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Mar-5-2004 22:03

Does anybody ever *falsely* suspect someone based on specific evidence (blood, watch)?

Does any evidence at the crime scene ever *falsely* point to someone (an innocent person's hair)?

Trying to figure out if you only need one piece of evidence to accuse someone.

- It would be awesome if this weren't the case and that people would lie or there'd be complications about the crime scene built into the plot. "The innocent person's hair was there because she was there the night before." "Person X lied to you about suspecting person Y because of a personal agenda."
- But if not, it would be cool to know that there's only one piece of evidence needed to speed up how long it takes to solve a case.

Mar-6-2004 02:05

I just bumped into my first case with misleading physical/verbal evidence (on Hard difficulty, never on Intermediate or below.

But I still haven't bumped into a case where two people both have physical/verbal evidence against them, lack of real alibi, and motive?

Mar-6-2004 06:43

I was playing on Intermediate the other day, and I got a piece of physical evidence, a piece of verbal evidence AND no alibi on one person, and I was told I'd accused an innocent woman. It almost seemed like a bug in the system, because I'd been so sure it was her. So I don't really know if that was supposed to happen or not. Or there's always the chance that I just got confused along the way.

Mar-6-2004 08:56

I'm sure I have found contradictory physical evidence. I'm still a newbie so maybe I'm mistaken but I've accused with only alibi and verbal while physical contradicts these and been right. (In all of mine, everyone has had a motive.)

It may be that the physical just did not support the case instead of incorrectly pointing to someone.

Mar-6-2004 08:59

hmm, that looks odd. The part I'm sure is that physical did not support the correct person. The part I may be mistaken is going on just alibi and verbal. (Hope that clears it up.)

Mar-8-2004 11:52

Sirgarr,
I have confirmed that physical evidence will falsely point to someone. In my last case (hard), victim had clump of curly hair in hand but murderer had straight hair. Guess I need a few more skills to be able to handle the hard level.

Mar-9-2004 07:52

I can say the same. In the case I just solved, I had two witnesses suspecting a person, and a bloody footprint that contradicted that ("No, this isn't x's footprint.") I accused anyway and was right.

Another question, though - has anyone ever had two witnesses say they'd seen the same person do it and be mistaken/lying? I haven't, so I'm trusting that at the moment, like in the case of the contradicting footprint I described above.

Mar-9-2004 07:54

Btw, this was on Easy difficulty, so you can encounter misleading physical evidence on all, or almost all, levels!

Mar-9-2004 18:16

There's always physical evidence that doesn't point to the killer.

There's sometimes physical evidence, or a eyewitness account, that points to -somebody else- besides the murderer. That's when things get trickier .... But I think that whenever this is the case, that -somebody else- has a legit alibi.

Mar-10-2004 06:47

What I was asking about earlier was whether two or more people could say they suspected the _same_ person and still be mistaken/lying? There may or may not be yet other people saying it was somebody else. I've never seen two eywitness accounts towards the same person be false evidence, so I'm just wondering if this really is a thing to be trusted 100%.

Mar-10-2004 07:51

Sirgar and Kitten,

The answer to most of your questions is, "Yes that can happen". The rule of thumb is, you can be sure that somebody is guilty if:

a) They have a motive (as some of you noted, almost everybody has a motive)

b) They don't have a valid alibi

c) There is at least one piece of physical or witness evidence pointing to them.

That said, there are certain patterns that you may recognise, that are level dependent, about evidence density, etc. I won't spell that out too much (these are mysteries after all), but once you get used to playing a certain level of difficulty, there are shortcuts.