The Region; Hunt for Fugitive Rape Suspect Intensifies as His Trial in Ventura County Continues
Los Angeles Times
January 8, 2003 Wednesday,Home Edition
The search for fugitive rape suspect Andrew Luster continued Tuesday as Ventura County law enforcement officials sifted through dozens of potential leads while at the same time trying to compile enough information to obtain a federal arrest warrant.
Investigators have been checking airports and looking at bank and cellular phone records in an attempt to track down the 39-year-old great-grandson of cosmetics magnate Max Factor. They suspect Luster, who faces a life prison sentence if convicted of drugging and raping three women, jumped his $1-million bail last week during a break in his trial.
Tips on Luster’s possible whereabouts poured in Tuesday in response to news reports of his flight, said Eric Nishimoto, spokesman for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.
The Sheriff’s Department and the Ventura County district attorney’s office each have one investigator working on the case, as well as backup investigators. “Obviously, we have limited resources,” Nishimoto said.
That is one reason why local authorities are trying to obtain federal assistance.
During the last two days, prosecutors have scrambled to compile information that would enable the FBI to obtain an arrest warrant for Luster and give them authority to investigate leads in foreign countries.
At the same time, authorities are working to put together a list of leads on places Luster may have gone — homes of relatives, former girlfriends or friends, and any of his previous residences.
Meanwhile, Luster’s criminal trial continued in his absence.
Santa Monica-based attorney Roger Jon Diamond stood alone at the defense counsel table, his bulky briefcase parked in the chair where his client once sat alongside a four-member defense team.
Co-counsel Kiana Sloan-Hillier walked out Monday after Superior Court Judge Ken Riley declared Luster a fugitive and issued a warrant for his arrest. She has yet to return.
Investigator Bill Pavelic, a former Los Angeles police officer, also walked out — angrily clutching his briefcase — after prosecutors called him as a witness outside the jury’s presence and asked whether he helped Luster flee.
“It is insulting,” he snapped. “You know damn well I didn’t.”
Diamond also asked to leave the case, but Riley ordered him to stay on and defend Luster, who faces 87 criminal counts, including rape, sodomy of an unconscious person, sexual battery, drug possession and poisoning.
Defense attorneys, who did not give an opening statement, have maintained that Luster engaged in consensual sex with the purported victims. But prosecutors allege that Luster used a potent date-rape drug to knock out the alleged victims, erasing any memory of the sexual assaults.
On Tuesday, a 23-year-old former UC Santa Barbara college student, identified as David Doe, said he believes Luster drugged him and his friend, Carey, after they met at a Santa Barbara bar in July 2000. Doe said he has only a spotty memory of the events that night, but testified he began feeling nauseated and tired after Luster handed him a glass of water on a dance floor.
Carey told detectives that Luster raped her at his Mussel Shoals beach house after they drove there from the bar. It was her report that led investigators to search the home, where they seized videotapes of two additional sexual encounters that prosecutors contend are rapes.
The Emaciated Indistinct Stroke
A Ventura province Rape Case demonstrates How complicated It Can Be to Judge the fact When Sex Takes Place in a Hard-Partying Miasma
Los Angeles Times
December 1, 2002 Sunday
Home Edition
On the night his life changed forever, Andrew Luster and a friend drove north to a bar in Santa Barbara called O’Malley’s. Especially on weekends, the bars and clubs along State Street, where O’Malley’s is located, overflow with tourists and with students from UC Santa Barbara, many of whom fully expect, as a pretty blond 21-year-old named Carey did on that warm Friday night in July 2000, to “get messed up.”
Until that night, Luster’s famous heritage had served him well. He had a trust fund of nearly $1 million and a $600,000 cottage on the beach in Mussel Shoals, a Ventura County community. He was 36, handsome, with thick dark hair, green eyes and a trim, toned body from years of boating and surfing. He took fishing and surfing trips to Mexico and Costa Rica and slept with a string of beautiful young women. Usually he didn’t brag about how he got his money, but on that summer night at O’Malley’s, he wanted to impress Carey, so he says he casually mentioned that he was related to the legendary cosmetics tycoon Max Factor.
