The jury never heard about the results of any of these presumptive tests, because Judge Ito had ruled that the results of all such tests in the case would be inadmissible at the trial.
Another
bad ruling by Ito. Although no one would quarrel with the position that the jury should not hear the results of presumptive tests from a place frequented by animals, it would seem that blood found, for instance, in the washbasin area of one’s bathroom should have been evidence the jury was definitely entitled to hear, letting them give it whatever weight they thought it was entitled to.
As for the supposed absence of blood on the narrow walkway behind Kato Kaelin’s guest house where the bloody glove was found, Fung told me, “The area is heavily foliaged with a large mass of leaves on the ground [see photo section]. We didn’t even bother to check the leaves.” (When Fuhrman found the glove, he did not touch or move it. Fung is the person who eventually picked it up, and he told me he didn’t even bother to look for blood on the ground or leaves upon which the glove had been lying.) Andrea Mazzola told me the same thing. The “whole area,” she said, “including the pathway, was covered with dry and discolored brownish and reddish leaves and twigs. It looked like no one had been back there for ages. We didn’t get down on our hands and knees checking leaves.” With blood already visible in Simpson’s car, on the driveway, and in his house, it’s understandable, knowing what Fung and Mazzola knew at the time, that they didn’t start checking every leaf.
But at the trial, the jury received a totally different and incorrect message. On cross-examination of Fung, Barry Scheck asked him, “Along the walkway, you found no red [blood] stains?” Fung answered, “That’s correct,” and it was left at that. On redirect, instead of prosecutor Hank Goldberg clarifying the matter for the jury by establishing that the reason Fung never found any red stains is that he never really searched, Goldberg never asked Fung any questions about the matter. (On redirect examination of Vannatter at the trial, after Shapiro, on cross, had asked Vannatter how much blood was found in the area behind the guest house and Vannatter replied, “None, none that I’m aware of,” Darden asked Vannatter if he, Vannatter, had checked the leaves for blood, and he said he had not. Vannatter, of course, is not the person whom the prosecutors should have asked that question. In the morning his main job was to prepare the affidavit to secure the search warrant, and he was at Parker Center with Lange almost all afternoon. Fung and Mazzola were the main
LAPD
representatives searching for, and collecting, blood evidence.) If the prosecution had elicited testimony from Fung and Mazzola that they did not examine the leaves for blood, it would have precluded a big argument of Cochran’s.
Cochran told the jury in his summation that there was no blood found on the leaves (which implies there had been a search) in the subject area, and this, he argued, was strong evidence that it wasn’t Simpson or anyone else who dropped the bloody glove on the pathway. Fuhrman had planted it there. And several jurors bought this argument. In
Madam Foreman
, Simpson jury foreperson Armanda Cooley writes, “Another [problem we had with the prosecution’s case] was the glove found at Rockingham. Supposedly someone had come down the pathway along the side of the house, hit the side of the air conditioner, and made this noise that Kato heard, and dropped the glove. The question was, if the person—Mr. Simpson is about six feet—if he dropped the glove and it was so bloody, why wasn’t there blood on anything else? If the glove hits the ground, surely some blood would stick to the leaves. We checked our notes and went over that.” Juror Sheila Woods, on the
Today
show, told Katie Couric that the most questionable piece of evidence in the case was “the Rockingham glove,” because although the glove was moist and sticky when it was found, “There was no evidence of blood in that area.”
“So if you believe the prosecution’s theory [that Simpson ran into the air conditioner jutting into the dark pathway behind Kato Kaelin’s guest house, causing the loud thumping sounds on the wall],” Cochran argued in his summation, “where’s the blood back there, ladies and gentlemen? There’s not one drop of blood. Where’s the blood back there?” And later: “Where’s the blood on the leaves around there? Their theory doesn’t hold water. It doesn’t make sense.”
So the
LAPD
criminalists’ not even searching for blood on the leaves was transformed, without any solid evidence to support it, into their looking for blood and not finding any. Near the end of Cochran’s final summation, one of the questions he asked Clark to answer was: “Why was there no blood on the narrow walkway?”
Yet Clark and Darden, in their rebuttal, didn’t address themselves to the question, and at no time in their opening and closing arguments did either one of them even say one word about the defense allegation that no blood had been found on the pathway behind Kato Kaelin’s guest house. The prosecutorial incompetence was endless in the Simpson case.
M
any references have been made by the Simpson prosecution, the media, even a book already in publication on the case, to a supposed partial bloody Bruno Magli shoe print in Nicole’s blood on the carpet of the driver’s side in Simpson’s Bronco. If true, since we know the killer wore Bruno Magli shoes, this fact, all by itself, would prove the killer had been in Simpson’s Bronco car on the night of the murders.
Marcia Clark argued to the jury: “On the driver’s side of the floor mat of the Bronco there was a bloody imprint that [
FBI
agent William] Bodziak told you had characteristics consistent with the Bruno Magli shoe of that pattern.” But Bodziak’s actual testimony wasn’t nearly as strong as Clark suggested. He testified that although there was an area of the bloody imprint “which could
possibly
have been a border of the [Bruno Magli] shoe, and there also is some little, what I call, squiggles or little “S” shapes which
might
represent the curved areas between the design elements [of the Bruno Magli Silga sole], they weren’t clear enough or reliable enough to make
any
kind of a positive determination.”
Bodziak told me, in fact, that not only couldn’t he identify the bloody imprint on the driver’s carpet as coming from the sole or heel of a Bruno Magli shoe, he couldn’t even identify it as an imprint from a shoe sole or heel.
E
veryone who followed the Simpson case knows that in addition to the defense’s allegation that Fuhrman planted the glove, the other main contention of the defense in its conspiracy argument was that when Detective Vannatter (who didn’t book Simpson’s vial of reference blood when he received it at Parker Center from Thano Peratis at 2:30 p.m. on June 13, 1994) took the vial back to Rockingham (about twenty miles from Parker Center) that afternoon, it was for the purpose of sprinkling some of it (the allegedly missing 1.5 cc) in various incriminating places.
Vannatter testified that the reason he never booked the vial is that he knew Fung was still collecting evidence from Bundy and Rockingham, and since each piece of evidence is sequentially assigned a property item number, he didn’t know what item numbers Fung had already assigned to each item of evidence. Also, he didn’t yet have a DR (Divisional Record) number to book the reference blood under, so he brought the vial directly to Fung to be booked at the same time as all the other evidence in the Property Division of the
LAPD
. (In practice, when detectives physically hand evidence over to the criminalist on the case, they consider this the equivalent of “booking” it.) Fung explained to me, “If Vannatter had booked the vial of blood it would have screwed up all my numbers. The vial would have been Item 1, but I had already assigned Item 1 to the bloodstain I found above the outside driver’s door handle of the Bronco.”
Lange told me that when he and Vannatter got the vial of Simpson’s reference blood, although it would technically have been possible for them to get a DR number and book it, it would have been very unusual under the circumstances. He said they had only been on the case for a matter of hours at the time they withdrew Simpson’s blood, and they had to “deal with the media, brief
LAPD
brass, and so forth. Getting a DR number was the furthest thing from our mind. The DR number is nearly always gotten
after
all the evidence is collected by the criminalists pursuant to the search warrant. So we decided to bring the vial directly to Fung. Phil and I left for Rockingham in separate vehicles.”
Vannatter personally handed the vial, inside an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch gray envelope (a blood collection envelope marked “
LAPD
refrigerated storage”), to Fung at Rockingham in the late afternoon of June 13. Fung looked inside the envelope and saw the vial, then wrote on the envelope, “Received from Vannatter on 6-13-94, at 1720 hours (5:20 p.m.).” Fung in turn put the envelope in a plastic bag and gave it to Mazzola to put inside the LAPD’s crime scene processing truck. Fung said he never told Mazzola what was inside the bag and she just assumed it was another item of evidence, which of course it was. Not only does television color film show Vannatter arriving at Rockingham at 5:16 p.m. and carrying the gray envelope into Simpson’s home, but a police video a minute or so later shows Fung, in the foyer of the home, holding the envelope. Television film then shows Mazzola carrying a plastic bag to the evidence van minutes later. Fung testified that at the time Vannatter showed up with the vial, he and Mazzola had
already
collected all the blood evidence at the Rockingham estate and were getting ready to leave. “Here, I got some more evidence for you,” Fung told me he recalls Vannatter saying. Shortly thereafter, Fung and Mazzola left Rockingham, bringing the vial, along with all the other evidence, down to the lab at the Scientific Investigation Division (
SID
) of the
LAPD
, and after the detectives got a DR number the following day, Fung booked all the evidence with the Evidence Control Unit of
SID
at Piper Tech, about a mile from
LAPD
headquarters.
Much of the defense’s cross-examination of Vannatter, Fung, and Mazzola dealt with the chain of custody of the vial of blood, the implication from all of the questions being that something amiss, sinister, and conspiratorial was going on, most probably that Vannatter had not given the vial to Fung, and instead he and his colleagues had used it to plant blood
that evening
.
