I think she absolutely knew that something was up when she write down the information about where/when Nancy practiced (I think the 'when' was part of it?). But, she remained in denial about it and I don't think that the players involved shared the details with her.
That handwritten note is certainly the biggest piece of evidence against her. She was really gullible and dumb when it came to Jeff so there is a possibility that she didn’t know the real purpose of obtaining the information. He actually shared how he could have duped her into getting the rink information in his FBI statement.
The evidence related to the handwriting is this:
The FBI handwriting expert claimed that the name and address were in her handwriting. The phone number was not Jeff and “highly probable” her. The training costs on the other side that equal the money ($6500) the hit was going to cost was written by Jeff. Tonya wrote some of the other training related notes below that. Everything else (random numbers, doodles ) on the envelope was inconclusive or no opinion.
Tonya called a skating reporter friend to find out where Kerrigan lived and trained - that damning Tunee Can Arena note in her handwriting apparently starts with this call. Tonya told the reporter friend that she was asking because she had a bet with Jeff. According to Jeff’s statement, he told Tonya to tell the reporter that she wanted to compare her training times with Kerrigan’s (to sort of get an upper hand on the competition) - this is how he could have duped her.
This means she would have been a real idiot but well she certainly has acted like a complete idiot at other times. I guess it’s possible that Jeff tricked her into getting the information for him by nagging her that she was being lazy again and not training enough. Jeff: “Tonya, you still haven’t lost weight and I’m worried that you’re not training enough! Do you want a repeat of Albertville? How can you expect to land a triple axel at the Olympics with those thunder thighs? That Kerrigan bitch looks like she hasn’t eaten anything since 1989! I bet she skates like 10 hours a day! I want to find out. Where does she live anyway?” Tonya: “Oh shut up or I’ll file for divorce! Oh damn. I already did that. Why are still you still here anyway?”
That’s how they start looking through the skating books and get into a fight like she mentions in her book. Then she calls the reporter and one of them calls the rink. She could care less about any of it except to win the argument. When he sees that Nancy does not skate much more than her, he'll leave her alone.
A few days later before leaving for nationals, she’s talking on the phone with her secret lover Paul (ha – look at the envelope) who wishes her good luck. She scribbles his name and doodles his picture on the envelope with Kerrigan’s practice times as they’re talking. She then throws the piece of scrap paper in the trash not realizing it will be used as evidence against her later. Oops!
We see this sort of play out in the hilariously cheesy 1994 tv movie: in her interview with the authorities, she originally said that she had made the calls to Nancy’s rink. She said it was to ask Nancy if she would autograph an old photo of the two of them with Kristi. It was at this point that the detective said he knew she was lying. He had been waiting for her to get to this part of her story all along because, unbeknownst to Tonya and Jeff, Shawn had already confessed and blabbed to the authorities about the cover- up story they came up with the day after Jeff and Tonya came back from Detroit.
After this, they took a break in the questioning and she spoke to her lawyer alone for over an hour. When she came back, she said she really did not make calls to the rink. What’s curious about this part of her interview is that while she was telling them that she made the calls to the rink, she apparently couldn’t name the rink, and her story of how she obtained the phone number did not match the phone records. The phone records showed that the rink number was obtained via directory assistance in Oregon and then Boston. I thinks she said she had obtained the phone number from the USFSA. Is it possible that she got the rink information from other means (USFSA)? That would mean that she threw the envelope in the trash later before Jeff actually had a chance to make the calls! LOL! He would have remembered the name of the rink and called directory assistance to obtain the number again, and destroyed that evidence later.
Tonya has to be the one that put the envelope in the trash before she left for Detroit because Jeff and Shawn had both said they destroyed all of the other evidence (including the audiotape) after the attack. That she didn’t destroy it would mean that 1 – she was not a very smart criminal or 2 - she didn’t know how the information was actually going to be used.
#badskatingfan
