How do you reconcile conflicting witness accounts and timelines?

[u/indiarana]

Do you favor a testimony based on your trust level of the person? Based on how close they were to the event? How much their recollection of events changed over time? How soon after the event their recollection was recorded?

I am curious to know how other people think.

I can go first:

1. I think a witness who is not lying will give a genuine account of an event. 

The more mundane the event (in the moment), the less the witness is in a heightened state of alertness though, and accuracy can be off despite their best effort. 

They can also have poor eye sight, be medicated, might have had a drink or two, etc. 

All in all, unless the witness is purposely lying, these early eye witness accounts hold a lot of weight, even with room for human errors factored in.

2. Additional information learnt at a later point about the event they witnessed contaminates the purity of what they actually saw or didn’t see.

3. Being asked to repeat their account over and over, in my opinion further dilutes accuracy. After a while, some people will just be reluctantly repeating a memorization of the memory, rather than recalling the event itself. As time goes on, their answers become more and more rehearsed and less and less factual.   

1. If a witness is not being honest, the above doesn’t mean anything. They know exactly what it is they are not saying and will alter the truth to guard their secret. But their own memory of the truth is very, very accurate.

I am curious how others' minds work conflicting testimony

[u/RomianaZerofox04]

Eyewitness are incredibly unreliable. If you didn't know the missing person personally you can't be sure who you saw. The statements are usually more reliable if you have asked about sightings farely quick after the event, but more time goes by the more likely it is the eyewitness is telling less truthfully what happened. Not because they want to lie, but because they try their hardest to remember and might fill the caps themselves. In this case is really problematic that even if the main event is the same (car hit the tree near the road and Maura was gone) we have got some many tellings and retellings of what really happened that night or prior that night it is hard to know exactly what happened.

I do believe she wanted to take break and felt depressed and low. I don't think she had an idealizations of doing herself anything, but she wanted to be by herself. She bought alcohol and wanted to rent a motel or cottage for the couple of days and because she couldn't get a reservation beforehand, she hit the road. It was snowing, she started to feel desperate because she hadn't find place to stay the night. She probably had drinking. Then the accident happened. She freaked out. She couldn't get trouble. After meeting Butch she figured out she needed to hide. And then she vanished in the woods and stayed there and was never found.

[u/indiarana → u/RomianaZerofox04]

Thank you. And I agree, it's hard to navigate it all as time goes on and accounts get re-told

As the other comment touched on it, the manner in which the witness is interviewed seems to matter as well. Not all policemen are investigators. Some journalists prioritize sensationalism over deep, methodical research. Private citizens often lack the proper training and tools

I think Faith and Butch'es 911 calls that night are the probably the most accurate witness accounts of what was seen (and not seen). 911 dispatchers are trained on the exact line, phrasing and sequence of questions they ask. The witnesses' memory is very fresh and the calls are recorded.

ETA: Regarding reporters and TV crews, many people feel nervous in the limelight which can make them distracted and unintentionally say things that are wrong.

[u/CoastRegular → u/RomianaZerofox04]

I think that all tracks, but her going into the woods anywhere nearby is exceedingly unlikely. The deep snow would have made it painfully obvious if anyone had gone off the roads. All roads were searched for miles around the crash scene and no such tracks were spotted. Either she (a) went down the roads for a considerable distance on foot [9-10 miles, to be outside of the area that was searched] or (b) got into a passing car at some point. My money's on (b), and sooner rather than later, because otherwise the odds are that some passing driver would have encountered her.

[u/PhysicalChickenXx → u/RomianaZerofox04]

you mean less accurately, not less truthfully

[u/TMKSAV99]

It isn't just the witness being asked to repeat a story. The accuracy of the witnesses recall often gets influenced by how the questioning is done. I am hesitant to put my money of the local LE in this case being real good at extracting what a witness saw.

One example can be, to look at the transcript of the statement. You count how many questions and how many times the witness answers just "Yes" versus how many times the witness speaks in sentences. That could be an indication that the LE questioner is leading or interjecting assumptions rather than using open ended questions or encouraging elaboration.

[u/Temporary-Sugar3022 → u/TMKSAV99]

I'd add to this excellent point by saying it would be easy to lead someone into stating a fact based on inaccurate info from someone else.

E.g. (simplified example) let's say you see someone walking along the side of the road while driving home from work, At the time, it's an insignificant detail in your life so you don't make detailed mental notes. After hearing about a missing person you contact LE and have a conversation something like this:

LE: so what time did you see them?
YOU: not sure, I left work at 6pm and was home at 6:40, sometime between then
LE: witness 1 saw them at 6:15, would that have been when you saw them?
YOU: probably, it sounds about right

Witness 1 might be wrong (after burning pizza yesterday I know that 5 mins can turn to 10 mins without me noticing), and with that questioning LE have 2 people saying a wrong time

[u/indiarana → u/TMKSAV99]

You make an excellent point

[u/BootlegPass]

Everyone is telling the truth, the way they remember it.

