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Murder Trial May Turn On Missing Router
bgood writes "The outcome of a murder trial taking place in Charlotte, NC, may turn on a missing router. State prosecutors believe that Brad Cooper may have used the router (never recovered by investigators) to make it appear his wife made a phone call from the house the day she disappeared. The trial is in its 8th week."
This trial is in Raleigh, NC, not Charlotte, NC. Fact check much, people?
Sounds like some iron-clad conjecture.
He'll fry.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
How do you turn on a missing router? WOL?
wear something sexy.
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
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Is the router running ReiserFS?!
Murder Trial May Turn On Missing Router
If the router is missing, how will you know whether it is actually turned on or if it's still off? Or are they implying that the antanae will be raised? (giggity)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Complex? Impersonating the home line is actually a FEATURE sold with many of these services so you can call from lets say, your cell phone but have the call appear to come from your home. It often also works like a calling card does, making the cell call a local call. It is trivial to do.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Using a program that can talk to your modem, send the command "ATDT 555-1234" (or whatever number).
I sat on a jury years ago. It was a bank robbery case and so it was in federal court. The FBI were involved but they had really screwed the pooch by basically being lazy and doing a crappy job. But the primary thing I remember is that they brought up surveillance video from the bank at some point. I don't remember how it came up but at some point it did, and the prosecution couldn't find the tapes.
At that point the judge told us, the jury, that if the tape couldn't be found we would need to assume that it contained information that helped the defendant. He said it was due to some prior case and missing evidence. In this specific case they did end up finding the video but it didn't help determine anything either way. Due to the FBI's failure to follow through on some simple stuff it ended up a hung jury.
At the time though, I felt comforted knowing that prosecution couldn't destroy or hide evidence and then use it against someone - but rather that lost evidence had to be presumed to help the defendant. Apparently that's not the case here, but it's really messed up as you say, if this guy goes to prison based on something that they don't even have.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
This is really long stretch and will require recording of actual call and other details. You can fake voice message, but faking actual call is very difficult, never mind Hollywood showing simple voice changers as hot cakes available for everyone. Interesting legal theory though. As usual, needs facts and sound arguments why they are binding together.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Trial is taking place in Raleigh. Not anywhere close to Charlotte. Although I'm sure some non-NC people think that Charlotte is the only city in NC.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
Cheap? FTA it was a Cisco 3825S router which runs about $4k refurbished.
True, but a cheep router is handy for it because you can use it then toss it in the dump. There are many out there that are relatively cheep and can be modded with custom firmware.
Set a router up with the right firmware, configuration, and connections and I can easily see a VoIP engineer using it for that general purpose, then tossing it in a dumpster never to be seen again.
It was a Cisco 3825S - which retails for a couple thousand dollars.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
True, but at the same time if their best piece of evidence is that he could have done it because he had the know-how, then god help anyone who is a VoIP engineer, knows anything about computers, or has ever used Google. I'm not sure I'm convinced that the fact that he supposedly borrowed the router from work and then never returned it points to his guilt. If it was pre-meditated enough that he borrowed a router for the purpose, why the hell would he raise a huge flag by not returning it - why not buy a cheap router to do the job, or wipe the router's logs and take it back to work at the very least? Being caught out like that sounds more like the plot for an episode of Columbo (and the fact that they'd then take such flimsy evidence as enough to prosecute on, doubly so).
Cary police investigators have theorized that Brad Cooper, an engineer in Voice over Internet Protocol, had the expertise and ability to use the router to stage a remote call from his home phone to his cellphone so that it appeared that Nancy Cooper, 34, was alive on the morning that she disappeared
That's an awfully complex way of doing it. You could accomplish the same thing with a simple modem. I'm disinclined to believe the prosecutions simply because any phone engineer would not need a router.
The router in question is a Cisco 3825S, which he apparently borrowed from work.
If the guy worked at Cisco, in VoIP, I have absolutely no doubt that he could actually do what they claim. I could probably manage it myself if I had the right hardware and spent some time looking through documentation.
But it seems kind of silly to borrow a relatively expensive router from work to fake a call to try to prove your innocence...