What happened over the next 12 hours, after the couple left O’Malley’s together, is hotly debated. But three days later, Ventura County sheriff’s deputies arrested Luster at his house and charged him with drugging, kidnapping and raping Carey “Doe.” (Her last name is being withheld under a Times policy of protecting the identities of sex-crime victims.) The graphic evidence investigators found at Luster’s house–16 videotapes in his bedroom that allegedly show him having sex with other women, some of whom appear drugged, almost comatose–led to additional criminal charges by two women Luster had dated in the past.
His status as a great-grandson of Max Factor became a liability for him over-night as the media played up the celebrity angle. The kidnapping charge, the possibility that Luster was “a clear and present and immediate danger to women,” plus the fear that he might flee, led a judge to set his bail at $10 million. Unable to come up with the $1-million bond, Luster sat in jail for five months. In all, Luster was charged with 87 counts of kidnapping, drugging, sodomy and rape. Prosecutors alleged that Luster is a serial rapist who drugged three unsuspecting women with the illegal substance gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB) and, without the knowledge of his two former girlfriends, videotaped them in various sexual acts. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
The defense, however, claims that this was never a GHB-induced rape case. “Plain and simple,” says Roger Diamond, one of Luster’s lawyers, “this is a case about prosecutorial misconduct and we plan to get to the bottom of it.” The defense claims that prosecutors have withheld key evidence, altered witness statements and coached the three women complainants who, Luster’s lawyers claim, are “gold diggers” out to get their client’s money.
In interviews last March, before the judge imposed a gag order, Luster and his defense team denied all of the charges against him. The women consented to have sex, Luster said, and if the two videotapes now being used as evidence were viewed in their entirety, they would show that the women knew they were being videotaped.
He also contended that he never gave any of them GHB. “My life has been ruined because police and prosecutors jumped to conclusions,” he said. “They wanted to make me their GHB poster boy. They’re doing this to punish me for my lifestyle, which doesn’t fit in with their conservative values. In 20 years I haven’t gotten anything except a few speeding tickets. Had they thoroughly in-vestigated [Carey Doe] before charging me, they would have discovered she lied” about how things transpired during their encounter. But, Luster said, “they allowed the case to go forward to boost their careers.”
Two and a half years after Luster’s arrest, his case still is not resolved. He remains under limited house arrest, an electronic-monitoring device attached to his ankle, as he waits for his trial to begin in the coming weeks. The high-profile case once seemed solid, but at this point it’s hard to predict how a jury might react to some of the evidence that has emerged since the charges were first filed.
As the pretrial debate between Ventura County prosecutors and Luster’s defense team continues, Luster’s case opens a window on the persistent problems that arise when the criminal justice system is confronted with accusations of drug-induced sexual assault. These cases often present difficult challenges, including physical evidence that vanishes quickly from the human body and built-in cultural biases against men and women who sometimes get caught up in a partying lifestyle. Such cases also often hinge on the meaning of “consensual” and the ability of a jury to sift the truth from a subculture of sometimes easy sex, performed in a haze of drugs and alcohol, that obscures traditional meanings of guilt and innocence.
By the summer of 2000, authorities in Southern California and elsewhere around the country considered GHB–along with Rohypnol, or “roofies,” and a variety of other central nervous system depressants–as a drug linked to sexual predators and their crimes. GHB is clear and odorless, with only a slightly salty taste. This makes it hard to detect in drinks or food, and it can be synthesized easily in a home lab with recipes that are available on the Internet. With GHB, a four-hour groggy period usually ensues, sometimes followed by in-and-out amnesia. (Former LAPD narcotics officer Trinka Porrata says that Ecstasy, another popular drug on the club scene, also “can compromise a woman’s judgment,” even though it is not a depressant but a stimulant.)
An average of 50 drug-facilitated sexual assaults are reported to the Los Angeles Police Department’s rape special section each year, says Det. Jesse Alvarado, “but there are so many more that go unreported. Many women don’t want to go through the emotional trauma of a criminal investigation, and these drugs make women often not remember what happened to them.” Most of the reported cases never make it to trial (last year only six did) because of a lack of hard evidence. GHB vanishes from blood in four hours and from urine within 12.
When L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. Mary Hanlon Stone got the 1998 case of George and Stefan Spitzer, identical twins who were dubbed the “Rohypnol Romeos” for using roofies to drug women they had met and then forcing sex on them, she had little physical evidence to work with. “These cases are complicated because evidence is disappearing every minute,” she says. “Women often don’t realize they’ve been sexually assaulted and don’t go to a hospital in time when it would be critical.”
