Before trying to see what’s wrong with the blood-drops to the left of the bloody Bruno Magli shoeprints, we’d better check the validity of the question. Imprints identified by FBI agent William Bodziak as belonging to one of 299 pair of size 12 Bruno Magli shoes sold in the United States misstates the facts. The soles that left those imprints were made by a company called Silga, which keep spotty records of its shoe-making customers. The only connection we can make between the bloody shoeprints and the manufacturer is the possibility that it may have been Bruno Magli. By the same token, the shoes that left those prints may have been made by someone else and could look like anything above the soles.

As to the likelihood of the Bundy blood-drops being left by a six-footer taking a normal 30" stride, you’d be safest with A or B—though it would be like throwing a strike blindfolded over a moving plate that isn’t there yet. Something like C might be found more or less in line with the right shoeprint if the drop fell from the cut on the extreme back swing of the hand just before it started forward. The effect comes not only from the motion of the body, but the motion of the arms swinging in counter-balance to the legs. Watch the position of the left hand relative to the left foot of our walking man in mid stride. Remember that the maximum point of acceleration in the forward arm swing is here, sweeping past 6 o’clock in less than one-twelfth of a second. Only a stationary hand in that position would leave a circular drop, though it might take a microscope to see the difference. Sample swatch # 47, taken from the circular drop next to the Silga shoeprint, was supposed to be from O.J.’s blood. It’s the sample Andrea Mazzola packaged and initialed—the one that went into the wrapper dry and came out uninitialed with telltale signs that it had gone in wet. It’s the one Henry Lee was talking about when he said the only conclusion he could draw was, "something wrong."

The best way to see how walking speed is derived from shoeprints is by thinking of a silent movie or videotape on fast forward. With the speeded-up film, everyone’s steps seem not only brisk but also short and choppy. If you could change the length of the steps in the movies to match the speed of the film, you’d get a believably smooth motion but unbelievably long strides. Where the film speed is slower, the strides seem longer and smoother. That’s because the real time relationship between how fast one steps and the space between them is fixed within a very narrow range. Try taking fast "baby steps" or slow "giant steps" and see what happens.

The size of the shoeprint and the height of the person who made it are also roughly proportionate. You are not going to find many men under 6’ who can wear a size 12" shoe, or men over 6’ who can slip into a pair of 9’s. The size 12 Silga’s would, therefore, be consistent with someone around O.J.’s height. O.J. is 6’ 2". Mark Fuhrman is 6’ 3".

Getting a blood-drop from a walking man to fall from the left hand at any angle next to the left shoeprint is tough to do by accident and virtually impossible to fake on short notice. The best you can do is stop, look and drop, which will give you a "C" pattern every time.

So, now that we know how simple it is to tell whether or not a blood-drop came from a moving body and in what direction that body was moving, how come nobody got it right at Rockingham? How could the detectives and criminalists not have seen the direction in those drops? Why did the prosecution and the plaintiffs argue that O.J.’s blood-drops on the Rockingham entrance of his drive were leading in when they were, in fact, going out?

Looking at the prosecution’s diagram of 360 North Rockingham next to the one that Fuhrman drew for his book, it’s apparent that either Fuhrman used the prosecutors’ diagram to make his or they used his to make theirs. In both drawings, the Bronco is scaled up so big and parked so close to the driveway that it could not have turned the corner of the drive onto Rockingham. The two closed gates along the south walkway between the garage and Kato’s bungalow are missing and the space shown between the garage and the curve of the driveway, where O.J. was supposed to have "hidden" a mysterious black bag behind his Bentley, does not exist. Neither does the obtuse angle formed by the exit of the drive and the street. Rosa Lopez’s room on the south side of the fence just west of O.J.’s garage is not shown.

     PROSECUTORS’ DIAGRAM         FUHRMAN’S DIAGRAM

When I say, distorted picture, you can see that’s literally true. The diagrams are drawn so badly out of proportion and scale that specific locations of the blood-drops relative to the edges of the driveway cannot be indicated. The blood-drop photos taken on Marcia Clark’s orders, after a conference with Fuhrman, are difficult to orient in space. Close-ups showing no direction are used to crop out familiar points of reference like O.J.’s Bentley and the front door of his house. The Bentley itself was moved before the official crime scene photos were taken. Extreme camera angles also make it a chore to see landmarks where they are needed to gage spatial relationships. In other words, Marcia Clark planned those shots to hide rather than to highlight where the blood-drops on the driveway were deposited.

