Westerfield's Fate In Hands Of Jury: VERDICT WATCH BEGINS in Van Dam Murder Case

CourtTV ^ | August 8, 2002 | CourtTV

[FresnoDA]

Jury's hands After two months of hearing evidence, jurors have begun deliberating the fate of David Westerfield, who is accused of kidnapping and killing 7-year-old Danielle van Dam

[John Jamieson]

Rowland was arrested 2/15, just after the body was dumped.

Let's see, going to arrested tomorrow:
Cancel electric and phone, and oh, get rid of girl.

[hoosiermama]

Actually, I've been wondering about the grandparents....Who raised Br and Demon to find such low life behavior acceptable. Yes I also believe the boys are in danger, although I know that often only one child at a time is targeted in the family, it concerns me. Which boy will be the next target?

[Southflanknorthpawsis]

Damon was a cell phone engineer, perhaps Albanian smugglers were ready to buy the latest in untraceable cell-phone call technology.

Very interesting thought !!!!!!!

A close friend of mine who just recently left a position with a well known convenience store chain told me of a recent bust invloving a number of LA area stores.

Suddenly they were seeing an incredible increase in orders for cell phones that they sell in the stores.

An investigation uncovered quite a widespread ring from the inside out that was supplying cheap phones that could be reprogrammed so as to be untraceable and sold to enemies of ours.

Hmmmmmmmm.........

[Kerensky]

Who were his victims? Does he have an alibi for the night in question?

[Southflanknorthpawsis]

All we can do is pray for those children. It's disgustingly ironic that the very reason we suspect they are in danger is the reason that the family will probablly be considered off limits. So sad and so wrong.

[tunneldiver]

I am a long time lurker, first time poster. I have been following these threads since Feb. and listen to the trial as much as time permits. I have not read all the transcripts though. So if there is testimony that addresses my concerns, I would love some input.

Dealing with the evidence presented, I wish there was not reasonable doubt, but in my mind there is. I would like to have seen some testimony on how the "blood stains" appear to have been deposited. Were they smears, sprays, drips, etc. Could the spot on the jacket have been other body fluid, kids and snot ring a bell for me. I want to know more about were that jacket usually was. I want to know the depth of the hair in the drain, how it was layered with the other hairs in the drain.

It seems like the most damning evidence is the presence of fluid, fingerprints and hair in the RV. I think there are too many unanswered questions here. I have a camper, and there is no telling how much various kid stuff I have in there. All the kids want to see it, I do keep it locked when I am not home, but there have been at least a dozen children in there at various times.

I do believe in the bug evidence. That coupled with the resonable doubts as to when Danielle was in the MH, the lack of evidence that DVD was abducted from her home by DW, and the lack of evidence tying DW to her murder would lead me to vote not guilty. All that has been shown in this case is that Danielle was in DW's home and RV at some time. That is not enough to convict IMO.

I am trying to deal with just the evidence that has been presented and leave my opinions about the VD's out of this. But I would like to know more about the DNA/fingerprints in DVD's room. Did they test people that they know should have been in there or not? Do we know that it is not a friend or family member? I amd pretty sure that I could name almost everyone that has been in my kid's room. If the DNA/fingerprints do not match those people, I would be screaming bloody murder to find out who they belonged to.

As strange as it sounds, I have seen no evidence that DVD was abducted and murdered. Yes, we "know" that she did not walk to the recovery site and just drop dead there, but the evidence does not prove that. I think that the prosecution did a lousy job and I could not convict DW. Personally, I don't think he did it either, but I feel like there is a difference is a gut feeling and what the evidence shows, and in this case, they both point to DW's innocence IMO.

Like I said, I am a first time poster so go easy on my posting skills. I will defend my "thinking skills" but I have no good defense for typos and such.

[sunshine state]

dread78645 startd a new thread earlier this morning. I don't think too many people have been on it.

[hoosiermama]

I was joking about the ENQUIRER. But, actually only someone with their money could afford to expose the entire scenerio. I imagine that the Van Dams will be in the media for some time. Hope after the gag order is no longer in place, someone talks big time. I'd contribute $ by buying a copy or two!

[John Jamieson]

Rowland is producer of child porno, 5+ victims. He was caught on the internet in Denmark with his pants down.

Nobody is looking at him for Danielle....that's been handled. He just happens to live in Poway, CA.

