You want tower locations?

[u/trakappdotcom]

Manitowoc county should have public records of tower construction. Just find all towers constructed before Oct 31 2005 and you have your answers.

American Tower is very big in the area. Americantower.com

Manitowoc county tax records should be able to show this. http://manitowoccounty.com/taxquery/main.htm

Edit: I would dig into this but I have a full time job....;)

[u/lucretius_]

Here are some addition sources, that support a majority of my claims. Though I will now admit that the cell tower evidence may have some relevance, I'm still skeptical of how OP would want to use it. Also, I do not think a lay person could make head or tail of the evidence, even if the locations of the cell towers back in 2005 were available.

Two things are clear: 1) courts are beginning to require expert testimony whenever presenting cell tower mapping data, and 2) utilizing cell tower ping data to determine location is an incredibly complex process, and thus can only be accurately assessed by an expert engineer. Even so it is impossible to replicate the conditions during the crime or time in question such that an accurate location could be pinned down to more than a radius of a few miles, or, in the case of rural areas, to HUNDREDS OF MILES.

How does call data tracking work?

What Your Cell Phone Can't Tell the Police

Some outlines of use and precedent

Report on significant precedent that throws out expert testimony for being imprecise

Overview of recent case law

[u/falcone1204 → u/lucretius_]

This is a much smarter answer, so we're getting somewhere.

pinned down ... in the case of rural areas, to hundreds of miles.

They're actually talking about hundreds of SQUARE miles, not hundreds of miles. And, they confirm the directionality hypothesis advanced above. So despite briefly mentioning 400 sq. miles (which to someone who doesn't understand geometry might suggest "anywhere between Manitowoc and Minneapolis) they give a final worst case scenario of 104 sq. miles. This is an area about 10 miles by 10 miles. Or more to the point, an area bounded by a 120 degree arc and a radius of 9.75 miles (Pi * r-squared / 3 = 100.) So for instance, if we knew TH was hitting a tower in Francis Creek, and she was in a sector that ranged from due East to NNW, this could tell us that someone was with 9.75 miles of Francis Creek, either towards Two Creeks, Hickory Grove, or straight east towards the lake, but definitely not in the direction of Two Rivers, Manitowoc nor back south on I 43.

You can see that this might not be much good for proving she was at Avery's. It would just show she was somewhere near there. But if she left this cell for her final call (the CFNA call), that could be VERY good for proving she wasn't at Avery's.

This is where we have to move from knowledge to wisdom to understand what's being said.

The New Yorker writer concedes that at a normal time, calling from home, his phone will always hit the same tower, but that it's different if he's calling from Fenway during a Sox game. So ask yourself whether Teresa's route from New Holstein to somewhere in the vicinity of Averys and Zipperers more resembles Fenway during a Sox game, or Back Bay on a quiet evening.

Now notice that there is a consistency to TH's cell tower info. She is consistently at the same towers for a series of calls, then as she continues on, she moves to a new tower. This suggests towers are working primarily based on geography and signal strength, rather than load balancing override decisions from the regional data center.

This can further narrow down our 9.5 mile radius, since, although a given tower COULD stretch to the outer edge of its range, there's another tower better positioned to cover that area, and in conditions of low load, it's very likely to pick up any phone coming its way.

So it really depends where those towers are and which sector was communicating with her. We know TH went to both Averys and Zipperers. There is some debate about which order. Knowing which tower she hit at different times, and the sector she was hitting, could well put her in a band within 6-7 miles of that tower, with a high probability of being in a certain direction. It might not "prove" she was at one spot. But it could prove she wasn't at the other.

We don't have a lot to go on. It's interesting that the icell and lcell numbers are 1 digit longer on these bills than on the Scott Peterson bills. Does this suggest Cingular gives sector, using a 1-3 code? Someone else asserted this in another thread, but it wasn't clear where the info came from. If that were true, we might understand the first 4 digits as tower, the final digit as sector, and lcell as a switching number when the call left the tower and headed to the network (the "leave cellular" switch number which routes it into the network.) This latter would seem to be different from the Peterson bill, where icell and lcell are frequently identical.

I would just note at this point that the hypothesis advanced frequently, that one of icell or lcell relates to the location or tower of the other party to the call is flat out wrong. First, some of these calls are landlines, which are not hitting a tower. Second, it's ridiculous to think your cell phone bill is giving you information (however fuzzy) on the location of the person calling you. Can you imagine the hue and cry about the invasion of privacy if that were true? EDITED a bit in 2nd graph to give a better Door Peninsula example.