Do the conspiracy theorists understand the concept of eyewitnesses?
Picture this example: A man, who we’ll call Ozzie, walks into a houseful of people. He pulls out a gun and shoots the owner of the house, Jack, in front of sixteen witnesses. He then drops the gun and walks out of the house. The police arrive at the scene, recover the murder weapon, and arrest Ozzie a few blocks away. Ozzie gets knifed in the jail yard before standing trial.
The story makes the paper. Oliver, who lives hundreds of miles away and never met Ozzie or Jack, reads an article in the paper. He looks at a picture of the crime scene and notices that Jack’s feet were pointing up. Oliver, a man who knows very little science, believes that someone who is shot would instinctively grab their chest and fall face down. So obviously Jack couldn’t have been shot.
Oliver now makes some phone calls and finds Mildred, an elderly woman who lives down the street from Jack’s house. Mildred wasn’t in Jack’s house when the crime occurred but she remembers she saw a man walking around the neighborhood that afternoon carrying a cricket bat. There’s no explanation about who this man is or why he had a cricket bat, so he’s “mysterious”. And because Oliver’s proven that Jack wasn’t shot, he must have died by some other means such as being hit by a blunt object. Clearly this mystery man with a cricket bat is the real killer.
Oliver contronts the police with his new evidence and the detective assigned to the case tells him there were sixteen eyewitnesses who identified Ozzie so they arrested him. Having found Ozzie, the police saw no need to search for anyone else including the man with the cricket bat. Oliver realizes that at the very least, the police failed to investigate all possible theories because they were too focused on Ozzie. Or perhaps they’re protecting Cricket Bat Man, who may after all be a police officer himself.
Ozzie goes to the local paper and blows the lid off the story despite the danger he might be putting himself in. When an article appears in the paper, a man called Ken comes forward and says he was walking through the neighborhood that day with a cricket bat he was giving as a birthday gift to his nephew. At the time of the shooting, Ken was at the birthday party. Oliver quickly sees the holes in this story: How could Ken have been at a birthday party when he was committing a murder? Maybe he ducked out of the party, went to Jack’s house, beat Jack to death, and then snuck back in to the party. Maybe it was Ken’s nephew who was the real killer. Or maybe there was a second cricket bat man.
Meanwhile, Steve is working on the real story. Steve heard in a bar that Jack had been in a big fight with Max a week before he was killed. So Max is the obvious suspect in Jack’s murder. But Max has an alibi and says he never met Ozzie. This doesn’t stop Steve, who’s researching the secret connection between Max and Ozzie. Marty meanwhile knows that Oliver and Steve are following the wrong trail and may in fact be part of a conspiracy to divert attention from the Man With Red Hair, who Marty knows is the real killer based on a psychic revelation he had. And there’s Herman, who knows the Freemasons did it because they’re behind everything.
