Contents:
Part 1
Introduction and Overview
Chuck Reid Finally Morphs into Pinocchio
Chip Harding and Richard Hudson Embarrass Themselves
Part 2
Medical Experts Share Their Deep Insights
More Effusions
Part 3: An Interview with Dr Andrew Griffiths
Introduction – Episode 4: The Confession
To Begin: Soering Interviewed by Knox
Interview with Andrew Griffiths
Further Nonsense
Whatever Happened to Scotland Yard?
Qualifications and Expertise
*
Introduction and Overview
It must have been carnival season, or maybe summertime for Jens, and the livin’ was easy. Quite recently a number of Jens Soering’s most dedicated supporters gathered together under the roof of Amanda Knox’s podcast, in many cases their only intention being a public display of ignorance and ugly prejudice on the subject of the Haysom murders. Enlightenment came there none, except in relation to the characters involved. They have nothing new to offer in the way of facts and evidence, inevitably, but this is an extended nothing new in eight dismal parts, presumably as succour for the fans. As so often with the activities of team Soering, their wild allegations and vicious calumnies are more likely to damage him in the longer term, a result which will be welcomed by anyone with a concern for justice.
The Truth About True Crime with Amanda Knox relentlessly promotes the lie that Jens Soering is innocent of murders he unquestionably committed. This series is named after Killing for Love, the equally dishonest propaganda film, and boldly claims to tell “The Truth” about true crime. Unfortunately it does nothing of the kind, not in this instance. What it does is to regurgitate the same old discredited arguments from the same old discredited sources, frequently with atmospheric music brooding in the background.
The podcast comes with a sensible disclaimer:
“The views, information or opinions expressed during this podcast are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent those of AMC Networks and its employees.”
Understandably so.
It also comes with gushing thanks from the fantasy land of Soering’s (English language) Facebook page, as it should, because it amounts to another arm of the propaganda machine:
“We are profoundly grateful to Amanda Knox and her entire team for dedicating season 3 of her podcast series “The Truth about True Crime with Amanda Knox” to Jens’ case.” (21 July 2019.)
In order of release and broadcast, the episodes are as follows:
Part 1 – The Catalyst (29 May 2019)
Part 2 – Two Crimes (5 June 2019)
Part 3 – Martin Sheen – Life Lines (5 June 2019)
Part 4 – The Confession (12 June 2019)
Part 5 – Big Crime, Small Town (19 June 2019)
Part 6 – The Black Box (26 June 2019)
Part 7 – Grinding Gears (3 July 2019)
Part 8 – The Cost (10 July 2019)
*
It would appear that Amanda Knox has appointed herself an all-purpose expert on matters pertaining to criminal justice, with predictable results. As such, she becomes just the latest in a long line of uninformed people to descend on the fashionable Soering case, diving in to add her own contribution to the usual farrago of lies, misapprehension, distortion and omission. What she thinks that will do to enhance her reputation is anyone’s guess.
Part 1, The Catalyst, starts badly and immediately reveals its hand. Knox says that Soering was a “foreign exchange student at the local university.” It’s simply not true. In itself this is a very minor error, barely worth mentioning but for one notable fact. Exactly the same error is made by Sandy Hausman, Martin Sheen and Jason Flom, and highlighted here in the posts dealing with their claims. Amanda Knox now repeats it yet again, which indicates that they all get their information from the same corrupt source. And so they reiterate the very same nonsense.
Knox: “…from the start I knew the double homicide of Derek and Nancy Haysom was a lot more complicated than the state of Virginia would have you believe...”
That’s only true if you insist on listening to people who couldn’t tell a sacrum from a scrotum, even if they wanted to. In the end it’s not very complicated at all when you strip out the congealed mass of accumulated lies.
Knox: “Derek and Nancy were likely butchered by someone they knew and trusted.”
And there’s the set-up, preparing the ground. Derek and Nancy Haysom were certainly butchered by someone they knew, which is fairly obvious. That says nothing at all, either way, about whether it was a person they trusted, but it’s a demonstrable example of Knox’s motivated reasoning.
Knox: “I’m looking at a related but separate crime: the ongoing 33-year wrongful imprisonment of Jens Soering by the state of Virginia. Jens is partly to blame for he intentionally misled the police when he falsely confessed, and last episode I looked at how the investigators, prosecutor, judge, media and jury in Bedford County were responsible for putting an innocent man behind bars...”
Now the old logical fallacy of “begging the question”, whereby her proposition assumes the truth of something that remains to be proved. And it’s 29 years of imprisonment by the state of Virginia, of course.
