The Mammoth Book of New Csi (32 page)

The defence alleged that Fuhrman had taken the glove from the crime scene and planted it at Simpson’s house. The prosecution said that officers had been at the crime scene for more than two hours by the time Fuhrman arrived and none of them had noticed a second glove. It was also suggested that Fuhrman was responsible for the blood from Nicole found in Simpson’s Bronco. He could have swiped the glove inside the Bronco in order to plant the victims’ blood there. Detectives testified that the Bronco was locked when they first saw it and denied that anyone had opened the doors while it was at Simpson’s residence. But the defence produced evidence suggesting that Fuhrman had opened the door of the Bronco. In his testimony, Fuhrman reported seeing bloodstains on the lower sill of the Bronco’s door. Photographs of the Bronco showed that there were stains where Fuhrman reported them, but they could be seen only when the door was open.

Even if Fuhrman did not swipe the glove in the Bronco, he might have transferred the victims’ DNA there unintentionally as he had already visited the crime scene. A photograph taken at South Bundy Drive showed Fuhrman standing in a pool of the victims’ blood pointing at a glove. Afterwards, Fuhrman went with the other detectives to Rockingham Avenue. If Fuhrman then entered the Bronco looking for evidence, the blood on his shoes could have been deposited on the carpet. Fuhrman or another officer who had some of the victims’ blood on a sleeve or shirt cuff could have accidentally swiped it on to the Bronco’s steering wheel and dashboard while looking for evidence.

The blood could also have arrived on the dashboard when the Bronco was in storage. On 14 June 1994, Dennis Fung first collected blood from the Bronco. The general practice, when swabbing blood, was to collect the entire sample. Three witnesses testified that they had been in the Bronco after 14 June and saw no blood. But when the Bronco was inspected again on 26 August 1994, blood was found on the dashboard in the same place that Fung had collected the initial samples. In the meantime, the Bronco had been left at an unsecured storage facility where a large number of people had access to it and two unauthorized people were known to have entered looking for souvenirs.

Fuhrman’s credibility was further undermined. When first asked whether he had planted evidence at Simpson’s home, he replied: “No.” Asked the question a second time, he took the Fifth Amendment that permits witnesses to remain silent, rather than give testimony against themselves.

The jury took just four hours to return a verdict of not guilty. One juror blamed Fuhrman and his possible “racial vendetta” against Simpson for their decision to acquit.

“There wasn’t enough evidence,” she said.

“There was a problem with what was being presented to prosecutors for testing from LAPD,” another maintained. “We felt there were a lot of opportunities for . . . contamination of evidence, samples being mixed or stored together.”

It was all down to the crime scene evidence.

“As far as I’m concerned, Mr Simpson would have been behind bars if the police work had been done properly,” said a third.

Later, the Goldman and Brown families brought a civil suit against Simpson. In civil proceedings, Simpson could not take the Fifth Amendment and was forced to testify. The standard of proof was also lower. While in a criminal suit the case has to be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt”, in a civil suit the case is decided on the “preponderance of the evidence”. This time the venue was the Santa Monica courthouse and the jury comprised one African-American, one Hispanic, one Asian and nine whites. The civil suit took four months to hear, rather than the nine months of the criminal trial. The jury spent six days on its deliberation – rather than four hours – and found against Simpson. It awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages to Fred Goldman and his ex-wife Sharon Rufo for the loss of their son. A few days later, they awarded punitive damages of $25 million to be shared between Nicole’s children and Fred Goldman. However, by then, Simpson was broke. His money had gone in legal fees and back taxes. He was now deeply in debt. The mortgage on the Rockingham Avenue estate was in arrears and it was repossessed. Simpson moved to Florida where future earnings would not be seized to pay the damages, as they would in California.

“It will be a cold day in hell before I pay a penny,” said Simpson.

Then in October 2008, Simpson was convicted of kidnapping and armed robbery after he entered a room at the Palace Station hotel-casino in Las Vegas and took sports memorabilia that he claimed had been stolen from him. He was sentenced to thirty-three years in jail, without possibility of parole for nine. His earning potential gone, it seems he will be proved right and never pay a penny in damages to the families of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goodman.

O
N
18 J
ULY
2003, Dr David Kelly, an expert on biological warfare and a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq, was found dead in a wood in Oxfordshire. Normally in the case of a person who had met a violent death there would be an inquest. However, as the case was politically sensitive, the government set up a judicial inquiry under Lord Hutton. Critics pointed out that this had fewer legal powers than a normal coroner’s court. Witnesses could not be compelled to appear and did not have to testify under oath. The Hutton Inquiry duly concluded that Dr Kelly had committed suicide. Others were not convinced. Crucial, as always, was the crime scene evidence.

David Kelly was in Iraq after the end of the First Gulf War. In 2002, he was working for Britain’s Defence Intelligence Staff when the Joint Intelligence Committee was compiling a dossier on the weapons of mass destruction possessed by Iraq. The purpose of the dossier was to convince the British Parliament and people to join the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Although Kelly did believe that Iraq had retained some weapons of mass destruction after the First Gulf War, he had some doubts about the claims made in the dossier – particularly the controversial claim that the Iraqis could deploy chemical and biological weapons within forty-five minutes.

After the invasion of Iraq that toppled Saddam Hussein, Kelly returned as a weapons inspector. He went to see what the British government alleged were two mobile germ-warfare laboratories and decided that they were no such thing. He told the
Observer
this, off the record.

On 22 May 2003, back in London, he met BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, who wanted to ask him about the validity of the dossier that claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction when none had been found. Kelly agreed to talk on a non-attributable basis – the BBC could report what he said, but not who had said it. BBC Radio Four’s prestigious
Today
programme reported that the forty-five-minute claim had found its way into the dossier even though the government knew it was dubious. In a subsequent article in the
Mail on Sunday
, Gilligan reported that Tony Blair’s director of communications, Alastair Campbell, was responsible. This caused a political storm.

Kelly admitted to his bosses at the Ministry of Defence that he had talked to Gilligan, but added: “I am convinced that I am not his primary source of information.”

Eventually, the Ministry of Defence announced that one of its employees was the source for Gilligan’s story. It did not name Kelly, but gave enough clues for other journalists to identify him. To avoid the press, Kelly and his wife went to stay in Cornwall. However, he was required to appear before two committees of the House of Commons. On 15 July, he appeared before the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee where he expected to be chastised for saying too much to Andrew Gilligan. Instead, he was asked whether he had briefed Susan Watts from
Newsnight
. A long quote was read from Watts’s piece. Dr Kelly denied all knowledge, but Watts had recorded the interview with him. He compounded the falsehood by denying having briefed the BBC’s Gavin Hewitt.

Once he was found out, he knew is reputation would be in tatters. At the time, his marriage was on the rocks. In Iraq, he had become close to Mai Pedersen, a US Air Force interpreter. Coming up to retirement at the age of sixty, he had to decide whether to leave his wife and take a job with a think-tank in California, near to where Pederson lived. He asked a friend for advice about the matter.

On the morning of 17 July 2003, Dr Kelly was working at home in Oxfordshire, largely answering emails of support from journalists and friends. In one email to Judith Miller of the
New York Times
, he said that he would wait until the end of the week before judging how his appearance before the House of Commons’ committees had gone and talked of “many dark actors playing games”. Then an email came from the Ministry of Defence asking for details of all his contacts with journalists. At 3 p.m., as usual, Dr Kelly told his wife Janice he was going for a walk. When he did not return, she went to look for him. Later she was joined in the search by two of their three daughters. They drove around the lanes where they knew their father liked to walk. No trace of him could be found.

At twenty minutes past midnight they called the police. A police dog and a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment were brought in. Assistant Chief Constable Michael Page had a meeting with key personnel at Abingdon Police Station at 5.15 a.m. By 7.30 a.m., forty police officers were engaged in the search, which centred on Harrowdown Hill, an area where Dr Kelly often walked. Members of the South East Berkshire Emergency Volunteers and the Lowland Search Dogs Association also joined the search.

Paul Chapman and Louise Holmes, along with Holmes’s trained search dog, arrived in the area at 8 a.m. Her dog picked up a scent. It returned barking, indicating that it had found something, and led her to the body of a man. He was lying on the ground at the foot of a tree with his head and shoulders slumped back against it. His legs were straight in front of him. His right arm was at his side and his left arm had a lot of blood on it and was bent back in a strange position. It was clear that the man was dead and he matched the description of Dr Kelly that she had been given by the police.

Chapman made a 999 call to Abingdon police, then Chapman and Holmes made their way back to their car where they met three police officers who were involved in the search. Chapman then took Detective Constable Coe to show him where the body was lying some 75 yards (69 m) in from the edge of the wood. DC Coe saw that there was blood around the left wrist, and a knife and a watch on the left side of the body. He remained some seven or eight feet from the body for the next thirty minutes until two other police officers arrived to tape off the area. At around 9.55 a.m., two members of an ambulance crew arrived at the scene. They checked the body for signs of life. Four electrodes were placed on his chest and a heart monitor showed that there was no cardiac activity. Dr Kelly was dead.

When Assistant Chief Constable Page heard that a body had been found, he initiated an investigation. Home Office forensic pathologist Dr Nicholas Hunt was called. He arrived on the scene at 12.10 p.m. At 12.35 p.m., he again confirmed that Dr Kelly was dead. He then waited until the police had finished a fingertip search of the approach path to the body, before beginning his examination at about 2.10 p.m.

Kelly was wearing a green Barbour-type wax jacket; the zip and the buttons at the front had been undone. In the bellows pocket on the lower part of the jacket, Dr Hunt found a mobile telephone and a pair of bifocal spectacles. There was also a key fob and three blister packs of the drug Coproxamol. Each of those packs originally contained ten tablets. Of the thirty tablets, only one was left.

Kelly’s face appeared pale and vomit had run from corners of the mouth, streaking the face. To Hunt, this suggested that Kelly had tried to vomit while he was lying on his back. Next to the body there was a Barbour-style flat cap with some blood on the lining and the peak, which was near his left shoulder. Lying on the grass near his left hand there was a digital watch, which was also bloodstained. It had a black resin strap. Next to the watch was a Sandvig gardening knife with a little hook or a lip near the tip of the blade for pruning. There was blood on the handle and the blade.

Nearby there was a half-litre bottle of Evian with some water left in it. The bottle was lying propped against some broken branches to the left, about a foot away from his left elbow. There were smears of blood on the bottle and the bottle top, indicated that Dr Kelly had been bleeding when he place the bottle in its final position. More blood was found spread across the soil and undergrowth up to 3 ft (1 m) from the body.

Dr Hunt could see that there were at least five cuts in the creased area to the front of Dr Kelly’s left wrist. Later, Dr Kelly’s daughter Sian confirmed that her father was right-handed.

A fingertip search was made of an area of up to 30 ft (10 m) from the body. This lasted from 12.50 p.m. to 4.45 p.m. One of those involved was Constable Sawyer. He said: “When I first saw Dr Kelly I was very aware of the serious nature of the search and I was looking for signs of perhaps a struggle; but all the vegetation that was surrounding Dr Kelly’s body was standing upright and there were no signs of any form of struggle at all.”

At 7.19 p.m., Dr Hunt ended his initial, on-scene examination of the body and it was moved to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where Dr Hunt began a post-mortem examination. This started at 9.20 p.m. and ended at 12.15 a.m. the following morning. After the corpse was removed, the police conducted a fingertip search of the ground under the body. Nothing of significance was found in the searches.

In his post-mortem report, Dr Hunt wrote: “There was a series of incised wounds, cuts, of varying depth over the front of the left wrist and they extended in total over about 8 by 5 centimetres on the front of the wrist. The largest of the wounds and the deepest lay towards the top end or the elbow end of that complex of injuries and it showed a series of notches and some crushing of its edges. That wound had actually severed an artery on the little finger aspect of the front of the wrist, called the ulnar artery. The other main artery on the wrist on the thumb aspect was intact. There were a number of other incisions of varying depth and many smaller scratch-like injuries over the wrist. The appearance that they gave was of what are called tentative or hesitation marks, which are commonly seen prior to a deep cut being made into somebody’s skin if they are making the incision themselves.”