Thread by @MollyAndAMic

Back in the courtroom today. I was working on some web stuff as we had a bit of a slow start to the morning. The judge told the lawyers that this trial id "dragging". The jury just finished up watching a video of a forensic interview from Sept. 2018 with the younger sister.

This next video sounds like it's from October 2018. Fair warning, sounds like the audio is brutal on this one. I'm going to run up to the courtroom since the media room is already rough on audio. Will tweet out notes in a bit!

Quick morning recess just wrapped. I need to keep taking notes. Here's what is expected today in court: kvue.com/article/news/l…

Today we've seen two different forensic interviews of the older sister. One from October and one from November. It's like watching a completely different person in the second video.

Ok, let me try to tweet out some updates while we're watching this video. Let's start with the October 2018 forensic interview with the teenage sister.

The interviewer asks why she was nervous to talk. "I just don't really like talking to people...but mostly because it feels like I'm in front of a class speaking and everyone is staring at me."

Interviewer asks about Miles. "I don't want to talk about that part."

"(My mom) went to her room...I was still making dinner...she came out. She was still in her uniform thing...but she came out and said she wanted us to go somewhere."

Remember--this audio is really low and tough to make out. I won't be able to tweet as many quotes out this time.

Investigator tells her evidence shows something different happened.

She said she remembers tears from the day her mom died.

At the house, the teen said she remembers her sister in the car, Says her sister was wondering what they were doing. She told here they "were going on a trip."

At the campsite, she said she remembers the tent: putting stuff inside, cooking things.

She says they remember being in Colorado and going to get pizza and remembers someone driving up to them.

Interviewer asks i there were any changes made to the car. "(Miles) took off the speaker thing and he took off the radio thing." "the radio and the antenna"

"(Miles) left the back one on." Says Miles took off the front license plate and says he said the back one was dirty and no one would be able to see it.

Asks why he took the antenna off. "Because it had a satellite and they could find it."

Says Miles told her he was taking the stuff off the car because he thought Christine was the one who hurt their mom.

Interviewer asks if Miles ever told her what to say. She said "I don't remember"

She says talking is making her anxious, and she feels like she's being watched. She starts crying at this point.

Interviewer asks why she is worried about being safe. She says she fears that if Miles doesn't get kept in jail long enough that he'll hurt her because of things she found out about him."

At this point the video stops. And skips ahead. Previously, lawyers said portions of the interview were redacted. Can only assume this is one of them.

They're talking about the evidence. Interviewer says her mom's phone didn't leave the house until 11:45 that night and then went to walmart and says only one person, Miles, went inside. She asks the girl what happened to her mom's phone. "He put it at walmart."

She said Miles did this so they couldn't be tracked. "He just threw it." she says she saw Miles throw her mom's phone at the back of the walmart.

She says she and Miles had a conversation about the phone and how it could be tracked and says he's planning on getting rid of it.

She says she last saw the phone in the house when her mom was holding it in the kitchen while she was talking to her.

Interviewer tells her she knows her mom asking them to drive around for two hours that night isn't accurate according to evidence.

She asks the teen where she got the phone when her mom was on the floor. She said Miles gave it to her and "told (her) to hold onto it."

She said, while in Colorado, Miles got rid of a phone (from previous testimony, this is the phone that the teen and Miles shared). She said Miles "took out the batteries and smashed the phone and threw it all off a cliff."

Again, she says Miles didn't want them to be tracked. She's crying during the interview.

"He told me her was going to toss them." Teen remembers Miles telling her his plans to get rid of her sister's phone and her mom's phone.

We went into morning recess and after the video wrapped up. FBI Special Agent Mullen returned to the stand. He said the next video is of a forensic interview with the teen from November 30, 2018.

In this video, the interviewer notes her demeanor is different and not as "baby-like". I tweeted about this earlier, but that's a fair statement from what I've seen. The teen is MUCH more talkative in this video as opposed to the one we saw this morning.

Teen explains she got an uncomfortable vibe from the interviewer and that's why she wasn't as talkative as she'd been in therapy sessions/talking to attorneys.

Interviewer asks the teen to start from the beginning, when she first met Miles.

“I went down to my dad’s for the summer like I usually do, and Terry was there because my dad had hired him to clean up the place so it would look nice.”

