Further, the assumption is that he just cast Avada Kedavra against Lily and James. So that would have been the last spell if he cast no spells at Harry and just left.
If we're assuming a clever Voldemort, there's any number of ways that 'check his wand's last recorded spell' could fail to be conclusive evidence. He could've used someone else's wand (a backup wand is a good idea for a ton of reasons). He could've brought someone else to do the actual deed (how else did Bellatrix get to the wand before anyone else showed up like Dumbledore or Aurors?). He could've used any of a billion Muggle methods, as you point out (plausible since we know about Pioneer and Dumbledore regards clever use of Muggle tech as pointing to Voldemort). He could've used an innocuous spell in a fatal way (a dark lord in hiding could be expected to use Apparating all the time, and Apparating seems like it could be quite fatal given 'splinching'). He could simply have broken the detection spell and set up a false audit trail, as it were. And so on and so forth.
The official story seems completely inferred.
Lily and James are dead. Harry has a scar. There is a burnt husk of something nearby.
In fact, not even so much. What the world sees are Dumbledore producing the dead bodies of Lily and James, a scarred Harry, and a burnt husk of something.
One point against a Dumbledore conspiracy theory - how would he know that Voldemort wouldn't show up a week later and blow his story?
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: