Post by Admin Horan on May 25, 2017 20:11:28 GMT -6
I have 30 years of experience (off and on) conducting original investigations, and reviewing police investigations. The problem with trying to "solve" the Cabin 28 case is that only some of the law enforcement agency documents are available for review. Some more documents have been transcribed by amateur sleuth and sensational pain in the ass David Craig McNarie ("dmac," owner and Administrator of Keddie28.com.) A third set of "documents" is actually transcribed summaries of most of the witness statements used by Plumas County Sheriff's Office investigators in an attempt to reconstruct the sequence of events before, during, and after the brutal attacks in the Sharp family cabin on the night of April 11, 1981.
In other words, we have three different sets of "documents:" 1. Photocopies of some the original documents, like autopsy reports; 2. Transcriptions of some other documents, mainly a small number of witness statements, by a person who has access to what he claims are original documents; and 3. Transcriptions and summarizes of yet another set of documents prepared by LE personnel for their own internal use, which, in turn, have been retranscribed and summarized by amateur investigators.
Added all together, these represent what I estimate to be about 50 percent of the total number of "case files" of the PCSO, and maybe less than 10 percent of the California DOJ's files. On this board, we will try and discuss whatever "meaning" we can derive from these "known" documents, and try to narrow down which "unseen" (so far) documents we'd need to see in order to come close to a full "explanation" of what happened, and who did it.
There are, of course, lots of purported statements made by key people over the years, but as I have learned over and over during the last 30 years, decades-old "memories" are worthless at best, and hopelessly confusing at worst. So, THIS board will be limited to discuss of the actual files, and ANOTHER board will discuss what these "witnesses" have said over the intervening years.
In order to ultimately gain access to the rest of the files, we must first determine, as best we can, how the known files were leaked in the first place. High school English teacher and amateur documentary filmmaker Josh Hancock, through cooperation with Sharp family survivor Sheila Sharp, gained access to the restricted room at PCSO dedicated to storing the files, evidence, and other materials related to the investigation. Hancock has claimed that he surreptitiously photographed a detailed "Timeline" containing summarized transcriptions of all the witness statements that was displayed along the walls around the room. Then, supposedly, Hancock snuck out a box of file folders containing the rest of the files (but not all the files stored at PCSO) that have been leaked over the years. This, of course, is a crime, if it really happened, and Hancock, supposedly under legal pressure, agreed to turn the box of documents over to a third party whom he trusted to return the files to police. But that person instead delivered the files to McNarie. I suspect that it is far more likely that someone at PCSO who had access to the Cabin 28 room (mooooooost likely the same person who gave Hancock and Sheila Sharp access to the room) GAVE the box of files to Hancock.
The files that have been used by Hancock to make his documentaries, and by McNarie on his website, to perpetuate the frame around Martin Smartt and S. John Boubede, are clearly (as we shall see) not the complete set of files. They appear to me to have been "cherry-picked" to fit the frame around Smartt and Boubede. My first question is, who did the cherry-picking? Did Hancock/McNarie focus on certain files in the box, and deliberately ignore others? Or did the person who "let" Hancock "steal" the box actually hand over a collection of pre-sorted documents? I think the second scenario is the more likely. But the first thing I'd like to do is prove that.
However, people are welcome to create other threads discussing the documents, as well.
In other words, we have three different sets of "documents:" 1. Photocopies of some the original documents, like autopsy reports; 2. Transcriptions of some other documents, mainly a small number of witness statements, by a person who has access to what he claims are original documents; and 3. Transcriptions and summarizes of yet another set of documents prepared by LE personnel for their own internal use, which, in turn, have been retranscribed and summarized by amateur investigators.
Added all together, these represent what I estimate to be about 50 percent of the total number of "case files" of the PCSO, and maybe less than 10 percent of the California DOJ's files. On this board, we will try and discuss whatever "meaning" we can derive from these "known" documents, and try to narrow down which "unseen" (so far) documents we'd need to see in order to come close to a full "explanation" of what happened, and who did it.
There are, of course, lots of purported statements made by key people over the years, but as I have learned over and over during the last 30 years, decades-old "memories" are worthless at best, and hopelessly confusing at worst. So, THIS board will be limited to discuss of the actual files, and ANOTHER board will discuss what these "witnesses" have said over the intervening years.
In order to ultimately gain access to the rest of the files, we must first determine, as best we can, how the known files were leaked in the first place. High school English teacher and amateur documentary filmmaker Josh Hancock, through cooperation with Sharp family survivor Sheila Sharp, gained access to the restricted room at PCSO dedicated to storing the files, evidence, and other materials related to the investigation. Hancock has claimed that he surreptitiously photographed a detailed "Timeline" containing summarized transcriptions of all the witness statements that was displayed along the walls around the room. Then, supposedly, Hancock snuck out a box of file folders containing the rest of the files (but not all the files stored at PCSO) that have been leaked over the years. This, of course, is a crime, if it really happened, and Hancock, supposedly under legal pressure, agreed to turn the box of documents over to a third party whom he trusted to return the files to police. But that person instead delivered the files to McNarie. I suspect that it is far more likely that someone at PCSO who had access to the Cabin 28 room (mooooooost likely the same person who gave Hancock and Sheila Sharp access to the room) GAVE the box of files to Hancock.
The files that have been used by Hancock to make his documentaries, and by McNarie on his website, to perpetuate the frame around Martin Smartt and S. John Boubede, are clearly (as we shall see) not the complete set of files. They appear to me to have been "cherry-picked" to fit the frame around Smartt and Boubede. My first question is, who did the cherry-picking? Did Hancock/McNarie focus on certain files in the box, and deliberately ignore others? Or did the person who "let" Hancock "steal" the box actually hand over a collection of pre-sorted documents? I think the second scenario is the more likely. But the first thing I'd like to do is prove that.
However, people are welcome to create other threads discussing the documents, as well.