“I was watching a movie with my dad, I think my dad went to do something…and then (Miles) came and talked to me. I don’t know how the conversation started or what he said I just remember he asked if he could watch porn on my phone…

...because he said he had blue balls since his wife had died, and he hadn’t had sex since then.”

Regarding the porn: “He wasn’t doing anything, he was just watching it. I think he may have asked me to watch it, but I’m not sure. I think he told me to watch it, but I didn’t want to, I think. I’m not exactly sure.”

“Later on, I hadn’t seen him since then, and I was in my room. I think I was watching a show on my kindle and like he came in the room or something and he asked me if I would have…"

"...I think he said it was maybe just once, and I said yes, I guess. He said he’d give me money, and it was just once…it happened, I was just waiting for it to be over with. I didn’t care it was happening. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad...”

“After that, I guess it kept happening. Well it did keep happening. It had been happening for a while, and he went away for a month, I don’t remember what for, and then he came back…he’d come by, and it would happen.”

“He would ask me if I knew my mom's facebook account so (Miles) could contact her.”

Says he messaged her mom on facebook and she didn’t respond—the teen says she told her mom who he was. “I woke up one morning and he was waking me up” (says this was about a month after she got home). She said she first thought it was a dream. “I was like how’d you get here?”

Says Miles was there to protect them and help them move.

“(Miles) was staying at a hotel for a while, and my mom sent me over there just for a night with him so he and I could hang out. So I slept over there with him, and well ya know it happened again.” She clarifies that "it" means "the sexual stuff."

“My mom had dropped me off there with him at the hotel and said ‘I’ll get you tomorrow’”

Now talking about her life: “My step dad was being very abusive…he was trying to grab me...throwing stuff at my mom, things like that.”

“My step dad was there and saw Terry and got very defensive and was like so this is the guy you’ve been effing?” (it's not clear if she was saying her step dad said his to her or her mom) Says step dad got out the shot gun and pointed it at neighbors

“(My step-dad) was extremely intoxicated too," she said. She says her step-dad chased after them. “He drove down the road, hit an old lady and tried to run from the scene.” Says his dad bailed him out

At this point, she says they are living at a hotel but says it was too expensive so they moved to a homeless village. “We went there, and we had this like wooden little teeny house.” She clarifies that "we" means her mom, her sister, Miles, and the teen.

She says they would "keep getting threats from this Kristin girl." (I'm guessing this is the Christine we've heard about before.)

“She thought I was video taping so she grabbed me and punched me in the face…so that happened and Terry ran down and pushed her off me”

“She started going ‘you see what he did, he was hurting me’ like trying to get them on her side.”

The teen said the cops showed up and she went to the hospital. “After that happened we hadn’t heard from her anymore.”

Teen says she and Miles would still go off and do stuff. (Assuming she's talking about sex here.)
“It would happen once to twice a day”

Finding their home in Round Rock: “Then once the stuff was mostly all out of the apartment and into storage, my mom finally found an actual place to live.”

She said Miles told her he had a head injury. “He got about almost 800 dollars at the most every month.” She said, “he didn’t have any work, and my mom wanted him to get a job, but, if he did, he wouldn’t get that money in.”

Teen told interviewer that Miles would give $500 to her mom, keep $275 for himself.

Says mom would get mad if house wasn’t clean

“We started moving stuff in…it looked really nice, like an actual home”

Says Miles slept on a futon in the garage “because Terry didn’t want me and (my sister) to be in the same room.” Teen says that was because the rooms were really small.

“The stuff was still happening, all the sexual stuff.” Teen says she and Miles continued having sex.

Says they would pick up her sister from school first, come home, play video games or clean up, “then we’d go get mom, and we’d have dinner almost done.”

“And that’s how it would be every day, well not every day, sometimes she’d have people over.” Says her mom would ask them to go into the garage when this happened.

Teen recalls a time when a man came over: “Somebody came into the house, a man…it had been an hour or so, when the person finally left.”

“My mom didn’t want Terry seeing the guy or knowing who it was and that really pissed off Terry because he likes to protect us and know who these guys are.”

Teen says her mom told her she was not monogamous and that she was with multiple guys. "I told her I didn’t really like it," she said. "That seems kind of bad to me.”

Says mom went to New York and was there for about a week. Teen says her mom would go out with different guys.

"Pretty much every day if we were alone." Teen says she and Miles consistently had sex.

She recalled when he first showed up in Round Rock and woke her up. She said Miles tried to do stuff “and I told him I didn’t want to because my mom was just down the hall, but he did it anyway.”