Stone was able to win a conviction by building a strong circumstantial case around the testimony of more than a dozen female victims and seven boxes of Rohypnol found in the twins’ Marina del Rey apartment.
“I tell people they should pee in a cup right away,” says Porrata, who now teaches law enforcement and high school and college students how to recognize and avoid drug-facilitated rape. (She also is a prosecution expert witness in the Luster case and declined to comment on the upcoming trial.) “These are hard cases to prove, and cops who don’t understand the phenomenon are a big part of the problem. Most rape investigators don’t even have enough training. If they did, they’d know to rush a victim to the hospital. As it is, most police don’t respond to these situations as drug-induced rape cases. They think of the woman as some drunken bimbo.”
Most cases of drug-induced sexual assault “are alcohol-related,” says Alvarado. “A woman can just as easily get drunk and not remember what happened. As long as someone does not give their permission, that’s rape. In sex cases, there are only two defenses: it wasn’t me or it was consensual. Consent is the hardest thing to prove, particularly with the use of drugs, because the victims can’t remember whether or not they gave consent. Sometimes there’s a very thin line between what’s true and not true.”
As the Luster case demonstrates, a partying lifestyle can easily blur that line. Andrew Luster moved to Mussel Shoals 19 years ago after graduating from Windward School in West Los Angeles so that he could be close to his “true love”–the ocean. His freewheeling lifestyle weakened his already tenuous ties to the Factor family, which is involved in the arts and philanthropy.
“For me, it’s not about chasing dollars or fame,” he said last spring. “I’m not a high-profile guy, nor am I some wild party animal. I’m a nobody, really. Just a humble surfer who’s had a few girlfriends.” He doesn’t have to work–his investments provide an annual $55,000 income. But over the years he has dabbled in real estate, played the stock market and started a number of small businesses, including a surf accessories company.
A former surfing companion who asked not to be identified says he was not surprised by Luster’s arrest. He ran around with a crowd of “chicks who are into sex and drugs,” the surfer says. In this beach crowd, explained Luster’s defense investigator, Bill Pavelic, “sex is nothing more than entertainment for a few hours.”
There were other ways in which Luster didn’t fit the Factor mold. “In a sense, Andrew isn’t really a Factor,” says Fred
Basten, coauthor of “Max Fac-tor’s Hollywood Glamour, Movies, Make-up.” Based on Luster’s lineage, Basten notes that Luster “doesn’t have [Factor’s] name or his blood.”
Luster’s mother, Elizabeth, was adopted by Freda Factor, the oldest daughter of Max Faktor Sr., a wig maker for the imperial family who fled Russia in 1902 and smuggled his family aboard a ship bound for America, where his name was misspelled as Factor at Ellis Island. In 1909 they settled in California, where Factor specialized in theatrical makeup for screen legends such as Joan Crawford and Lana Turner. He later expanded the company into a multimillion-dollar inter-national cosmetics firm.
Factor died in 1938, and in 1973 the family sold the company to Norton Simon Inc. for $480 million–it is now controlled by Procter & Gamble–and the proceeds have been passed down through four generations in trust funds.
Luster’s father, a psychiatrist, died from emphysema-related surgery when Luster was 9, leaving his mother to raise him and his younger sister. He has two children, ages 8 and 11, by a former girlfriend who brings them for weekend visits.
Andrew Luster met Carey Doe at O’Malley’s sometime after 1 a.m. on that Sat-urday in July 2000. By then, according to court documents, she had consumed three beers, two Long Island iced teas and a Cosmopolitan. Like many her age, Carey, a third-year UCSB student, had experimented with drugs. She had taken Ecstasy and smoked marijuana three times prior to that night, she told police. She said she sometimes got so drunk that she vomited.
Carey told police that she felt strange after dancing with Luster. She later suggested to friends that perhaps she had been given a spiked cup of water at O’Malley’s, because she does not remember agreeing to leave with Luster or that she and her friend David got into Luster’s green Toyota Forerunner and headed back to his house in Mussel Shoals.
According to various accounts, it was after 2 a.m. when the group arrived at Luster’s house. The beach was dark except for flickering lights from an oil rig up the coast. Carey later told police that she walked onto the pier, took off her dress, handed her money and ID card to Luster, and jumped into the surf.
