Rush to Judgement: a critical examination of the David Westerfield, Danielle van Dam child kidnapping and murder case, San Diego 2002

An overview of the case is in From the Back Cover. Here are more reasons for doubting Westerfield's guilt.

Stranger kidnappings are rare and Westerfield - middle-aged, no history of sexual or violent crimes - was an unlikely suspect. Yet just 2 days after Danielle was missing, the police excluded the usual perpetrators and decided this was a stranger kidnapping and he was that stranger.

He behaved like an innocent man: only left home hours after the kidnapping and returned twice that day. Nobody saw her with him or any place he went. Eye-witnesses, cell-phone records and gas receipts confirmed his alibi.

The kidnapping scenario is implausible. Danielle's house had an alarm. Several people and a dog were in it, and the kidnapper was inside for an hour, yet they suspected nothing.

The van Dams had recently visited him so some evidence of her there is expected. The police didn't ask her brothers if she had been in his RV while it was unlocked in the street: one visit could account for that evidence. The quantity was far less than from a weekend kidnapping, murder and sexual assault: in particular, just 1 drop and 1 small stain of blood. Testing of the drop initially didn't give a result for one DNA marker, so it might have been old and degrading. The stain was faint so it might have been old and had previously been cleaned. Her hair was darkening yet her hairs in his RV were blonde suggesting they were old. He vacuumed his RV after that weekend but his vacuum cleaner contained no evidence.

There was no evidence she was sexually assaulted. The only evidence for that motive was "child porn" on his computers, but some in law enforcement said it wasn't child porn (the jury wasn't allowed to hear that), there wasn't much of it, and most was old and had been seldom viewed and not recently.

The bloodstain on his jacket wasn't seen by the dry-cleaners, couldn't be seen on the photo in court, and wasn't examined for spatter: was it only applied afterwards? The drop of blood on the RV carpet wasn't photographed or measured: did it exist? Her print was only the fifth one found in his RV, yet they stopped searching: how did they know it was her's? The forensic people only examined a few items from her house, so the orange evidentiary fibers might have come from there.

The police used dogs to detect his scent in her home and her scent in his, but the strongest evidence this gave was the claim by dog handlers, made weeks later, that a cadaver dog alerted at his RV - which wasn't seen by the detective and that dog hadn't alerted there 2 days earlier.

The police's entomologist calculated that insects didn't colonize the body before the 16th - nearly 2 weeks after Westerfield was under surveillance (4th). Insects usually colonize a body in hours so he couldn't have dumped it. The prosecution entomologist gave an earlier date (9th) but still after the 4th, and he used recent Canadian insect data that might not apply to southern California.

Someone else's DNA was in bloodstains on her bed (it wasn't checked against CODIS), and red fibers with her fingernails didn't match to him.

Failing a polygraph played a role in him being suspected. Yet the examiner kept the heater on making Westerfield uncomfortable, constantly adjusted his equipment, and changed the questions, all of which could have caused him to appear to fail. The police leaked his "failure" to the media, contaminating the jury pool and inflaming the community. Jurors weren't sequestered so they were aware of the hostility. Was their verdict due to the media having "convicted" him? The media reported that he offered to reveal the body location in return for no death penalty, but evidence is that the prosecution offered him a deal which he rejected.

The prosecutor implicitly admitted that he didn't know how, where, why or when, and the jury foreman that they couldn't figure out what had happened. Seemingly the prosecution scenario didn't make sense to them.