Yeah, you must deal with the fact that the descriptions from the different crime scenes differ dramatically. How did he get from a big beefy guy at LB to a lighter guy at PH? With different hair. Yet we know it was the same guy (unless it was some kind of weird partnership.) So the evidence points toward a guy that used disguises (including padding to make him look bigger, hair dye and/or wigs, possible shoe size disguise, maybe some others.) Could be that’s why he never got caught.
You say dramatically. I say subtly. People tend to read way too much into witness testimonies and start reading between the lines, which often leads to misinterpretation.I have already discussed the fallacy of the "thin guy in the padded coat theory".
A lot of guys have slim faces but go pear-shaped below.
Mageau: Short, curly, light brown, almost blond.
The PH kids: Reddish-blond, crew-cut.
Fouke: Light colored hair, possibly graying at the back, crew-cut.
These descriptions are all well within the same range. The question is whether BH’s description is absolutely incompatible with the above. The man is described as almost blond at the extreme end of the spectrum – not even there is he positively blond. Light brown to reddish blond – that seems like the middle ground for him to me.
If he was sweating under that hood and/or had grease in his hair, I don’t think it’s inconceivable that it may have appeared a darker shade than it actually was to BH – who observed a small portion of it behind his mask + sunglasses.
Short and curly at BRS: Nearly three months later he could have easily worn it long enough for some greasy/sweaty locks to be observed by BH. And between LB and SF he had a hair cut, going for a crew cut. I don’t see a huge problem here, to be honest. The wig-under-the-hood theory seems unnecessarily complicated to me. If BH had stated that he had long hair, then we’d have a problem. Ditto if he had described it as pitch black – or flaming red.
None of the witnesses observed him in ideal conditions, that has to be taken into account too. He was observed at night on two occasions, and behind a mask by BH.
If I were to theorize that Z’s actual hair color was brown, fairly light, bordering on reddish – I don’t think anyone can call that preposterous. Now, get a hold of a person with that color, slap a LB style costume on him and make him sweat – I’m pretty sure his hair would look darker than it actually was.
People tend to read way too much into witness testimonies and start reading between the lines, which often leads to misinterpretation.
Very true.
We also tend to look for confirmation of what we happen to believe at any given time. I’m very much guilty of this myself. It’s tempting to take some parts of a statement literally, while largely ignoring other parts.
If you believe for whatever reason that more than one person were involved in the Z crimes, you’ll treat every discrepancy as highly significant. If you believe there was just the one guy, you tend to write such discrepancies off as being unimportant in the bigger picture.
I’m in the second group. I don’t expect three different sets of witnesses to three different crimes which took place over a period of some months to provide descriptions of the perpetrator that do not contradict each other to some extent, not to say a considerable extent. If anything, I’d take an absence of discrepancies as being downright suspicious.
The descriptions themselves are inherently vague on several of the points people keep debating. Bryan’s height and weight estimate for Z, for instance, is all over the place.
What was the color of the hair samples at the Bates murder that the FBI looked at? Brown of some sort, right?
