Natalee Holloway 4

The Chinese whispering gallery

Updated: 10/7/06 22/02/07

Jon Posted: Mon Jan 22, 2007 5:22 am to Scrux

[this] essay would have been improved by omitting the fourth chapter, where he digresses into a gratuitous rant against “HMI”.

It is naturally up to the reader to decide if this page (or the next one, 4a) is a “gratuitous rant”, but it is a claim I have seriously considered, and now reject without reservation.

As you can see this page doesn't even mention HMI but deals with some other cases where there were serious injustices.

The next page, 4a, as you will see deals with “troll” mentality generally and is mainly a extensive quotation of a post by MoonShadow on Freedom of Blog.

The remainder of the page is my discovery and exposure of HMI dirty cyber games in the form of “name squatting” and can be verified by the 60-odd links provided.

In my view Jon's comment says more about the commentator than the actual content of this or the next page, and I do not resile from what I have written as a valid commentry on an important aspect of this case - an attempt at trial by Internet.

Judge for yourself...

Mixed messages; “Send three-and-fourpence, we're going to a dance”

Did I say something about being badly researched? The following post is pretty typical of some of the wrong-way comments, but atypical in that it was actually corrected, and by the poster. Most of these furphys just fly on with a life of their own.

tex Says: 

April 10th, 2006 at 10:29 pm 
The world is also realizing what a limp
administration we have - total cowardice
for its citizens. Even Australia gov't
stood up for a girl lost in the Indonesia
and their gov't waged hell

tex Says: 

April 11th, 2006 at 5:44 am 
sm - you may delete my last email,
mentioning what australia did for a girl
who was lost in indonesia has no bearing
on this case; if you remember it was
about a girl who apparently had a kilo in
her surf board case; not even hidden at
all. the airlines check-in counter agent
in sidney said the bag was check before
it boarded the flight for drugs and it
was not there, yet someone in baggage
used her luggage to transport it once on
the tarmac; and she got blamed and
sentenced to 20 yrs in jail.

The woman is Schepell Corby. In fact the the current autocratic Prime Minister, John Howard, is very anti-drugs and cannabis in particular, so the Australian Government ran totally dead on the issue, abandoned her to her fate, 20 years in an Indonesian hell-hole prison, despite very serious questions about the evidence.

We also have the cautionary experience of the Lindy Chamberlain case where hysteria seems to have got ahead of the facts leading to a wrongful conviction for infaticide. In particular the forensic detection of a spray of babies blood in the Chamberlain car turned out to be a 'false positive' caused by ... a well-known softdrink.

I assume everybody knows about the miscarrage of justice in the Lindy Chamberlain “dingo's got my baby”! 'Evil Angels' case.

This is only one case of many where the utter finality of the death penalty would have been Judicial murder.

The Marion Wishart Case

The following is a summary of a different case only a few months later, the subject of a long article in todays (28/5/06)'Age' (a quite reputable investigative newspaper).

About 7.45am on December 21, 1982 in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote single mother Marion Wishart tried to rouse her six year old daughter Bonnie. Pulling back the doona Marion, a nurse, saw that Bonnie had been stabbed and sexually assaulted.

The investigation was led by Det. Snr. Sgt. Eric Lilley, whos' age and experience carried considerable weight. Bonnie had been suffocated as well as stabbed, but there was no semen present. Lilley had a hostility towards single mothers and from the outset formed the opinion that Wishart had killed Bonnie and faked the sexual assault.

In 1984 a Malcolm Clarke was convicted of the stabbing murder of a woman he met at a disco, and on a different count of rape. Clarke had rented a room from Wishart for 9 months ending 3 months before Bonnie's murder. Lilley refused to change his opinion that Wishart was responsible - “It's not his [Clarke's] style”.

Fourteen years of late night phone calls from police 'reminding her she was being watched' later, the file was handed to Det. Tim Day. In June 2002 Day finally teased a confession out of Clarke to sneaking into the house and assaulting and killing Bonnie in the early hours.

There's a lot of ugly detail, but those are the key points. In this case Lilley's fixation didn't let a murder roam the streets because he was already doing 15 for the earlier murder, but 14 years of really baseless suspicion has ruined Marion Wishart's life.

It would have been bad enough if it had been resolved in 1983/4 with Clarke's arrest and conviction, as it should have been. Some junior detectives tried, but were blocked by Lilley's fixation. Not corrupt. Just made a serious mistake and stopped listening.

Witness statements are 99% dross and 1% gold. If you stop listening you miss the critical 1% you really need to know.

But it also has a lesson for the Holloway case - what seems so obvious on the surface may not actually be true.

The mixed message at the head started out as “Send reinforcements, we're going to advance”.

http://member.telpacific.com.au/rolyroper/NataleeHolloway/page04.htm | 15/04/06 | Last update: 08:58 22/02/07