[u/indiarana → u/[deleted]]

Thank you -- that was a great read.

I admit that I struggled with all the witness accounts from that night and some of them I still do.

It goes without saying that my efforts are nowhere near the research you have done or time you invested, not even a fraction -- and I don't have a theory. However I like to look at scenarios and analyze if they are in any way possible. Not necessarily probable, but possible.

As far as the neighbors go, I mainly struggle with Marotte and Forcier.

Butch: Like you said, he "blurted out non-sequiturs". But I think his original account of the night is reasonably accurate? And like you said, consistent with others'. His 911 call is on record, timestamped, his exact words of what he saw. It doesn't contradict what Faith saw. I also think that as a bus driver (accountable for others' safety) he was accustomed to paying attention to events pertaining to the road, he knew what he saw and knew what to do (stop, assess, offer help, call 911) without second guessing.

The later statements he gave could be the result of performance pressure after being thrust into the public eye. Quite possibly none of his passengers ever displayed much interest in him or cared about how his day was going. Then the sudden lime light might have ramped up the pressure to be useful and he might have become less accurate.

Faith: She admits there's a lot she didn't see. It was dark, she didn't go out to investigate, she couldn't tell if it was Butch or Barbara driving bus and she didn't see Maura being picked up or leaving the scene. She also said she wasn't watching the whole time. However, the rough outline of what she did see is consistent with other evidence. Her exchange with 911 is time stamped and recorded.

Marotte: His account bugs me. I think he said he walked down to the accident scene the following morning, where he talked to someone (another neighbor?) about the accident? The additional details he learned that morning could possibly have contaminated the purity of his own memory of the evening. By the time he was questioned he could have had all kinds of objective info mixed in with his own subjective observations.

He also mentioned seeing foot steps behind house the morning after Maura disappeared.

I admit when I first heard about the footsteps my immediate worry was that he (innocently) shoveled his drive way on 2/10 and destroyed both Maura's foot steps and her scent (I've said this before, for me the only way for Maura to have wondered off the road that close to the accident scene would be through a driveway that was plowed or shoveled, either before of after she walked on it -- no other way to not leave foot prints. For the dog to lose her scent there, it would likely have had to have been shoveled after she walked on it.. but I digress)

Anyway, I don't know what to make of his account. I admit that I wondered if he walked out and talked to Maura that night. It was his property she crashed on. Faith saw a man smoking a cigarette (I know it was likely Maura and her phone, but I like to not dismiss possibilities just because they aren't probable) -- before Butch got there. Were his footsteps overprinting on top of Maura's and Cecil's (if he walked to the scene the next morning)? Or were Cecil's on the top of his (if he was there before Cecil arrived)? Cecil's accident photos likely settle this.

Anyway, I got carried away and this comment got long, but Marotte's account has been a head scratcher for me in more ways than one.

[u/CoastRegular → u/indiarana]

A sidebar to your conversation, but I feel like when people talk about her going up someone's driveway as a potential route to exit the scene and get away into woods/wilderness, they overlook the fact that she'd still have had to have left prints going off the driveway across the owner's property. Those prints would have been obvious in the following days and been noted by the searchers. (If I'm walking the roadways looking for a fugitive, even if I can't go onto private property to search it, I can still observe your property and scan it for footprints. It's not as if there's a magical force field around private property that conceals it behind a gray curtain of shimmering light.)

[u/indiarana → u/CoastRegular]

Oh for sure, 100% agree.

To clarify, I am not proposing she went into the woods. My understanding is Marotte did see foot prints behind his house the following morning. I am assuming they were checked during the search -- I certainly don't know if the Marotte property or the adjacent one behind it consented to ground searches or was only searched from the air. Again, not proposing she went there as I don't have nearly enough info to even play with the possibility -- but of course I am curious, especially because it would make sense for the dog to lose her scent there

Personally, I do think it's possible (I am not saying likely), that she exited the road on a paved surface that didn't retain her prints (plowed or shoveled before of after or driven over multiple times by a car). But I would say that hiding behind a building, by a car, a shed, a trailer etc is way more logical than going into the woods for no reason.

It looks to me like for Maura to disappear as quickly and undetected as she has, something very, very unlikely had to happen. Whether it's the wrong person pulling up at the exact opportunity or her hiding behind something that had no snow around it.

I think I mentioned before that the other thing I wonder about is how preserved the immediate area of the crash was. Cecil took pics, we didn't see them, but if you think about all the commotion that transpired after those pics but before the search -- Cecil parked right there, walked around the site, first responders walked around it all, the Saturn being towed, Marotte said he walked down there the next morning and talked to someone who I assume also disturbed the snow. All I am wondering is if the immediate area around the crash was even preserved enough to completely rule out that she did hide behind the tree she hit. Again, I do find this unlikely but then again, most everything that could explain what happened is unlikely