[Kerensky]

http://www.chipcenter.com/eexpert/bmcginty/bmcginty008.html

Untraceable Phone Calls

For a while I worked on setting up a database for prepaid cell phones running on a Berkley BSD Unix box and the Postgress data base. The principle of prepaid is straight forward. Instead of a traditional contract with the phone company billing to the subscriber account, you buy minutes beforehand. The phone queries the database to see how many minutes are left and deducts them automatically on every call. Good for the phone company (much less customer support) and good for you (if your phone is stolen you are only out those minutes instead of a lot of calls to Columbia and Ecuador). But looking at my new prepaid phone I couldn't help wondering, why don't they put solar cells on the back of cell phones so they can charge when you're not using them?

The cell phone is a simple transmitter and receiver, just like a ham radio, with Maxwell's demon inside. (1) The traditional ham finds a frequency no one is talking on, cranks up the power and talks to another ham on the other side of the world. Back in 1990, while I was on Ascension Island, South Atlantic, I remember the Global HF operator telling me he had to call the Desert Storm troops and tell them "your !$%^$& morale calls home are wiping out traffic in the entire hemisphere". This one frequency per customer system works OK as long as you don't have too many customers, which is why in the 1970's you were really somebody if you had a phone in your car.

Your cell phone has a little demon inside that changes the transmitter power constantly, from 3 watts out in the country miles from an antenna down to .05 watts next to the base station. The base station has another demon doing the same thing. Put up lots of base stations wired into the telephone land lines and you can fit a lot more cell phones into an area. Cleverly, when you need more capacity you can build a base station in between the first two, the demons crank down the transmitter power even further, and you can sell more phones.

Since we now have a lot of idle demon time out there, we can add more channels too. In one system, the French designed GSM (Groupe Systeme Mobile, or in English the Global System for some word that starts with "M") and you get two hundred channels per radio. The little demons can hop your calls around different frequencies while you are talking, hand off to the next cell when you are moving, and use extra channels to send stock quotes when you're not talking. The system was designed to be able to hand off a phone call from one cell, that might be only a few hundred yards across, to another while you are riding on a three hundred mile per hour bullet train. Think about how busy those demons are now. Kind of reminds me of that Star Trek episode where the aliens moved so fast that the crew members looked like they were standing still and the only thing that saved the ship was Kirks libido.

Early cell phones had an identity number burned into memory (the EIN) that was sent at the beginning of every phone call so the phone company could look it up in the database and start billing. The computers obviously must keep track of what cell the phone is in, so with a little programming you can track where the phone is down to a few hundred yards, and even how it's traveling by looking at the list of cells it has passed through. This is how the police were able to find OJ Simpson driving down the freeway.

Newer phones come with a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module), a little chip that comes with the phone and fits into a slot on the back. Makes it much easier to transfer your services if you buy a newer phone. I bet if OJ had to do it over again, he'd go into a wireless store that didn't have any security cameras with a couple hundred in cash. He'd buy a cheap phone for about $90, and some air time, maybe $50 for 120 minutes. All the airtime is in a card with an 800 number and another unique number assigned to an unsold block of 120 minutes on it. He'd take it home, put the SIM chip in, and call the 800 number. After punching in the other number he now has 120 minutes of calls on a phone nobody knows he owns.

If you're buying a prepaid phone, try paying cash just for fun. If the store does have video cameras leave the phone on your shelf a week so they tape over you being in the store. It won't help you if you call a tapped line already, but at least you have something to say when the office nerd is showing off yet another smallest-phone-money-can-buy.

"That's great Fred. Can you make completely untraceable calls on it too?"

A lot of jurisdictions (Italy) are already on to this and require you to present ID when buying a phone. Try not to call any people who have wiretaps on their phones, and of course don't use it for criminal activity.

Most important of all, don't leaving it sitting out in direct sunlight where it will melt. They tried putting solar cells on phones, and wouldn't you know, people left them on the dashboards of their minivans and came back to phones that looked like they came from Dali paintings.

(1) Thermodynamics was a very hot topic in the late 19th century, the age of designing steam boilers that didn't use up so much coal. One of the knottier philosophical questions was why a cold object placed next to a hot one gets warmer while the hot once gets cooler, and never the other way around. This is more than a toddler question when other guys are inventing things like refrigerators which seem to violate the common sense answer: "They just do." James Clark Maxwell proposed a thought experiment: Suppose I construct two boxes with room temperature air in them, and connect them with a small tube that has a gate on them. I put a small demon on the gate and tell him to open the gate when he sees a fast moving molecule of air coming through, and close it when he sees a slow one coming. In short order one box will get all the hot air and the other keeps the cold air. Similarly, the computers in cell phones handle the repetitive power adjustments and bookkeeping better than humans ever could.

[kayti]

Great post, welcome!