Fuhrman’s disclaimer that the blood-drops he indicated on his diagram running up the far left of the drive are not in their exact location only serves to make the unknown margin of error seem insignificant. But how can that be? Coming from Bundy, where Fuhrman had theorized that the killer was bleeding, as opposed to having allowed the victims’ blood to drip from the weapon he said they were cut with, the four detectives had to be looking for evidence of a bleeding killer. More than that, they had to be looking for signs that the killer was bleeding on the left side of his body. They had no bloody shoeprints to go by, but they had good landmarks in the precise location of the Bronco and the Bentley, and the sides of the driveway. Fuhrman, an avid hunter, was proficient at reading blood trails—plus, it was his theory!

If blood-drops did go directly to O.J.’s driveway from a cut on his finger as he was walking, their lack of direction could have meant only one thing: They were altered before the pictures were taken by someone with the training, equipment and material to hide the truth. LAPD homicide detectives had such training and carried the same swabs, swatches, coin envelopes and eyedroppers with them in their official LAPD cars as the criminalists carried in their van. But, to say that O.J. was framed by Fuhrman, who could not have anticipated the celebrity’s cut finger, that’s not enough. The killer’s "bleeding killer" theory had to have been an improvisation which required access to an official homicide detective vehicle after the fact. Since Fuhrman had no such car assigned to him that morning and he rode to Rockingham with three other detectives, he couldn’t be sure of anonymous access to the necessary supplies. Therefore, his partner in the murder had to be another detective he could count on to participate in the investigation, someone who could pick up the car, drive it to Rockingham alone, and get to the blood-drops before the criminalists could. Did Fuhrman know anybody like that? Let’s look at the candidates:

Q: AND WHAT DID YOU DO AFTER THAT?

Nolan never teamed up with Roberts. Since Phillips’ involvement was strictly as a facilitator, Fuhrman and Roberts were the only working detectives on the case for over an hour and a half. Roberts was, in fact, Fuhrman’s partner all along, and would never have been partnered with Nolan if Fuhrman had anything to say about it, which he did.

Isn’t there something fishy about all of that, in a case where the only way the accused could be innocent is if he was framed by Mark Fuhrman and another detective? If Fuhrman wasn’t on call, neither was Roberts. If four other detectives (they worked in pairs) were on call, why was Fuhrman called first? Why were the next three detectives that Phillips called after Roberts unavailable, and the fourth called so late that he was not likely to have ever gotten involved in a high profile case? Without Roberts, there could have been no blood trail from Bundy to Rockingham, because he was the only one who could have manufactured it.

Perhaps you’ve noticed how peculiarly and unprofessionally key people in this case behaved after talking to Fuhrman. It happened to Phillips, Vannatter, Lange, Clark, Hodgman, and, possibly, Yamauchi and Kestler, who showed all the symptoms of early exposure to the old Fuhrman charm. Fuhrman was their prime source of critical evidence, a fountain of ideas about how it should be interpreted, and a Pied Piper to experts on how to proceed with the investigation. Phillips was first to get in line.

You can draw a logical connection between Phillips and Fuhrman, because they were friends and Phillips knew how smart and ambitious he was. With Fuhrman comes Roberts, because they were partners. But how could four other detectives on call for that night have been "unavailable" without a specific request from Fuhrman to artfully exclude them?

No record exists of anyone riding in the same car with Roberts, so no one can say what was or was not missing from it or carried in it to or from Rockingham. Roberts has a deeper, "older-sounding" voice than Fuhrman’s. It matches the description of one angry voice heard by Robert Heidstra at Bundy during the killings. Heidstra never got to hear Roberts voice in an excited state the way he heard O.J.’s before he was called to the stand. Roberts was never called to the stand. He filed no official reports. However, according to Mark Fuhrman, he was "marking" the Rockingham blood-drops before Dennis Fung stopped him.

Fuhrman wrote about the incident in his book to explain away the blood-drops he pointed to in his drawing that did not appear in the photos. In case Fung was asked about Roberts’ actions in regard to the blood-drops on O.J.’s driveway, it would also explain what he was doing with them. Roberts is the detective who told O.J. when he was handcuffed at Rockingham on the 13th that a blood trail ran from Nicole’s body to his house. He was close enough to the drops to know which direction they were going in. It’s more likely that he was "collecting" blood samples than merely marking them before they were photographed. Since it was "obvious" to all which direction they must have been going in and detectives were authorized to take blood samples, it would not have been an issue at that time for anyone but Dennis Fung. Had he gotten close enough to the tiny droplets to notice the direction before Roberts obscured them, a simple admission of error would have sufficed.

