Today, Neil Entwistle's attorney introduced the possibility of suicide as the cause of Rachel Entwistle's death. I've been waiting for this. I wonder if the jurors were. Of course, suicide raises the issue of how the gun made its way back into the gun collection at Entwistle's in-laws' house after the shooter pulled the trigger. It's almost a classic locked room mystery or an impossible circumstances  puzzle. Not only is it impossible that a suicide returned the gun to the locked box, but by an unlikely coincidence the very next day someone cleaned the gun (apparently his first lesson in gun-cleaning). This postmortem gun-cleaning also, strangely enough, didn't remove all the DNA or fingerprints (smudged) from the gun, including blood and brain matter.

So, there are two Christie-esque mysteries here: 1) how did the gun get back into the locked box, and 2) why didn't the person who cleaned the gun notice blood stains on the cloth he used to clean the gun? Wouldn't a gun that had blood on it after a cleaning have had more on it before the cleaning?

I'm very curious about how the defense will resolve these questions. They can't leave this as simply unanswered questions that ought to raise reasonable doubt in the jurors' minds. Unless the defense connects the dots in one or more logical ways, the jurors will have to believe that Neil Entwistle is guilty, and he returned the gun to the locked box--exactly what the prosecution has charged.

This is another example of the way that trial lawyers must be very good rhetoricians. The prosecution has already told the jury a coherent story. Now the defense will have to present at least one alternative, coherent story, too. That phrase "connect the dots" came up in jury deliberations when I was on the jury. Both sides had failed to connect a number of dots for us. Lawyers and judges may tell juries not to speculate about things not presented in the trial, but it is absolutely impossible for a sentient being not to try to connect the dots.

Whodunit in the Entwistle case? Who put the gun back in the locked box? Why was the gun cleaned the next day? Why didn't anyone notice blood on the gun?