During the podcast Knox seeks to rely on the insights of neurologist Dr Lucy Brown about the effects of romantic love on the brain (part 4, The Confession). Since she carefully sets up Dr Brown with a false premise it’s no wonder that the poor woman then gives the desired answers.
We could equally well look at the more balanced insight of another neurologist, Dr Steven Novella, academic clinical neurologist at Yale University School of Medicine, writing on the Neurologica blog about source credibility:
“When dealing with beliefs that relate to emotionally-held conclusions, or our source of tribal identity, we tend to deviate from a logical Bayesian approach. Rather, we engage in motivated reasoning, and all the rules change. Facts become increasingly irrelevant, and our ability to rationalize is on full display.”
Does that ring any bells?
In any event, nearly every claim and assertion made in the podcast has already been covered and refuted with existing evidence posted here (with more to follow in due course). In total the eight episodes amount to around five wasted hours of listening time. It’s neither necessary nor desirable to bore everyone senseless by endlessly repeating every refutation, so this will be mainly a look at the very few equally disreputable new angles.
A fundamental question is just how much of her information Knox actually took wholesale from the corrupt sources around Jens Soering. The indications are that it was probably a substantial amount, which itself reflects badly on her, as we see all too clearly:
Knox: “We know the type O blood, which the prosecutor attributed to Jens, later proved through DNA testing to exclude Jens, while identifying two unknown males. That’s enough to know that Bedford County’s version of events, that Jens is the sole killer, is wrong.” (Episode 6, The Black Box.)
Blood is not synonymous with DNA, however much she wishes to obfuscate the distinction. One thing she must know is that the DNA claims made by Soering’s people have already been rejected and discredited by Professor Dan Krane, one of America’s leading DNA experts, working independently for the ABC network. Yet in five hours of content there is no mention of that, not a hint or whisper. Like all the others on her team, she affects not to know and continues to pretend that DNA results establish Soering’s innocence. They do nothing of the kind, not even at $225 an hour in friendly scientists’ fees. It seems likely that Virginia will also have something to say on the matter, doesn’t it?
Another thing Knox must know about is this website. It’s right there on the first page of many Google (or other) searches, often near the top, depending on the search term used. Thousands of people have already found it without the need for exhaustive research, so we can take it that Amanda Knox would have too, and ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. More specifically, ignoring the evidence and information posted here doesn’t make that go away.
She quotes liberally from Elizabeth Haysom’s incriminating letters, but seems not to have found the time to quote from Soering’s. How strange! A major letter of his is featured on this site, but we nevertheless hear nothing from Knox – nothing! – about his hatred of the Haysoms, his thoughts of their death, his need to find a way to “crush”, his “many, many bizarre sexual fantasies”, and numerous references to black people as “niggers”, etc., etc. In her vivid imagination Soering is the all-round good guy, and she’s not going to let deeply uncomfortable facts and evidence stand in the way of her cherished thesis. That’s fine, as long as she doesn’t expect anyone with a concern for the truth to be as credulous. It also tells us something about her ethical standards and values, more of which later.
Then there’s the issue of the many confessions – not “a” (single) confession as she wishes to imply. Again, she must know about these, as well as the detailed judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, the Virginia Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. But they must be way too inconvenient so they have to be passed straight over, along with the additional confession to the German prosecutor. (The confessions and the irredeemably flawed opinions of Dr Andrew Griffiths will be examined in a separate post.) And what does she make of the Hamilton report? That was paid for by Soering’s own parents, after all. These documents are all posted or linked here. Knox may choose to disregard them, as do all Soering’s dedicated fans, but it’s much less likely that people who actually care about the truth will do so, and therein lies his problem. Propaganda only gets him so far.
The reality is that people who are genuinely concerned about the truth don’t take highly relevant evidence and try to kick it all under the table, out of sight and never to be mentioned, as everyone on Soering’s team does as a matter of routine. That’s just not the action of people seeking justice: it’s the action of hucksters with a bogus story to sell to anyone they can inveigle into buying it.
Bucking the dreary trend, one independent party has recently looked at the case in good faith and with intellectual honesty, which is always an ominous prospect for Soering. Former Texas criminal defense lawyer, now an academic, writer and translator in Germany, Andrew Hammel has taken the trouble to present an analysis of the facts and the evidence on his personal blog, with inevitable results, and it richly deserves a wide readership, not least among representatives of the German media, who do not emerge with any credit.