Like you, I'm thinking he could probably accomplish this in a much simpler manner. Get some cheap little Linksys VoIP router, like the ones you get when you sign up with Vonage. Or just a regular dial-up modem, a Linux box, and a shell script.
It seems to me that if he was thinking ahead enough to borrow that router from work to cover his ass, you'd think he might realize that there'd be a paper trail involved in borrowing that router, and that his ass wouldn't be so nicely covered.
But maybe I'm just over-thinking it...
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
A Cisco 3825 is not a cheap router. It is also complex, large, and heavy (2U rackmount.)
And he borrowed it from the office. It would be dumb to use it for that purpose (not that it excludes the possibility.)
So a guy has some experience, someone from years ago has a missing router, and we jump to "Aha! He stole a router and killed his wife." TFA doesn't say if there is any other evidence. A witness (who did tell different stories) said she saw the wife at the supposed time the husband was murdering the wife. They better have some better evidence than conjecture, because I don't want to get blamed for some crime just because I have an engineering degree and some guy I used to know stole a router and then covered it up by saying I stole it. Where is CSI when you need them? They can do magicky stuff!
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I didn't mean technologically complex, but logistically complex. Why misappropriate hardware from your employer, when you probably already have the hardware you need in a box in the attic?
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Seems all the more strange that such an expensive router would go missing. If I had some rackmount hardware that cost 4k, I can pretty much guarantee that I'd always know where it is.
They should build a GUI Visual Basic interface to track the ip to find the router...
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Still cheaper than a divorce. Just sayin'.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Why does everyone say router router router? Wtf happened to setting up a regular run of the mill telephone modem and calling task manager. Wow guys does it really need to cost $200 to pull this off? I bet most of you have access to an old analog modem or two, and a computer. Fresh install Win XP have the thing place the call, that night slick it, or install a new drive, lose the modem. Why a router?
Occam's razor.
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s/turn/hinge/ and it will make more sense. English being my (close) second language, it took me a moment to parse as well.
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What you are referring to is called an "adverse inference" in legal circles.
It isn't handed out at the drop of the hat and usually indicates the mood of the judge. An adverse inference in your favor (say when videos go "missing") mean it is time to work on your dismissal motion. An adverse inference against you means you should start drafting your appeal...
just so you know - all of that type of call spoofing works with Caller ID not ANI which you have to be the bell to spoof.
ANI will show exactly what device called what device no matter what the caller id said.
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
I could spit to the courthouse from here, and these are only a fraction of all the twisted facts:
All kinds of things SUGGESTING he did it, BUT-
This trial is ALL over the place from the prosecution...They have argued he both did it in a fit of rage, and that he premeditated it (such as acquiring the router)
The router is the Prosecution's response for his "alibi"- She was still alive that morning and called him from home while he was at the store before she went jogging.
Computer showed Google Map searches from his computer showing where the body was found before the authorities found the body
BUT- The Defense has offered that the time stamps are an invalid format. However, the Judge would not allow the jury to hear the testimony of the defense witness for this fact.
They said the victim was murdered after returning from a neighborhood party where she had been drinking quite a bit.
BUT-Defense says then her BAC would have still been elevated, which it was not.
He is missing a pair of shoes that he was video taped wearing after she disappeared.
A diamond necklace that witnesses testified she never took off was found in the house, suggesting he killed her then removed the valuable item. BUT-Store tape from two days before shows she was not wearing it then.
A set of supposedly really expensive decorative ducks were missing. The prosecution contended they were broken in a struggle in the house. BUT-Mother of the accused had them somewhere else.
Wife was divorcing the husband who was cheating on her and going to move back to Canada with the kids. BUT-She had had affairs as well and potential divorce proceedings could have outed someone else who wanted to keep things quiet.
The husband bought a tarp the day before- BUT the wife was expected the next morning to help paint a friend's house.
An exterminator says when he was in the garage, there was clutter everywhere, and no room to pull a vehicle into the garage. BUT-Police found a cleared space in the garage where a vehicle may have been pulled in to load a body.
What's crazy about all this the Prosection has gotten away with "It COULD be this, but it COULD be that"
I honestly feel this will hinge on the Judge not allowing the testimony for the defense that the Google Searches are suspect as well. I will contend that looks really bad if you are then not told something doesn't seem right about the dates.
