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From: Jasper
Date: 3/31/04
Time: 3:10:36 PM
Remote Name: 69.212.213.131
Intra nos,
I agree that what you say makes sense. That’s where I started and that’s why I started there. However, I ruled out the switchblade through a combination of specific first-hand knowledge and general ignorance. I’d seen plenty of them in my youth and I didn’t know they came with the heft or the heel that could have caused Nicole’s brain damage. The kids I knew who carried them, mostly Italians and Latinos, did so because they were light, terrifying, easy to carry and quick to deploy. I’d never heard of a German Stiletto.
My first guess was that the killer used a hunting knife (sharp point/heavy/hammer-like butt) or a K-Bar (Ka-Bar, kBar, etc. – sharp point/single edge/heavy/hammer-like butt) carried in a scabbard. I also considered a bayonet (sharp point/double edge/heave/hard steel butt) But I couldn’t find a bayonet or a K-Bar that matched the puncture wounds in either body. I found the German Stiletto listed under “hunting knives.” It was a folding knife with a hammer-like heel and a locking blade.
In the hands of an expert any folding knife can be deployed as quickly as a switchblade. The trick is to loosen the mechanism that holds the blade tightly in the handle so that the tip of the blade can be exposed with a flick of a thumbnail. You hook the tip on your pocket or the seam of your trousers and when you are ready to use it you just jerks back your hand. The blade flips out and locks in place pointed at your target.
No one at the time of the Bundy murders was talking about a Swiss Army knife as “the” murder weapon because the only Swiss Army knives that could be traced to O.J. were too small to have inflicted the stab wounds. After the autopsies, which Vannatter attended, he was convinced that “the” weapon was the German Stiletto O.J. purchased from Ross Cutlery two weeks before the murders. The knife Marcia and Kelberg used to indicate “the” murder weapon was the one Vannatter purchased from Ross Cutlery.
As you indicated, the Swiss Army knife did not have a sharp TAPERED point. The LONG TAPER is why all of the experts, including Dr. Baden, agreed that a knife like the German Stiletto could have made the blunt end wounds characteristic of a single-edged knife as well as the pointed ends characteristic of a double-edged knife. A long tapered point can do both, depending on how it enters the body and the movement of the victim or the knife user on contact. Therefore, it appears that all of the wounds could have been cause by one knife – until you knit-pick Dr. Golden’s width and thickness dimensions.
Fuhrman’s dimension in his drawing of the Swiss Army knife match those dimension precisely. But they correspond mostly to the wounds on Goldman’s right side (delivered by someone using his left hand) and all of them have a blunt end. All of Fuhrman’s cross-sections of the wounds show a single edge and the wounds he shows are on Goldman’s left side (the thigh wound, by the way, was in Goldman’s LEFT thigh – sorry about that). The long wound in Goldman’s chest was undoubtedly caused by the short blade of a knife with a blunt edge compressing the soft tissues, just as Fuhrman said. –Jasper