Another theme of the podcast is the resurrection of the old, hopeless and totally discredited theory that Elizabeth Haysom may have committed the murders in conjunction with two drifters, Shifflett and Albright. Predictably enough, this was first put forward by Soering many years ago in purest desperation, and with equal desperation is now being proposed again with a straight face by Chip Harding. The argument is risible, its glaring defects numerous and not in need of further reiteration here. It was considered long ago by the Virginia Supreme Court and the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, and scornfully rejected on both occasions. Flogging that dead horse isn’t going to make it get up and gallop.
So too with the bluster about the offender profile, previously covered here.
*
Chuck Reid Finally Morphs into Pinocchio
Knox asked one of the original investigators on the case, Chuck Reid, about his relationship at the time of the murders with former partner Ricky Gardner:
Reid: “Ricky was young, he hadn’t been in investigations more than I think about 6 months. That was his first murder investigation so I can imagine what kind of a shock it was to him, much less to us more experienced guys…”
Reid has a lot of form here, of course. The scale of his dishonesty should be breathtaking, but isn’t – we’ve heard it all so many times before. If he were Pinocchio his nose would be dragging along the floor by now:
“[Ricky Gardner] and Chuck Reid, another investigator, had arrived at the Holcomb Rock Road house simultaneously… Also a former uniformed deputy, Reid had been an investigator only six months longer than Gardner.”
Ken Englade, Beyond Reason (pages 42-43). 1990, Kindle Edition.
In the light of Reid’s insinuation about how shocked Gardner would have been, we should also consider Gardner’s previous experience for a moment:
“At seventeen, straight out of high school, [Ricky Gardner] had joined the Bedford County Rescue Unit where his job was to answer distress calls at bloody auto wrecks and pull bloated bodies out of rivers and lakes. At twenty-five, he left the rescue unit for the sheriff’s department where his duties were much the same but the pay was better. He proved an able, intelligent, eager-to-learn officer. Five years later, in October 1984, some six months before the Haysoms were murdered, he was named an investigator. Investigators were the cream of the crop in the sheriff’s department, and Gardner’s appointment to that post proved he was on the fast track. In his years of seeing Bedford County life from the violent side he had examined a lot of bodies. A year of so earlier, as a uniformed deputy, he had answered a report of an explosion, and when he arrived at the scene he found what was left of a farmer who had scattered himself over a large part of Bedford County while trying to remove a stump with too much dynamite…” (Beyond Reason, page 41.)
Ricky Gardner’s background and experience thus speaks eloquently for itself.
The murder scene at the Haysoms’ home was a terrible sight and would have horrified anyone but a psychopath. Just the photographs are revolting enough. No doubt everyone attending was appalled, but for Reid to imply that Gardner was somehow more delicate is merely another exercise in self-promotion, as is his claim to be much more experienced.
After finding excess mileage on the rental car –
Knox: “The detectives’ eyes were now solidly on Elizabeth. And Jens, he only came into the picture because he was Elizabeth’s alibi.”
This is rubbish. It was quite normal for Elizabeth Haysom, as a family member, to be interviewed long before Jens Soering. Like all close friends and family she might have had vital information of assistance to investigators. After discovery of excess miles on the rental car the extent of their joint involvement, if any, then became a matter requiring further scrutiny. At that point they began to come under suspicion together.
Knox: “Did you really only suspect [Jens Soering] 1%?”
Reid: “Yeah, when that 18-year-old kid walked in my office the first thing hit me was, there’s no way – I just can’t see this… My gut feeling just tells me that I just don’t think this boy was there and physically involved in actually killing Mr and Mrs Haysom.”
There are multiple examples of Reid’s highly flexible opinions over the years, captured on film for the record. The account he has given more recently is a complete reinvention of his views at earlier points in the story, now made with the purpose of pretending that he always believed in Soering’s innocence. He most certainly did not:
Reid: “Ricky and I kind of played the good guy, bad guy…”
“Jens left me a letter and he referred back to a statement I made in the original interview with him that I was 99% sure he was innocent. He stated that apparently Investigator Reid is gonna have to still consider that he was 99% innocent. Well, he had a chance to prove that 1%, but when he left the country that 1% told me he was guilty.”
The Parent Slashers (Couples Who Kill), 2008.
