Blood Secrets: Chronicles of a Crime Scene Reconstructionist (23 page)

¹
In subsequent references to Nicole Brown Simpson, she is referred to as “Brown” rather than “Brown Simpson” for clarity. In subsequent references to O. J. Simpson, he is referred to as “Simpson.”

That’s when they saw the blood. Someone had smeared it all over the walkway. Great rivulets of red had run all the way to the front gate from the condo’s steps.

Police responding to their 911 call just after midnight spotted the source of all the blood immediately. The body of Nicole Brown Simpson, thirty-five-year-old ex-wife of former pro football star O. J. Simpson and mother of two of his children, was slumped at the bottom of the steps outside her home. Brown had been stabbed multiple times, and her throat had been slashed so deeply that her head had almost been severed from her neck. Her face was swollen as though someone had beaten her, and—as coroners would note in the autopsy—so much of her blood had run down the garden path that there was almost none left in her body.

Lying near her was the body of a man who would soon be identified as Ronald Goldman. The twenty-five-year-old aspiring actor and model waited tables at a nearby restaurant called Mezzaluna Trattoria and had become friendly with Brown, a frequent customer who worked out at the same gym he did. As investigators learned, Brown had dined at Mezzaluna that evening with her parents and children, and when Brown’s mother called the restaurant to say she had accidentally left her glasses there, Goldman volunteered to drop them off after his shift. Like Brown’s, Goldman’s throat had been slashed. He had also been stabbed repeatedly in the torso and thigh. All in all, he had suffered nineteen stab wounds. Autopsies would reveal that the murder weapon was a blade at least six inches long.

Brown’s eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son were still asleep on the second floor and had to be awakened by police. They had slept through the carnage below, mercifully unaware.

As far as blood evidence goes, the crime scene was a bonanza. A trail of bloody footprints next to a line of blood droplets led from
both victims to the back of the property. Several objects lay near Goldman’s body, including a bloodstained brown leather glove and a blood-spattered white envelope containing a pair of women’s glasses.

Within hours, police on the scene received orders from their commander to drive to the home of O. J. Simpson a few miles away on Rockingham Avenue. They were to tell him his ex-wife was dead and ask him to take charge of the children. Among the four homicide detectives who went to Rockingham were Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter, both from the LAPD Robbery/Homicide Division’s elite Homicide Special Section, which handles high-profile murder cases and which had officially taken over the investigation, with Lange and Vannatter assigned as the lead detectives. Accompanying them were detective supervisor Ron Phillips and detective Mark Fuhrman, both of the LAPD’s West Los Angeles Division. Fuhrman had gone to Simpson’s home years earlier as a patrol officer in response to a distress call from Brown—one of many she made when her husband’s temper exploded into threats and violence.

When the detectives pulled up to Simpson’s walled estate, they saw a white Ford Bronco parked with its wheels on the curb, its back end in the street. While waiting for someone to answer the door, they ran a license check on the vehicle and learned it was leased to Simpson by Hertz. As Fuhrman was shining his flashlight on it, he noticed a reddish smear on the outside of the door. It looked as if it might be blood.

What if the ex-football star, too, were dead or dying inside his mansion? No one answered their repeated knocks and phone calls, so the four concurred and judged the circumstances urgent. That permitted them to enter the property without a search warrant. Fuhrman scaled the wall and unlocked the gate for his colleagues. Again they tried to awaken whoever was inside the main house but got no
answer. Next they tried a trio of bungalows on the property. Two of the doors opened. Arnelle Simpson, the ex–NFL star’s daughter from his first marriage, peered out bleary-eyed from one bungalow. In the other doorway stood Brian Kato Kaelin, an aspiring actor pal of Simpson’s who was a quasi-permanent house guest at Simpson’s estate.

Kaelin told police that he had eaten dinner with Simpson at McDonald’s the night before, then spent the evening in his bungalow. He was on the phone with his girlfriend when he heard three wall-rattling bangs and went outside to find the source of the commotion. He saw a limo near the front gate and, remembering that his host was planning to catch the red-eye to Chicago, hurried over to help him load his bags.

