When I was a snot nosed kid about 35 years ago, I got involved in some petty theft. One night a friend and I picked a lock and walked into a room with four adults waiting for the same perps who had already been pilfering items. We weren't them, but these guys were certain that we were.
I picked the lock. As a young kid I learned how to pick the easist of locks, the older ones. It was mostly the idea that I could figure it out and do it that drove me. On this night I picked a really old door lock. Most old timers know how easy the old time door locks were to pick. The old wing of the school had ancient fixtures. The new wing had modern Sladge locks. I didn't know them from Adam, but these guys were convinced that if I could pick on, I could pick all.
The mentality behind the Westerfield photos seems like the same thing to me. Westerfield has lots of photos, thereby he's a perve. Sure he's had that computer for a couple of years, but he just had to be a full time porno abuser. They were positive.
From my own experience I have seen how some investigators jump to conclusions. Yes the data seems to confirm what they say it does. But alternate explanations also do. Westerfield may have used the computer in the day, his son at night. Who knows which of them accumulated the majority of the pictures. A young kid with raging hormones could have responsible for most of it. In one evening he could have easily downloaded 500 small photos without hitting the download key once.
I don't know. I'm just not as comfortable with the public prosecutor's explanations as I'd like to be. So much for that.
Take care. BTW, I hope you uncover enough material to slam the door on homosexuals who prey on school kids.
Anyway, I have personally had several seperate experiences with unscrupulous LE. Well, by unscrupulous I mean dishonest. I guess there are other forms of unscrupulous.
Fist was when I was about 11 yrs old. I had been hanging around with a guy who was 13(we'll call him R), and we were at the elementary school playground one weekend, and someone had broken into it the same weekend. A cop pulled into the area where we were, and took our names and addresses. Fast forward about 6 months or a year. A cop comes to my house, sits me and my parents down and say that the middle school had been vandalized, that he just came from R's and that R had admitted that he and I had done it. My mom and dad believed him, and my mother beat the crap out of me after the cop left. Bear in mind, I hadn't even hung around with R in a couple months. Well, after my continued protests, my dad drove me over to R's house to talk to him and his parents. When we got there, R came out of the house threatening to kick my butt for being a damn liar. See, the cop did go to R's house before he came to mine, but when he went to R's house he told them he had just come from my house and that I had confessed that it had been us that did it. BTW: we didn't have anything to do with it, and never heard anything else about it.
Next time I was 17, a friend woke me up to ask if I would come pick him up from a bar(it was 1 in the morning). I did, and on the way home, we were pulled, basically for being the only car on the road at the time. The police in that area(Cayce) had and still have a rep for corruption and brutality. My frined was drunk, and made fun of the way the cop was talking, one thing led to another, I was arrested for DUI. I told the cop(very nicely, i was in no way belligerent, and tried to stop my friend from behaving stupidly. I was so nice in fact, he took me to the station in the front seat with him, no cuffs or anything.) that I had had nothing to drink, and that I would take a breathalyzer. He said "That don't matter, look what I found in your car." He held up a fresh baggie with a small amount of weed in it. Now I knew I didn't have any with me, but I did smoke it regularly, and I was trying to figure out when I had lost some. He said he could see my little gears turning, and not to worry about it, just plead guilty and nothing would come of it. He winked at me and told me my car smelled strongly of marijuana smoke when he stepped to my window. It took a second, because I was one naive young man, but I got the picture. Pled guilty. My buddy got a baton-whuppin back at the station. I guess he had something coming to him, and he didn't get any permanent injuries out of it. But still. Just to be spiteful, the cop was a Sgt. Tincher. So if you know a guy named Tincher who was a Cayce, SC cop in 80/81, don't trust him.
Third. I was 18, my roommate was dealing small time(weed), the house got busted. To make a long story not quite so long, it was the type of case where the guy that was dealing would usually pay a large fine and it remain on his record, the other two roomates get simple possession, expunged after 10 yrs. Well, the cops said we had alot of stuff that we didn't but that it had been lost on the way to sled headquartes for analysis. My favorite was a baggie of "mexican brown heroin" found in the kitchen cabinet. Everyone who lived there knew about the baggie of shake and bake that had been in the cabinet all summer because we decided not to cook it one night at the last minute. Anyway, because of that, I had to take a simple possesion charge that could not be removed from my record. so far as I know, it is still there, since 1981.
There have actually been a few others, but I wonder if you get the picture about why I think that even if Mudd had said you could weigh two reasonable theories, I would still clear Westerfield, because a theory that involves the cops lying and falsifying evidence is eminently reasonable to me. Even more reasonable with the dubious circumstances surrounding the gathering of the evidence.
Now I really must say, that have had occasion to interact with four seperate Lexington County cops in the last year and a half or so(nothing about me doing anything wrong, but I don't want to go all into it) and every single one of them impressed me. Great guys, integrity and all, really really good folks. One was was maybe not too bright, but he almost brought a tear to my eye with his sheer, raw, niceness. So I am not a cop hater, and know there are some cops who are just super super good people.
But based on my experience, no way do you just assume the cop is honest. The problem with the cleaning ticket, the polaroids, the rag placed on the floor after the first LE search where the blood speck would later be found, they found time to supposedly test everything orange owned by anyone in the pictures at the last minute(dusek: "good thing i cought feldman's little trick in time") but twenty day was not enough time to even look at the unID'ed fibers, prints and DNA associated with the crime scene... I am very very skeptical.