but in context I don't think it's particularly odd. After all, Avery was previously convicted of rape, the cops are (potentially) looking into him again, and in connection with a young (missing) woman.
I agree. Does anyone really think this family had not been talking about this since 11/3, after Colborn talked to SA and when it was all over the news? It was probably their sole topic of conversation at Crivitz. Brendan alludes to this when he says the RAV may have been planted or that TH may have gone to Green Bay to be with friends. He's obviously been listening to his family talk about this, and the subject of Steven's previous arrest and conviction for a rape he didn't commit was almost certainly part of those conversations. So his mentioning rape is not, imo, incriminating.
The "interview" with Brendan by O'Neill and Baldwin, and later Skorlinksi, who also came into the car briefly, apparently occurred on 11/6 at Crivitz. The transcript is not dated but they refer to "up here". This is not an interview but an interrogation, a forerunner to W&F's later interrogations. They repeatedly accuse Brendan of lying, using the same tactics W&F used, and they get him to change what he first says. I think it's impossible to know if or when Brendan is telling the truth. He is so impressionable and suggestible, lacks confidence in his own memory and thought processes, and is anxious to "get it right" as defined by others. They doubleteamed him, just as W&F did. (And why does O'Neill keep leaving the car and returning? What was that about?)
Brendan keeps insisting he is telling the truth, but they don't accept that and ask why he didn't see her when the bus driver and all the kids on the bus did.
Baldwin: Yeah. You remember that girl taking that picture. You're gettin' off the bus, it's a beautiful day, it's daylight and everybody sees her, you do, too. Do you remember seeing that girl standing there taking a picture?" Brendan: "Maybe, I don't know.....I don't remember."
And yet Blaine, who was also on the bus and who walked down the road beside Brendan never says he saw her. And they never lean on Blaine the way they do Brendan. Why is that? Was it because Blaine didn't have the cognitive problems Brendan does, and they saw that right away? Brendan himself says he has a "bad memory" which, to him, which may mean that throughout his life he has been able to be persuaded that he remembers something he doesn't think he remembers.
Brendan also says the bonfire was scheduled for Thursday but was called off because his mother and Steven quarreled. He does not mention a bonfire on the 31st and neither O'Neill nor Baldwin insist that that's when it was. He also says Bobby goes goose hunting every day at 3:00, with his friend Mike Osmundsen (goose hunting with bow and arrow is apparently a thing). That he was hunting with friends was never mentioned at trial. Did he meet them at the hunting site?
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