As late as 2011, in On the Case with Paula Zahn, Reid was still expressing no doubts about the identity of the Haysoms’ murderer, even though by then he had consciously begun the process of attempting to shift a much greater share of blame onto Elizabeth Haysom:
“Elizabeth wanted them gone. She found an individual who she could manipulate and use to do her deeds for her…
And unfortunately, Jens, he was just madly in love with a girl he thought that really cared for him. She played him for a fool ’cause she knew that all she had to do was plant a little seed and back off and then pretend, OK, I was just joking about this, but in her own mind knowing he’s gonna do it.”
There was definitely no question in his mind during that interview about who committed the murders. It doesn’t take a lawyer to understand how badly Reid would be exposed and humiliated under cross-examination. Nor is he the only one by a long way.
*
Which leads straight to…
Chip Harding and Richard Hudson Embarrass Themselves
Harding: “Bedford Sheriff’s Office guys Luminoled that vehicle… Elizabeth said there was no blood left in the car because Jens instructed her to clean it with Coca-Cola, so she poured Coca-Cola in there and scrubbed it all out, which is highly improbable…” [Knox laughs.]
We’ve been here before. “Bedford Sheriff’s Office guys Luminoled that vehicle…” And do we know who was responsible for the Luminol testing on the vehicle? In fact we do:
Hudson: “When Elizabeth described Jens covered in blood wrapped in a sheet, the Bedford supervisory staff at Bedford Sheriff’s Office sends Investigator Chuck Reid to luminol the car with instructions only to inspect the drivers area of the vehicle: seat, steering, floor, other controls. Reid luminols the area of the vehicle he was instructed to examine and finds absolutely no evidence of blood staining or residue. Chuck Reid acknowledges the entire car should have been examined using the luminol technique but he was following directions from his supervisor…”
Richard Hudson, letter to Governor McAuliffe, 12 September 2017, page 5.
Aside from the admitted inadequacy of the testing, Reid would have had no particular expertise in Luminol testing anyway. What’s notable is that all the Luminol testing at the Haysoms’ home, which did yield positive results, was carried out by professional crime scene specialists.
Hudson’s chronology is also wrong. When Elizabeth described Jens as covered in blood and wrapped in a sheet Reid had already left the Sheriff’s Office.
Harding: “…so then you move to the hotel bill. Elizabeth said that she ordered a bottle of alcohol to drink and several food items while Jens was away. Well, I’ve gone back and looked at the hotel bill, and the bill was far less than what she claimed she ordered, so it’s not consistent, and Jens said what he ordered and it’s consistent. She said she paid for it with Jens’s father’s credit card and forged his name, and the hotel said that’s not the way we do business – it was charged to the room. It was all paid, you know, when they checked out.”
Knox: “The hotel room service bill was paid for with Jens’s father’s card, and signed with Jens’s signature…”
So now we need to take a close look at some of the issues around the hotel bill and see just how accurate and truthful Harding’s statements really are.
1. “Elizabeth said that she ordered a bottle of alcohol to drink and several food items while Jens was away.”
She didn’t. At her sentencing hearing on 5 October 1987 Elizabeth was asked about room service purchases by Hugh Jones, her co-counsel:
Q. “What did you buy in room service at the hotel?”
A. “I know I bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker scotch. I may have bought some food. I was tripping so –“
Q. “You were what?”
A. “Tripping.”
Q. “Because of the drugs?”
A. “Well I had dropped the acid, yes, the LSD. And I have this vision of food. I don’t know, I can’t tell you whether I bought food or how much food but I know I bought a bottle of Johnnie Walker.” (Transcript, pages 167-8.)
In fact she didn’t say she ordered “several food items.” She couldn’t remember.
2. “…I’ve gone back and looked at the hotel bill, and the bill was far less than what she claimed she ordered…”
Harding has no evidence for this bare assertion. The records of individual items ordered from room service were retained only for a short time by the hotel, as explained by the manager in his testimony, and are not detailed on the extant bill. What else does he purport to have looked at since there is no other source for that information? For his assertion to be anything but knowingly false he needs to reveal the cost of an unknown number of unknown items she may or may not have ordered. We can wait…
3. “…and Jens said what he ordered and it’s consistent.”
This is a familiar line from Harding, and largely reiterates what he said in the litany of lies and distortion contained in his 2017 report to the Governor:
“Soering gave a statement to police and testified that while Haysom was gone, he, in fact, ordered room service and identified precisely what he had.” (Page 12.)
