Read Online Murder in Brentwood by Mark Fuhrman - Free Book Online

hovering overhead just a few hundred feet above us. It was impossible for us to hear, so we moved inside to the living room.
    As I described everything that I observed, noted, and found, she sat smiling and nodding. Hodgman listened and took notes. When I had completed my story, they stated they were very satisfied. They asked no questions.
    I spent the rest of the day on the scene while the photographers and criminalists completed their time-consuming jobs. I finally left at 6:00 P.M.
    It had been a long day, and I knew this was just the beginning. But I thought the killer would be found and justice served. I should have known better. If my twenty years as a cop taught me anything, it’s that people get away with murder every day.
    Chapter 4 COSTLY ERRORS
    To distill this case down to its irreducible minimum, if your blood is found at the murder scene, as Simpson’s was conclusively proved to be by DNA tests, that’s really the end of the ball game. There is nothing more to say.
    VINCENT BUGLIOSI
    I HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT that the Robbery/Homicide Division (RHD) was the cream of the crop when it came to murder investigations. But mistakes made in the first fourteen hours of the investigation, mostly by lead detectives Vannatter and Lange, would compromise the case and change my life forever. The murders at 875 Bundy should have been investigated just like any other murder, by the book. But they weren’t. One of the first avoidable mistakes was my returning to the Bundy crime scene after having been at Rockingham. When I found the bloody glove behind Kato’s room at Rockingham, Vannatter felt we had to compare the color, hand, and material of that glove to the one at Bundy immediately. Had this information been necessary to establish that the Rockingham estate was a crime scene, or to gain a search warrant, I could understand the need lo send me to the other scene. But neither case applied.
    If you find two gloves at two separate scenes that are linked by a blood trail and look similar, you have enough probable cause. And even if you do feel the need to establish the match, you don’t send a detective from one crime scene to the other and risk cross-contaminating the scenes. Had the case remained mine, I would not have sent a detective back to Bundy.
    But this was Vannatter’s case and he was calling the shots, so I went to the Bundy scene to inspect the glove. In doing so, I possibly took anything on my shoes or body with me that I came in contact with from Rockingham.
    Probable cause for a warrant could have been easily established without close comparison of the two gloves. We had already found blood on the Bronco, blood drops in the foyer, and a bloody glove behind Kato s room. The Rockingham estate was clearly a crime scene. Would it have ceased to be a crime scene if it turned out the two gloves were not perfect matches? Just the evidentiary discoveries as they occurred and the obvious connection of the two crime scenes would have resulted in a signed search warrant, if the warrant had been written accurately and completely.
    Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Vannatter’s June 13 warrant was only two and a quarter pages long, double spaced. There is no way that all the details of the probable cause and evidence we compiled at Rockingham could be described in a document of that length. And they weren’t. This brief and faulty warrant would become a focal point of the defense’s claim there had been suspicious police conduct at the scene. In the warrant, Vannatter did not establish a strong initial connection between the Rockingham estate and the Bundy scene, but merely noted the fact that one of the victims and Simpson had two children together, and that detectives had gone to Rockingham to make a notification. Upon arriving at Rockingham, Vannatter stated that “detectives were unable to arouse anyone al the residence,”
    Vannatter went on to describe the   Bronco and the blood found on the door handle. But he did not