Northern Colorado Regional Forensic Laboratory – Digital Evidence Analysis including iWatch Kinetic Data Logs & Bar Charts [28th Tranch]

5 Comments

1. 

   Kaye

   November 25, 2018 at 9:06 pm

   Wow so NK also searched for Chris Watts back in August 2017. Makes perfect sense then why she searched for Shan’ann in Sept. 2017. If she had been keeping tabs on them since then she must have seen Shananns heartfelt 30-minute video in May 2018 where she described in DETAIL all of the family’s planned traveling that upcoming summer. NK knew exactly when Shan’ann would be out of town. I’m beginning to think she was the one who ramped up any flirtation etc. starting that June. She knew Chris would be all on his own that summer and it would be perfect timing to get something started.

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2. 

   Ralph Cifaretto

   December 20, 2018 at 1:26 pm

   In my opinion this is one of the most overlooked and crucial pieces of evidence related to establishing a timeline of events that night. I’m surprised you posted this without comment Nick and have not delved into the subject more.

   As a preface to the rest of my post: If you’re unsure what these graphs are you are looking at, they are ”step counts” recorded by iphones of both Chris and Shanann. An iphone has a ”health app” that passively records your movement based on a variety of factors using gyroscopes, accelerometers and other various good stuff. It does this as ”step counts” and represents them in a graph. The photos here are shocking but I can tell you that the Y axis goes up in increments of 200 steps, and the x axis is a is a 24 hour time period in one hour increments, starting at 12am on the selected day. I personally use this app frequently and am quite familiar with it.

   How accurate are iphones in recording steps? Pretty accurate. Refer to this video to get an idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ljk7kAjvEd8

   Its important to note: The iphone can ONLY record your steps if it is directly on your person and in motion, it can still be on but not record steps you do not have it. Is it also not fooled by car/air travel movement. Given that both Chris and Shanann were almost constantly glued to their phones, I feel this would be a quite accurate way to track their movement.

   Now on to what the iphones show:

   Chris’ work iphone:
   – Barely any activity on the sunday, some very minor stuff late sunday afternoon on the 12th. (possibly when he picked up the phone to text Kodi Roberts he will be at Cervi tomorrow morning.
   – 0000-0400 on the 13th. NO recorded activity.
   – 0400-0500 on the 13th. Some very minor movement in this hour. Establishes Chris as awake
   -0500-0600 on the 13th – Lots of movement and activity, Chris takes over 400 steps with the phone in his possession
   -0600-0700 on the 13th – Minor activity, this is when he had loaded the bodies and was driving the truck out to Cervi and dumping the bodies
   -0700 – 1000 another flurry of activity, Chris takes a combined total of around 1400 steps during these hours with the phone in his possession

   Chris’ personal iphone:
   – 2300-0000 on the 12th. Chris takes over 200 steps with his personal iphone in his possession. We know he is awake at this time and the last time he texted Shanann was at 23:21.
   – 0000-0400 on the 13th. NO recorded movement from Chris’ Iphone during this period. He receives an alert from his Vivint security system at 0148 telling him the front door has been opened.
   – 0400-0500 on the 13th. Minor activity on the phone. Around 20-30 steps are recorded during this period. Establishes Chris as awake at this time.
   -0500-0600 on the 13th. A similar story to the work phone, increased activity with around 200 steps with the iphone in his possession during the hour.
   -0600-0700 on the 13th. Another lul in activity with 20 or so steps record. Once again he is driving to Cervi and dumping the bodies.

   Shananns Iphone:
   0000 – 0100 on the 13th. Around 100 steps recorded
   0100 – 0200 on the 13th. Around 800 steps recorded. She arrives home during this hour at 0148
   0200 – 1500 on the 13th. NO recorded activity.
   1500 – 1600 on the 13th. Just over 400 steps recorded. This is likely just after Chris ”found” the phone and switched it on again.

   Summary:
   -Both of Chris’ Iphones (work and personal) show absolutely no movement with the phone in his possession after 12am and before 4am on the day of the murder. There is slight activity during the 4am to 5am period on both phones, with increased movement between 5am-6am before another lull. They are both very consistent with each other.
   – Shananns phone shows no movement after 2am Monday and before 3pm Monday. This means its likely that Chris turned her phone off completely after the murder and did not switch it back on until it was found by Nickoles son.
   – The Vivint motion sensors on the ground floor alerted to Shanann opening the front door at 1:48am and did not detect any other motion on that floor until 4:23am. This matches almost perfectly with the recorded movement from all 3 iphones and I believe has huge implications for when the murders took place.