A few minutes later, she swam back to shore and climbed out, shivering in only her thong underwear. One of the men helped her out (accounts differ about which man) and they went back to Luster’s house, where she took a shower. Luster got in with her and they had sex. Again, accounts differ. Was it consensual, as Luster maintains, or was Carey so out of it that she was in no condition to give consent? Luster took several photos of her in his living room that night and Luster’s defense team claims those photos were taken sometime after she took a shower. One of those images is expected to become pivotal evidence in Luster’s defense. It shows Carey fully dressed and smiling.
By the time Luster drove Carey and her friend David back to her apartment near Santa Barbara on Saturday morning, she claims Luster had raped her two more times. Before they parted, she told police, she gave him her telephone number.
“There is a strong cultural bias against women who get drunk and, say, rip off their clothes in the middle of the street,” says Porrata. “It’s not a pretty picture and predatory men hide behind that bias. Women who party like the boys and drink and take drugs voluntarily complicate these cases because their behavior fuzzies the issue of consent, but it still doesn’t mean they give their consent.”
Carey went to the police the following Monday to report that she’d been raped by Luster. A series of tests at a local hospital found no trace of drugs in her system, according to Luster’s defense team. But details of her account convinced detectives that she’d been drugged with GHB, although the defense claims that none was found in searches of Luster’s home and vehicle.
Without proof of toxicity “prosecutors take another road and try to find other victims toweave a tapestry of stories,” says Deputy Dist. Atty. Stone. In the Spitzer twins case, the prosecution urged other victims to come forward in news articles, “and 23 women came out of the woodwork,” Stone says.
Even when other alleged victims come forward, drug-aided rape cases can still be “hard sells to juries because jurors look for inconsistencies in the women’s statements,” says jury consultant Lara Giese. Giese worked on the John Gordon Jones case, a high-profile GHB criminal case that was tried in Long Beach and ended in an acquittal on all 30 counts of drugging and raping nine women. (In July, Jones was ordered to pay $5.3 million in civil damages to one of his ac-cusers. One of his defense lawyers, Richard Sherman, is co-counsel on Luster’s defense team.)
Dubbed “the limousine rapist,” Jones, a successful computer company owner, frequented Hollywood nightclubs, where he met women and took them back to his house in a limousine. As in the Luster case, some of the women who accused Jones of drugging and raping them had dated him in the past, which, says Det. Alvarado, “is always a complicating factor. In the Jones case, some of the victims had issues; they were party girls.”
As jury expert Giese knows, jurors tend to care less about a victim who has an alternative lifestyle, and it also didn’t help that no GHB was found in Jones’ possession. “The gold-digger theme came through,” Giese says, “because some of the witnesses’ accounts may not have been completely true.” For example, some of the women testified that they’d been locked in Jones’ various bedrooms and then raped, but jurors doubted their credibility when they went to his house and saw no locks on the doors.
“Women can end up jeopardizing their own cases and hurting the credibility of cases–and women–that are real,” Giese says.
Adds Alvarado: “We always proceed from the position that the woman is telling the truth, but sometimes the evidence doesn’t hold up. Some women use elaborate fabrications for various reasons. The last thing I want to do is hurt an actual victim more, but I also don’t want to put a rape arrest on an innocent man.”
In Luster’s case, the defense is counting on one witness in particular, Carey Doe, to create reasonable doubt in jurors’ minds. When Bill Pavelic, who retired as an LAPD detective after 19 years, joined Luster’s defense team, he first con-centrated his investigative efforts on Carey, “because without her there is no case.”
After Luster was arrested, new details emerged that cast doubt on Carey’s initial story, particularly her claim of having been kidnapped and drugged. Luster told detectives that on the drive back to his house, he saw Carey perform oral sex on her friend David in the back seat of his car. Detectives went back to the UCSB student and asked if this were true. She denied having sex of any sort with David.
Initially reluctant to share details, David eventually told detectives his own version of events. He said he had memory gaps that night, but that Carey “may have” performed oral sex on him. When pressed further, David recalled that Carey lifted her dress, straddled his lap and that intercourse “probably” happened.
Prosecutors said they could not talk about details of the case because of the gag order, but tests they conducted on DNA samples, including semen found on Carey’s clothing, raised even more questions about what happened. The tests showed that one semen sample tested positive for Luster, another for David, and a third for an as-yet unidentified person whom Pavelic believes was Luster’s friend who accompanied him for their night on the town.
“We will show that over the course of 72 hours, Carey had sex with at least three men,” Pavelic says. “So why would she just single out Luster? There is only one answer. She did it hoping to get his money.”
