It is quite difficult to discern who saw what and when or what has been added later. I think there is an awful lot of misinformation which has become factoid.
For example we know officially of Andrina Bryson's sighting of a young couple the time of which the court accepted fitted the timeline for being Joni and Mitchell.
Snip
Sun 6 Jul 2003 01.47 BST
There have been no reported sightings of Jodi in the six hours between her leaving home and the discovery of the body after 11pm ...
Despite taking nearly 400 calls from people keen to help with the investigation, police have no reported sightings of Jodi as she left home.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2003/jul/06/ukcrime.scotland
The witness who had seen Jodi being followed by Stocky Man put the time at slightly after 5 o’clock. The police appealed for Stocky Man to come forward so must have thought the eyewitness claim credible. The eyewitness’s evidence would have put Jodi at Luke’s road at around 5.30, just the time Luke says he left the house.
There was no appeal for the couple seen by AB, at this time they could have been just another innocent couple. There was no appeal because Bryson’s first and second statements put the time of her sighting at 5.45.
An excellent summary of the sighting from elsewhere by a poster called Rolfe.
A woman called Andrina Bryson stated that she saw two people, male and female, at the eastern end of the path early that evening. There's a lot in the book about Mrs Bryson not being the complete stranger to the Jones family that she claimed to be, and about the possibility that by the mediation of her brother-in-law (who was very close to the Jones family) her description of the couple might have been contaminated. I think that's all a bit of a red herring, and in fact the testimony doesn't stand on its own terms.
The prosecution claimed that the two people were Luke and Jodi, and this proved that Luke had walked along the path from his own house (which was some little way from the western end of the path) and met Jodi at the eastern end. Thus giving the lie to his story that he hadn't seen her at all, and placing him with her, close to where her body was found, about 20 minutes before the time the police had decided was the time of death.
There's so much wrong with this that I don't know where to start.
Luke hadn't necesarily been expecting Jodi to "come out to play" that evening, because she was in her mother's bad books because of having played truant some time the previous week and originally she wasn't going to be allowed out until six, but around 4.30, after Jodi had come home from school and changed out of her school clothes, Judith had said, well OK, on you go. Jodi texted Luke (using her mother's phone as hers was broken) between 4.34 and 4.38, probably saying that she was coming over (the actual texts were deleted from both phones).
The implication is therefore that Luke was still at home when these texts were exchanged, because that was his first intimation that Jodi was free. You might think that if she was coming over to his neck of the woods, as seems to have been the arrangement, he would simply have waited for her. However her mother insisted that Jodi wasn't allowed to walk down Roan's Dyke path alone and that Luke was expected to come and meet her. This wasn't actually true, Janine confirmed that Jodi often walked the path on her own and Judith knew that, but the rendezvous at the eastern end was insisted on by Judith.
So if Luke immediately dropped everything as soon as he got those texts and walked briskly to the eastern end of the path to meet Jodi, what time could he have got there? In the end the time of that sighting was determined in court to be between 4.49 and 4.54, to fit with the (revised) time that Jodi was believed to have left the house, which was 4.50. If she had left at 4.50 she would have been at the eastern end of the path at 4.53, assuming she went straight there.
But hang on, if Luke was still in his own house texting at 4.38, could he have got to the eastern end of the path by 4.53, only 15 minutes later? The distance is about a mile, so yes, but he would have been hurrying. So that was the prosecution story. Luke had left his house the minute the texting exchange ended (or he was already on his way at that time, even though he didn't know Jodi was coming out unti he got the texts) and walked very fast and got to the spot by 4.53, just in time to meet Jodi, who had left her house at 4.50. And that's what Andrina Bryson saw.
It's not that simple. Andrina Bryson originally timed that sighting at about 5.40 to 5.45. According to the police theory Jodi was already dead by then. That time didn't work for the police at all, because there was a definite confirmed sighting of Luke sitting on a wall at the end of his own street in Newbattle at six o'clock. He said he hadn't left Newbattle at all and he was still waiting for Jodi to show up at that point, and no there was no arrangement that he was supposed to go and meet her at the eastern end of the path and walk her to Newbattle. (There was an arrangement that he would walk her home along the path, but not that he would go to meet her.) He was seen sitting on the wall waiting for her at 6.00 by friends who actually knew him, so there was no getting out of that one. Working back from that time the police figured that 5.15 was the latest he could possibly have committed the murder and still got back to Newbattle to be seen sitting on a wall as if he hadn't a care in the world. Therefore Jodi had to have left as early as 4.50 to get her to the spot where she was murdered in time for Luke to be the murderer and the whole mad-slasher thing to have happened.