   Side note: More shoddy policework done in this case. If detective Baumhover had tried a little bit harder at his job, he would have noticed that underneath these graphs on the Iphone is a menu that contains an option named ”Show All Data” Clicking this option will allow you to see the EXACT times that the iphone was picked up and moved during a given day, and the time that it stopped moving, and an approximate distance traveled/step count for each time. Unfortunate that this wasn’t done as it would have helped nail down both parties movements much more accurately in the given time periods. Unfortunately these graphs broken into hour increments is all we have to work with.

   Any thoughts Nick?

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   • 

     nickvdl (Post author)

     December 20, 2018 at 3:14 pm

     Hi Ralph

     Thanks for an excellent comment here, worthy I think to be put up as an individual guest blog post – with your permission. Let me know if that’s okay.

     My response to the iPhone data is similar to the GPS, Vivint and Chris Watts’ phone data. It’s useful to know but it’s not the whole story. Just as a killer selectively leaves out information in a story of events or a confession, digital metadata can be altered so distort a picture. I do think the lack of activity from Shan’ann’s watch from 0200 – 1500 confirms what I’ve said from the beginning. She was attacked and killed immediately after arriving home, and she didn’t make the online transaction at 02:30 [another example of counterfeit digital data].

     Chris’ work iphone:
     – 0000-0400 on the 13th. NO recorded activity.

     Chris’ personal iphone:

     – 0000-0400 on the 13th. NO recorded movement from Chris’ Iphone during this period. He receives an alert from his Vivint security system at 0148 telling him the front door has been opened.

     Both of these reading I believe are bogus. I believe Watts was very active between 02:00 and 04:00 that night. It also seems inconceivable that when Shan’ann came home he didn’t get up to use the bathroom or acknowledge her in some way.

     Chris’ work iphone:

     -0600-0700 on the 13th – Minor activity, this is when he had loaded the bodies and was driving the truck out to Cervi and dumping the bodies

     Chris’ work iphone:

     -0600-0700 on the 13th. Another lul in activity with 20 or so steps record. Once again he is driving to Cervi and dumping the bodies.

     In RAPE OF CASSANDRA I’ve provided a timeline for the dumping and burial. He ought to have taken quite a few steps and gone up the steel staircase straddling the tank a few times. He arrived at about 06:30 so there’s a lot of movement no account for.

     Shan’ann’s burial probably took place closer to and after 07:00. I’m not sure how many steps digging would involve, but it would be interesting to track his movements between 07:00 and 07:30. I’m guessing he left his phone in the car during the dumping and burial.

     I do have a question: can this data be cross-reference to the iWatch data, or is the iWatch data essentially the same? Is the iWatch the source of this data or does it exist alongside…?

     Reply
     • 

       Ralph Cifaretto

       December 21, 2018 at 12:36 am

       Hi Nick,

       Thanks for your reply. You most definitely can use this or any of my posts for the site and I would be honored if you did.

       In response to your post:
       Its definitely possible that Chris manipulated the data in his favor on the night of the murders from his iphones. Both him and Shanann were big iphone users and into fitness, so he would have been very aware that it could record his movement. As mentioned, the big flaw of this data is that the iphone has to be on your person for it to record movement, which means crafty Chis could have simply put it down and not touched it during his usual sleeping hours in order to appear asleep while he carried out the murders. My main conundrum in this case is how the data matches with the Vivint readings. Vivint appears to passively record all motion even when not set to alarm, and it matches quite well with Chris’ iphone readings. Did he somehow turn the system off entirely and then back on in the morning when he ”woke up”? Unsure.

       In response to your question about the iwatch:
       This data is entirely drawn from the 3 iphones described in the document (Items 40, 41 and 42) , is it possible to synchronize your iwatch to the iphone so the data appears the same on both, but in this case I believe if the data had been synched the step counts and activity levels throughout the day would be much higher. ( Based on personal experience and the fact that the watch is literally strapped to your body the entire day)

       In the discovery I cannot find any information about the iwatches themselves being forensically examined. I believe this is another huge and glaring omission by the police again. Why? Because the iwatch itself has an even more advanced suite of biometric data it gathers from the person its attached to, the main one of interest being their heart rate. If Chris and Shanann were wearing their watches at the time of the murder, the iwatch would have most definitely detected the massive heart rate spike resulting from that (along with the fact that Shananns watch would stop giving a heart reading entirely), and could have possibly even given us an exact time of murder.

       Incredibly frustratingly, it wasn’t done. Why?

       Reply
3. 

   nickvdl (Post author)

   December 21, 2018 at 12:51 am

   Unless it was done and the data has been withheld. There are a lot of numbered pages simply unaccounted for in the Discovery Documents. A good exercise will be to go through them and see in which areas of evidence pages start dropping off. And where are the biggest holes?

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