From: Jasper
Date: Tuesday, January 30, 2007
Time: 09:52:49 PM
Rovaan, …This is indeed a strange one. Then again, it might have been part of Fuhrman’s plan all along. I’m not sure what it means. …….. Going back over this passage I recalled that it was one reason I removed Phillips from my list of possible conspirators in the plan to murder Ron and Nicole and to frame O.J. I knew only enough about Roberts to be sure that everyone on the prosecution team who knew that he was Fuhrman’s partner tried to hide that fact from the defense. The biggest thing, however, that caused me to scratch Phillips as a party to the murders and the frame-up was his place in line when Fuhrman noticed someone in Kato’s bungalow. Phillips went past the bungalow. This action separated him from knowledge of how to find the Rockingham glove and put the spotlight squarely on Fuhrman and someone else as partners in planting and “finding” the glove. I could think of no reason for anyone working with Fuhrman in a murder/frame-up conspiracy to do that. The more I looked at Roberts as the man who planted the glove, the less I looked at Phillips. ..…… Now that Solitairea1 has opened my eyes to things Phillips did that make it likely that he was involved in the murder/frame-up plot before the fact, everything looks different. The story reported by Lange and Vannatter in Evidence Dismissed (1997) that Phillips told Fuhrman to stop talking to McKinny before anyone else on the prosecution team new the tapes existed doesn’t have to be true. Phillips doesn’t say this; Vannatter and Lange say he said it. Maybe he didn’t. In any event, they didn’t say who he told, why or when. From the point in their account when Phillips allegedly said he told Fuhrman to stop his taping project with McKinny the tapes were coming out anyway. So, there was nothing to loose in Phillips lying about it to Marcia or to Vannatter and Lange. ………It seems unlikely to me that Phillips told Vannatter and Lange anything about the tapes. It seems very likely to me that Marcia called Fuhrman and Phillips on the carpet to explain the tapes as soon as she heard about them. With Fuhrman, she would have wanted to know every detail that the defense could use to discredit Fuhrman. With Phillips she would have wanted to know what he knew and when he knew it. ………In other words, I don’t see this revelation on Phillips part as being voluntary. The tapes were a fact of life that the prosecution had to deal with and Phillips, as Fuhrman’s close friend, former partner and current supervisor had to come up with something that meshed with the social and professional relationship between him and Fuhrman. Phillips telling Marcia that he knew about professional relationship between Fuhrman and McKinny when the last tape was made in July, 1994 gives a logical answer to both questions, although not necessarily a truthful one. ……..Phillips had to know about the tapes when they were made but he didn’t have to tell Fuhrman to stop. I don’t think he did. I think he knew about Fuhrman’s book and the part the release of the tapes would play in making it a success – for Fuhrman and his heroes in the book, Roberts, Gates, Devries and Phillips. --Jasper