While Kaelin talked, Arnelle Simpson found a phone number for her father’s hotel in Chicago, and Ron Phillips placed the call. Simpson answered. He sounded horrified at the news of his ex-wife’s death and promised to catch the next flight home. He didn’t ask how she had died, though, which struck Phillips as odd. It’s almost always the first question people ask.

While Phillips was calling Simpson, the other detectives investigated the estate’s grounds. Fuhrman trained his flashlight over the area where Kaelin said the loud bumps had originated, and the beam fell on a brown leather glove. It looked just like the one at Bundy Drive, and like that one, it appeared to be stained with blood. He hurried back to the house to get Phillips. About the same time, Vannatter spotted what looked like blood drops in the driveway. He followed them to the Bronco and, shining his flashlight onto the car, spied again the suspicious smear Fuhrman had noticed on the driver’s door latch as well as what appeared to be more stains inside the vehicle. The trail led on to the front door of the main house. The detectives left the evidence where they found it, vacated the premises, secured it, and obtained
a search warrant to re-enter. The glove and other items would be photographed and collected by criminalists from the lab.

When Simpson returned from Chicago, homicide detectives took him to the Parker Center for questioning and fingerprinting. He wasn’t under arrest or charged with any crime. He went voluntarily and answered questions. The officers questioning him noticed a bandage on the middle finger of his left hand and asked if they could photograph the wound. Simpson said okay. He also let a male nurse draw blood for DNA tests. He didn’t seem particularly worried, though he contradicted his version of events from the night before several times.

But after lab results showed that the glove found at Rockingham was soaked with both Brown’s and Goldman’s blood, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office issued a warrant for Simpson’s arrest on June 17. Police went to lawyer Robert Kardashian’s home to pick him up. It turned out they were too late. Simpson and his friend Al Cowlings had driven off in Cowlings’s white Ford Bronco, also leased from Hertz. (O.J.’s bloodstained white Ford Bronco had already been seized and submitted into evidence.) What followed was a surreal televised slow-speed chase with news helicopters and bystanders shouting from overpasses. The procession eventually led back to Rockingham, where Simpson surrendered and police searching the Bronco found a loaded gun, a passport, and a fake beard and mustache. Simpson was arraigned a few days later but pleaded not guilty to murder charges.

In the months that followed, while “the Juice” cooled his heels in a private cell, an all-star cast of defense lawyers lined up to defend him, including the now familiar names of Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, Johnnie Cochran, and DNA trial specialists Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. The media dubbed them the Dream Team.

At the outset, the case appeared almost airtight. Simpson seemed to have done everything but leave his calling card at the murder
scene. Lab tests showed that hairs on Goldman’s shirt and inside a navy knit cap found lying on the ground near his blood-covered body belonged to Simpson. So did blood droplets nearby. A pair of socks retrieved from the foot of Simpson’s bed tested positive for Brown’s blood, and its fibers matched fibers found on Goldman’s clothing. Tests of the bloodstains inside the Bronco revealed DNA from all three people—the murder victims and Simpson himself.

Add to that testimony from witnesses like limo driver Allan Park, who said he rang the doorbell at the front gate on Rockingham for twenty minutes, then caught sight of a tall African-American man in dark clothes sprinting toward the estate’s side door just before eleven
P.M.
Simpson answered the intercom moments later, claimed he had overslept, and hurried down to load his bags, drenched in sweat.

Of course, the case turned out to be anything but a slam dunk for prosecutors, who were hardly braced for what the Dream Team had in store. Simpson’s defense lawyers launched a furious attack on the credibility of the witnesses, the evidence, and the cops who spotted it. They made mincemeat of criminalist Dennis Fung and his assistant Andrea Mazzola, suggesting the pair had so botched the evidence handling and used such shoddy collection techniques that the blood samples had been irreparably contaminated. Blood samples from Bundy Drive had been stored in plastic bags temporarily, hadn’t they? Couldn’t plastic bags cultivate bacteria? Wouldn’t that destroy test result accuracy?

That was just the beginning. Why had the male nurse at the Parker Center recorded drawing eight milliliters of blood from Simpson when six and a half were in the vial? The nurse said he had estimated the amount, but couldn’t someone have filched the “missing” blood to plant evidence around Bundy and Rockingham?

