DEATH BY TALONS-Tiddy Smith

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A neighbor, Larry Pollard, came up with an alternative killer. He claimed an owl had attack Kathleen outside her house. He said it sliced her scalp with its fierce talons and caused her to run inside, collapsing at the stairwell and bleeding to death. When the media heard about his theory, Larry was mocked and Michael was convicted. Now twenty years later, author Titty Smith explores Pollard's theory and questions whether law enforcement ignored or even hid evidence to convict Michael Peterson

and was an owl in fact the real killer. The book that we're featuring this evening is Death by Talons then an Owl Murder Kathleen Peterson with my special guest, philosopher and author Titty Smith. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.

could be that she felt, couldn't it. But the more I looked at the evidence in the case, and the more I got through the episodes, I realized, Wow, it's really it's not looking good for Michael here. The evidence is not stacking up well. Most likely, if I put what I want to decide, I put my emotions to side, No,

he is probably the murderer. But then a few years after Kathleen's death, a neighbor of Michael Peterson Kathleen Peterson, a man called Larry Pollard, began to put forward this owl theory, and according to him, Kathleen's death had resulted from an owl attack which occurred late at night outside

her house. So the idea is that rather than falling down the steps and patting her head, rather than being bludgeoned to death stairwell by Michael, in fact, she had first been attacked by an owl, a bird of prey outside her house, and then ran inside with these terrible cuts on her head, having already been put there before falling in the staircase and bleeding to death after having

gone concussed or knocking herself out after falling. Now that theory captured my imaginations, and I'm sure it captured many imaginations around the globe, right. It was a very crazy theory and people were attracted to it, not just because

it seemed in some ways to fit the evidence. For example, fits the shape of the wounds on Kathleen's scalp very very well, and this was something that ornithologists were actually quite happy to accept that, yes, those are wounds that owl would be capable of inflicting, you know, So that that was the first thing that really captured my attention. Was Larry Pollard putting forward this owl theory, and I, you know, captured my imagination. I started, is the supplause theory.

It seems like it could work, you know, I mean either and by this I think I was in two minds. I thought, either Michael killed Kathleen or an owl killed Kathleen. And I was pretty fifty to fifty. Then in twenty nineteen, I was discussing the case with the stranger at a party and I said something along the lines to that, Oh, but the owl there is pretty persuasive too. You know, she got these wounds on her head, she had the feather fragments that were found in her hand. You know

what about all that? And this dude just laughed at me. You know, you think, and owl, a bird of prey could attack a woman, scour her head with its talons, slice it to shreds, and all that would be found in the aftermath are a couple of tiny feather fragments in her hands. You really, have you ever seen a cat with a bird, he asked me. And I thought about it, and I thought, oh my god, he's right. That's just incredibly obvious. If a bird of prey was

tussling with Kathleen. You know, the idea is that she was supposed supposedly pulling to pray from her head. You know, she's bound to be coveredant feathers, and they're bound to be feathers all around where she was attacked, And according to all of the official accounts, there was no such thing. All that were founder a couple of stray for the fragments in her hands to fear the fragments. So at that point I realized, Okay, I'll have to start again, because one of these theories has to has to be

right right, or both of them could be wrong. Either Michael did kill his wife, after all all, there are feathers all over the place where she was attacked. And that's when I started to look at the evidence a lot more closely in this case and discovered something that in a way I almost wish I hadn't by this point very interesting.

amount of blood around her body. He's found her body at the bottom of the stairs, and he calls nine one one and he said his first words to the operator are eighteen ten seed of set. Please, my wife's had an accident. She's still breathing. And the operator says, what kind of accident, and he says, she's fell down the stairs. She's still breathing. Please come. So his first impression from finding his wife, so as far as we can tell us that he believed she'd fallen down the

stairs and whacked her head on the way down. But as soon as police arrived, as soon as the first responders arrived, they find something that is just absolutely incompatible with a fall downstairs. To them, this looks like a brutally violent scene, and so already with their arrival on the scene, we have these two hypotheses set in stone. Either she fell downstairs, as a crying husband claimed, or she was beaten to death by that same husband who

was in fact crying crocodile tears. That's I think the very first moment where this case turns sour, because we begin immediately with what we philosophers like to call a false dilemma, as though these are the only two options on the table. It must be one or the other, either she fell or she was murdered. And that was the view that these were the lenses through which this case was viewed ever after, until at least Larry comes along with his outrageous theory about a bird. Pray.

