FBI Agents Called to Rebut Simpson Bloodstain Expert

O.J. Simpson’s double-murder trial lurched closer to conclusion Thursday, when prosecutors called two FBI witnesses they hope will convince jurors that a defense expert was wrong when he told them that evidence at the Bundy crime scene suggested that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were killed by two assailants.

Prosecutors used FBI Special Agents Douglas Deedrick, an expert on fiber evidence, and William Bodziak, a footprint specialist, to offer the jury alternative explanations for the bloodstains that defense scientist Henry Lee detected on an envelope, on the front walkway of Nicole Simpson’s condo and on Goldman’s blood-drenched trousers.

Lee, the avuncular dean of American forensic scientists, testified last month that the stains--which were not detected by Los Angeles Police Department investigators--”could be” from the shoe of a second assailant. He also said the patterns did not come from the Bruno Magli shoes that left other imprints at the scene.

Deedrick, who testified concerning hair and fiber evidence during the prosecution’s case in chief, took the stand shortly after lunch Thursday. In a brief examination by lead prosecutor Marcia Clark, he testified that the bloodstain impressions on Goldman’s blue jeans could have been made by the swiping motion of the victim’s own shirt, which was drenched by the blood from multiple stab wounds.

The FBI analyst also told Clark he was aware Lee testified that he reached his conclusions without preparing any test patterns of his own. When Clark inquired what Deedrick thought of that analysis, he replied that it was “inadequate.”

However, in a biting cross-examination, defense attorney Barry Scheck forced him to concede that his own analysis of the material had been brief, and that he is neither “an expert in blood pattern analysis” nor in crime scene reconstruction. In fact, Deedrick said, he has visited only 20 to 25 homicide sites and never when a victim’s body was present.

Lee is regarded as one of the country’s foremost experts on serology--the analysis of blood evidence--and crime scene reconstruction, as well as on other aspects of forensic science.

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“Deedrick came across as precise and meticulous,” said Southwestern University law professor Myrna Raeder. “But Scheck’s cross-examination was incredibly astute. He downplayed Deedrick’s fiber opinions by diverting attention to his lack of expertise as a blood-pattern expert. There is no doubt that Deedrick was bound to lose any direct contest between himself and Henry Lee. Deedrick admitted ultimately that the parallel lines could be a shoe print on the envelope or the jeans.”

In his testimony, Bodziak, the FBI’s leading authority on shoe imprint evidence, flatly contradicted Lee’s suggestions that the bloodstain imprints he examined had been left by a shoe. During an examination whose deliberate pace clearly troubled Judge Lance A. Ito, Bodziak and Clark used oversize photo blowups of the stains to lead jurors through the steps the agent used to reach his conclusions. Clark had not completed her direct examination when the judge recessed the trial for the day.

The two FBI analysts are the last witnesses prosecutors plan to call in this phase of their case, which is expected to conclude today. For their part, defense lawyers continue to pursue their effort to call FBI scientist Frederic Whitehurst, a witness they hope will cast a pall of doubt on the credibility of all the FBI crime lab analysts who have testified in Simpson’s trial. Whitehurst has charged that one of his colleagues in the lab, Roger Martz, falsified evidence in at least two cases and pressured him to tailor his own testimony to the needs of prosecutors.

Martz, an FBI toxicologist, testified in July that blood on a sock from Simpson’s bedroom and from the crime scene showed only vague signs of a preservative, which, he said, could have come from any number of sources. The defense maintained that the preservative’s presence proved the police planted the evidence.

Simpson’s lead defense attorney, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., said his law firm’s Washington office had obtained a federal subpoena for Whitehurst’s FBI records Thursday morning. Cochran said that once the records are obtained, they will be examined to see whether Whitehurst has expressed any opinions about testimony rendered so far in the Simpson case.

A federal law enforcement source said that Whitehurst would fly to Los Angeles today. In court Thursday, Scheck said that the FBI whistle-blower would be interviewed by defense and prosecuting attorneys on Saturday.

Two of Simpson’s lawyers, Carl Douglas and Robert Blasier, filed sworn affidavits Thursday saying that Whitehurst would accuse Martz of “misconduct and improprieties in the execution of Martz’s professional duties in connection with the matter now before this court.”

Although the affidavits offered no details on Martz’s actions in the Simpson case, the attorneys asserted that he “is knowingly and intentionally carrying out FBI policy to suppress information which might be helpful to the defense and to produce results that will only help the prosecution.”

Ito granted a defense request and declared Whitehurst a material witness, ordering him to be at the courthouse Tuesday with his notes and records. But Ito has not yet ruled on the admissibility of any testimony by Whitehurst.

In another festering controversy spawned by the Simpson case, Los Angeles City Atty. James K. Hahn finally secured a copy of taped interviews with former LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman from the district attorney’s office after reaching an agreement with aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny.

