Natalee Holloway 3

Let's take it down a bit.

Only one thread of investigation is getting a battering to the exclusion of all else, hang it on Joran, and any suggestion of deviation is howled down as dishonouring Natalee, Beth, and what all.

But when one line of investigation that seems so obvious isn't giving results it's time to come at the problem from a different mental viewpoint. Identify and reconsider all assumptions.

This may either produce an answer you didn't expect, or it may lead you back to where you are stuck, but better assured in the process that you are going the right way.

We need to remember in trying to solve the puzzle of Natalee's dissapearance that the real events of that night are frozen in time. They do not vary - but our perception of them does. Initially we can't see how any of the bits fits together, but in changing our viewpoints, by giving factors different weight in our considerations, we move our perspective.

This process continues until we finally look at the problem from a direction that makes the greatest sense and it is solved; or until we give up.

Assumptions

In this case there we have a jigsaw puzzle with only a few pieces, but it is as if they come from two or more different puzzles and aren't meant to go together. The challenge is to find how all these pieces fit.

Most people have some sort of a theory. This consists of a few bits of fact glued together with some assumptions. Part of the process is re-arranging the bits so that less glue is required to hold them together, fewer and more everyday commonsense.

It is traditional in murder mystery books and scripts that the guilty party is introduced to the audience early. This is a dramatic device that is almost TV formula, but it is not how things go in real life.

When your investigation comes to a dead end all the facts, and particularly assumpions, that led there must be re-examined.

If the problem is actually has a knowable solution then one or more of these facts and assumptions must be wrong, found, and corrected.

But unlike adding two numbers together, it is not clear in this case that there is actually a knowable solution to be found - that the only person who knows for sure may be dead.

In this case a knowable solution is a very important constraint because it is quite possible that the puzzle is actually unsolvable.

The general rule is to try and find a solution that has the lowest potential energy, much as water flows downhill to the lowest points. A bit like golf, the model that fits with the least amount of assumption is the most likely, formalised in Ockham's Razor - “entities are not to be multiplied without necessity”.

Minimum energy surface

One way of visualising the process is as an elastic membrane supported by a number of facts and assumptions. The membrane takes on the shape of these underlying facts or assumptions and forms a more or less bumpy surface.

Large assumptions form large hills or mountains, while dependable facts form depressions or valleys. The smaller the assumptions the flatter the surface, and the least energy is required to traverse it in any direction between facts. Dead flat represents certainty of the supporting facts and minimum energy to traverse the surface.

This can also be thought of as not sweeping uncomfortable facts under the rug, where they will form a lump. This is also sometimes called “ignoring an elephant in the room”.

This is a lowest energy idea, like soap bubbles, so the mimimum energy surface of the truth may still be curved and have to traverse strange and unlikely, yet true, points such as using Gerbils as sex aids; but the true surface will traverse all the known points with minimal assumption. “Awkward” facts produce large lumps in the surface.

If these assumptions can be given numbers such as probabilities then they can be compared for minimal overall assumption using the Root Mean Square method.

Armchair Detective

We watch Law & Order, C.S.I, and sundry police reality re-creation shows. We know how it goes, particularly from the latter - evidence.

Even a full and frank confession must be supported by the evidence. And material evidence is more reliable but much harder to interpret in reality than fiction, to establish a sequence of events from isolated facts.

We know personal testimony and eye witnesses can be very unreliable, that fingerprints can be mis-matched or falsified, and that even DNA can fail through contamination. I have spent most of my life sorting fact from fiction in a non-criminal technical field and have learned the hard way that statements are the least reliable element in an investigation.

The test for any proposed scenario is that it first conforms to the known facts.

• It must pass through gateways of known time and place. (e.g. Natalee can't be at the bus stop and swiping her key in the hotel at the same time)
• Then it has to pass a credibility test of Ockham's Razor, the less complex answer is the more likely. (e.g. we can discount alien abduction)
• And finally, putting yourself in the situation; empathetically, how did you or your group behave when they were that age and away from constraints? (e.g. most people would call help to somebody who was injured or sick)

Natalee “hater”?

In this atmosphere even an attempt at a dispassonate look at the few known facts of the case is very likely to get me branded as a Troll and “Natalee hater”. Well if that's what passes for rational thought at your place, that's your problem.

My response is that I would love for her to turn up alive. Truly. We could all then live Happily Ever After. The next best thing would be finding her remains in a situation that cleared up the mystery; at least then we could all get some 'closure' on the issue.

But there is so much bile and venom, and so many hate-filled lynch-mob sentiments being expressed on pro-Natalee sites that I actually feel embarrassed for the girl. (see also page 11a.)

If George 'Jug' Twitty didn't actually call the police “Aruban arseholes” in front of Joran's home the night after Natalee disappeared, and later threaten to “burn Aruba down” if she wasn't found, that attitude is still writ large and glaringly obvious from the later record, particularly when Beth was highly critical of Aruban authorities and called for a tourist boycott of Aruba until Natalee was found.

Other incidents include a violent and alienating confrontations with allies Julia Renfro, Angela Munzenhofer, Charles Croes, and an alleged incident with Aruban police.

This particularly nutty, unjust, counter-productive, and ill-directed idea only soured relations with the Aruban authorities even more, but her campaign still continues today.

In the Vanity Fair article police investigator Gerold Dompig is quoted as saying; “They act like they come from a world where you can just crush people”, and that their intervention was “very harmful to our investigation”.

Would Natalee approve and subscribe to any of these “lynch Joran” sentiments if she suddenly reappeared like the runaway bride? How much humble pie would Beth, Greta, and many other pundits have to eat then? It's highly unlikely, but just it's possible, and if for no other reason I'd like to see her reappear from somewhere like Mexico, perhaps with a new baby, apologetic for the pain Beth, Joran and the others have had to endure. It's in the deck alright, but not on the odds.

(20/04/06) No sooner written than there is a new arrest in the case that has Greta in reverse, trying to back away and disown her previous certainty about Joran's guilt, interviewing Beth who is still trying to tie Joran in somehow as the focus moves away from him.

Aruban cops have arrested Geoffrey van Cromvoirt, 19
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/62565.htm

(10/7/06) Which came to nothing.
Next the arrest of CarlosII, like “Cumpa The Gardener” a.k.a. CarlosI, this is another “eye witness to the actual crime” who is also a Columbian illegal who emerged via Jossy Mansur. His story has been dismissed on all sides as simple reward-hunting.

Despite the huge impact the case has had in the US due to saturation cable coverage, it has had very little media coverage elsewhere. The fact that it has crowded out many other major news stories - you know, like Iraq going even more pear-shaped, of Bush wire-tapping America and shaping up to nuke Iran, never mind equally worthy missing persons stories for many months - the media coverage has become very much a story in itself. I will get back to these issues.

Being in Australia and not much of a TV watcher I have never seen any of the video material so widely known in the US. But I've read Greta's transcripts and I get the general idea. In this case I think a little distance is a good thing.

http://member.telpacific.com.au/rolyroper/NataleeHolloway/page03.htm | 15/04/06 | Last update: 23:21 24/07/06