reading glasses on top of the blood. Next to Kathleen's head. There were a couple of blood soaked paper towels, one skin right side Kathleen's head, over the blood which was on the bottom steps and under her head. Michael had apparently stuffed at least one, possibly two large cotton towels that have been sort of bundled up into a pillow of sorts for her to rest her head on. And this was soaked in blood. Her hair was soaked in blood. Shirt,

her sweatshirt, dark gray sweatshirt, was soaked in blood. Her white track pants were soaked until say knee high, or rather down to the knees, blood running down to the knees and in her hands were clumped over sixty individual hairs from her own head that she had wrenched out. So doesn't sound like fall downstairs, does it now? It doesn't sound like full downstairs, And it didn't look like fall downstairs. It looked like something much much more violent.

But there were also other and normal subjects around Kathleen's body that fran Borden was the first to mention the detective. Friend Borden, who was one of the first detectives to arrive on the scene, do you not that it was very strange. She thought that Kathleen's body was surrounded with pine needles, so many pine needles scattered all around her body. He said, so, again, this is a very strange thing.

If she was just falling down the stairs, or indeed, if she was beaten, she beaten to death with the limb of a Christmas tree, maybe it was a very strange thing that friend Bordon noticed. And these weren't the only strange things that I believe the investigators found when they arrived. There were other objects surrounding Kathleen in the stairwell, on the walls that I think we'll get in too shortly.

where it actually shuts. So for some reason, blood had been smeared all in the frame of the door. Very strange place for a bunch of blood to be found, right if you've just fell down the stairs, or in fact, if you were beaten to death at the bottom of the sets. Now, the fire captain Gary Paschell takes two steps inside and as he's waiting for the paramedic team to wrap up, he turns his head and he looks at the back of the door. Now all over the back of the door are great wipes of red blood.

These are not small smudges. This is not just a little fingerprint or two. These are great wipes of wet blood that have been deposited there. So immediately, as you can imagine, the police turning up, the fire captain, the paramedics, they know a fall didn't happen, because you can't fall down the stairs and smear blood all over your front door in a different room. So it was a very strange situation, and there's no wonder that the police were extremely skipped called Michael's story to beginner.

very very much the dark of night. The police investigators arrived not too late afterwards, we're talking about I think it's within two minutes of his second nine to one one call that the paramedics arrived, so about two forty eight am. So again, this was part of the reason that the owl theory came to Larry's mind, and the idea that well the time of night during which Kathleen was found might help support the hypothesis as well. And he also asked what was Michael's story about his whereabouts?

This is a problem for anybody who wants to defend Michael's innocent It's a big problem. It's not a small problem. It's a really big book. According to multiple paramedics who were at the scene that early morning, they asked Michael directly, when did the falls happen, and he said, I don't know. I was just going downstairs to turn off the lights.

I came back in and found her. Now, for anyone who's familiar with the staircase story and the documentaries and all that, you might be very surprised to hear that, because everybody knows that his story goes he was outside the pool, outside beside the pool all night, smoking his pipe, having a few drinks, maybe having a doze, maybe he was snapping. You can't really remember. It was late, you know, he was tired out by the pool all night at something.

I don't know what ten degrees celsius is and fahrenheit right now, it's skipped my mind. But it was not very warm that much. It was relatively cool. So for most people, I think if you're familiar with the Staircasse story, you might not know that his first words the paramedics were in fact, I was going outside to turn off the lights. I came back and and found it. It's only in all of his subsequent stories in the media and its lawyers and documentaries and so on, that he says, no, no, no,

I wasn't inside the house. I was out by the pool all night, really far away from Kathleen. So of course I couldn't care her fall. So it's a big story. Sorry, it's a big problem for Michael, and it's one that you know, I come at from a position of what I hoped, you know, the reader would know of it. This is kind of honesty about it, right. This book is not designed to exonerate my it's not about Michael.

