One thing that is strange is that IIRC while Rick Bullman said he definitely saw 2 vehicles come out of the field, he adds that he then watched them cross over Trinity and continue on Book road heading west. However, According to the video footage at supersucker that most sides tend to agree on, the 2 vehicles would have been turning right and onto Trinity and continued past Supersucker. Hopefully nobody jumps all over me, but it makes me wonder (IMO only) If Bullman accidentally got that detail wrong, it's a question whether he got it wrong that Both Yukon and TBs truck pulled out together rather than MS version. Not to mention that when I've driven by that spot in my opinion only, I could see a (many point) turn around then followed by MS could possibly appear to be 2 pulling out of driveway.
The importance would be that Bullmans testimony contradicted MSs, but the last video footage contradicts part of Bullmans eyewitness reliability imo (and the huge issue of both vehicles in field speaking of TB already being dead vs MSs story of just switching vehicles.)
This apparent contradiction bothered me, too, at first. But I am inclined to think that if anyone's testimony is discredited it is that of MS, not that of Bullman.
First and most obviously, if we posit that Bullman did in fact see both vehicles pull out of the field one after the other, turn left onto Book Rd, stop at the stop sign and then cross Trinity, continuing west on Book Road, that doesn't mean the same two vehicles could not have been subsequently caught on the SuperSucker video some minutes later. They could have first driven west on Book, whether for a few hundred metres or farther, stopped (it's pretty dark back there and there are some lonely patches of road) to do whatever -- roll the window down, throw a tarp over the body, assuming the shooting had already happened, or something else that can be done quickly, then turned around and come back, turning north on Trinity this time -- by which time Bullman would have been going back towards his house or continuing his walk with his dogs around his property, but would not have been watching them.
The second, but less likely IMO possibility, is that Bullman was watching the two vehicles stop at the stop sign, noticed they did not have their turn indicators flashing, and when they pulled out he did not see precisely whether they turned right or proceeded straight but inferred the latter from the lack of signals (this could have been an unconscious process). The area where he was walking is heavily treed and might have obscured his vision of the corner. The reason I think this is less likely (though possible) is that, unlike cases of inattentional blindness, he had noticed these vehicles and their behaviour as somewhat odd (while not suspicious particularly) and therefore he was paying more attention than he might have done if a single vehicle had done the same thing. We don't know exactly where he was standing, and AFAIK the question wasn't asked in precise terms, so what we know is that he
thought the vehicles went straight west on Book. We don't know if he definitely saw them cross Trinity or whether perhaps he inferred that they did this. Of course, now that we know what scofflaws these two charmers were, it would come as no surprise that they didn't bother signaling their turns (if that was the case).
Going by the tweets of MS's testimony, I found his reported description of where they parked the Yukon to be questionable. It wasn't IMO on the side of the road, it would have been parked in the field proper, or at least in that wide entryway into the field, which I doubt they would have blocked lest someone on that property tried to come out that way. Surely they didn't want to call attention to themselves. I thought all along the likeliest thing would have been for them to drive the Yukon into the field and turn left by the haystacks where they could have been out of sight. Like the Crown I thought this could well have been the crime scene, too, but don't feel this is a critical point. The fact that no glass evidence was found there might be due to the fact that when police searched the field they were still looking for a missing person, and any small shards of glass that fell into the scattered hay on the ground might have been unnoticed if visible at all, and certainly wouldn't have been something the K-9 unit would have been looking for.
If it's MS' testimony vs Bullman's, I'm with the latter. Even if MS were telling the truth (and I think
some of what he said would have been the truth - Dungey would not have put him on the stand to tell what he, TD, knew to be a pack of lies - but TD would not have been able to tell what specifics were true and what weren't), MS was definitely slanting his testimony to cast himself in the best possible light. It's not just criminals who do this, we all have a tendency to revise our recollections in our own favour, and it's also true that retelling a memory or memories over and over tends to obscure the original and gradually refine it into a partly fictitious narrative. It's how memory works, especially visually loaded memories. The verbal overlay changes the actual storage and retrieval of the original.
Of course in cases like this the accused has much to gain by misrepresenting things, as do some of the witnesses, and to try to separate wheat from chaff is a challenging task. I don't envy the jurors. I expect they will deliberate for several days at least even if all 12 are convinced of the guilt of the two accused. The complexity and amount of evidence presented, and seriousness of the charges, mean that the jurors have a duty to carefully weigh all the evidence amongst themselves, guided by the judge and the jury foreman, to ensure justice is served.
I'm looking forward to Justice Goodman's charge. I hope it will be published somewhere.