In our picture of O.J. walking through the gate with the golf club in his hand, you will notice that only 2 of the 3 spots where the blood-drops were marked are shown. That’s because the first 2 tiny droplets were probably slung forward at the same time with one swing of the arm. O.J. said that his dog ran through the gate as soon as he opened it and across the street. He might have raised his arm in sudden fear that the dog might be hit by a car. It might also have come from the natural swinging of his arm. Either way, the gate was open and he was on his way out. As you will see, the third droplet was deposited later. Scale the width of a man to the width of the gateway in the photo, as I did, and try to duplicate the triangular blood-drop pattern. You can’t get all 3 drops in one pass or connect any 2 of them with the man going into the property bleeding from the left side. But as soon as you see where O.J. had to be standing before he exited the gate if he opened it manually, the mystery of the three drops goes away.

The key here is the fact that O.J. truly did not know when or how he was cut, as evidenced in the civil trial when he could have cleared himself with any simple story that matched the blood-drops on his driveway. The story he did tell had to be dragged out of him by Dan Petrocelli, who obviously understood the implications of the odd blood-drop pattern:

Q: When you went out towards the Rockingham gate, how did you cause the gate to open?

A: Push a button.

Q: Right on the inside of the gate?

A: Yes.

Q: Which side?

A: Left side.

Q: And the gate swings inward?

A: Yes.

Q: And then you go out the left side, right [This is the most important question asked in the civil trial. If O.J. or his attorneys had understood the significance of it, the trial would have ended in O.J.’s favor and given the LAPD a whole lot of explaining to do.].

A: I don’t know. Left side or the right side [The blood-drops say he did both].

Q: The box is on the left side of the gate, the gate starts to open and then you exit. Correct?

A: Correct [as you will see from the pictures of the gate in both positions, that’s true].

Q: And you walked to your car?

A: Yes

Q: The Bronco?

A: Uh-huh.

The more Petrocelli grilled him about where he went and what he did during the time of the murders, the more he filled in the details needed to explain the blood on his driveway—unwittingly. O.J. never realized what a problem his real blood trail would have been for the plaintiffs if anyone had given them a good look in context. One thing for sure, the gate had to be open for him to leave the three drops characterized by the four detectives as going into the compound. How that gate opened, which way it swung and how long it stayed open, made all the difference in the world as to whether or not a reasonable case could be made for a bleeding man in a big hurry going in.

O.J., believing that he had cut himself when he was rushing around on the tail end of his trip rather than when he was goofing off earlier, never connected the dots. His defense team in both trials, seeing no direction in the drops, concluded that some of them were planted rather than obscured and tried to minimize their significance. Big mistake. They were like windows in time that told the same story O.J. did.

Oh yeah, about the gate. It opens slowly, stays open 30 to 40 seconds, then closes...

Q: Did you go to the Bronco after you completed all of the activities described at the Bentley [The activities O.J. described at the Bentley were, getting his golf balls and his pitching wedge. Getting was the word he’d used.]?

A: Yes, sir.

Q: You had finished hitting all your golf balls. Right?

A: Yes, sir [did O.J. hear, hitting or getting? Probably, getting, since that’s what he’d just told the man, and he did not hedge or hesitate about when he started hitting the balls when the question came up again.].

Q: And you had closed the trunk of the Bentley, right?

A: Yes.

Q: So on the ground was the bag with the windbreaker?

A: Yes, I believe so, yes.

Q: OK. So before you went inside you went to the Bronco?

A: Yes, I believe so, yes...

...Q: After you made the phone call, you either put the phone down or in your pocket?

A: Uh-huh.

Q: If you put it down where did you put it?

A: Right in the trunk of the Bentley.

Q: And you opened up the trunk and you described what you did at that point?"

A: Yeah.

Q: Closed the trunk?

A: Yes.

Q: Took your 3 wood out of the Bronco.

A: Yes.

Q: And you were looking for your sand wedge?

A: Yes.

Q: And you didn’t find it, right?

A: Correct.

Q: And you waited for the dog to finish and then—

A: We walked up the street. She went across and up a way. First she went to Stanley Sheinbam’s stuff, and she walked up. Started going up the grass to the other, and I was just on the grass walking, swinging, and then finally, "Come on, Chachi," and we went into the Ashford gate.

Q: The Rockingham gate closed behind you?

A: Yes.

Q: And then you entered the Ashford gate [O.J. could not have been thinking about the blood trail that confirmed his story, because he didn’t know it existed then. You can bet that Petrocelli knew. You can bet that’s what the question was designed to find out about O.J.]?

A: Yes.