This book is about the forensic evidence this case and what it bet supports that doesn't actually have a lot to do with whether Michael knew about it, whether he was in the house, outside house anything. It's not a book about Michael and his innocent as not supposed to be.

as George went on with the video. Now, it's very difficult to express in words how poor quality the video that was given to the jury is, and all I can suggest for any interested listeners that they go to court TV, find Dan George's testimony and watch the crime scene video for themselves to see how truly terrible. The quality is as though it's been filmed by a potato. George also seems to make some very fundamental errors in crime scene videography. When you make a crime scene video,

you're not really supposed to make any scene cuts. Supposed to be one continuous stream. There's a pretty reasonable justification for that, right you don't want the defense coming in at a later date and saying, well, what did you meet it out? Yes, absolutely, so it's rather shocking to note that Dan George's crime scene video has twice as many scene cuts as it does minutes of footage. In other words, there's approximately one scene cut every thirty seconds.

Some of these scene cuts are indeed just cuts between different rooms, but other cuts totally anomalous. They are cuts that occur in the middle of the same shot. So, in other words, we might have a close up of a doorknob, and then there's a cut, and when the film returns, it's still a close up of the doorknob. So something's been cut apparently from that middle portion, and we don't know why. Either that or we're really just dealing with some pretty lous and police video skills. Now

that's just the crime scene video. Now, another problem to know about crime scene video is it doesn't actually film that much of the house at all, or the outside of the house at all.

The outdoor pool wasn't filmed, the basement wasn't filmed. There are all sorts of areas in the house that you know, the dining room wasn't filmed with it tap dinner that night. There arell sorts of areas of the house that you wonder, now, why did that go on film? And most important level, a couple of the detectives throughout the investigation have claimed that they saw blood drops in the kitchen. The blood

drops were never filmed. The blood drops were never photographed, and the blood drops were never given a presumptive friends a test. So all that we have is the testimony of the investigations, and all they say is they saw something that looked like a blood drop in the kitchen, or a couple of blood drops in the kitchen. So that's this is a big problem with the crime scene video. The crime scene photos appaul. They're over exposed to they're smudging,

they're blurry, they're often almost entirely colorless. They come with a strong cpo toned th effects almost everything, so we can't tell the difference between green or red or yellow blue. And once again, photos that are supposedly meant to represent particular objects like blood spots or items of interest and bits of murder weapon are so rather of such poor quality you can't make out what they're supposed to represent. There's one photo in particular that I want to talk about.

There's a photograph of a pot in the kitchen sink. Angie Powell was the apprentice photographer under Dan George who took the photo in question. Now on the stand, one of the detectives who was there that night, or one of the agents rather said, well, there was something in the pot. We couldn't I couldn't make out what it was. It was dark red, tannish brown, something, but I couldn't make out what item was in this in the pot,

in the sink in the kitchen. Well, luckily I got to interview the person who took the photo in question. I got to interview the agent, Angie Hell, who took that very photo. And I said, well, you took the photo. What was in the sink, in the pot, in the in the pot and the sink in the kitchen And she said, oh, I don't. I don't really remember. It

might have been cork or little bits of cork. So you can't make out what these photos are off or what they're supposed to represent, and so much so that, I mean, these are so useless that even somebody who took a photo in Christian can't remember and can't make out what the objects are supposed to be.

that night. So Kathleen, so far as we've been told, couldn't access her own work email from home, so she asked for Michael's email address that night to give to Helen Prislinger, the colleague in Toronto. So Michael handed told Kathleen his email address and Kathleen recited it to Helen. Helen sent through some important documents that Kathleen had to review. Now the theory goes for as far as the murder theory goes that Kathleen said, pretty much, I'll just have

a look at these emails. Michael and then I'll join you out by Paul or wherever you want to go. And she opens Michael's email and she finds not Helen Pristling's document, but she finds a sordid gay rendezvous meeting appointment exchange with male prostitute whom Michael had been following and who Michael had been apparently arranging extramarital liaisons with. So Kathleen is absolutely enraged. She runs from the computer room, finds Michael downstairs, says, what the hell is this I've

just found on your computer. You're planning to have sex, not just outside the marriage, not with just some other woman, but with a bloody man? Are you kidding? They fight, They rowl, they howl at each other. Rage takes over Michael finally there's nerves at their end, grabs fireplace, blow poke the thin hollow brass rod from the fireplace, and he thrashes at Kathleen in she cowers in the stairwell.

Now he eventually beats her unconscious and she's bleeding from the head, collapsed at the bottom of the stairwell, and Michael looks at what he's done and he thinks, Jesus, I'm going to spend the rest of my life in prison.

