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From: Jasper
Date: 10/15/03
Time: 10:16:15 PM
Remote Name: 68.77.163.133
Charlie,
My old friend Frank Horenkamp used to say, “When intelligent people do stupid things look for an intelligent reason.
Many people made the mistake of thinking that Vannatter and Lange were stupid. I was one of those people until the civil trial where the judged did not allow a live video camera in the courtroom. E! TV did a daily reenactment using actors to play their parts. Now, hearing their words come from the mouths of other people, I got a completely different take on “Dumb and Dumber.” These guys were nobody’s dummies.
Going back over Vannatter and Lange’s testimony in the criminal trial I saw the same thing. I saw two very experienced investigators who came upon enough evidence when they arrived on the murder scene to convince them that O.J. was guilty – and Mark Fuhrman “sweetened” the evidence against him. Their mistake was in never considering the possibility that Fuhrman committed the murders and was responsible for planting ALL of the evidence. I don’t think they gave Fuhrman credit for being smart enough to do it because some of the things they saw him do to implicate O.J. looked so stupid.
Thanks to Miss Marple’s “quantum leap” observation, Chris Darden’s entire approach to the case also begins to make sense. Everyone saw his emotional gaffs but one ever questioned his intelligence. And everyone knows that no matter how smart you are you are going to make mistakes now and then. But Darden’s most crucial mistakes, like the glove demonstration, his heavy-handed demeaning of Lopez, Heidstra and McKinney and his incredibly stupid racial arguments to the jury follow an intelligent pattern.
This is precisely what someone in his position would do if he thought O.J. was innocent and he feared that someone in the LAPD and his superiors in the DA’s office might have been involved in the murders and the framing. Apparently he said as much in a thinly disguised way in his ‘fiction” novel. Sometimes the only safe way to tell the truth or to get anyone to take it seriously is to do it in a novel (or like Shakespeare’s Hamlet did in a play.)
If anyone would know about corruption in the LAPD and in the DA’s office it would have been Christopher Darden. –Jasper