I think guilters may wish to ponder this issue further. If Jeremy planned this, then did he invent the call from Nevill out of thin air or did he stage it?
If he invented the call, that means he is taking a huge risk in assuming that the police won't be able to log calls. How will he know this one way or the other? It is said that he asked the police to check with the phone company that certain calls were made. Was that a bluff?
If, on the other hand, he did stage the call from Nevill, this seems to accord much more with some of the known facts, such as his slowness in notifying the authorities - including messing around looking through the phone book and ringing two different police stations - and later asking that the police check with the phone company.
If we are saying that the call was staged, this means that, from the point he ended this staged call, Jeremy had a maximum 30 minute window to make it back to Bourtree Cottage and notify the police.
During this 30 minutes, he had to:
(i). Wait for the answering machine at the outside end to beep, so that the call lasted a decent period.
(ii). Terminate the call.
(iii). Clean the phone.
(iv). Change into fresh clothes.
(v). Leave the farmhouse through the window (or howsoever he made his exit).
(vi). Return to Goldhanger, on foot. This is roughly 2.5 miles as the crow flies, but he will need to negotiate and circumvent obstacles along the way, such as fences and ditches and what not.
(vii). At the outskirts of Goldhanger, hide his incriminating clothes and change footwear, for retrieval later on the night of the 7th./8th. This was necessary because he doesn't want to be seen near his house with a rucksack.
(viii). Sneak back into Bourtree Cottage, or if seen, make an excuse such as having received an emergency call or heard an intruder, or whatever.
(ix). Shower and change again into fresh clothes.
(x). Make the brief phone call to Julie.
(xi). Call Witham Police Station and let this ring out.
(xii). Dial the number for Chelmsford Police Station for P.C. West to answer.
Even if it can manage all this in 30 minutes, it still looks suspicious, but not as suspicious as 35 minutes or 40 minutes.
Could Jeremy have carried out (i) to (xii) above in 30 minutes?
Now let us consider some timings.
If I understand correctly, Jeremy claims the call was from his father at roughly 3.10 a.m. Obviously we must be reasonable and allow that Jeremy's timing may be considerably out. It could have been 3.00 a.m., but equally it could also have been later than 3.10 a.m. - several minutes later even. Essex Police also inadvertently assisted Jeremy by getting their timings wrong, but it does seem likely that the explanation for the time discrepancy at Chelmsford HQ is simple: West accidentally recorded the start time of the call as its end time, 3.36 a.m., thus Bonnett was correct that his phone or radio call with West commenced at 3.26 a.m. This allows for Jeremy to call West at, say, 3.24 a.m. That makes sense.
Having established this, the timings look very tight for Jeremy to be guilty and the whole thing doesn't look very plausible. To make the pro-guilt position seem more plausible, we'd have to suppose that Jeremy is wildly out on his own time for Nevill's call. This is possible, of course, because Jeremy has a vested interest in pushing forward the time of Nevill's call, and even if Jeremy assumes that calls are somehow logged, he may be counting on 'winging it' by pretending there is some sort of mix-up or he was confused or tired. But the problem with this is that we can only stretch the timings this so far. It looks suspicious enough as it is. At some point it will simply be rejected as not credible.
I selected 30 minutes for Jeremy's time window arbitrarily because, psychologically, that seems to be the maximum outside parameter for Jeremy to 'dilly-dally', but if Jeremy is telling the police he got the call at 3.10 a.m., would it not seem strange and suspicious if it turned out from the examination of call logs at the exchange that he had in fact received the call at, say, 2.54 a.m.? And even if we assume that he could brazen it out and get away with it, could he really have made the call from White House Farm at 2.54 a.m., perhaps waiting a minute or so, then terminate the call, and carry out all the other steps (i) to (xii) above and manage to dial the number for Chelmsford Police Station by, say, 3.24 a.m.? Does this not stretch credulity?
Where does this leave guilters?
The options:
1. The first option is to say he returned to Goldhanger by some quicker method, such as a push bike. I view this as extremely unlikely on basic common sense grounds and would dismiss it. It's too complicated and risky. Lots of things can go wrong with the bike, it means he has to use footpaths and bridleways, he is more likely to be seen or heard by somebody, and he will need to use lights; he is also more likely to run into somebody on one of the footpaths if he is on a bike, he won't want to carry the bike if something goes wrong, and if he decides to leave the bike or abandon it somewhere then that entails the risk of it being found and reported to the police. When you put it all together, it looks like a total non-starter. But the bike idea, while immensely risky, does have one advantage: it allows him to return quickly, which means that the phone calls side of the plan knits together much better because he can more plausibly stage a call from Nevill and then call the police from Goldhanger within the 30 minute window.
2. The second option is to abandon the idea of a staged call and rely on the supposition that Jeremy just invented the call out of thin air. This would grant considerable latitude in the timings and avoids the problem of Jeremy having a narrow time window to return to Bourtree Cottage and make his calls, and do everything else he has to do in the process. However, this raises a new problem: How does Jeremy know that the police can't retrieve call information from British Telecom? How does he explain himself if they do or if they come back and claim that there is no record of any such call from White House Farm to Goldhanger? Can he wing it? What does he say? Or do you think he researched the point? If he did research it, how does he go about that without leaving a paper trail and/or witnesses? Or do you think he relied simple-mindedly on the bills not being itemised, assuming that meant no calls would be recorded or pinpointed? That would make him perhaps a bit dense, but as it turned out, it was the right calculation, at least as far as this matter is concerned.
3. The third option is to accept there is reasonable doubt on the basis that there are difficulties with his moving between the farmhouse and Goldhanger and making the calls, meaning that there is a reasonable possibility that in fact the call from Nevill really happened and was not staged or made-up.
These options are not mutually-exclusive, especially 2 and 3. You could accept them in some combination, depending on how convinced you are that Jeremy could and would pull this off without staging a call from Nevill.
