Chapter 7: Discovery

"There it is! See it?" I said to Marty as I pointed at the bottle on the nightstand in the video.

We'd already put the camera's back in their boxes and cleaned up the bedroom. Then, while the sheets were in the wash, I'd burned the video we made onto a DVD so we could use it for comparison. When the DVD was finished, Marty and I returned to the living room so we could watch the two videos side-by-side on the wide screen television. Only this time, one of the videos we watched was Lilly's, the other was the one Marty and I had made.

He got up from his position on the couch and walked over to the screen so he could get a better look. "I think so. Can you zoom in on it?"

I did.

Astonished, Marty exclaimed, "Damn! You're right; it is a bottle of Spanish-fly. And, it's in the exact same place on the nightstand that you set the one you used! How the hell did we miss it?"

"Because neither of us was looking for it then; we were both too busy watching Vince and Gloria doing the nasty." I told him.

He sat back down and said thoughtfully, "I wonder what else we missed?"

"Let's watch it again and find out."

Inspiration must have struck him because he said, "Hey, can you slow it down any more?"

"Sure, I could ... if we hooked up the laptop to the television. But I can't do that." I told him.

Marty responded, "Why's that?"

"I don't have the cable for it." Then it occurred to me that we'd worked through lunch and I was hungry. If I was hungry, then I was sure that Marty was too. What better excuse could I find to get out of the house? "Let's go get something to eat. While we're at it, we might as well go shopping for the cable I need."

So we did.

Two hours later, our stomachs were filled and the cable in place, we started watching video at one thirty-second speed.

That's we found the first editing error in the video.

Marty saw it first. "Did you see that?"

"No. I didn't."

Excitedly, he said, "Run it back a few frames and play it again. This time, watch the digital clock on the other nightstand."

I did, restarted the video and then saw it.

The time on the clock jumped suddenly from 5:33 to 5:35.

"I see it!"

So we ran the video back until the clock on the nightstand said 5:32 and began watching it frame by frame. We were looking for any anomalies we could find.

Six frames into to it, we found the first one. There were three frames of video in which the pillow behind Vince's head had somehow moved to the right just enough to reveal his left wrist to the camera.

"There it is!" I pointed out. The 'it' was referring to was the rope tied around Vince's wrists.

Marty conceded, "I'll be damned! You were right."

"Do you think it's enough?"

He turned to me and said, "Probably. Our burden of proof is 'by a preponderance of the evidence' not 'reasonable doubt'. Still, I think we should see just how many of these little editing errors Lilly left behind."

"Hey, let's put the other video back in and play them side by side again."

Perplexed, Marty asked, "Why? We already did that once."

"Because I'm willing to bet that we're going to find, because of the editing done, the two videos will become out of sync every where they were edited."

And that's exactly what we did.

It didn't take long after that to find the rest of the anomalies.

After the first one, I started keeping a log of them. In it, I recorded the video name, frame number it started, and time stamp as it appeared on the video.

There were at least thirty-seven of them. In total, they represented a time gap of eighteen minutes and twenty seconds. Funny, that's the same amount of time missing from the Nixon White House tapes!

Anyway, the longest single deletion was five minutes and two seconds in length. It was also at the end. That's odd isn't it? The action was already over. Why did they delete something from the end of a video? Odder still was the fact that they left one frame left behind as evidence. Marty and I studied that frame for two hours trying to figure out what was missing. But we couldn't see anything. In fact, the only thing we did see was a cell-phone on the nightstand that wasn't in the rest of the video.

But, since we had more than enough evidence to prove our case, we gave up and decided it would remain one of those mysteries we'd never know the answer to.

When our work was done, I called Samantha and told her what we had found.

She told me that we'd done a good job and for us to take the rest of the weekend off.

We were to meet her at the courthouse an hour before court Monday morning.

When I hung up the phone, Marty told me he'd put the sheets in the dryer and asked me what Samantha had said.

I told him.

He looked thoughtful for a moment and then said, "Why don't we run through the video a few more times and see if we find anything else?"

"Why? We've got more than enough evidence as it is. Besides, she told us we could take the weekend off?" I asked.