19. SMOLAREK GLOVES - December 2016 Police found a bag of trash in Mandi's car. And they said inside the trash, they found some bloody surgical gloves. But in pictures, the gloves show up on a piece of brown butcher paper, before the trash bag is opened up. Smolarek’s evidence log shows the gloves were found at 11:45 AM. The first picture of gloves is taken at 11:51 AM. A Walmart bag can be seen unopened in the background at 11:52 AM. State’s exhibit 162 from Mandi's trial, the Walmart bag with trash, is photographed torn open but with all the trash still packed in it at 12:09 PM. There is no way somebody digged through that already to find a little ball of gloves. If you really found gloves in the bag Smolarek claimed at trial she found the gloves, wouldn’t you empty it completely out to see if there were more gloves, or knives or bullets or who knows what? Smolarek claims they found gloves with suspected blood in that bag at 11:45 AM. But that was so uninteresting, that at 12:09 PM, they still haven’t been curious enough to see what else might be in the bag. Suppose you found gloves with suspected blood and duct tape in a trash bag, after finding blood and duct tape in an apartment. Could you possibly f1nd gloves with suspected blood and duct tape in a trash bag in the suspect’s car, without being curious to empty out the rest of the trash in the next 24 minutes? Does the truth matter? More likely, what they actually found was the bag itself. They were looking for a place to say they found the gloves. They found a bag with trash in it, and that was the perfect place to say they found the gloves. So they left the trash in the bag, and photographed it 24 minutes later, because they needed a bag with trash in it. They did not have any interest what was in the trash, just the bag itself. The gloves just appear all of a sudden, in two groups. On the left are three loose open surgical gloves spread out. Two have the tip of the thumb torn off. Two, some f1ngertips are inside out. One of them has a large piece torn out. These gloves on the left are clearly not inside the small locked bundle on the right. On the right is a tiny bundle of blue items, wrapped as a small square package with two small crisscrossed zip ties. The bundle is such a tight, neat little square package, with the zip ties crossing in the middle, it is fair to speculate whoever made it has experience doing the same thing more than once. Someone likes to make a project of tying small bundles. Why package something neatly to throw in the trash? The three loose gloves on the left have a kind of dingy tint and stains like they have been used and stored. The gloves tied up in the ball on the right are a different color from the loose gloves on the left. Upon cutting the zip ties, the tight bundle on the right is shown to contain two blue shoe covers like you might wear in a clean room, and what looks like two darker blue gloves that have been used. Though later pictures seem to show several clean gloves stacked below them. Sprague’s police report has two separate entries in the list of items found in Mandi's car on page 8: - Three plastic gloves with suspected blood - Plastic booties, plastic gloves, zip ties, and duct tape But on page 18 of Sprague’s police report, Alison Smolarek is listed as having only collected one item: ABS74 TWO BLUE PLASTIC BOOTIES, FIVE USED BLUE LATEX STYLE GLOVES, PIECE OF BLACK DUCT TAPE AND TWO ZIP TIES (all tied together) The three loose gloves on the left in the photos, and the "Three plastic gloves with suspected blood" in the report, have either vanished, or have been combined into the single item. At Scott’s trial, Smolarek said there were five total gloves. At Mandi's trial, she described eight gloves. III - 60