It wasn’t true then, and repeating it doesn’t make it any more true now. First, Soering gave no such statement to the police: he admitted being in Lynchburg and murdering the Haysoms. He also told us in Mortal Thoughts what he claims to have ordered:
“Finally I ordered room service for two, another part of the alibi which Elizabeth and I had discussed before her departure… I definitely remember the hors d’oeuvres of pink shrimp fanned out atop lettuce leaves on glass plates, but I simply cannot recall the entrees: Welsh rarebit or something simple like that. I signed the room service bill and was given a small torn-off receipt.” (Page 64.)
So he really didn’t, and couldn’t, identify precisely what he had, contrary to Harding’s assertion. By the time Soering finally gave this account it was no more capable of being checked and verified than Haysom’s, and he knew it. The point is well made once again by Dr Steven Novella:
“We also consider plausibility of any claim, and apply logical principles like Occam’s razor to determine the relative probability of competing hypotheses. It’s not about proof – science is all about probability.
If you claimed that you ate a grilled cheese sandwich 100 days ago, I would have no reason to doubt or challenge that… If, however, what you ate 100 days ago was somehow a critical piece of evidence in a murder trial, then we would need to see some evidence. Show me a picture, a receipt from a restaurant, or produce some unbiased eye-witnesses. Otherwise, you cannot admit the claim as evidence. It doesn’t make the claim false, just unknown.”
How Do We Know? 23 May 2019.
4. “She said she paid for it with Jens’s father’s credit card and forged his name, and the hotel said that’s not the way we do business – it was charged to the room. It was all paid, you know, when they checked out.”
An object lesson there in how to distort the truth about the means of payment for room service. But before getting to that, it is necessary to establish exactly how the hotel room was paid for, which is not in dispute:
Soering: “When we decided around 8:30 p.m. to go to a movie, Elizabeth and I discovered that we might not have enough ready cash for all our plans for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. So on our way out of the hotel I paid for our room with my father’s VISA card, and Liz received back her $95.” (Mortal Thoughts, page 58.)
That’s correct for once. Elizabeth made an initial payment in cash, which was then refunded after the weekend stay was to be charged to Klaus Soering’s Visa card. Jens handed over the card and an imprint was made directly onto a payment slip, the total amount to be filled in at the time of their departure.
Elizabeth was fully aware of this and sent a copy of the credit card slip along with other documents to her Charlottesville lawyer at that time, John Lowe, months before going on the run. To suggest that she didn’t know how the system worked is asinine, but we’ve come to expect nothing less.
So returning to Elizabeth’s testimony at the sentencing hearing, she was asked about various aspects of the alibi, including the credit card:
Q. “Now there’s been some evidence presented previously about an alibi, movie tickets, credit card, room service.”
A. “Yes, sir.”
Q. “Was there some discussion between you and Jens about that, about the movie tickets and an alibi?”
A. “After the fact, yes, sir.”
Q. “When after the fact?”
A. “When he came back. Not directly after he came back, but on the Sunday. He assumed that I had been to the cinema, so I let him carry on assuming that I had been to the cinema and I told him that – well, I had to tell him because it was actually his father’s credit card – that I had bought room service with his card and I forged his signature because I didn’t have enough money to pay for the room service with cash.” (Transcript, pages 168-169.)
In effect the pair of them had already opened a line of credit with the hotel, which she knew very well, just as she knew how room service charges were added. What she said was accurate: she bought room service with the card by signing the room service slip in Jens’s name and the relevant amount was charged to the card. She explained at the later trial that she was in possession of the card in order to practise and copy Jens’s signature, not for the purpose of paying for room service:
Haysom: “The alibi was – I was the alibi in Washington, and that I would go the movies and keep the receipts, tickets, the stubs; that I would go to the hotel, order room service; we had this whole little skit planned out of how I was to behave with the room service. We decided that I would phone somebody and make it sound like Jens was with me. He gave me his Visa card – actually I believe it’s his father’s Visa card – to forge a signature, I practised forging his signature.” (Soering trial transcript, page 170.)
Harding, of course, is desperate to say that she claimed to have handed over the card itself to pay for room service, which she didn’t. The notion is absurd because the hotel already had the blank imprint. And any fool would know that hotel employees did not carry around cumbersome imprint-making machines on their person, which in 1985 were similar to this:
What the people of Albemarle County deserve next time around is a sheriff with very much greater respect for the truth.
5. Before we leave the subject of room service and the hotel, however, there’s a couple of final things to add. This is what Soering says:
“Finally I ordered room service for two, another part of the alibi which Elizabeth and I had discussed before her departure… I signed the room service bill and was given a small torn-off receipt.”