Hahn said he took a box of tapes and transcripts to his office, “where I put them in a safe . . . and locked them up.”

“Under the protective order we signed, access is limited to 15 people,” including all five members of the Police Commission, Police Chief Willie L. Williams and several other police officials. “They have to come to my office, and I or Assistant City Atty. Mary House have to open the safe. They can listen to the tapes here. They can’t take them or make recordings.”

At a news conference Thursday, Williams said the LAPD already had developed an investigative team to review the tapes and “determine what is fact, what is fiction.”

Asked if charges would be filed against Fuhrman, Williams said, “It’s too early to draw any conclusions based on our review. The review right now is only based on one complete sitting by two or three people and a partial sitting by others. You have to understand there are 12 or 13 tapes and hundreds of pages of transcripts. You have to really go through them, put them in order and try to determine the tone . . . talk about prior experiences, philosophy. Was it play-acting ? . . . There’s a lot of work that has to be done.”

Asked how long it would take to review all the tapes, Williams said, “I have no idea. We’re trying to do it very expeditiously. We’ve got people assigned to it basically full time.”

The jury seemed to pay sporadic attention to Thursday’s detailed scientific testimony; one juror appeared to doze briefly as the afternoon wore on. But as the jury filed back into court for the afternoon session, there was a rare flash of humor as the last panelist in line, a woman, quipped to one of the deputies, “All present and accounted for.”

Lawyers from both sides emerged from an in-chambers meeting with Ito after court and said that the problem of the juror who asked to be excused so she could deal with a vacant rental property on which she has lost $3,000 has been “resolved.” Just how was unclear, but a prosecution source said no one was leaving the panel. The court has received numerous offers to assist the juror, a retired gas company clerk, who is divorced and in her 60s.

The first came from Michael Viner, president of Dove Audio, a company that has published several so-called instant books on the Simpson case, including Faye Resnick’s lurid memoir of her friendship with Nicole Brown Simpson, as well as accounts of sequestration by dismissed jurors Michael Knox and Tracy Kennedy.

In a letter to Ito released Thursday, Viner proposed paying “the amount in question to the juror with a hardship problem, and in the interest of fairness and to eliminate any question of bias, to pay the same amount of money to the entire jury for the remainder of the trial, so that justice and fairness can both be served.”

Viner added, “We . . . are of course aware that we have profited from this tragedy [and] we would like to offer to do something in return.”

Howard Kabakow, director of legal affairs for the 12,000-member Apartment Owners Assn. of Southern California, said the organization has offered “to arrange for the temporary management of the property while the juror is sequestered.” He said that he made the offer to the county court’s juror services division and is awaiting a response.

Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson said the offers of assistance parallel other events in the long-running trial.

“The Simpson case has become a participatory event for the public,” Levenson said. “But as generous as these people may be, you don’t want the court beholden to these people.

“On the other hand, our jurors should definitely be paid more than $5 a day. The problem is much broader than payments in this case.” “

Viner, for example, already is moving to secure exclusive rights to former jurors’ stories. He said Thursday that he has begun filming a “feature documentary” about the jury system in the aftermath of the Simpson case. “We have filmed five former Simpson jurors to this point,” Viner said. “Of the 10 former jurors, there will be five to seven in the film.” He said all those jurors will share in the film’s profits. He said the project is scheduled to be finished one week after the Simpson case goes to the jury. Viner said the ex-jurors involved in the project, including Knox, Kennedy, Willie Cravin, Jeannette Harris and Tracy Hampton, are “restricted from other interviews until after we’ve aired.”

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Elsewhere outside the courtroom Thursday, a source close to the defense said the jurors’ restive mood will probably weigh heavily on the minds of the former football star’s attorneys when they meet this weekend to weigh the possibility of asking the California Supreme Court to review Wednesday evening’s decision by the Court of Appeal. In that ruling the appellate justices rejected a defense demand that Fuhrman be forced to assert his 5th Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination in front of the Simpson jurors, and that the panelists be told that they may consider his invocation of the privilege when evaluating his credibility.

In an acerbic appellate brief, the defense also argued that Ito erred when he rejected all its proposed remedies, including striking portions of Fuhrman’s testimony from the record, granting him limited immunity from prosecution or letting the jury hear additional selections from the recorded interviews.

The Court of Appeal rebuffed the request on procedural grounds rather than addressing its merits. Essentially, that means the justices felt they did not have the right to intervene in the trial at this time. That, the source said, is another factor Simpson’s lawyers must take into account as they decide whether to avail themselves of their 10-day window for further appeal.

“Everyone is mindful that the situation with the jury is festering and about to explode,” said the source close to the defense. “The problem is that if the Supreme Court decided that our appeal involved issues they felt compelled to address, they would stay the proceedings in the trial. Even if we prevailed, the decision certainly would be unacceptable to the people, and they would seek reconsideration. That would entail further delays, and the jury surely would be lost.”