geragos says, jennifer was still alive, sending real, not fake, text messages herself from her phone. by all accounts, she was alive at 1:17. okay. and at 1:17, paul was not at the house. so where was paul? trying to pick up paperwork at the palo alto police station and then at the hookah lounge where he appears on security camera video footage around 1:37 p.m. and then from there he headed to his anger management class about 18 miles away. on the way, he stopped at the restaurant depot seen here on camera around 3:30. why is that important? because, says geragos, the prosecution s own timeline should have cleared paul zumot. investigators said jennifer was strangled several hours before the fire started, and it was lit no earlier than about 6:30 p.m. but early in the afternoon, after paul had left the area, geragos says, jennifer was still alive, sending real, not fake, text messages herself from her phone. by all accounts, she was alive at 1:17. okay.
make sense. they weren t a sensible response to the message he sent her. in fact, he got the same text twice. she didn t show up, and her phone was off. so as soon as i got that repeat text message, i was kind of worried because she wasn t responding to what i was saying. jennifer was nowhere to be found. jennifer was dead. now what prosecutor gillingham wanted the jury to think about is what happened or didn t happen much later after the fire. here was the scene, house burning, paul standing on the street outside watching the fire. at this point he supposedly didn t know if jennifer was inside or outside, whether she was alive or dead. but in the time that he was there, he made 38 calls and text messages, two of which went to
now yesterday she walked home and she said, hey, somebody probably was stalking me. had the brothers killed her, too? police listened, and then had paul give them his clothes for forensic testing. questioned by police, his home destroyed, his girlfriend dead, paul zumot was very nearly in shock, said his friend. his mind was, are they sure jen for the gone and, oh, my god, she s never coming back? as the weeks went by, paul was in a kind of daze. the gist of our conversations for the first few weeks is that jennifer s not coming back. he was completely distraught about the fact that jennifer was in that fire. meanwhile, as those same weeks went by, investigators went quietly and steadily about their task, picking through the cinders of the fire and coming to the conclusion that none of it smelled right. literally. coming up was gasoline there? no question at all. it s in her hair. you can smell it, and you can smell it when you walk in just with your own nose. inves
furniture. he kicked in my car. somebody saw him at starbucks spit in my face on my way to work. but things clearly changed after that. remember, they were all lovey-dovey and paul was even talking marriage the night before the fire. and now here he was not more than a year later on trial for her murder, listening to the prosecutor take the jury inside the last days of paul s relationship with jennifer. how did gillingham do that? jennifer s cell phone. detectives discovered and this was rather curious that most of her text message history had been deleted. but law enforcement has changed a lot. it s had to, to keep up with high tech. the palo alto cops managed to find a phone expert all the way across the country in new hampshire who had a very deep look into that cell phone and was able to pull up thousands, literally thousands of deleted text messages between jennifer and paul in the last few months of her life. and, oh, boy.
and at 1:17, paul was not at the house. so where was paul? trying to pick up paperwork at the palo alto police station and then at the hookah lounge where he appears on security camera video footage around 1:37 p.m. and then from there he headed to his anger management class about 18 miles away. on the way, he stopped at the restaurant depot seen here on camera around 3:30. so there simply wasn t time in between, said geragos, for paul to go to the cottage, strangle his girlfriend and douse her body with gasoline. a solid alibi, said geragos. his client simply couldn t have killed jennifer, and he couldn t have started the fire. how could he have been in two places at once? and as for rosie, the yellow lab who alerted to a gasoline smell