In a telephone conversation between Evelyn Case and Robert WitbolsFeugen on December 26, 1997 (a tape of which still exists), Mrs. Case called Mr. WitbolsFeugen to complain that he was "harassing and upseting" her son. She told him that Case's father (her ex-husband) had died on December 24, and that Case's car had been vandalized recently (as it turned out, his tires had been deflated), and that the "interrogation" that Mr. WitbolsFeugen had been "conducting" (in reference to the recent emails between Case and Anastasia's family) was just adding to her son's stress.

During the conversation, she described the events of the morning of October 23rd as she witnessed them:

"Justin called that morning around 9:00 AM, and he wanted to talk to Byron. I knocked on Byron's door, but he didn't answer. I guess he was sleeping pretty good then. I told Justin I'd have him call. We never heard from him [Justin] again."

Both Case and his mother would later describe that incident differently, claiming that she had woken her son and that he had spoken briefly with Justin Bruton that morning.⁽¹⁾

It was common practice for Case's friends and aquaintances to page him if they could not reach him otherwise; it is illogical for Justin to have called him at home, left a message, and never bothered to page him when he didn't call back immediately. The fact that Case's mother remembered quite clearly two months later that he did not respond when she called him on the morning after the murder creates doubt in his alibi. Further, Case drove over to the home of his friend Aaron Vermeullen that day,⁽²⁾ who lived no more than 20 blocks from Case's father's house. Testimony in the trial already had left the impression with the jury that Case had tried to plant false memories with Tara McDowell in January 1998,⁽³⁾ and changing a small but important detail like where he was that morning is no great stretch of reasoning.

Considering (1) Evelyn Case's taped conversation of December 26, 1997 with Robert WitbolsFeugen that she did not wake her son up to speak to Justin, (2) Case's later assertion that he did indeed speak to Justin that morning, (3) knowledge of how he used his pager, (4) Case's own statement to police on July 29, 1999 that he drove to his friend's house that was only a few blocks from his father's, and (5) his history of planting memories, we conclude that Case did not spend the night of October 22-23 and his mother's apartment, and that the most likely alternate layover would be his father's home.