The someone they had in mind was Mark Fuhrman. Why Fuhrman? Fuhrman despised African-Americans, the defense said. For proof, they produced ten-year-old taped interviews made by aspiring
screenplay writer Laura Hart McKinney of the homicide detective spouting a slew of racial slurs and lurid descriptions of violent acts against African-American suspects taken in the line of duty. Fuhrman claimed he was acting—creating an exaggerated character of a bigoted cop—but the damage was done. Johnnie Cochran likened him to Adolf Hitler, a genocidal maniac who would stop at nothing to destroy a black man.

As pundits noted, O. J. Simpson was no longer on trial. Racism was. And with the black community still stinging from the recent Rodney King verdict, the issue touched a raw nerve.

To Fuhrman’s colleagues who had been on the crime scene, the notion was ludicrous. No matter how distasteful the man’s views might be, more than fifteen other detectives had beaten him to Bundy Drive and not one of them had spotted a second glove. It was nearly inconceivable that he or any other cop could have found such a big piece of bloody evidence and surreptitiously pocketed it right under their noses to drop at Rockingham later. Besides, at the time no one even knew they would get orders to go to Rockingham.

Long before the race card surfaced in the courtroom, I got a call from Marcia Clark, Los Angeles assistant district attorney, to analyze the blood evidence from both Bundy and Rockingham. I’ll never forget her words: “This crime is a gold mine for a blood spatter analyst. There’s blood everywhere.”

In the months that followed, I flew to Los Angeles fifteen times to inspect Simpson’s Bronco, gloves, socks, and other bloodstained items from the crime. I spent countless hours with Clark, Supervising Deputy DA Bill Hodgman, and their colleagues, poring over hundreds of photos from the crime scene, trying to understand how events had unfolded based on the story the blood told. We discussed different scenarios, challenged one another’s theories, and refined our interpretation again and again until we were sure we had it right. We also
worked extensively with Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, L.A. County’s chief medical examiner. “Dr. Lucky,” as he was known around the ME’s office, was instrumental in helping us to understand the positioning of the victims and their murderer based on the wounds and other forensic clues.

Almost all the blood smears and transfers in the crime scene were sixteen inches from the ground or lower. There was no blood on the upper part of the foliage. What did that tell us? Most of the bloodshed occurred when both victims were already down. The autopsy indicated that Brown had been struck on the right temple with a hard object, probably the handle of the murder knife, and either stunned or knocked out so that she put up virtually no struggle. This explained why no one heard her scream, why she had just one tiny defense wound on her hand, and why the soles of her bare feet were blood-free.

Unlike Brown, Goldman put up a monumental fight. His palms and arms were covered with deep defensive cuts—the same type as the one visible on Simpson’s knuckle in the photos the LAPD took. The back of his shirt had been ripped by a knife in several places, yet he had no stab wounds in his back. This told us that during their struggle, the killer wrenched Goldman’s shirt around almost backward in his effort to hang on to his victim. Goldman also suffered numerous shallow wounds to the sides of his neck in addition to having his throat cut. One early hypothesis held that the jabs were evidence of torture or “teasing” by the killer before he inflicted the fatal, deep wounds. In reality, it showed that Goldman was fighting fiercely—twisting, ducking, turning away, and making it hard for the killer to hit his mark.

After careful and protracted analysis, we determined that the killer moved back and forth between his victims after they were incapacitated,
making sure both were going to die by inflicting two mortal blows. He dealt the slash to Brown’s throat that almost decapitated her and inflicted multiple deep puncture wounds to Goldman’s abdomen, which severed his abdominal aorta and caused massive internal bleeding.

A number of puzzling blood smears on Brown’s body confounded us initially. It was only after I borrowed some large dogs from the Multnomah County K-9 unit and from my students at David Douglas, who were still helping me with experiments, that I began to understand what the patterns meant. We poured animal blood on the ground outside the high school, then used a rubber ball to wind up the dogs until they were hyperenergized. As they jumped around in the blood, their claws and the pads of their paws created patterns virtually identical to those in the crime scene photos from Bundy Drive.