Oops!...I Did It Again

(I knew if I waited long enough to post, something would happen)

No, this is not another post about Britney Spears...it's about O. J. Simpson. Today he is a suspect in the alleged armed robbery of a man in a hotel room in Las Vegas. "The Juice" admits to being there but said the whole thing was part a sting operation (set up by himself) to get back his own stolen sports memorabilia. Nice of him to take time away from his methodical search of every golf course in America for his ex-wife's "real killers" to give the Las Vegas police a hand.

Which brings me to what I am reading today; Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers by Michael Baden, M.D. (Former New York City Chief Medical Examiner) and Marion Roach. I have just finished a chapter about blood pattern analysis and Herbert Leon MacDonell's class, Geometric Interpretation of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis, at the Institute on the Physical Significance of Human Bloodstain Evidence.

If you are going to take a class on blood analysis Herb MacDonell is the man you want teaching it. He is this country's leading authority on blood pattern analysis. He even consulted on the Nicole Simpson/Ronald Goldman murders. To bad they called him in after the LA police and coroner's office had already screwed things up so badly.

MacDonell's introduction to the case was 150 crime scene photos. What caught McDonell's eye in the photos was, (1) the amount of blood, (2) the size of the area (small) where the crime was committed, and (3) the fact that Nicole Simpson was lying face down on the ground with blood drops on her back. She had been stabbed and her throat cut so there was a lot of blood pooled around her body. Since she was lying face down there was no way the blood on her back was her own. The only way any blood could be on her back would be if someone else had bled onto her. If the coroner's staff had collected some of that blood the DNA analysis could have pointed to her killer but, unfortunately, they did not do this.

And, after the police were through with the crime scene, not only did they not collect samples of the blood drops on her back, the coroner's people rolled her body over and wrapped it a sheet before putting it into the body bag. As it lay in the bag blood seeping from her cut throat mingled with the blood drops on her back eliminating that important piece of evidence.

Which means if they had done their job correctly we would not have O. J. Simpson to kick around anymore. He would either be sitting in prison or would have slipped back into the anonymity he so richly deserves.