I have to clean up the scene. So he runs to the laundry and he gets a bucket and a mop, or he gets some rags and he gets some cleaning products, and he goes into the stairwell with Kathleen and he begins to wipe the north wall of the stairwell, and then he goes down on his knees and he wipes very selectively at a couple of little corners of skirting board. He does that on each side because that's very important

to wipe those areas. And then just as he's finishing the other skirting board, wiping the little inch wide piece of blood from there, Kathleen stirs and she starts climbing to her feet again, and Michael can't believe it. She runs back to the blowpoke and he picks it up again, and he finally thrashes Kathleen again over the head, unleashing

what will be the final fatal blows. Kathleen dies. Michael runs out the door with the fireplace blowpoke, leaving smudges on the door as he goes out to hide the weapon. He comes back inside, he thinks, oh my god, but I've got no why how can I explain how she just fell? Oh? I know, I'll make it look like

she's drunk. Right, So he goes into the kitchen and he empties a bottle of wine down the sink, and he puts the bottle of wine on the countertop, and then he goes to the kitchen cabinets and he pulls out two wine glasses and he puts them aside the wine bottle, and he thinks to himself, Great, Okay, now they'll think she's drunk. That will explain how she fell. And then he gets the phone and he calls nine one one, and he starts balling with his best fake

cry until the paramedics arrive. That's the murder.

is rather more simple, doesn't take as long to explain. Luckily, fall theory is just that Kathleen fell. She'd had a couple of glasses of wine, she'd had a vellium. She was a bit tired, she'd been working pretty hard. She'd been having some headaches recently, but she'd been complaining about Michael was out by the pool. He was dozing away,

smoking his pipe and drinking. Kathleen goes to walk up the steps of the internal staircase, but you know, it's wearing flip flops, and these get tangled on one of the steps. She slips, pits her head. This smacks open a great wound on the back of her head. Blood

starts to spill down the steps. So when she tries to get to her feet again, she slips again, pits her head again, this time on the metal chair lift that was installed by a previous owner, so sharp edges, and then she finally slips the third time and dies from a sort of slow exanguination bleeding to Now Michael

was eventually convicted. I think it was in October of two thousand and three, but just a week before his conviction Larry Pollard, a neighbor of Peterson's, asked one of the lawyers of Michael's legal teak whether he could see a picture of the autopsy or a photograph of the autopsy as it was on the back of Kathleen's head, because he wanted to see the head injuries. He had been told that these were absolutely strange in their dimensions in shape, so his interest was paued. He was a lawyer.

He was an attorney who had previously worked for the Special Prosecutor's office in Durham, so he was not just a nosy neighbor. He was very confused about the evidence in this case of what it was supposed to support. So one of the lawyers passed the color photo of the autopsy on Kathleen's head. Kathleen scalped to Larry and he took one look at it and he thought, just look like bird tracks. Now Larry was a hunter, and that's why he identified these marks as like bird tracks.

So a few days past and it occurred to Larry that it might have been an owl because there were always barred owls and barn owls around the property line in this area of Forest Hills and Durham, and Larry had lived in this part of Durham for fifty years, so he knew that they were always usually making their nests in December. They were often aggressive, they were swoop at people. And yet so that was how Larry's theory started.

In Embryo and Larry first saw a photograph of the back of Kathleen's head from the autopsy and he thought, good grief, those looked just like turkey tracks. And that's where it all began for Larry. So just to be clear, Larry didn't have all of the evidence that he would find, yet that was just what caused him to have his first hunch that something to do with a bird might well, there might be something to do with the bird involved in this case.

Larry thought, okay, I'm not sure I believe that. I'm going to check it out for myself, so he sort of went behind the District Attorney's back, went to the Special Prosecutor's office where he used to work, and asked an old colleague if he could get the Traces Evidence report, which he then received. That's when he found that, in fact, a feather had been described as being plastered to one

of Kathleen's heirs, which had been pulled out by the route. So, in other words, one of the hears that was found in Kathleen's hands had microscopic feather fragment attached to it. So that was in the trace evidence report, and Larry thought, well, I'm really angry now because you said there weren't any feathers, and now I'm looking at the trace evidence report and it says there was a feather. So we're going to

have a look at this. So Larry went to the DA's office and he asked for the slide to be brought in so that he could view this feather. When the microscope was finally set up, when the slide was brought in from the police office, they looked down the microscope, they increased the magnification, and they found that, in fact, the trace evidence report was wrong. It wasn't a feather fragment.