Anthony Wold, the lead prosecutor in Luster’s case, argued against having the third semen sample tested because, as he said during a court hearing: “It’s irrelevant. This is not a case about identification. We know who did this.”
It’s not clear what connection, if any, those tests had on the prosecution’s decision just before Luster’s June 2001 preliminary hearing not to pursue the kidnapping and drugging charges stemming from the events at O’Malley’s involving Carey Doe. He still faces rape charges in the Carey Doe case, and drugging and rape charges involving the other two women, both of whom have filed multimillion-dollar civil suits alleging severe emotional distress. An attorney for one of the plaintiffs says nothing is expected to happen on those cases until the criminal cases are concluded. When contacted by telephone, one of Luster’s accusers declined to comment and Carey did not respond to a message left for her with co-workers. The Times was unable to locate the third woman.
The most relevant issue, says Trinka Porrata, is an understanding of the issue of consent. “It doesn’t matter if a woman has consensual sex with 10 guys on the football team but not the 11th,” she says. “It still doesn’t mean sex [with the 11th guy] was consensual. Even prostitutes get raped.”
Luster’s defense strategy of attacking Carey’s behavior comes as no surprise to women’s-rights advocates. “In these cases, the burden of proof is still on the woman instead of the man,” says Patricia Bellasalma, executive vice presi-dent of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women and a civil rights attorney. “Sexual assault laws now say that a woman’s past can’t be used at trial, but lawyers still find ways to get it in. Another problem is that the public still operates on the old idea that if a woman didn’t go to a bar and drink, she wouldn’t get into trouble.”
Prosecutors are banking on the two sexually explicit videotapes to help win a conviction. “He can’t get around these videotapes,” Wold said in a court document.
Suggesting that prosecutors don’t intend to use all of the 16 seized video-tapes during the trial, Pavelic says, “You have to ask yourself why.” He concludes: “The other tapes establish that women knew they were being taped.”
The tapes–edited versions of two have been shown in court but never to the public–allegedly show two of Luster’s former girlfriends drugged and in various sexual acts. At Luster’s preliminary hearing, the women testified that they had no memory of the taping or of having given their consent for sex. Luster’s defense maintains that both women are motivated by shame and greed.
As the battle between Ventura County prosecutors and Luster’s defense lawyers intensifies in the days leading up to trial, the case has refocused attention on a number of basic ideas. “Women need to be more aware that these drugs are out there,”
Alvarado cautions, “and if they think they were sexually assaulted, they need to get a urine sample immediately.” On a broader level, Bellasalma believes that instances of drug-aided sexual assault will not decline “until the cultureaccepts that women, and not the public domain, have ownership of their bodies.”
As for Andrew Luster, he sat quietly at the counsel table during a pretrial hearing in September, occasionally swiveling in his chair to smile at people who had come to lend support. He appeared noticeably older and heavier than he had at his preliminary hearing in June 2001. As usual, his mother sat in the front row and shook her head whenever prosecutor Wold said something about her son that she didn’t like.
Outside in the hallway, some longtime courtroom observers began to make their bets, while others declined, knowing the outcome of this case is too close to call.
Private eyes probed : State checks Simpson’s in-vestigators
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
SECTION: FRONT; Pg. A9
LENGTH: 429 words
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES
Private investigators hired to sniff out flaws in the case against O. J. Simpson are themselves being investigated by the state consumer affairs depart-ment.
The probe follows complaints that Simpson’s investigators lack California li-cences and are taking jobs from in-state detectives.
“If you’re doing traditional investigative work, such as interviewing people or scoping out the scene of a crime, then you need to be licensed,” said Louis Bonsignore, spokesman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs.
Bonsignore said Thursday the investigators being investigated were Zvonko (Bill) Pavelic of Glendale, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective; John McNally of New York; and Patrick McKenna of West Palm Beach, Fla.
They are part of the team working for Simpson, who has pleaded not guilty to charges he murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Gold-man. His trial is set for Sept. 19.
Under state law, private investigators must undergo a background check, apply for a licence, pass a test and pay a fee. The penalty for doing detective work without a licence is up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Simpson’s lawyers — Robert Shapiro, Johnnie Cochran and Leroy Taft — did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
Bill Pavelic also known as William Bill Pavelic and Zvonko Bill Pavelic has said he isn’t a licensed private investigator and has never claimed to be one. He says he is a defence consultant whose job is to look for mistakes, oversights and violations of police policy in the official investiga-tion.
