****UPDATED Saturday 30th April 2011 ****

It is widely accepted that around 85% of murder victims are killed by someone known to them. From the beginning, it was clear police believed Jodi had been killed by a male.

We believe that police decided from the outset that Luke was Jodi’s killer, and, as a result, failed to properly investigate other possibilities. Note the examples below, where exactly the same circumstances apply to people other than Luke, but who were never treated as suspects.

Consider now the realities between the prosecution case, and the truthful version:

The Prosecution said:
(1) Jodi left home at 4.50pm to meet Luke, and:

(2) She met Luke at the Easthouses end of the path between 4.49 and 4.54, based on a sighting by a witness AB

There is no evidence, anywhere, that this is the case.

There are, in fact, several points in this case where timing is critical, and this site can show that timings claimed by the prosecution were manipulated to fit the case constructed against Luke.

 
* The time of Jodi leaving home was changed from an originally claimed 5.30pm to 4.50pm, a full 40 minutes earlier, apparently to fit with a “witness statement,”  (AB) sighting two teenagers at the Easthouses end of the path. This timing went through an almost painful manipulation.

*  The 5.30 timing of Jodi leaving home meant, categorically, that if the girl seen by this witness was Jodi, then the male seen by her could not be Luke – he was identified by some schoolboys sitting on a wall at the Newbattle end at 5.45pm

*  It would take an absolute minimum of 16 minutes to get from the Easthouses end to the Newbattle end, without stopping off to commit a murder en route.

 *   The timings were then changed to fit with till receipts from a local store where this witness had done some shopping. Unfortunately (for the prosecution case,) these too, excluded Luke as the male seen with “Jodi” – at between 5.01 and 5.06, there was still not enough time for him to have committed the murder and been on the wall at the Newbattle end. Eventually, evidence was apparently “found” that the store’s switch payment machine was set at the wrong time, and the sighting must have been between 4.50 and 4.54. (No conclusive evidence has yet been produced to prove that the switch machine was wrong).

* This timing was apparently based on a series of texts between Jodi, using her mother’s phone because her own was broken, and Luke. These texts were exchanged between 4.34pm and 4.38pm.

* No-one, at this stage, seems to have questioned the obvious anomaly- the last text between “Jodi” and Luke was at 4.38. This means Luke had only 16 minutes to get to the Easthouses end of the wall, in order to have been the person seen by AB

 *  BUT, had Luke been at home at the time these texts were exchanged (and since there was no reason for him to be elsewhere, as apparently Jodi was not “ungrounded” until the exchange of the 4.34/4.38 texts) another 2 – 3 minutes, absolute minimum, would be needed to get him from his home to the Easthouses end, putting him outside the claimed sighting by AB.

UPDATE: It has emerged since the above was published that initial statements about Jodi’s plans that evening indicate that she was believed neither to be going to Newbattle, nor “mucking about up here (Easthouses) but was heading somewhere else entirely. There would have been no reason for Jodi’s family to believe she would be using Roan’s Dyke path that evening, if they had, in fact, believed she was going to the place specified in this statement, as it is in the opposite direction. This statement suggests that the family member who made it did not know what Jodi’s plans were for the evening.

Furthermore, it has also emerged that statements from other witnesses, placing Luke at the end of his own street much closer to 5.30, changed over time (and a series of interviews) to read closer to 6pm. These witnesses were all very young.