By J. Harry Jones
STAFF WRITER
September 17, 2002
Minutes before Danielle van Dam's remains were found Feb. 27, David Westerfield's lawyers were brokering a deal with prosecutors:
I loved listening to people on radio and TV trying to explain this article today. They had a hard time reconciling the part that states that:
Feldman and Boyce took the map back to Westerfield and later telephoned to say they no longer "had anything to discuss regarding a plea bargain."
With the ending of the article that says:
Then, on Feb. 27, volunteer searchers combing the Dehesa area, far from where police had focused, found Danielle's badly decomposed remains.
At that point, the official sources said yesterday, any opportunity Westerfield and his lawyers had to win a plea bargain evaporated.
How can any "opportunity" for Westerfield to plea "evaporate" when he already said that he no longer "had anything to discuss regarding a plea bargain."
This article is purposely misleading. It seems the Prosecution offered a deal and gave Feldman a map for Westerfield to locate the body on.
Feldman would have to report the offer of a deal to his client, after which Westerfield, having no knowledge of the location of Danielle, refused the deal.
It seems every media person in SD was aware of what they thought was a plea from Westerfield from before the trial even started. They were mislead by LE for the purpose of having it sway their reporting, which it obviously did.
The problem is that the media need LE for access to the good stories, violence, sex, drugs. Therefore, they are often times reduced to nothing more than whores for LE's version of the story.
This was one of those times.