Homicide detective supervisor Ron Phillips arrived at approximately 2:10 a.m. with detective Mark Fuhrman, and his partner, Brad Roberts. At this time, Roberts was the eighteenth person logged in at the crime scene; clearly too many people. Phillips was notified that the investigation was handed over to division head William O. Gartland, who then assigns detectives Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter as lead investigators. At this time Phillips walked detective Vannatter through the scene carefully so that no one, except the first responders, went close to the bodies. The men, getting no closer than six feet from the bodies, could not determine the exact cause of death.
Upon searching the scene, investigators found a number of items lying near and around the two victims. Amongst those items were a set of car keys, a navy blue knit cap, a white blood-spattered envelope, and a single bloodstained left-handed leather glove. Bloody footprints were noticed to be directing the officers away from the scene towards the back of the property; accompanying blood drops were noticed headed in the same direction. Commander Keith Bushey, chief of operations for the LAPD’s west bureau, tells Phillips, Fuhrman, Lange, and Vannatter to try and contact O.J. Simpson in order the identify and gather his two children found upstairs, asleep in the house. At the time, Simpson was considered a potential, but not actual, suspect in the murders.
At approximately 5:00 a.m. the four detectives arrive at Simpson’s home at 360 Rockingham, no more than five minutes away from the Bundy crime scene. The detectives assumed Simpson to be home due to his 1994 white Ford Bronco parked in front of the home. Upon inspection of the vehicle, detective Fuhrman noticed bloodstains on the vehicle’s door panel. Combined with the blood and unsuccessful attempts to reach Simpson via the gate intercom, the detectives feared they were about to discover another murder scene. Acting out of emergency and fear of another homicide, the detectives, having enough cause to forego a search warrant for the premises, did just that by climbing the fence. After inspecting the property, detectives encountered Kato Kaelin, a Simpson houseguest, and Simpson’s eldest daughter Arnelle Simpson. With Arnelle, detectives Phillips, Vannatter, and Lange searched the main house while Fuhrman stayed with Kaelin. In Kaelin’s immediate interview he noted that he and Simpson went out to get some food earlier that night and separated upon returning. He also noted that he heard three loud thumps on the other side of his bungalow’s wall at approximately 10:45 the previous evening. Not long after, Kaelin said he helped Simpson load a limo waiting to take him to LAX for a flight to Chicago. Kaelin noted that Simpson had a small bag with him that he didn’t let anyone else handle.
The detectives reached Simpson at his hotel in Chicago, and upon hearing of the events that took place that night, Simpson, though he seemed distraught, didn’t ask certain questions about his ex-wife’s death, which ultimately made investigators skeptic. After the conversation, Simpson agrees to immediately return to Los Angeles. Detective Fuhrman, upon further investigation of the Rockingham scene, finds a right-handed leather glove matching the left-handed one at the Bundy scene. The second glove appeared to be covered in blood. Detective Vannatter also found blood in the form of spots leading from the glove to the Ford Bronco and to the entrance of Simpson’s front door. At approximately 7:10 a.m. a police photographer, accompanied by chief forensics investigator Dennis Fung and his assistant Andrea Mazzola, arrived at the Rockingham scene.
Back at the Bundy scene, detective Lange preserves the scene for the coroner’s investigators. Noticing a mass increase of television cameras, since the media has been notified, Lange, in order to relinquish any dignity for the dead, covers Brown’s body with a blanket he finds inside the house. During the trial, detective Lange would live to regret that. After photographs are taken at the Bundy scene, inspector Fung documents and gathers evidence once the two bodies are bagged. The way in which the evidence at the Bundy location was gathered was heavily scrutinized by the defense in the trial; thanks to the media coverage that was so conveniently across the street.
Downtown, Simpson is being questioned as a suspect. Simpson seemed to contradict himself quite often on details he shouldn’t have: whether or not he was in a hurry to catch his flight or how he cut his hand. After the questioning, Simpson voluntarily agreed to submit hair samples, fingerprints, and a blood sample in order to seem compliant and innocent. Division serologist, Thano Peratis, took the blood sample. Peratis allegedly said he took 8 CC’s of blood from Simpson, but later at the trial the LAPD lab said that they could only account for roughly 6.5 CC’s. The flaw in documentation of the exact amount of blood taken from Simpson caused uproar in the defense. The defense states that the LAPD detectives purposely contaminated the crime scene in a way that would frame their client. The fact that a certain amino acid, called EDTA which is used as a preservative and added to lab samples, was present in blood spots found on the back gate of the Bundy scene and on the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed at the Rockingham scene gave the defense a window to argue police tampering. Even the discovery of the socks themselves was argued as a part of a police conspiracy.
When the LAPD investigators searched the Rockingham scene, they took along a camera to record their findings. The videotape was to cover them from impropriety and act as a damage control moderator. Investigator Willie Ford videotaped the master bedroom after the socks were collected as evidence. Little to the police’s knowledge, the camera’s date and time were reset due to the camera being inactive for a long period of time. During the trial, since there was no concrete way to determine when exactly the socks had been there, or even if they were there to begin with, caused major concern for the prosecution and implanted more reasonable doubt in the juror’s minds.
Further discussion about the bloodstained socks came in the form of professional witness and forensics master Henry Lee. Lee states that the way in which blood spatters caused the blood to be in the socks weren’t consistent on how the blood rested on the socks surface, and not in the fibers. Lee also noted that the socks had identical blood patterns throughout the entire sock and therefore theoretically, through the suspect’s ankle. Things were beginning to go wrong with the prosecution’s case.