It was two feather fragments. So that now we've doubled kind that doubled from one to two to be fair, but we found a new piece of evidence that wasn't known to be there before. Now, this is absolutely incredible when you think about Larry predicted. So just by the power of deduction, Larry thought were if it were a bird, there ought to be feathers, right, and therefore we ought to look for some feathers. He finds these feathers. It's

absolutely incredible. So that's one part of the justification for Larry's theory. Other things have to do with the injuries on Kathleen and the general distribution of blood around the inside of the house. Add all of these things together and get to Larry's theory. But again, it's not as though Larry just woke up on and I've got a great idea and el kill Kathleen is sort of a dream or something that came out of nowhere. It's a slow process of putting all pieces of evidence together.

his new theory. She then began to reach out for Larry two ornithologists around the United States as to what they could do in so far as helping to justify

this theory further. So this importantly eventually culminates in the decision to send photographs of the two feather fragments that were found in the trace Evidence report to an ornithologist at the Smithsonian Institute, a woman called doctor Carla Dove, who is an expersion in the forensic analysis feathers, so from small feather fragments she can identify birds in the

particular species, the genus whatever. So the way that Larry put it to me when I was interviewing him was that Sophie Brunet had done more to popularize the our theory than any other person, including himself. So Larry believed that she was the great popularizer of the view. And I think this is an important point to note because when Larry first came out with the theory, he was absolutely ridiculed by the newspapers and Durham. It received virtually

no international attention. It was a sort of embarrassing PostScript to Michael's trial. And it was only I think with the help of Sophie Brunei in the years that followed, that Larry regained some standing and some sense of honor and dignity through the work of brune who helped show that theary actually did have some legs.

was not. Larry's theory was that this was where the attack first happened, That Kathleen had been attacked outside on the front path and then had run inside. Not and it was not that the blood was going the other way round. Kathleen killed in the stairwell, and then Michael carrying some bloody object out the door. This is the main chunk of evidence that Larry had. But Larry also had a suspicion about something, and maybe this is a

good segue into my own's the case. Larry had a suspicion that one of the key pieces of evidence found in the autopsy report may have been misdescribed. So embedded in the back of Kathleen's head was an item that was eventually described in the evidence report as something like woody vegetation and some sort of piece of woody vegetation.

But in fact, when it was first discovered by or first looked at by one of your friends of investigators, it was described as like a wood metal pit rather would slash metal chip, something that you couldn't really call metal, but too strong to be wood. You know, it was something some sort of you know, probably like probably a

bit of the weapon that had been used. Now, Larry's hunch, although he's never really put this out in the public realm very loudly, but I think now's the time to start to question, is that this was in fact a shard of talent that had broken off become embedded into

her skull. Now what's interesting here is that the descriptions that this investigator used would slash metal chip is identical to the description, but a different investigator gave to a different object which was found embedded in one of the steps of the staircase. Now, this object was described by the lead forensic technician, Dan George as quote like a mini talon.

is another chip talent as well. And for this reason we'd have to start considering that Larry's theory might have got things ever so slightly wrong. The attack didn't happen outside with Kathleen then later running inside and dying. The attack began outside and continued inside the stairwell. So there must be at some point in Catholic during Kathleen's demise, a bird inside the stairwell with Kathleen, and that opens up a real cannid works. So maybe we've talk about that can of worms.

the investigation. They were disposed of, even before the chief medical examiner had a chance to come to the house and view the body in the early morning. They'd been removed and disposed of before the medical examiner arrived in saying, so they weren't collected. Probably the most important exerments not collected. A telephone, a cordless telephone that had fingerprints, bloody fingerprints

all over. It had been used by Michael, might have been used by Kathleen, for all we know, had been handled by Todd Whenetsad mcdell, one of the investigators, and by Dan George. So at least five people that night. That bloody, blood smeared phone was not collected. It was in the stairwell with Kathleen when she was first out, so the phone was beside her head. It was not collected. The towels under her head, they were not collected. The two paper towels beside her head that apparently Michael and

may have used to clean the scene. Weren't we told, well, they weren't collected, because hell, if he did clean zin, who needs to collect the paper towels that he did it with. Right around Kathleen's body, right her flip flops, the flip flops that she was wearing that apparently caused the fall, they were not collected. There's jacket around her

body that was not collected. I mean, it's just extraordinary the number of there's about in total, fifteen items around her body that should have been taken into evidence, and every single one of them was not. Now that's not that's not just screwing up. That's something else. Because there weren't any other objects in the stairwell with her that's that were collected. So every item around her body was

not collected. That's undeniably evidence of well, it's evidence that we ought to be very very suspicious about.