He says he signed the room service bill, meaning in his own name. If that were true it would also destroy his story that he was creating an alibi for Elizabeth. Had he been creating the alibi he’d have signed the bill in her name, not his own. In fact she created the alibi, as they had arranged, by signing the bill in his name, just as she said in her testimony.
6. Again on page 64 of Mortal Thoughts, Soering recounts what he did in the hotel room while he was waiting for Elizabeth to return, as he claims:
“I went to our room and waited… I turned on the TV and flipped through the channels, unable to concentrate because of my fear for Elizabeth’s safety. I got up and paced. I sat back down…
Finally I ordered room service for two, another part of the alibi which Elizabeth and I had discussed before her departure… I signed the room service bill and was given a small torn-off receipt.
But Liz did not arrive. So around 9:30 p.m. I gave up waiting and proceeded to the final stage of the so-called alibi...”
He missed out something rather important there, didn’t he? Now his problems have just become a whole lot worse and he’s in a heap of difficulty…
Elizabeth Haysom was asked at the trial to confirm that she had actually gone ahead and forged Soering’s signature on the room service receipt:
Q. “Did you do that?”
A. “Yes, I did. I also made a phone call at some point during all of this, but I’m not sure when. I tried to phone Christine, but I’m not sure when that was.”
Q. “And why did you try to phone Christine, this being Christine Kim, your friend?”
A. “Well, I was having so much trouble with the Most machine card I thought that my number must be wrong. I hadn’t remembered the number correctly, and I phoned her to find it. And I also was phoning to make it appear in the conversation that I was having with her that Jens was with me.” (Trial transcript, page 177.)
A long-distance telephone call is listed on the hotel bill. It might be thought surprising that Harding didn’t mention it, taking into account how much he loves to talk about that bill. There’s a good reason for his screaming silence on the subject, however, the implications of which must surely fill him with horror.
On the timeline jointly agreed by Soering and Haysom (the innocent Christine Kim doing nothing more than write it down for them), the call from the hotel room is shown as being made in mid-evening.
Neither in Mortal Thoughts nor in direct examination by his counsel Richard Neaton does Soering mention making a long-distance telephone call. It was one lie he dared not risk because it would have been too easy to bring the person who took the call to court and give evidence that it was Elizabeth who made it – while he was nearly 200 miles away in Lynchburg on other business.
*
Richard Hudson had commented earlier in his 2017 letter, referred to above:
“It is impossible to make a competent assessment of the case without spending many, many hours reviewing and digesting the statements and testimony presented in various court proceedings and then compare those statements with what the evidence really is.” (Page 5.)
He’s right about that.
So this would be the same Richard Hudson whose investigative powers are such that, when writing to the Governor, he can’t even identify the correct hotel Soering and Haysom stayed at, which could hardly be more basic:
Hudson: “We do know that Elizabeth and Jens had checked into the Key Bridge Marriott in Washington, D.C. on Friday March 29, 1985...” (Page 5, and repeated on page 6.)
Do we?
Around 18 months later he was still saying the same thing to Amanda Knox:
Hudson: “You know the story that Jens tells and the story that Elizabeth tells about the room service at the Key Bridge Marriott...”
We emphatically do not know that Elizabeth and Jens checked into the Key Bridge Marriott because they never went near the place.
They stayed at the Washington Marriott, a different hotel entirely, the advantages of which were explained by the general manager, Yale Feldman, when giving evidence on 6 June 1990. The crucial difference for present purposes is that the Washington Marriott had a deep underground parking garage, which will become significant in due course. It matters.
The name of the hotel and the address are both right there and clearly visible at the bottom of the original bill:
After going over the various transactions relating to rental of the room, use of the telephone, room service, and so on, prosecutor Updike then asked Feldman to describe the location of the hotel. He was establishing that Elizabeth and Jens were close to Georgetown. Feldman said:
“As you walk out of the front door of the hotel you make a left turn, and go down to the corner that puts you at the intersection of 22nd and M, make a right turn on M Street, and you have got one mile to Georgetown, one mile or less.”
Hudson’s confident assertion again:
“It is impossible to make a competent assessment of the case without spending many, many hours reviewing and digesting the statements and testimony...”
If he were sent to investigate a crime in New York the risk is that he’d end up in Arizona. Still, at least Knox was impressed, but the Parole Board – maybe not so much.
Perhaps the most shocking thing is that all these people who previously held trusted positions of authority have so little concern for truth or accuracy in their oral statements as well as in formal letters to the Governor about a deeply serious matter.
* * *
Jens Soering - Guilty as Charged 