The evidence against Simpson was commonly referred to as a “mountain of evidence” by the prosecution. The defense wasn’t even started when it came to diminishing the mountain into an unreliable anthill. They still had the biggest trump card left to play, but it wasn’t Mark Fuhrman, he was just an appetizer.
The defense began an all out assault, focusing in on the two areas they would target to prove their client’s innocence. One would be based around the racist attitude of a policeman; the other around their contention that the blood and DNA samples were corrupted by the criminalist team authorized to collect them, or worse, deliberately mishandled and in some cases illegally manipulated to form a pattern of guilt leading to their client.
It was obvious that Fuhrman could not have seized a second glove at the Bundy scene (seventeen other police officers had viewed the death scene and all had only spotted the one glove near the bodies, not two) and transported it to the Rockingham scene, framing Simpson for the murders. The defense based its whole case around two related items, turning the interrogation away from Simpson and aiming it at Fuhrman’s supposed racial intolerance, combining that with its assault on the blood evidence, the way it was collected and presented by the prosecution.
With the DNA evidence in the crosshairs, Denis Fung and his assistant found themselves blasted by defensive cross-examination. Over the period of defense’s questioning, they brought up the fact that a crime scene photograph showed an ungloved hand holding the blood-spattered envelope. He also admitted to placing blood samples into plastic bags, which he claimed was purely a temporary measure, although doing this could foster bacteria growth, which in turn could distort test results.
Andrea Mazzola was called to give evidence on April 20th and spent four days being grilled by Peter Neufeld, who subjected her to as severe a battering as to Dennis Fung. She agreed that she had collected most of the blood samples without any supervision from Fung, although in the preliminary hearing, Fung had claimed the opposite. Neufeld also tried hard to show that Mazzola did a sloppy job, using videotape as evidence of her resting a hand on a dirty footpath, wiping tweezers with a dirty hand, and dropping several blood swabs. She admitted that there were times when she had made mistakes in the collection of evidence, but denied vigorously that anyone, including herself would have deliberately altered evidence.
She was unable to confirm that she had carried out to the evidence truck the vial of Simpson’s blood returned to the scene by Detective Vannatter, thus reinforcing the defenses notion that the blood was never handed over to Fung that day, and this delay gave the police ample time to plant blood evidence.
Mazzola finished her testimony on April 27th. Both Scheck and Neufeld had done a brilliant job in creating a smokescreen to confuse the jury over the propriety of the criminalists' activity that day in June. If there was confusion over who did what in the collection of crime scene evidence, it was minor compared to what was to come next.
The most ridiculous thing about the trial preceding unfolded in a way that defies logic. The prosecution actually requested that Simpson put the bloody gloves on to show that they fit. The defense didn’t need their trump card because the prosecution just played what could be considered the defense’s “ace-in-the-hole.” After leather gets wet and then has a chance to dry, it will most definitely shrink. To add to a tight fit, Simpson was wearing latex gloves at the time of ‘fitting’. In front of the jury and on televisions across America, Simpson at the time was saying to the courtroom (and the audiences watching at home), “It doesn’t fit.” Johnny Cochran uttered his famous cliché, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” just as Simpson finished his observation.
The prosecution was fatally wounded, beaten, battered, and humiliated by the defense. To the prosecution, the case should’ve been relatively simple because “a mountain of evidence” supported it: Simpson had an abusive relationship with Nicole and was jealous of her since their marriage ended. Simpson dropped the bloody gloves, one at the crime scene and one at his home. He wore shoes the same size as the footprints leading away from the crime scene. His blood was everywhere, some of it mixed in with that of the victims. He had a motive; he had the opportunity; he had no alibi for the time frame of the murders; but he had a defense team that shot holes through all that evidence.
Late in the afternoon of Friday September 29th, Judge Ito issued his instructions to the jury, sending them back to their hotel, telling them not to begin their actual deliberation until Monday, October 2nd. Having selected #230 Armanda Cooley as their foreperson, the jury sat down at 9:16 a.m. in the deliberation room at the Superior Court building and began its review of the trial. At 2:28 p.m., jurors notified Judge Ito that a verdict had been reached. He announced to the court that he would disclose it the following morning at 10:00 a.m.
By 9:45 a.m. next morning, the courtroom was full; everyone still and quiet as the jury was seated. The judge ruled the court was in session and asked the foreperson to give the verdict to court clerk Deirdre Robertson. Nervously, her voice faltering as she scanned the verdict, she read out: “Supreme Court of California, County of Los Angeles in the matter of the State of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA 097211. We the jury, in the above-entitled action, find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder.”
The defense did it, Simpson got away with murder.
Simpson was guilty of murder, without a shadow of a doubt. What the defense did was play the game of justice better than the prosecution. If it wasn’t for the prosecution’s bad investigation and the forensic procedural mistakes, Simpson wouldn’t have had a chance. The DNA evidence alone was enough to convict, but since the techniques used to gather that evidence shone to be flawed and not procedurally correct, a murderer is free. The case was never a case to be won by the prosecution. The prosecution lost the case because of two distinct reasons: what district the trial was held at, and who the defendant was. At first, one might believe that it was a trial with an important racial overtone; a trial about black injustices facilitated by white perpetrators. What overtone the O.J. Simpson trial carried was the social difference not between blacks and whites, but the rich and the poor. In all reality, Simpson didn’t get acquitted because he was black. Simpson bought his acquittal. Some things in life may be priceless, but in the state of California on October 3, 1994, twelve people put a price tag on freedom and sold out the lives of two innocent people.
