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Most of the witnesses we have seen so far have had conflicting (meaning conflicting with the supposed statements they gave to police, or conflicting with each other) statements. Most have also been supportive of DW's statements as to his whereabouts and actions.

We all know how people are too. When something exciting occurs in the neighborhood, everyone wants to be the bigshot that has some exciting 'detail' they can tell the press or police. They want to be helpful to the victim or victim's family. They are basically good people.

Do they embellish? Many do. Why? Their 15 minutes of fame. Their chance to make a difference, their chance to put away a criminal, to get back at all the injustice in the world. You can tell witnesses that embellish or have creative memories from fairly reliable witnesses. They only had one fairly reliable witness today. They snoopy neighbor witness type will get on the stand and have absolute answers. On cross, they can get mixed up and start making excuses. The fairly reliable witnesses will answer in a calm but responsive manner, and will admit whether they are reasonably sure, or whether they can't say yes/no because they aren't sure.

Don't people remember things exactly as they happened? Almost Never. People change their memories to correspond with current situations. If they get involved in a situation like this, being asked about some minor details during a high profile death case, and they have bought into the guilt of a certain party, their memory will adapt to provide the answers to support that guilt.

I know, I get arguments against this all the time, but tons and tons of personal experience has proven I am right. I have been in counseling with married couples, where they say things to each other and 5 minutes later, when asked about certain statements, swear to GOD they never said them. 5 minutes folks. And we are supposed to depend on these peoples rememberance of details, ordinary everyday details no one even pays attention to, from 5 months ago.

People also believe so much in eyewitness accounts. This is unreliable too. I can't do it here, but I have a little test for those that believe that what you see is real. We don't realize that what our eyes see is passed to the brain, and same with hearing. The brain evaluates the input in thousandths of a second, altering,discarding,adding whatever it wants to fit our preconceived attitude of the world around us.

They have done testing on hearing and vision and proven this over and over.

The simple test I use is one where I draw a circle inside a triangle and write a simple phrase inside that.

Then I ask the person to read the phrase. After they do (and so far 100%fail) I tell them they read it wrong, and show it to them and ask them to read it again.

I can do this repeatedly, even holding the paper in front of them for a long time, and they don't see it.

Eventually I tell them what is wrong, and INSTANTLY they see it. Sure is funny to see the look on their face.

Also, I did notice the question asked of the volunteer host: had he been following the case in the paper or on television? He had. Did he perhaps change his statement in hindsight? I don't mean to railroad Westerfield, but because he believed that Westerfield did it (all the media says so) so it must have been him. That will come up again later, I'll wager.

And we are supposed to depend on these peoples rememberance of details, ordinary everyday details no one even pays attention to, from 5 months ago.

yeah-- remember 'Mr. Ranger, sir,' recalled the time of day because everthing that day started with "2"? No more questions. LOL