So the Bryson sighting, if it was to remain part of the evidence (and it had to be, because nobody else claimed to have seen Luke at the eastern end of the path at that time, to give the lie to his story that he'd spent the entire evening west of the path), had to be earlier, and indeed had to be pretty much at 4.53 precisely.
Andrina Bryson's original story was that she got into her car with her two children (one a toddler) at 4.05, pretty much as soon as her daughter got home from school, to go to the supermarket. It took five to ten minutes to get to the supermarket and then about 35 to 45 minutes to do her weekly shopping. The police got her till receipt which said 4.45, so that more or less checks with the shorter of the time estimates. 4.05 leave the house, 4.10 arrive at the supermarket, 4.45 at the checkout. She wanted to look at a house for sale in Easthouses (the village where Jodi lived, at the eastern end of the path) so she drove there, getting a bit lost, looked at the house from the street, and then drove home. It was on the way home she saw the couple.
It was agreed she would have taken five minutes to get the messages and the kids into the car and drive away, so leaving the supermarket at 4.50. The minimum time to get to Easthouses from the supermarket was 12 minutes, or 17 minutes if she'd gone a longer way, so 5.02 to 5.07 arrival in the village. Then she had to find the house for sale, stop in the street to look at it, then turn the car in the cul-de-sac to head off home. Originally she gave herself more than half an hour for that, estimating that she'd seen the couple at the end of the path at 5.40 to 5.45. Another time point was that she'd received a phone call "about half an hour after she got back home". That call was logged at 6.17 (she originally guessed 6.20 before the time was checked), meaning she got home about 5.50.
I'm not quite sure how long it was supposed to take to drive from the western end of Roan's Dyke path back to Andrina Bryson's house, but possibly this sequence of events puts her sighting of the couple a little bit earlier than 5.45, perhaps 5.40 or a few minutes before that. Certainly not 4.53. So how did that happen? You'd think the till receipt timed at 4.45 would knock the whole thing on the head from the start.
Here's how it was done. The police got Mrs Bryson's bank statement, and for some reason the transaction was timed on the bank statement at 4.32 (and 45 seconds), 13 minutes earlier. They decided that had to be the correct time and the till receipt was wrong. Well OK, but that would have meant that Mrs Bryson managed to do her weekly shop (with a kid and a toddler in tow) in about 15 minutes, compared to her original estimate of 35 to 45 minutes. Given the 4.32 time, add 5 minutes to get kids and groceries into the car, then the 12 minutes minimum time to drive to Easthouses from the supermarket and you have 4.49, or 4.54 if you take the longer route. Hey presto, this is just right to have seen Luke and Jodi meet at the eastern end of the path exactly as the police timings needed them to have met.
But what about the drive to look at the house for sale? Mrs Bryson always put the sighting of the couple after she looked at the house, on her way home. They seem just to have forgotten about that, unless there's another altered statement that hasn't been mentioned.
So who did Andrina Bryson say she saw? Originally she described a male in his early 20s, white, average height and build, thick sandy brown hair standing up in a clump at the back. He was wearing a green fishing-style jacket with a lot of pockets and trousers to match. She didn't see his face at all. The girl had very dark shoulder-length hair, with a plain navy-blue hoodie and light blue boot-cut jeans. Again she didn't see the face and couldn't guess an age.
Luke Mitchell, on 30th June 2003, was a skinny 14-year-old kid with dead straight blond hair. The prosecution were adamant that he had been wearing a parka jacket (which he didn't actually possess at that time, but which in any case didn't match the fishing-jacket description). Jodi had mid-brown or auburn hair. She was wearing a baggy black top with a prominent logo on the back, and very baggy black trousers.
It's blindingly obvious that Andrina Bryson saw two completely different people, not Luke and Jodi, at maybe twenty to six. But it was vital for the prosecution that it had to be Luke and Jodi at 4.53. There's more, including a photospread which seems to have been about as fair as the one Tony Gauci was shown on 15th September 1991 (that is, anyone could probably have figured out which photo was the suspect) from which Mrs Bryson (who didn't see the man's face) obligingly picked out Luke - of course Luke was already the prime suspect by then and it's pretty unlikely she didn't know what he looked like even if her brother-in-law hadn't been as thick as thieves with the Joneses. And a parka which she said wasn't what the man had been wearing, but she picked it out because she'd been asked to pick the garment most like the one she'd seen the man wearing. (Again shades of Tony Gauci - well if I have to pick someone then the one that looks most like is the number eight - not the man I saw in my shop but the man who looks a little bit like is...)
I don't think the people Mrs Bryson saw have actually been identified. Of course if they weren't there till 5.40 and the police were concentrating on the period between 4.50 and 5.15, they might not have pinged anyone's radar. But since it seems likely Jodi was murdered later than 5.15 they might have been important witnesses.’