Solving the Marathon Bomb Mystery, Part 6: Grainy Is As Grainy Does

by Mary W Maxwell, LLB

In Part 4 of this series, it was said that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested on the sidewalk at 1.05am, and therefore the police story of the 12.35am shootout is nonsense. Today, we’ll go to the famous grainy video of Bombers One and Two walking “single-file” at the Marathon to see if it could have been photo-shopped. As noted, Jess Bidgood of the New York Times pointed to the graininess of the single-file photo.

This article takes the form of a chat between me and a friend who wants to remain anonymous for the time being. Neither of us are experts in photo-analysis, but there are some oddities that don’t require expertise to illuminate. PHOTO ONE is from Laurel St.

Maxwell. Please say something about that shot.

Friend. I think we can dispose of it; it is worthless. For one thing I can see that the alleged Tamerlan in this photo must be an actor. I call him Fat-ass. See his rear end? Tamerlan was a very fit athlete, would not have stuck out like that.

Maxwell.  I think that photo does more to incriminate the photographer than to incriminate Tamerlan.  Let’s now turn to PHOTO TWO. This scene occurred – well I mean it is alleged to have occurred — when Dun Meng and his two carjackers pulled into the Shell gas station.  There is a video of Tamerlan running, or at least walking fast, towards the convenience store.

 Friend. That’s not Tamerlan. It must be an actor. By the way, note that he wears dark pants, but the real Tamerlan was wearing khaki pants when he was arrested on the sidewalk around 1.05am. Have a look at PHOTO THREE. His pants are practically screaming “Hello I’m Khaki! Notice me, notice me!”

Friend. Personally I think they stripped him naked when they realized he shouldn’t be wearing khaki pants. That clothing would disagree with the plan for the evening – I presume – which was to have the fake Tamerlan be black-panted.

Maxwell. I must say they take a lot of chances pulling off a show like this. I thought the logistics of my little show at the Adelaide Fringe were traumatic enough.

Friend. Now we come to PHOTO FOUR. It has a photo-shop element in it, even though it’s a video – and that could be true also of the grainy video of boys walking in single file.  I think they got an actor to play Jahar walking around the store. Note how this guy takes each item off the shelf with his left hand. The real Jahar is right-handed. Also, this actor is constantly touching his face, probably to hide it from the camera.

Maxwell.  Frankly, I feel sure the Tsarnaevs never went to the Shell, and that Meng made up the whole story about being carkacked. Russ Baker of WhoWhatWhy has demolished Meng’s story.

Friend.  Yes, and during the trial, it was reported by Tweets that Meng kept his eyes focussed on his Northeastern professor while being questioned in court. Maybe looking for guidance.

Maxwell. OK, if no carjacking, there shouldn’t be any magical CCTV photo date-stamped at the appropriate moment. Still, most people won’t be persuaded about the left-hand bit.

Friend. I beg to differ. There is also a video that was taken in Whole Foods Cambridge, 20 minutes after the Marathon bombing. (The media broadcasts it as proof of how callous the killer is, that he could walk so casually into a supermarket.)  See in PHOTO FIVE how he reaches out with his right hand. Also he, the real Jahar in Whole Foods, is taller than the actor in Shell convenience store. And he doesn’t put his hand in front of his face.

Maxwell. Hmm. To me, the Jahar who emerges from Shell with Doritos or other snacks is comparable to the real Jahar on the famous Rolling Stone cover.

Friend.  I have to agree. So I assert that although a Jahar-actor walked around the convenience store, for the first 2 minutes of the CCTV video, someone cleverly pasted in a photo of Jahar into it, where he exits the store. Possibly they did that to some earlier frames also. Towards the end, in PHOTO SIX, they also inserted a real face of Tamerlan – he’s standing at the cashier’s counter.

Maxwell. It’s so easy to swap heads –as they famously did with Lee Harvey Oswald holding a rifle in his backyard. I asked a geek named Ian to insert Tamerlan’s head on a photo of someone else, PHOTO SEVEN. Have a laugh:

Maxwell. But Dee McLachlan, with oodles of film-editing experience, says it is very hard to do that to a film, as you would have to photo-shop each frame.

Friend.  They get paid by the hour at the FBI, don’t they?

Maxwell. Unless they are slaves down in a bunker somewhere, and I wouldn’t rule it out. So let’s go to PHOTO EIGHT.

Friend.  The main problem with this Boylston St video, besides the peculiar fact that the brothers are walking single-file, is that Tamerlan is clean-shaven. His family believes he had a beard continuously since 2012. He never shaved it off.

Maxwell.  So you don’t think this famous picture is Tamerlan.

Friend.  Sorry, I do think it is Tamerlan. Undoubtedly that is his face, but younger than 26. I assume they got a video of him at a younger time and folded it in.

Maxwell. If so, maybe he and Jahar were working for FBI or some such, and were asked to pose in that way on a different day.