We're at the day her mom died. Teen said her sister was still out of school because her mom drove herself to work. (She said, if her sister was in school, then she and Miles would drop her mom off at work then drop her sister off at school)

She, again, says her mom tells her someone is coming over. But then they back track to when Miles and the teen first met in Louisiana.

Teen clarifies that she knows what "blue balls" are. She says she had sex wit him in the guest bedroom at her dad's house where she was staying that summer.

The teen told the interviewer that Miles offered her $200 for sex, but she says he never paid her. She says he, instead, gave her a drone.

“I was laying down, he was on top of me.” She said he did not use a condom. "He pulled out," she said, and says he thanked her.

Court is in a quick lunch recess now, and you all are caught up! Feel free to tweet at me or message me if you have any questions.

Court is back in session. They're taking a break from the videos. Marcy Plaza, a forensic examiner, is on the stand.

They're going into a lot of details of what she does. She's now talking about testing for bodily fluids (blood, semen) and if they are present on the item she is testing.

She's going over Nuclear DNA. There's a pictures of a cells and chromosomes. Feels like we're in science class again here. (Note: I took geology in college)

Now we're looking at a slide about how the DNA is shaped.

She says, with the exception of identical twins, DNA is different from person to person. She said 99% of the DNA will be the same, however the last 1% is what makes people different. She concentrates on that 1% during her forensic testing.

She says bleach is known to breakdown DNA. Remember, we've heard about flashlights found in the bathtub in a "bleach and water solution". The flashlights have been brought up a few times during the trial.

She says they use a software called STRmix to help interpret DNA. It "deconvolutes" DNA mixtures.

She says there are several methods they can use to collect cells.

She said she tested Bates's underwear for semen. She said none was detected.

She said they also tested three swabs--vaginal, anal, and oral. All tested for the presence of semen. None was detected on any. She also tested DNA. Said no male DNA was found. All DNA found matched Bates.

Next they tested Miles's DNA. They also tested a swab from the teenager. They also took a blood standard from Bates. She said this is a standard way for her to get a blood sample from a dead person. She said she was able to get a DNA profile.

She said she was able to get DNA profiles on Miles, the teenager, and Bates.

She tested Miles's shoes. Remember, last week, the teen testified that there was blood on his shoes.

She tested both shoes. She didn't find any blood on the right shoe, so no further testing was done. She said blood was identified on the left shoe.

We're seeing a picture where stains have been circled on Miles's left shoe.

She calls them "composite stains" meaning it's not one, uniform stain.

There are four stains. Stain 1: tested for blood and blood was identified. Then they tested the blood for DNA testing. She found female DNA. Said it compared to two individuals. When she compared it to Bates's profile, she "could not exclude her as a possible contributor"

She said the blood found highly supports Bates's DNA...AKA it was likely Bates's blood.

We're now looking at the pineapple towel that has been testified to belonging to the teenage daughter. They tested this for blood and semen. Both were found. Remember, this is the towel the teen said she used to clean up blood after she and Miles had sex at the campsite.

Four stains are circled. She's talking about stain one. She said they had to try to separate any sperm cells from all other cell types. This way she has a male fraction and the female fraction. She got DNA from both fractions.

She interpreted the male fraction that matched one profile. She said "I could not exclude him as a possible contributor." She said the number she came up with supports identification AKA it was likely Miles' DNA.

For the female fraction--she obtained a DNA profile. She said they matched two profiles. When she compared the teen, she wasn't able to exclude her and says it provides support for identification.

Stain 3: another blood and semen stain. For the male fraction, she obtained the DNA profile. Male DNA was present. Miles could not be excluded as a likely contributor. She says the number she calculated provides support for identification.

She also got the DNA profile from the female extraction. Says it came from a single individual. Not able to exclude the teenager. She says the number calculated provides support for identification.

Ok let's recap the findings on the towel. The first stain had semen and blood. She found a mixture of two individual's DNA. Highly likely (nothing is 100%) it came from Miles and the teen.

^^This is the same for stain three. She found semen and blood. Found Miles's and the teen's DNA.

REMEMBER: she can't say with 100% certainty who the DNA belonged too. That's why she does a likelihood ration (I believe this is the term) which supports the identifications.

Now looking at a pair of underwear that shows staining. The underwear belonged to the teen. Says semen was identified. DNA profile had both male and female DNA.

