Now this is not a very elegant way to bow out of a forum (to say the least), but there are some points that I feel absolutely need addressing before I leave.
First, I misread "nor did it" as "nor did I" - which makes you seem more incoherent than is fair. "It" obviously means my post. However, may I clarify here that the post was not meant to elicit ANY replies, not just heated ones.
In fact, this forum goes back a long way, and all of the main questions have been dealt with thoroughly. What I did was just suggest a possible speculative alternative to the manhole theory, and I honestly did not expect any replies.
I have been through all of this on a film forum (IMDb, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) which unfortunately deletes old posts. I was quite interested in the subject and found myself posting frequently for three months, long posts at that. Got lots of praise and two very good penpals as a result. But at one point it was clear that the questions, answers and arguments started to repeat themselves to the point where it felt stupid to answer the same questions and contest the same arguments over and over again. So I left, as did my new-found penpals.
The same has happened with this case, except that Websleuths,as far as I am aware, retains all older posts. So Compassionate Reader has answered most questions thoroughly already, as have several other posters (Nova, Entre-Nous, and there are more). They have read all of callahan, I have read almost all but not all, and they have reasoned answers to most if not all of the questions. I have no intention to duplicate them.
What I have done - on another thread - is point out that merely reading documents is not enough, critical reading is necessary (a post you have not answered, interestingly enough). In the post I provide links to a scientific analysis of Jessie's first confession which just impartially dissects the text as to how much information was provided by Jessie spontaneously (very little and all of it wrong) and how much was provided by the interrogator - with Jessie just answering "yes". Now if Jessie were really the type of a normally intelligent person (you even have the audacity to "assess" his "real" IQ, as opposed to what the psychologists found and what is supported by his academic record and his whole lige story) - why on earth would he answer "yes" to all these prompted questions - absolutely in the majority - where all of the information was provided by the interrogator?
And even if his IQ IS higher than 70 (which I do not believe and which you have NO evidence to contest, apart from your own impression), I am sure you have read all the newest literature on false confessions - even people with normal IQ are involved in them. I would probably confess to anything if I did not have access to the toilet for a long time (no, I would not, but this is simply because I have read so much on the subject - I'd rather piss in my pants
) But actually very few people are as informed.
False confessions are a very interesting academic subject which I am sure you are aware of. That they exist and are quite prevalent has been proved by, e.g. the Innocence Project - I may be mistaken but in roughly half of the cases where DNA exonerated people they had confessed to the crime (for sources, go to Google, I hope you know how to use it or other search engines). There is a case where a young man confessed to having killed his fiancee, who turned up a few weeks later - he was still kept in prison for a week, and released without an apology). There was an experiment where the researcher went to a man who had falsely confessed to molesting his daughter. He had NEVER met the daughter but supplied INVENTED new details of the molestation to the poor man (with normal IQ) who almost immediately confessed to them. So if one doubts Jessie's "real" IQ, which I don't, one is still left with false confessions by people with normal IQs. There is AMPLE literature on the subject, which you will be able to find out just by searching False confessions, so do not require anybody on this board to "please provide me with the exact addresses" ...
The length of the interrogation, BTW, is but one factor in producing false confessions: it may take only two hours to convince a person that they have a choice between a false confession and, say, a death penalty. Ample respectable literature about this (the so-called optimal decisions) available on the Internet, so do not ask me to provide the links, you have sufficient IQ to find them on your own.
I would like to point out once more that almost it is impossible to prove the negative (if there is NO DNA of the suspects on the crime site, even when there is DNA of other known and unknown persons, one can always say that whoever is accused just had their DNA washed away - by a VERY selective water - or levitated, or whatever). Strictly speaking, the fact that your own DNA was not found on the crime site, or mine, for that matter, does not exclude us as possible suspects. However, if people who were supposed to be THERE (as per Jessie's "confessions") did not leave ANY DNA, this starts to approach pretty convincing evidence. If Jessie's confession in any of its four forms is correct, the probability that the DNA of none of the defendants was there is pretty slim. As Attorney Dennis Riordan put it, many of his clients have refused DNA to be tested once they understand "this stuff really works". In the case of WM3, if the DNA of even one of them were found, it would, according to Jessie's narrative, implicate all three, they have voraciously gone on with testing absolutely everything. This, again, presumably has no weight with you, since the preconceived notions are so strong.
And finally - this time really finally, or I would turn into a fool who repeats things that are already there - the choice between the witnesses as presented in the two documentaries (Paradise Lost 3 and West of Memphis) and the "witnesses" at the original trials is NOT A FALSE DICHOTOMY. A false dichotomy is a legitimate concept in logic and the field pf logical fallacies, which I am perfectly aware of. The choice between what Vicky Hutchenson said at the trial and what she said when she had no motive to lie (unless you believe the filmmakers paid her huge sums to recant a testimony) or what Carson said at the trial and the heartfelt apology in the film does not in any shape or form qualify as a a false dichotomy - as I am sure you are perfectly aware of. This labelling qualifies as one more obvious attempt at manipulation - and again I am quite sure you are aware of this.
One could, of course, take the stand that ALL witnesses under any circumstances, whether they state something or recant it, are motivated by self-interest (reward money and more lenient treatment in the casts of Hutchenson and Carson at the trial stage, and huge amounts of Peter Jackson's money at the film stage) - but in this case the most honest course would be to refrain from ANY judgment in ANY legal case and admit that witnesses are always unreliable. So discard all witnesses. If one starts cherry-picking, one is by definition biased. I am biased, since I believe the recanting in the films rather than the original trial testimony, but i am not afraid to admit it. Also, the satanic panic is over, so Hutchenson's stories about esbat do sound ridiculous (you have skilfully avoided my question about whether you really believe the esbat stories). Carson has been shown to have got the details from another person (do google this, I do not owe you all the mail addresses) and having had not actual time to listen to such a conversation (the witness was told to make herself scarce during the origianl trial - she is in the documentary and her story is also in "Devil's Knot").
So we have a real dichotomy here - and the very term "false dichotomy" is bandied about by you for a mysterious reason, perhaps to make your case look more intellectual? It is nice of you to avoid false dichotomies in debates, but in this case the notion is clearly not applicable.
I'll now bow out finally, and irreversibly. Which means I am not going to return to the site.
Best regards!