RSBM
I've always been fascinated by this, and indeed it is why I joined Websleuths in the first place.
On the Knox case I got in a very detailed and heated debate with a maths professor about the Pistorius testimony. Though we agreed on Knox, she was convinced Pistorius version was largely true, because it better fitted the witness evidence. She approached it in a very analytical/probabilistic way.
As a former lawyer, I was convinced Pistorius testimony was inherently unreliable, and that he had reverse engineered it having heard the State case. IMO i was a quite a lot more cynical than her as to how a defence strategy worked.
But to prove who was right, required a micro level of analysis that i sort of feel is beyond the Court process and indeed the trial Judge largely failed to confront the evidence at all, throwing her hands in the air and simply ignored large amounts of circumstantial evidence, including incredibly, all the crime scene photos.
Ultimately, although i think it will never be possible to know what happened that night in detail, some very industrious posters were able to reverse engineer some of the tailoring, and show how some honest mistakes from the witnesses could be fitted back together.
Indeed the Prosecutor had implored the judge to focus on the big picture which the witnesses all agreed on, rather than focus on micro-explanations for each point, which taken together, were highly implausible.
IMO that is exactly what we are seeing in this case. There is no plausible explanation for the totality of Chase's conduct.
I've come around to the conclusion that people get seduced by highly speculative explanations about cheques, DNA, cell, IP addresses etc etc which are balanced on the head of a pin