To explain the blood-drop on the left side of the short walk leading to his front door, he could have said that he went into the front door. The blood trail going from the Rockingham gate around the block to Ashford, would have made perfect sense and given O.J. a perfect alibi. There was nothing in his previous testimony or statements to police that would have prevented it. He had plenty of time to do it and millions of dollars worth of incentive to think it over. Yet, he said that he went in the gate with the dog, he skipped the chipping, and told of putting his 3 wood in the garage and entering his kitchen through the garage. Why?

Because he didn’t know precisely were the blood-drops were found.

Perhaps he didn’t want to know. Perhaps they were washed away before he could see them. Whatever the case, he wasn’t likely to have been able to tell by the available photos. All of which adds up to one thing; O.J. truly didn’t know when or how he was cut, but a close observer would have been able to take an educated guess.

Lange and Vannatter, who could have connected the dots on the day they interviewed O.J., were on a different mission. Playing a covertly aggressive game of "good cop/good cop" with O.J., they sought only to catch him in a lie. They interpreted everything possible as an inconsistency, including a statement he made at one point that he was doing things in a leisurely way and at another point he said he was rushing. Had Henry Lee been given adequate time and resources to do his job the way he wanted to, he would have seen by the placement of those drops that O.J. had taken a leisurely walk through the Rockingham gate at one point—and a hurried one later on.

In light of what can be readily discerned with an accurate layout of the Rockingham crime scene, it appears that Dr. Lee was handicapped in his ability to reconstruct what happened there for a reason. I can’t say what that reason was, but the effect was to bury the fact that the blood on the driveway could not have been a continuation of the Bundy blood trail. If there was a link between blood trails at Rockingham and Bundy, it would have to have started at Rockingham.

The whole picture painted by the Rockingham blood trail would have given the prosecution a problem with Fuhrman that went way beyond allegations of racism and evidence manipulation. Why else would Marcia Clark ask Fuhrman what his alibi was for the evening of the 12th? Why else would Dr. Lee be given junk equipment, bad photos and permitted only 20 minutes at each crime scene? I don’t think that anyone has even tried to formulate a reasonable answer to that one.

Dr. Lee’s ability to read a crime scene was unsurpassed. Only because of my experience as a design modeler building good 3-D models from bad 2-D sketches and blueprints, was I able to identify relevant features in the prosecution’s photos and diagram and put them closer to where they belonged. I have to confess that this book would have been in print months earlier if I, too, hadn’t been fooled. I copied a distortion in the Clark/ Fuhrman diagram, that turned strong evidence of innocence on its head. Dr. Lee would, no doubt, have seen what the prosecution did and what you are about to. He would have seen that O.J.’s trail of blood at Rockingham proved his innocence, and Fuhrman’s "brilliant deduction" or "lucky guess" about a dog bite had nothing to do with brilliance or luck, and everything to do with an observer.

Kato Kaelin’s Nissan was parked on the south side of Ashford, east of the Ashford gate where Fuhrman, Phillips, Vannatter and Lange tried to get into the estate. O.J.’s Bronco was on northbound Rockingham, parked at a 2-degree angle to the curb. That’s the "funny angle" Vannatter was talking about in his interview with O.J., and the one Fuhrman refers to in his book as drawing his attention because it appeared to be parked in great haste. That "haphazard" 2-degree angle is what Fuhrman said looked suspicious enough to check out, whereupon he "found" the speck of blood near the door handle which led to the search of the estate. Inside the compound, O.J.’s Bentley was parked where Arnelle’s SAAB is shown in the photo.

Marcia Clark showed Allan Park the photo of the Rockingham entrance reprinted here. On the witness stand, Park could not recall the Bronco, but he did "remember seeing" another car in the driveway which wasn’t there. He could recollect nothing about it, not even the color, but he did recall seeing it behind the Bentley. The only car behind the Bentley on the 12th was Park’s limo.

Given Park’s concern with getting around "obstructions" when turning, which was why he didn’t enter through the Rockingham gate, he might have noticed the obstruction if not the car. The closest he came to saying whether or not the Bronco was parked next to the driveway during the killings was in the reason he gave for not trying to enter the estate through that gate. Among other things, he didn’t like the way "the cars" (yes, he said cars) were parked.

This is the scenario that Marcia Clark argued was proven beyond a reasonable doubt by the physical evidence and the testimony of Allan park and Kato Kaelin: 10:21-10:25 PM. O.J. is at Bundy, two and a half miles southeast of Rockingham, when Park arrives about twenty minutes early to take him to LAX. While O.J. is searching in a panic for his lost cap and glove after butchering Ron and Nicole in a jealous rage, Park is looking for O.J. He doesn’t see the Bronco because it isn’t there.

