An intruder knocked a glass out of the wine rack.
The testimony regarding the wine rack proves that this would be impossible unless someone actually removed the wine glass with his/her hand. The rack had a safety mechanism engineered into it to prevent the glasses from accidentally falling out.
James Cron testified that “later in the evening after all the fingerprints were finished on it, I shoved the wine rack, rattled it, bumped into it and jarred it to see if any glasses would fall off and none did. I couldn’t dislodge any glasses without tilting it forward so far that they would all fall out of their rack.”
(James Cron, Sec. 2251)
The wine rack was not knocked askew or pushed away from the wall, as it would be if someone had bumped or run into it, and there were no broken glasses or bottles inside the rack itself. Several small items, such as a bottle opener and ice tongs, were still balanced on top of other containers.
Davis: Did you or some other officer balance these two openers on this little round object here?
Cron: No.
Davis: Were those two objects still balanced up there as they are in 36-C when you first saw the wine rack?
Cron: Yes.
Davis: The ice tongs, were they perched up here on top of the ice canister when you got there, too?
Cron: Yes.
(James Cron, Sec. 2418)
Alan Brantley also testified about the wine rack. “You see the glass broken here on the floor, and the decanter here that is on its side. But there are some very small glasses up here that are seemingly undisturbed… but what is interesting, and what I believe is a contradiction, is you have this ice bucket, and you have some utensils that go along with that ice bucket, that are in place and not disturbed. Especially down here you have a corkscrew, and you have a can opener and a bottle opener and some other device that is carefully balanced on this corkscrew, and they are sitting very symmetrically.
You also have two glasses on either side of this ice bucket, and they also are very symmetrically placed, and it looks like they haven’t been disturbed at all. So if you’re to believe someone hits this wine rack with enough force to cause this wine glass to come up over that holder or lip which is like a U-shape, then why wasn’t there enough force applied to dislodge some of those other items?”
(Alan Brantley, Sec, 3687, 3688)
In his cross-examination of James Cron, Mulder suggested that an intruder could have bumped into the wine rack, causing one glass to break in the rack before hitting the floor. As proof, he showed Cron what appeared to be one shard on the glass shelf of the wine rack.
Mulder: Well, put your good eye on this and see if you can’t see some glass.
Cron: I never saw glass there. I don’t see any glass shard [on the shelf].
Mulder: See if you can’t see a shard. Let me point it out to you.
Cron: That looks like reflections of light on the glass shelf.
(James Cron, Sec. 2392-2396)
And, indeed, many of the photographs show a reflection of the small pieces of glass on the floor, produced by the camera’s flash. Corroborating Cron’s testimony was Charles Linch, who also inspected the wine rack and found no broken pieces of glass on it. Mulder didn’t offer an explanation as to why, if an intruder had broken a glass in the rack itself, only a single shard landed on the shelf below and the remainder of the glass fell on the floor, all the way over to the sink area. Nor did he offer an explanation as to why the wine rack was not pushed away from the wall if someone had hit it with enough force to break one, and only one, glass.
(Charles Linch, Sec. 392)
Conclusion
The evidence strongly suggests that Darlie herself threw the wine glass on the floor to simulate a struggle with an intruder. The safety features of the wine rack prevented the glasses from accidentally falling out, and an intruder hooking a single glass with his arm or elbow would be next to impossible. Despite writing in her June 8th statement that there was “glass all over the kitchen floor,” and much later claiming to have been frantically running towels from the kitchen sink to the family room, she didn’t have a single cut on either of her feet.