From: Jasper
Date: January 16, 2006
Time: 03:38 PM
Prien, …I did not phrase my answer to Buster’s aspiration question nearly as well as I should have. I should have said that the esophagus was “exposed” rather than “cut” and after reading what I wrote I noticed that I got the heartbeat/blood pressure relationship bass acwards. I should have taken more time to answer and to read what I wrote. ………The point I wanted to make in that post is that the absence of blood in Nicole’s lungs tells us that she did not inhale after her veins and arteries were cut. The animation showing Nicole upright on her knees with O.J. behind her cutting her throat therefore cannot be right. This is a point that I knew we agreed on for all of the reasons you stated. I also wanted to lay the groundwork for my reply to yours where I knew we disagreed. ………The severity of the injury to the back of Nicole’s head where she was hit with a hard, blunt object did not correspond to her so-called defensive wounds. There was no way Nicole would have been in any kind of fighting condition after she was hit. I do not see how she could have been conscious. Dr. Golden could not have arrived at this conclusion because he missed the severity of the brain injury. I can see how he missed it because of the obvious outward signs that she was hit first and tried to defend herself. ………..This is a classic example of functional fixedness. The more you have seen a problem with a known solution the more likely you are to go straight to it. The most experienced industrial sculptors and engineers, for instance, almost invariably make mistakes in new situations that resemble situations they have encountered hundreds of times before. They skip steps because they do not think it’s necessary to take them. The new guy takes all of the steps because he has no preconceived idea of what the result will be. He also makes mistakes that the pros would never make because he doesn’t always know what steps to take. In both cases the “obvious” solution can be the wrong one. ……….Golden performed thousands of autopsies. The ones he did on Ron and Nicole began with all outward indications of a rage attack with multiple antemortem (before death) stab wounds and “defensive” cuts. That’s why doctors Lee, Wolfe, Baden, Lakshmanan and Johnson agreed with Dr. Golden on the general sequence of wounds inflicted on both victims. Their blood had to be flowing to produce the bleeding and bruising around moss of the cut and stab wounds. You can’t bruise a corpse. ………Blood not entering the back of Nicole’s mouth or her esophagus is consistent with the position of her body in the crime scene photos (head inclined downward on a downward sloping surface). It is consistent with the killer positioning her body in just that spot before lifting her head enough to cut her throat. Blood not entering her lungs is consistent with her not inhaling through her mouth, nose or open wounds. That doesn’t mean her heart had stopped working. It means only that her lugs were not working. If her throat had not been severed she could have been revived. She died of massive blood loss. ……….I cannot find in the autopsy report the quantity of blood loss that you cited. Where did you find it and why do you believe it? –Jasper