I believe you have very well summarized why many of us consider DW not guilty. There just isn't strong enough evidence for conviction. Too many unanswered questions, poor specimen collection, even more poorly evaluated.

To believe that people within a neighborhood don't have similar fabrics, towels, clothing is ludicrious. Somewhere along the line our shopping patterns, vendor relations cross paths.

Layla's hair in the MV are the pointer that at one point Danielle was in the MV. Cross contamination from her PJ's is not the answer for the dog hair.

It is so important to look closely at the facts of the case and not the emotion of a dead child. I pray the jury does a job as well as you have.

[Betti]

Someone reported that un-identified fingerprints were found in the VD home.. on the stairway and other parts of the house.. I wonder if PD checked those fingerprints against all of the Scumbags they have recently found... I just feel the the Westerfield case is a rush to judgement... just too many questions still on the table.. he could be guilty, but the questions still need to be addressed..
I too have wondered how the VDs supported themselves... and about their parents...
Someone will have a field day once all of the informatiion is public...

[Southflanknorthpawsis]

Excellent post, tunneldiver. You have many of the same questions that a lot of us do.

There are so many unanswered that the list could be very long.

If I had to choose my two most curious, it would be as follows:

1. How DID that DNA spot get there? It is just too convenient and coincidental for my gullibility limit. How very, very odd that there is no 35mm photographic record of the spot and that the forensic specialists said they were told to only use polaroid.

That is some kind of big red flag in my mind. Why ??? Why ??? In a case this public and with so many holes, why wouldn't LE want to show the manner in which that DNA landed to avoid suspicion? The lack of proper photography leaves us to never know how. All we have to look at is cut-out hole.

2. Is it reasonable to believe that an intelligent man would abduct a child in darkness from his own neighborhood and keep her in his house for some hours only to take her, alive, from his house in broad daylight?

He could not have possibly known that it would take the I-didn't-check-on-my-kids pervert mom, Brenda, and up-all-night-off-and-on pervert dad, Damon, until 9 in the morning to discover Danielle gone. DW could have had cops pounding his door down at 4:00 am. Is he that much a daredevil? I doubt it.

None of it makes sense if you think about it. Why didn't he immediately take off in his SUV, do whatever, and get rid of all evidence? Why on earth would he traipse all over the place with a child knowing he could leave trace evidence? Utterly unbelievable, IMO.

[Kerensky]

There has been speculation that the van Dams were involved in some way with drug smuggling. Damon is/was a cell phone engineer and his talents would include knowledge of how to modify cell phones to skirt tracing. Combine that with Brenda's "job" selling books to libraries as a cover for servicing a distribution route.

Assume now that they have run afowl of a competitor, or Maybe they've been holding back on some proceeds, or threatened to get out of the business, or go to the police.

How to keep them in line? Kidnap Danielle?

What was Damon so intent on vacuuming up so soon after the crime? A pile of cocaine dust, left as a calling card?

[John Jamieson]

That would be the green jacket taken to the cleaners on 1/26, not the black jacket that they couldn't find.

"Give me one of Westerfield's jackets, their's still a little DNA left on this Qtip."

Feldman screwed up not testing a similar jacket to see if DNA would make it through the dry cleaners. He had nothing to lose.

[John Jamieson]

The DA is not interested in TRUTH, he would never even do a test that might show he's a total fool. He running for reelection on Westerfield's back.

[Kerensky]

The Jurors will give this jacket close scrutiny and
study the dna evidence. Is it true the sample is destroyed, that the photo of it was bad? It is true it wasn't a perfect match to Danielle's blood? When did they analyze this spot, before or after Danielle was found?

[Betti]

Thanks for the return... I am afraid that you are right... our politics seem to get the best of us every time... If we put all of the insane happenings together... our country certainly lacks the leadership of honest, honorable and ethical people.. as folks say today.. connect all the dots: Enron and all, the previous Administration.. our national and local charitible organizations, our acceptance of insane behavior and our ability to put money/power/politics above all.. it just gets scary to think of the future...

[Betti]

Unbelievable... it was reported that the VDs not only cleaned the house, but painted as well... after the OJ trial and all of the subsequent court crazies.. I have a real fear for our judicial system...
Thanks for the return...

[mouser]

going back threw the testmony you probably have a better handle on it than i do

i feel the only one to do a real good job at the drop site was the bug guy

i did have one thing pop out at me there has been talk of a dog used at the drop site usally saying the dog was worthless as the body lay right there i don't think the dog was looking for her it was looking for westerfield if that would be true i wonder if the procution ever told defence as it would add to the westerfield wasn't there

just don't see or remember it in testmony

anyone else remember this