More observations from Rolfe.
“I am simply gobsmacked that the time needed for Mrs Bryson to go and look at the house seems to have been airbrushed from the narrative. Her original story was that she drove first to the supermarket, did the shopping, loaded it into the car, then drove to Easthouses where there was a house for sale she was interested in. This wasn't an arranged viewing, she just wanted to take a look at it from the outside. She got a bit lost trying to find the house, but found it, had a look, then drove back home. It was quite clear at that time that she had seen the couple at the eastern end of Roan's Dyke path on her way home, after she'd looked at the house, not on her way to the house.
She said she got home, unloaded the car, put away the shopping, and started to make the tea. Then her phone rang and she took a call. She estimated the call came in about half an hour after she got home, at about 6.20. In fact the call was logged on her phone as 6.17, so she was about right. That would put her return home at about 5.45 to 5.50. She originally said she saw the couple at the path about five or ten minutes before she got home, which is about right for the drive from there to her house. This puts the time of the sighting at about 5.35 to 5.45, without any need to reference the supermarket checkout time.
The till receipt time of 4.45 (and 31 seconds) tallies with Mrs Bryson's own estimate of what she did, giving her 30 to 35 minutes for the actual shopping in the store (she in fact estimated 35 to 45 minutes) and about an hour in total for the drive to Easthouses (12 to 17 minutes each way), the search for the house for sale, time to look at it, and then the drive back home again. If the bank statement time of 4.32 (and 45 seconds) is used instead, this cuts the time for the actual shopping to only 20 minutes maximum, including queueing up for the till and ringing up the purchases. I suppose it depends on how much she bought, but the till receipt tallies better with her own recollection of how the time went.
However, why does it matter? If you take 13 minutes off the time spent in the supermarket, all this does is add 13 minutes to the time spent looking for and looking at the house for sale, because it doesn't affect the timing of her return home. It moves her arrival in Easthouses 13 minutes earlier, but it doesn't change her departure time. And yet it was on her way out of Easthouses that she was supposed to have seen the couple at the end of the path!
Using the bank statement time for the completion of the supermarket shop instead of the till receipt gets her arrival in Easthouses to about 16.53, which is exactly the time the prosecution needed Luke to have been seen at the end of the path with Jodi. But that's not when Mrs Bryson said she saw the people at the path!
Bear in mind that Mrs Bryson was driving her car, with two children in it, one of them only a two-year-old. She didn't stop to scrutinise these people, she simply noticed them as she drove past. The layout of the road is important here. If you're driving south from Easthouses on the road in question, the end of the path is at a fairly sharp bend. In fact at that point the path appears to continue on in a south-west direction while the road makes a fairly sharp left turn to continue in a south-east direction.
https://goo.gl/maps/bXJREZafGbzEsHyr5Note that a driver coming from this direction is pretty much looking straight up the path for a few moments, and Mrs Bryson would have had a reasonable view of anyone standing at the path entrance, although only for a couple of seconds. (Zoom in to the path itself here.
https://goo.gl/maps/sNUEqCb9Uw3fQkVB8) This is what Mrs Bryson originally said she saw. She wouldn't have had much time to see the couple, and she would obviously have had to concentrate on the left-hand bend in front of her, but it's a reasonable enough story.
Now look at it from the other direction, driving north towards Easthouses.
https://goo.gl/maps/eYqPxmuHt7PPmxRB6It's a bit different, isn't it? There's an indication of an entrance there, maybe, but an entrance to what? You can't see. Mrs Bryson didn't know Easthouses at all well. If she had seen a couple of people standing under that tree, how could she have known they were at the end of a footpath at all? It simply doesn't compute.
There's no possibility that anyone could be mistaken about which direction they were driving in when they noticed something at that spot. You're either driving south, when you have a left-hand bend in front of you and you can see right into the footpath, or you're driving north, when you have a right-hand bend in front of you and you can't even see that there's a path there. Even when you're right alongside the path entrance, driving north, you can't see that it's a path, as here.
https://goo.gl/maps/MqJo8eNVTcnHazsKA You actually have to go past the entrance and twist back to see the path!
Not only that, in court the suggestion was put to Mrs Bryson that the male that she saw was as much as 10 yards into the path. This is all quite confused as she originally said she saw both people together at the entrance to the path, nevertheless she seemed to accede to the suggestion that the male was some little way into the path, facing towards the girl who was at the entrance. Even more bizarrely there was a suggestion that she'd seen the male move down the path - which is completely impossible whichever direction she was driving in as she couldn't have had the path in sight for long enough to see this happening. However, the point is that it would only have been possible for her to see into the path, to see that the male was 10 yards down the path (wherever that suggestion came from), if she was driving south. It's impossible for someone driving north to see into the path at all.
In order for Mrs Bryson to have seen anyone at that path at 4.53, she must have seen this when she was driving north, towards Easthouses, before she went to look at the house for sale. But driving north you simply can't see what she is supposed to have seen. Driving south, you can see it (although to clock that much detail in the couple of seconds as you drive past is quite a feat), but if she saw this when she was driving south then the time was about 5.40, not 4.53.
So what the hell was Donald Findlay (more on him later) thinking about, in court? All he had to say was, Mrs Bryson, which way was your car facing when you saw these people? Was the bend (you should have been concentrating on, two children in the car and all that) a right-hand bend or a left-had bend? Could you actually see into the path itself when you noticed the two people?
If she actually saw them on the way to the house viewing then that is not what her original account said, so how come she originally thought she was driving south towards a left-hand bend then revised her story so that she was actually driving north towards a right-hand bend? And how come she even realised there was a path there, let alone acceded to the suggestion that one of the people was as much as 10 yards down the path, when a driver travelling north can't see the path at all? And yet that's what we have to believe if the sighting was 4.53.
If she made the sighting as she drove south, as everything seems to suggest and indeed only a southbound driver could possibly see into the path or even realise there was a path there in the first place, then the time of the sighting was about 5.40. The prosecution case relied on Jodi having been killed at 5.15.”