Park turns the corner on Ashford, makes a U-turn and parks on the opposite side of the street. He calls his mother, then walks to the rear of his limo and has a smoke. Looking through the gate, he sees no light in the house—further confirmation that O.J. is absent.

The weight you give Allan Park’s testimony about the absence of the Bronco, has to be balanced against his awareness of other vehicles that were unquestionably present or not present when he came to get O.J. How did he do? That’s what the jury in the first trial wanted to know and why the "not guilty" verdict came back so quickly notwithstanding what they may have learned about him in his deposition.

In that pre-trial hearing, Marcia Clark carefully avoided testing his powers of observation concerning Kato’s Nissan, a vehicle she knew was parked on Ashford just east of the gate. Though he described the car in detail a year later in the criminal trial—after its presence was firmly established and he had talked to his mother about it—he and Marcia painted no word picture which included the Nissan in his ’94 pre-trial deposition. Instead, she came at him again and again from every conceivable angle to get him to say the Bronco wasn’t there. All he could honestly tell her was what he told Johnnie Cochran; he didn’t know because he wasn’t paying attention.

And what about Kato Kaelin, who was outside walking around when Park saw O.J.? Where does he fit in the picture of O.J. "sneaking" into his front door from the pathway behind Kato’s bungalow? If O.J. had come from there, how could Park have seen Kato before Park or Kato saw O.J.? How could O.J. have gotten past Kato, and why would he, instead of going in the maid’s entrance on the side?

Between 10:39 when Park pulled up to the Rockingham gate, and 10:45 when he was standing there ringing continuously, O.J. rushes back to Rockingham in a panic. He parks haphazardly and dashes across to his neighbor’s yard, leaving blood-drops from his injured left hand on the driveway. Mind you, this is how her story is told. It’s not what the evidence showed. Marcia didn’t even try to explain how the three blood-drops near the gate could have led into the estate.

Unlike Phil Vannatter and Tom Lange, Marcia Clark showed that she understood the logic problems associated with suggesting that O.J. opened the slow-moving front gate. The last thing she wanted the defense to do was concentrate on the placement of the drops instead of trying to minimize their relevance because of their absence of direction in the SID photos. If O.J. opened the gate by remote control, what happened to the bloody gate opener? If he used his key, why was there no blood on the lock? If he was in such a hurry to get in, why did he wait for the gate to swing all the way open before he turned sideways and hurried in on the right side?

If O.J. was in a big enough hurry to crash into the side of his house—three times—and lose a bloody glove, the quickest route was through the neighbor’s yard and into the side door behind the garage. That also would have afforded him concealment from the limo driver. If you assume that O.J. put the knife and the shoes that left the rare imprints at Bundy in a bag behind the Bentley just before Park saw him walking up his driveway in the sweatsuit that left blue/black fibers on Ron’s shirt...it still doesn’t add up.

So, what we had there was a scenario of guilt presented by the prosecution in the criminal case that was factually deficient in some key areas and too improbable in others for the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in the civil case to buy. We now have a scenario of guilt presented by the plaintiffs and the LAPD homicide detectives, that Marcia Clark must have considered first and understood was fatally flawed before she came up with hers.

The scenario that has O.J. running through the gate makes for a series of actions that are impossible in some respects and highly improbable in others. There were two other gates along the narrow path beside the garage and Kato’s bungalow that he would have had to open and close, because they were closed when Kato went looking for the source of the thumps. O.J. could not have left the pattern of blood-drops straddling the line between the gate posts on his way into his estate—not all three drops at once. He would not have parked "in great haste," then waited for the gate to open as wide as possible before squeezing through on the far right side.

Clark knew what that triangular pattern meant; she had to know. What she had to say to get around the truth is a different matter. That’s the story she told in court about O.J. running through the neighbor’s yard and jumping the fence. That’s the only way he could have shaken the wall of Kato’s room the way Kato reported without having to stop to open those other gates then pick up the necessary speed and avoiding serious injury to his face.

Mark Fuhrman’s scenario is worse than the others, though it was his testimony in the preliminary hearing that gave Clark hers. Unlike the others, it accounts for the origin and disposition of the knife, the 10:03 time on Nicole’s broken watch and the origin of a white, freshly splintered sliver of wood found beside the Bronco. It even has a witness who called Robbery/Homicide to report a light-colored sports utility vehicle in the lot where Fuhrman and Roberts found a section missing from an old fence that matched the wood sliver perfectly.