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From: Jasper
Date: 10/16/03
Time: 1:18:49 AM
Remote Name: 68.77.163.133
Charlie,
I don’t think the defense ever thought of Lange as the good guy and Vannatter as the bad guy. I think they simply adapted their style to his so as not to alienate the jury the way Darden did with Robert Heidstra and Clark did with Kathleen Bell.
Lange was the man the media credited with talking O.J. out of killing himself during the “low speed chase.” Of all the detectives who went with Fuhrman to Rockingham, Lange was the only one who said that Fuhrman, not Phillips, called the other detectives’ attention to someone in Kato’s bungalow. He didn’t have to do that. If he came across to the jury as a good guy, which is how he came across to me, the defense could have lost big points in questioning his integrity.
You will note, however, that Cochran did not spare Lange in questioning his handling of the crime scene. He blasted him (politely) with the blanket and he showed a video that flatly contradicted Lange’s claim that he did not walk around inside of the courtyard at a particular time. He also got Lange to admit that he never considered a suspect other than O.J. because his years of experience taught him to go in one direction if he saw evidence that pointed that way. In other words, they got Lange to admit that he saw so much with the cap, the glove, the shoeprints and the condition of the bodies that he just went through the motions of conducting a thorough investigation and waited for the lab to confirm his initial impressions.
To me the reason for not taking notes about the evidence found at Rockingham is simple. Lange and Vannatter knew it was fishy and weren’t sure if they should even try to use it. I don’t believe that either of them believed Fuhrman could be trusted to tell a believable story of the glove or the socks and how he came to discover them until they saw his performance in the preliminary hearing.
Even with that, I’ll bet you topaz to toenails that Vannatter deliberately wrote a bad search warrant to bring Marcia into the case on day one because of the problems they saw with Fuhrman. All of the cops in the department knew that fixing bad search warrants was her specialty. I’ll give you the same bet that SHE pressured Vannatter and Lange into saying what was necessary to fix Fuhrman’s story. –Jasper