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Sorry, that's NOT their whole case, NOR is it his whole defense.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2122820&cid=36012748
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
Is the jury gonna believe the Upstanding Officers Of The Law or the Lying Perpetrator? Prejudice and procedure trump the facts, in most cases.
Aside from that, the husband/boyfriend is almost always factually guilty, so the Police start from there and don't try too hard to look anywhere else.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
The problem with most of these cases is the guy thinks he is sooo very much smarter than the police and prosecutor. So he gets a little cocky and mouths off to the wrong people. Or, decides that he knows how to manage his defense better than his lawyer, who just goes along with his cocky arrogant client.
First rule of crime is you are never smarter than the police, just luckier. They have rotten luck and the odds are usually against them. Which can be countered quickly by the prosecutor that is on top of the game.
This guy's biggest problem will be his ego. Second problem is while everyone is thinking he is going to go free, the prosecutor pops up with "the real theory" which doesn't need the router and explains the phone call away.
99% of the time the only person that can get really annoyed with someone enough to kill them is the person they are married to. The police and prosecutors know this and it makes their job a lot simpler. So, did this guy do it? Probably. Will the prosecutor's case fail without the router? Probably not. These lawyers are really good at coming up with stuff that isn't all that technical, whereas the techy types continually fall back on relying on technology and ignore basic facts apart from the technology.
Don't be suprised when a witness comes forth that saw the guy driving off after putting a really big, heavy box in his car.
I did a quick read of the case coverage over at WRAL and it does appear pretty darned sketchy for the state. In addition to denying the testimony about the invalid timestamps because the prosecution wouldn't have time to prepare a rebuttal, the reason for the late witness was apparently the fact that the judge disallowed the first defense witness as "not an expert". So their argument that they wouldn't have time to rebut is a little sketchy, if that story is right. The judge apparently did allow the prosecution to present the router evidence at the very last minute in the person of Chris Fry as a rebuttal witness. So disallowing the defense rebuttal witness on the computer files (apparently lots of files had altered timestamps after being taken into police custody, not just the google maps files). There was also some stuff about the police erasing data from cell phones.
The whole thing sounds really sketchy for the prosecution. They claimed quite a few things definitively that the defense was able to absolutely prove false. It sounds like there was a pretty good PR campaign afoot to prove the guy guilty in the media as well.
Having invested less than 15 minutes in the case, I couldn't say anything useful about whether the guy killed her or not. But I can say that I'm not at all impressed with the police/prosecution/judge team in the case. There seems to be a lot of disregard for a dispassionate arbiter of justice. From what I can glean from the press reports, there's a fairly unified team of police, prosecutors, press and judge all working to ensure a conviction, with a defense team and some of the guys friends working for an acquittal.
I really didn't like the last minute inclusion of a second lesser charge of 2nd degree murder by the judge. This smacks of trying to get the jury to compromise on 2nd degree murder - a charge that would be entirely incompatible with the case the prosecution has presented (a case for premeditated murder). The jury is apparently fed up with the trial and wants to go home. So the judge offers them a way to compromise between guilty on first degree murder and acquittal - just convict on 2nd degree and you can all go home! Pretty sketchy stuff.
That was my implication. He may not have been the one who used it, but may not have any knowledge or recollection of where it went.
I'm not going to re-read the article, but did they fix the time of death to before the phone call was made? Do they have evidence showing that his cell was not located at the house? There are plenty of explanations beyond the easy ones. He may have been there, killed her, dropped his phone somewhere in the house, and called it to find it. It's one thing to call your phone from the murder site. It's another to have the police find your phone there.
Any which way, it's circumstantial at best. He'd have to be stupid to take advantage of work equipment, plant the router, have it dial out to his cell to "prove" his innocence, and then make the router disappear. Want proof? Make sure you're a good distance away, start a bar fight, resist arrest, and then you have real proof. A sincere apology and no priors will probably get you probation.
Then again, none of us have all the evidence presented. They may have an air tight case. Using this circumstantial crap really makes it seem that they don't have any real evidence. If they had the murder weapon, her hair in the trunk of his car, his tire tracks at the dump site, and neighbors saying that he carried out "something large" at the time of the disappearance would be more damning than the circumstantial fiction.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.