Renee Ordway’s Dec 17 column offered a choice between Dennis Dechaine’s guilt for murdering Sarah Cherry, or an extraordinarily unlucky Dechaine cursed with “evil” public officials.

No doubt about “unlucky.” Papers from Dechaine’s truck bearing his name lay at the crime scene. A rope and scarf from his truck were on the victim’s body. Then look at the first lawyer he picked: George Carlton, a convicted felon and alcoholic who’d lost every case except one that year. After being told the family had hired another attorney and couldn’t afford to pay two lawyers, Carlton hung on without pay – then allegedly told friends that Dechaine had admitted guilt.

Ms. Ordway strengthened her argument with a series of facts she says believers must accept “in order to believe [Dechaine] is innocent.”

Permit me, please, to borrow Ms. Ordway’s technique.

In order to believe Dechaine guilty, one must accept the theory that this master criminal who left no tiny, invisible trace of himself at the abduction site, the death scene, or (in this most intimate of crimes) on his victim’s body – that this brilliant killer dropped two items bearing his name outside the house where the girl was baby sitting, and left them there.

Believe, too, that this 12-year-old victim was transported 3.2 miles in Dechaine’s pickup during a heat wave without leaving any trace the police lab could find after vacuuming the truck and microscopically examining its contents. No fingerprint, no fabric or blood, not a single hair.

The police-tracking dog couldn’t even detect her scent in Dechaine’s truck.

Believe that the truck was secured, despite the cab’s unlocked rear window.

Believe that, while the state medical examiner’s opinion (supported by other pathologists and the best forensic pathology textbooks) placed the time of death more than five hours after Dechaine was with state’s witnesses, including police, this magic killer somehow invisibly transmigrated a quarter-mile away from those cops to murder his victim.

Believe that while Dechaine strangled this little girl, the blood she scratched from her killer contains the DNA of a male person who is not Dechaine.

Believe that Dechaine uttered incriminating admissions alleged by two detectives who wrote down his claims of innocence, but not the incriminating words that helped their case. One detective’s notes show him later changing “How could I kill her” into “Why did I kill her.” The suspicious phrase which the other detective testified he was reading from his notes isn’t really in his notes. (Detectives’ notes were withheld by the state until our Legislature ordered the secret file opened, and I filed a lawsuit demanding that the complete file be revealed.)

One must believe that this indisputably nonviolent man whom state psychologists found “was not in a psychotic state on the day of the crime” – that this man with no record of crime or perversion suddenly perpetrated Maine’s most vicious sexual slaying in living memory.

None of us wants to believe our system misfired.

None of us wants to believe that an innocent man is serving life, or that Sarah Cherry’s killer got away with it.

We’d rather believe that officials who’re now defending their actions are perfect professionals

Most of us tend to believe what we want to believe.

For my money, the time of death and DNA evidence trump everything because science never lies, and science doesn’t care who wins.

The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “We’re all entitled to our opinion, we’re not entitled to our own facts.”

These facts speak for themselves.

All Dechaine’s supporters ask is a trial where – unlike the 1989 ordeal – jurors hear all the evidence.

James P. Moore is a retired agent-in-charge for Maine and New Hampshire from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He wrote “Human Sacrifice,” the result of his study of the Dennis Dechaine trial for the murder of Sarah Cherry.