It was my understanding from the documents that the tape's being stuck on the hair at the sides and across the mouth area was what held the jaw in place initially until the hair mat formed beneath and around the jaw helping to further hold it in position...? Obviously at the time the skull was collected, the hair that the tape was stuck to was no longer attached to a scalp, I would think the only reason the mandible and skull would stay together at all at that point would be due to the ME on scene deliberately holding them together, I would expect there could easily be a certain amount of shift during collection and transport even if they tried to pack them so as to minimize movement. The tape isn't stuck to the skull obviously, it was stuck to soft tissue that's now gone and to hair that's now detached.
I would have expected the MEs writing this report were only noting their own observations of the condition of the evidence when it arrived in their office, and that's what the report sounds like. Did they say they were also examining crime scene photographs? Maybe I missed that.
Regarding your last part there, if the ME had thought the tape had been placed over both nose and mouth originally, why wouldn't they have specified suffocation (insert medical term here, hypoxia? Anoxia? Help me medical people
) as the cause of death, instead of saying by undetermined means?
Wouldn't hearing someone yelling that your child had had duct tape over both their mouth and nose hit a "big nerve" with the parent of the child? Wouldn't they be exactly that horrified? It's possible she hadn't heard that before since no previous document had mentioned tape over both mouth and nose. Or, even if she'd been informed of that, that she still couldn't bear hearing it. Much less being accused of having done it. I definitely feel it could fall within the normal behaviors of an
innocent parent (obviously that is just one possibility.)