Seriously. Who memorises their passport number?
The only time you need it is when filling those little arrival cards on the aeroplane. You hand it over, they scan it, stamp it, you keep it safe. Who on earth is going to memorise the number?
The Port Arthur shooter.
When the police examined the abandoned Volvo at the toll booth, they discovered Martin Bryant's passport in the glove compartment.
When Terry McCarthy was on the phone negotiating with the shooter inside Seascape, the disjointed conversation went like this:
McCarthy: Now you’ve given me your name as Jamie and ar we both know that that’s not correct or you’ve told me it’s not correct. Are you prepared now to give me your correct name?
Jamie: Not really no I
McCarthy: Why not?
Jamie: I’ll tell wha right on seven o’clock in the morning I’ll give you my I’ve got my passport number and I’ll passport on me um
McCarthy: Well you prepared to give me your
Jamie: Oh sh
McCarthy: passport number?
Jamie: Shit could be.
McCarthy: Have you got your passport there?
Jamie: um in the glovebox. No no but it could be in my glovebox in the car but ah
McCarthy: Where’s your car now?
Jamie: Ah I’ve got a photocopy of it in my wallet but I’ll phone I want you to guarantee that you’ll have one in the morning early
McCarthy: Well look ugh I can’t guarantee anything until you start you know start playing it straight with me.
The conversation goes off on a tangent, with Jamie talking about helicopters, then Terry says he will call back at twenty past eight.
When he does call, Jamie is agitated. He has seen a police officer crawling in close, and tells Terry to pull him back. There's a twenty minute break, then Terry calls back. They talk about Sally Martin, then Jamie gets back to his request for a helicopter:
Jamie: I’m just wondering when this helicopters gonna arrive. Is it still gonna be in the morning?
McCarthy: Well, yeah we were talking about the morning weren’t we cause it was going to make things a lot easier ah organising a helicopter er ah ah that can fly during daylight hours.
Jamie: Well that’s fine with me if it’s fine with you and your boys.
Jamie: Well that’s fine with me if it’s fine with you and your boys.
McCarthy: Well we’ll working on that, we’ll work on that but as I said I still need some real information as far as ah being able to lodge ah flight plans an and what have you and um I know you talked about a passport earlier on that you had a copy in your wallet
Jamie: Yeah yeah yeah
McCarthy: of your passport
Jamie: That’s right. Yeah
McCarthy: Now if you don’t want to tell me your name that’s fine but how about giving me your passport number and we can do a check on that?
Jamie: I think it’s H024967 if I can remember it cause I travelled quite a lot overseas an most an um travel agencies know me around town me around Hobart I should say so
McCarthy: Right H024967
Jamie: Yeah I think that’s the number but um
So what does this tell us? The shooter knew Martin's passport number, and knew that it was in the Volvo. He also says there was a photocopy in his wallet.
Martin Bryant didn't use a wallet. Petra's witness statement says he kept his cash in a drawer in the house. When putting $15 petrol in the Volvo at Taranna, Chris Hammond said he did not have a wallet, and Martin pulled the notes from his trouser pocket.
Your passport is one of the most important documents you own. Who is going to leave it lying around in their unlocked car glove compartment? Okay, Martin had a 66-IQ, equal to an 11-year-old kid, so he might have made that kind of dumb security mistake. But if so, how did someone so dumb plan and execute such an effective military operation? Decoying the police away at the perfect time, making sequential head shots on different people at different ranges, shooting from the opposite hip, without using the scope or sights?
You can't have one without the other. Either it was all Martin, or it wasn't.
Talking about military style planning, here's something you might be interested to know. In the military, snipers aren't just experts at shooting, camouflage and field craft. A key part of a sniper team's role is observation. They get specific training to improve their memory. For example: https://science.howstuffworks.com/sniper10.htm
Army Ranger Sniper details one training exercise called the KIMS game:
...they would put different objects on the table: a bullet, a paper clip, a bottle top, a pen, a piece of paper with something written on it -- 10 to 20 items. You'd gather around and they'd give you, say, a minute to look at everything. Then you'd have to go back to your table and describe what you saw. You weren't allowed to say "paper clip" or "bullet," you'd have to say, like, "silver, metal wire, bent in two oval shapes." They want the Intel guys making the decision about what you actually saw.
The KIMS game that Army Ranger Sniper describes is played repeatedly throughout the two-month course. As time goes by, students are given more objects to look at and less time to look at them. To add to the challenge, the time between seeing the objects and reporting what they saw gets longer as the course goes on. By the end, they may see 25 objects in the morning, train all day, and then at night be asked to write down descriptions of all the things they saw.
Now, I'm not saying that the shooter was a US Army Ranger Sniper. All I'm saying is that the evidence points towards the shooter having some key abilities that would be provided by formal military training, and utterly lacking by low-IQ, civilian Martin Bryant.
To make the strange factors easier to understand, I've written a novel that reads like a Tom Clancy or Lee Child thriller. The only difference is, I've used footnotes that reference the witness statements and court documents, so you can see that truth is indeed stranger than fiction:
The 2nd Empty Chair is a fiction novel, based on the witness statements and court documents. Using poetic licence, it links the facts that we know into a plausible, possible narrative that 'pokes more holes in the official story than a Pastafarian's colander.'
Read the witness statements, this book and compare what you learn to the official story.
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