Had to be deliberate. Now, I think we should be suspicious about why these items were in collected, and I think it tells us something more broadly about the situation in the stairwell that night. There was something about the condition of her body that couldn't be noted. For some reason, none of this evidence could be collected because it would point in the wrong direction for the police place right now. The same goes again for the documentation of these items.

So there's a reason that the police video is so shoddy and so patchy. There's a reason that it has missing portion. There's a reason that the police photographs are so distorted, so blurry soever exposed, that you can't identify the object's photograph. The decision is deliberate, not just all these weren't very well trained forensic technicians. Something is going

on and something is being hit up. Now that's when I started to get suspicious, because a police team can screw up a couple of things, but they can't screw up everything. And in this case, they seem to screw up everything, and that makes me think it's not a

screw up. So I started to look at the police crime scene video again, very slowly, and it would be very difficult, I think, for anybody watching the crime scene video for themselves to understand how much effort I put it into seeing how the manipulation occurred in the crime scene video, which I believe has occurred. And I want to maybe just begin with how I noticed that something was a mess in the very corner of Kathleen's eye

in the chrimesn video. You can see it. There's just this little white fleck of something, And at first, when you view it, you think, well, I think it like a tear. Looks like a tear in the corner of a variety, just reflecting very bright white. I thought, well, it can't be a tear, though, because he's been lying there for hours by now, dead before the crime scene

video started, so there's no chance it's tear. And then I noticed that whatever the object in the corner of her eye was, it seemed to extend over the bridge of her names So it was it was not just a small fragment of something, It was something connected to something else. And the reason I could tell that there was something connected to something else that was extending over the bridge of her nose is that the same distortion of what seems to be distortion in the video is

visible from multiple angles in the video. So whether we're looking from far away, whether we're close up, whether we're looking straight bird's eye view down at Kathleen's head or sort of perpendicular to or a chimney, no matter what angle you look at, something cookes out or distortion seems to appear over the bridge of her nose. There was the first clue I had that there was something on her face that shouldn't be there, at least wasn't described

as being there. But there was something on her face because it's visible from multiple angles under different lighting, you know, different positions. So that's when I started thinking there might be some sort of manipulation of this tape going on.

a PCA analysis to the videotape. Now, a PCA analysis it's difficult to describe what it's really doing, but it's an AI interpretation of a video frame or a photographic frame, which tells you about unusual distributions or meaningful distributions in the color components of red, yellow, green. So you're getting a story about a normallys essentially in the video. Now if you submit the video tap to a PCA analysis,

very very interesting things start to happen. You start to see the same objects appearing in the video or in the PCA analysis of the video once again when they're filmed from different angles, and that virtually negates the idea that this is some sort of visual artifact of the photographing process or the video process, or indeed of the PCA analysis. So this is this is a real feature

of the scene. And so using this analysis, I started to develop some sort of what you could say is like enhancements of the scene to eliminate what seems to be the sepia tone distortion that the cinds and video has been put to it. And that's when I began to notice, good lord, it's not just something in the

corner of her eye. There's stuff everywhere. And the only reasonable conclusion I could come to is that, given the way the rest of the evidence sits, and given the shape and size of these objects which are scattered all through the staircase and all over her body and all through here and all over the front path, these are feathers.

These are bird feathers. And that was a terrifying conclusion actually because that's the moment at which the penny dropped for me and I realized that we were looking at we were no longer looking at something that could just be described as police malpractice or police You know, this is no longer a cock up. You know, this is this is probably, to use a word I wish I didn't have to use, a conspiracy. This is potentially quite

wide ranging conspiracy. That was That was a very worrying to have to discuss.

The question about who really orchestrated this or why. I simply I don't have a good answer to you know, maybe if I had ten more years to work on this, I might be able to come up with a good answer, but I had an absolute loss to figure out, you know. Again, to bring it back to the idea that Michael had disappointed the authorities by writing these editorials, I don't think, you know, a lot was risked to get this cover up done properly, and I really don't think it was

done over just a couple of annoying editorials. I think there's something much bigger at play.