And in Cochran’s and Scheck’s final arguments to the jury, although they never directly accused Vannatter of planting this blood, they both strongly suggested that’s precisely what happened. For instance, Scheck argued to the jury: “I think there is something really wrong here…. Detective Vannatter is walking around with [the vial of blood] he should have sealed and he should have booked for three hours at least, unaccounted for…. Something is terribly wrong at the heart of this case…. If you can’t trust the man who carried the blood, if you can’t trust where this blood went, something is terribly wrong.”
And Cochran asked rhetorically in his summation: “Vannatter could have booked that blood at Parker Center. Why is Vannatter carrying Mr. Simpson’s blood out there to Rockingham? Why is he doing that?…Vannatter, the man who carries the blood, starts lying in this case from the very, very beginning. Remember these two phrases. Vannatter, the man who carries the blood. Fuhrman, the man who found the glove.” And one of Cochran’s questions at the conclusion of his summation which he asked Marcia Clark to answer in her rebuttal was: “For what purpose was Vannatter carrying Mr. Simpson’s blood in his pocket for three hours and a distance of twenty-five miles instead of booking it down the hall at Parker Center?”
In posttrial interviews with the Simpson jurors as well as in the book by the three jurors, it is obvious that the prosecution failed to have Vannatter explain adequately to the jury why he brought the vial of blood back to Rockingham. The jurors made it very clear they found Vannatter’s conduct with respect to the blood highly suspicious. Interviewing several jurors shortly after the verdict, the
Los Angeles Times
wrote: “They questioned why Detective Philip Vannatter would carry a vial of blood taken from Simpson at Parker Center back to Brentwood.” Carrie Bess writes in
Madam Foreman
: “Vannatter said the reason he had the blood vial and brought it to Rockingham was due to the fact that he did not have a booking number…. Well, let me ask you this. Who would be the better person to get the booking number than the head investigator or the detective?” Juror Brenda Moran told the press right after the verdict that she found Vannatter’s bringing the vial of Simpson’s blood back to Rockingham “suspicious because it gave him the opportunity to plant evidence.” In an appearance on NBC’s
Dateline
on October 6, 1995, she added: “He’s walking around with blood in his pocket for a couple of hours. How come he didn’t book it at Parker Center or Piper Tech? He had a perfect opportunity. Why walk around with it? He was my biggest doubt. There was an opportunity to sprinkle [the blood] here or there.”
Since the Vannatter vial of blood issue couldn’t possibly have been more important, wouldn’t you thereby think that Clark and Darden, in their arguments to the jury, would each (like their counterparts Cochran and Scheck) have a lot to say to counter this charge that went to the very heart of the defense’s conspiracy allegation? That in the months since the defense leveled the charge, at least one of them would have thought about, and written down, what he was going to say to the jury about this defense charge? You know, things like Vannatter testified he handed the vial of Simpson’s blood to Fung on the afternoon of June 13 as soon as he arrived on the premises, and Fung testified he received it from Vannatter. So to believe the sprinkling and planting argument we’d have to accept the completely unrealistic theory that Dennis Fung, the obviously decent young man who looks like the guy who walks onstage when the magician asks for volunteers, was one of
the
main conspirators who framed Simpson for the murders. That either he planted the blood himself, or he never got the vial from Vannatter and committed perjury when he testified Vannatter gave it to him. Arguments such as why would Vannatter take a vial of Simpson’s blood back to Rockingham with the intent of planting the blood when he knew that an enormous swarm of media, hundreds upon hundreds of reporters and news people, had already congregated at Rockingham, their television cameras blanketing the premises and picking up, for the evening news, the movements of everyone walking around the estate? There also were helicopters up above filming everything below. He would also know that the blood could not have been planted in the evening either (as the defense was alleging), because a sizable contingent of the media remained at Rockingham as well as Bundy throughout the evening and night—that is, around the clock. Arguments such as if Vannatter were going to bring the vial of Simpson’s blood back to Rockingham to plant some of it, why not conceal it inside his suit coat or pants? Why advertise to everyone that you’re bringing something onto the premises by carrying it there in a large envelope? Arguments such as reminding the jury that by the time Vannatter arrived at Rockingham, the Bronco, which was found to have Simpson’s blood all over it, had
already
been removed from the premises, and all of the other blood evidence from Bundy and Rockingham had
already
been collected, so what was it that Vannatter and his coconspirators had planted? And four or five other reasons why the defense argument makes no sense. For instance, if the prosecutors had introduced Simpson’s statement to the jury, which they should have, why would Vannatter even feel there was any need to plant any of Simpson’s blood at Rockingham? By the time he brought the vial to Rockingham, Simpson had already admitted to him and Lange several hours earlier (the tape-recorded statement being between 1:35 and 2:07 p.m.) that he had bled all over his Rockingham estate—in his Bronco and home, and on his driveway.