[ Home | Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Jasper
Date: 9/12/03
Time: 3:53:48 PM
Remote Name: 68.73.59.129
Charlie,
I think that you are mistaken about the fingerprints being wiped clean.
After the civil trial when I got Lange and Vannatter’s Evidence Dismissed and saw the picture of the butcher knife on Nicole’s counter top I searched exhaustively for every reference I could find to fingerprints on handle. I couldn’t find a thing.
This is where you will find the testimony of the fingerprint specialist: http://simpson.walraven.org/aug17.html
Like Spring, I was struck by the fact that the tip of the knife pointed outward. No way, unless Nicole picked it up to use as a weapon with the thumb-side of her fist facing the butt of the handle and the blade pointing down and laid it down that way. This looked too much to me like the bloody glove, the knit cap and the socks on the rug. It looked too much like something I had seen in the movies.
Then I read Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood and in it, he told the story that the knife’s position told me. If this really happened, Nicole’s fingerprints would have been on the handle with a pinky finger-to- index finger orientation from the hilt to the butt. Unfortunately, Johnny Cochran asked the fingerprint specialist only whether O.J.’s fingerprints were on the knife. When the witness Gilbert Aguilar said “no,” Cochran went on to something else.
I do recall hearing somewhere that the prints on the knife had been wiped clean but I can’t remember who said it, why I didn’t record the source or why I can’t recall who gave the source. Perhaps it was because I was preoccupied with something else at the time or because I did record it along with other things and didn’t label the tape in a way that made it easy to find. Anyhow, I’m sure that you are right about someone saying that the handle of the knife had been wiped clean but it wasn’t the fingerprint specialist. –Jasper