She makes sure the jury knows that the teen was wearing this underwear, and it's expected her DNA would be on this profile. Said she "was present in the stain." She also said the other DNA profile belonged to Miles.

She said there was another area of staining on the underwear. They, again, did DNA testing.

Court is taking a quick recess.

Defense will start cross-examining Plaza.

Defense confirms with Plaza that she can't confirm how the DNA got on the teen's underwear.

She says they did not test a swab for the teen to determine if there was any semen found inside her body at the time.

Prosecutors clarified that if the teen said she didn't want to provide a swab then she didn't have to. I believe she testified earlier that she didn't let the doctors do any testing on her.

Plaza is excused. I'm guessing we'll go back to watching forensic interviews now...

The interviewer is asking about the teen having sex with Miles in Louisiana--this is where the teen said she first met Miles. She said it happened on the bed and the floor.

She said it happened more than once.

Interviewer asks if there was ever a time Miles asked her not to tell people. "He just said don't tell anybody, but I already knew that."

Interviewer asks the teen about her refusing to let the doctor do a full exam on her. "Well, I just felt like I'd be judged." She didn't let a doctor do a vaginal exam because she said she thought "everybody" would judge her.

Teen said she thought there would be DNA inside her. Interviewer asks what happened in Colorado that would have had DNA. She says, "the sex". She said it happened on the bed on the floor of the tent. "I think in the car too."

"In my bed...in the apartment." She said after Louisiana, she and Miles had sex in the apartment.

They also had sex in the living room of the apartment. She also said he performed oral sex on her.

She also had sex with Miles "in the hotel room bed."

They're talking about why Miles asked for her mom's facebook information. She said her mom didn't know anything about she and Miles's relationship. She says, if her mom knew she would have "probably kicked him out and called the cops."

"Just help pay for the stuff." She said this is what her mom thought Miles's role would be.

They're diving into how often she and Miles had sex, what they did, and where they did it. It's clear it happened a lot. I don't think we need to continue to get into detail on that on twitter.

Remember, she testified earlier that they moved around a lot.

Motel --> Air BNB-like RV --> homeless village -->duplex

She said her sister may have seen Miles without clothes on. "She knew that I was in that room." She said her sister never said anything to her about it.

“My mom tried to seduce (Miles), but he didn’t…because he already knew what my mom did with other guys.” She said she saw her mom "trying to do stuff" with Miles and said he pushed her away.

"She's like where's mommy, what are we doing?" She said she told her younger sister they were going camping. "She cried sometimes." She said her younger sister was upset in Colorado.

She said she and Miles had a bed in the tent and her younger sister would sleep next to them, not on the bed.

She said sex happened "very, very rarely" while in the tent in Colorado.

“He wouldn’t force me, but he’d do it when I wouldn’t want to because I was afraid my mom…” (couldn't hear what she said).

Interviewer asks her what she thinks "force" means?

“Grabbed you, held you down, kind of rape me.”

In the video of the interview, it sounds like they're looking at a picture of the pineapple towel. Teen says Miles wiped himself with it.

She said "usually Terry had it" in regards to her cell phone. She said he would typically use her phone. The teen said she thinks he had her phone the day her mom died.

The interviewer says the teen had "expressed concern" about sexual activities happening between Miles and her younger sister. Interviewer says if the sex was happening with the teen then it wouldn't happen with her younger sister. The teen says yes. "I have to protect her."

"(My sister) didn't say that anything was happening (with Miles)"

We're getting to the night their mom died. The interviewer tells her that her sister said she would hid in the closet.

"Fighting's been happening a lot since Joe kind of came into our family...I usually try to help her. My mom tells me go, take care of her, stuff like that... I care about her more than anybody else."

"She always gets scared." Teen says her sister "hates it when anybody fights." "It's just mostly the yelling that freaks her out so much."

What happened in the closet: "I just came in and I talked to her...I made sure she couldn't really hear if there was yelling"

"I went to the closet until she calmed down and the fighting went down."

Interviewer asks who did the fighting: "both of them"

"I think it was about the guys. Because he doesn't like that she does that." Teen says "mom would usually hit him like a lot."

Interviewer asks what happens when Miles would get mad. "He would just get upset..he would try grabbing me."

Court is in recess until tomorrow morning. Looks like we still have a bit of video to watch. Judge just told the jury that tomorrow is expected to run later in the evening.