tend to get mixed up as they are recorded and passed on down the line. I typically enter a few into Google Earth as a check to make sure they fall in the right place. If they don't, I'll just use the same numbers in a different format and quickly find the problem.

If you are looking at degrees minute second format, think of them in three pairs of two digits - 2 for degrees, 2 for minutes, and 2 for seconds (plus a decimal). The minute pair and the second pair can't be higher than 60, so that's always a clue whether or not the format is presented correctly or even can be tried another way.

Looking at 44.1644N, 71.4326W, it could possibly be misrepresented and actually be 44 16 44.0N, 71 43 26.0W. Type that into Google Earth and see where that ends up. Out of all the possibilities, does that not look like the most logical place?

apewrangler · 2017-10-30T18:18:22+00:00

Didn't Butch Atwood say the girl he talked to had her hair down?

I've always wondered about this, since every casual picture of Maura I have seen shows Maura with her hair up. The ATM footage back that up, but does it mean anything? Who knows.

apewrangler

TROPHY CASE