Friend.  The FBI now admits that it had involvement with Tamerlan for some years up to 2012 and not since then. A you know, many immigrants who haven’t yet got permanent status in US are asked to do some small or big job for CIA, FBI, etc.

Maxwell. Yes, Mary Gregory has told me that she sees Chinese women with their baby carriages lining up at a certain office in New York to get their instructions. Also I must tell you that I think Jahar worked for FBI, or someone, and was asked to do the exchange-milk routine.  If not, would Whole Foods have had such a handy shot of him, taken right after the bombing? (Of course he’d have done his milk-exchange on an earlier date).

Friend.  I just don’t know. I have heard it suggested that in the single-file video (Photo 8 above) the two boys were filmed separately from one another and/or that the single-file shot is the Tsarnaev brothers at an earlier Marathon.  Tamerlan was definitely overseas in Russia from January 21 to July 17, 2012. So no, he wasn’t at the 2012 Marathon. And as you said in Part 1 of this series, he asked his Dad “Since when do we go to Marathons?”

Maxwell.  The remaining problem is, of course, how did they get the single-file picture to contain a Tamerlan shot taken elsewhere?   Do you recall that in 2016 Dee McLachlan discovered a major problemo with another video of Jahar? They had foolishly inserted a still into the video that was square size instead of landscape or portrait. The way she discovered it was by noticing how they had cropped out his tell-tale white-grey backpack. Here, PHOTO NINE.

Friend. Of course I recall. I read everything Gumshoe publishes about the Marathon.  I know you sent that deviant picture to the judge.

Maxwell. Yep. I sent it to the Court in March 2016, with a petition for a writ of Error Coram Nobis. After a year of no reply, I sent a copy of that to the Massachusetts Legislature. I’m not holding my breath to get their answer.

Friend. Mary, there’s another way to prove that the famous single-file photo of Tamerlan could not be genuine. One of Jahar’s friend, Khairullozhon Matanov, invited both brothers to dinner the afternoon of the Marathon.

Maxwell. Pardon me, in Boston the evening meal is called supper.

Friend. Fine, Khairullozhon Matanov [“Cabbie’] invited them to supper.  Needless to say, Tamerlan was bearded, as he has been continuously since 2012. Later, Khairullozhon saw DesLauriers’ shameless press conference on TV and knew right away that the video was false, as Tamerlan seemed to be beardless. So he reported that to the Braintree police station, and is now deported. Wow, was he naïve about the facts of life.

Maxwell. We were all so naïve. Let me run thru the pix again, looking for beards on the older boy. The single–file one, clean-shaven. The shootout – hard to tell in the dark, probably clean-shaven. Hurrying to Shell station, hard to tell, I think he has five-o’clock shadow.  Photo thru window, at Shell cashier’s bearded. Gee that was quick growth! Sidewalk arrest, bearded.

Friend. In sum, I want to make a general observation. The feds like to confuse us. They put many different versions out. Thus those who are questioning the authenticity of any fake picture would be easily confused with those that look real. I feel as if I’m going crazy, from my inability to understand how, at one moment, there can be the real Tsarnaev boys, with their younger faces, and then, suddenly they have unrecognizable features of their faces or unrecognizable movements.

By the way, I could swear that, when the video at the convenience store was circulated in the media and YouTube, Tamerlan in the window shot looked different — he appeared to have a good-length beard. But after the Internet started boiling with discussions about how could Tamerlan grew a beard of such length within the three days, from the Marathon day, the feds removed his beard. They concocted the picture that was incorporated into Frame at 2.43 of the video.  The newer one was shown to the jury.

Maxwell. Par for the course. I think they’ve spoiled some of the videos on my Mary W Maxwell Youtube channel. There was one of me on a boat talking about the electoral college, and a while later a loud squeaky noise came into it. And my “kitchen constitution” video went from sharp focus to blurry. Interesting that “they” find it threatening – the electoral college for heaven’s sake.

Friend.  Just watch this short video published in May of 2013.  At 30 seconds, the narrator makes a point about Tamerlan’s facial hair, as he walks down the stairs (“Missing: his full, bushy religious beard”). They claim this film was from CCTV of the gym, dated April 10, 2013, but I doubt any information given about date-stamps:

Friend. Thanks for working on Jahar’s behalf, Mary.

Maxwell.  As I admit in the preface to my book, Marathon Bombing, I’m not in this for Jahar, I am in it for me. Life will be less frightening after we all start to admit that we allowed “law enforcement” to become the enemy of the citizenry.

Oh, and by the by, here is one more picture, PHOTO TEN probably not photo-shopped but using actors. MIT has submitted it to the court as though it was from campus surveillance camera. Cheryl Dean refers to it as the two ants – supposedly the Tsarnaevs, approaching the parked cruiser car of Officer Sean Collier.

–Mary W Maxwell apologizes for the delay in publishing this Part 6 and admits that interpretation of the single-file photo is still up for grabs.