“If he’s only doing analysis, then he’s probably not in violation of the law,” Bonsignore said.
Sue Sarkis, secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Criminal Defence Investigators Association, said she was “very, very, very concerned about these out-of-state people.
“I’m afraid they’re going to impugn the integrity of the licensed investiga-tors,” she said. “They don’t know the laws. They’re not familiar with what our limits are.”
In another development Thursday, a Denver private investigator claiming to work for acquaintances of Nicole Simpson said a witness can place either Simpson or his vehicle near the murder scene at about the time of the killings.
Robert Peterson, head of the R.W. Peterson Investigative Agency, declined to identify the potential witness and said he could not vouch for her credibility. He said she had spoken to one of his investigators.
“I think she may be a valid witness, but I’m not sure yet,” he said.
Peterson declined to identify his clients and has not turned over any infor-mation to authorities.
LOAD-DATE: September 21, 2002
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
TYPE: News
The Simpson Jury
ABC NEWS
January 30, 1997
SHOW: ABC GOOD MORNING AMERICA (7:00 am ET)
CHARLES GIBSON, Host: Well, hello, everyone, I’m Charles Gibson in New York, and you’ve signed on to Good Morning America. No busy signals here.
ELIZABETH VARGAS, Host: Good morning, Charlie. I’m Elizabeth Vargas in Los Angeles, sitting in for Joan Lunden. It is Thursday, January 30. And coming up, Charlie, as you know, I’m out here covering the OJ Simpson civil case, and the jury in that case has just completed its first full day of deliberations. It made two requests yesterday. We’re going to have the very latest in just a moment on what those requests might mean. We are also going to have a very interesting discussion this morning, we hope, with OJ Simpson’s former chief investigator. He has been with the OJ Simpson defense team since the criminal trial. He’s been an integral, intimate part of that team. We’re going to get his reaction to both trials, as well as your conversation yesterday, Charlie, with detectives Lange and Vannatter, or should we say former detectives Lange and Vannatter, with that new evidence they said was never introduced into either trial.
CHARLES GIBSON: It’s interesting the way this came about. We did have, as you mention, the former LAPD detectives who led the investigation on the Simpson and Goldman killings, detectives Lange and Vannatter, and they have written this book, and they defend themselves against charges, since they are very controversial, defend themselves against charges that they framed Simpson. And they do talk about new evidence they have. They defend themselves on the conversation they had, the interview they had, with Simpson after — a couple of days after the killings occurred. And we got a call from Bill Pavelic, the fellow you’re going to talk to, who was OJ Simpson’s lead investigator in all this, said he ought to have a chance to answer Lange and Vannatter, and we agreed with him. So he’ll be here in just a few moments.
Spencer Christian has a look at the weather this morning.
SPENCER CHRISTIAN: I’ve done a thorough investigation of the maps, and they have revealed strong winds blowing across the Rockies and the Southwest, very warm winds as well, some temperatures may climb to near record levels. But the winds, gusting up to about 70 miles an hour, could be dangerous at times, so we’ll take that further look at the weather in just a few minutes.
CHARLES GIBSON: Something that’s caught my eye, kind of an interesting situation. As you may have noticed, the ads for women’s razors and men’s razors on television, they’re — they give you a very different pitch …
SPENCER CHRISTIAN: Right.
CHARLES GIBSON: … for a men’s razor and women’s razor. And our consumer editor, Steve Filmer, sort of got interested, is there really any different? Who gets the better shave, men or women? We’ll tell you in just a few moments, give you the real deal on all of that. And as you probably all know, the “Star Wars” movies are coming back to theaters near you on the 20th anniversary of those movies, so we’ll have an interview with George Lucas today, exclusive interview with him on the reemergence of the “Star Wars” movies. Elizabeth?
ELIZABETH VARGAS: All right, thanks, Charlie. I’ll be watching that shaving segment with baited breath. At any rate, let’s get back to our lead story of the day, which is the OJ Simpson civil trial. As we said earlier, the jurors did spend their first full day of deliberations yesterday. Jeffrey Toobin joins me now.
Yesterday, jurors made two requests of Judge Fujisaki. They asked to see a loupe, a magnifying loupe like this, and they asked to see a picture of a test tube. What are — what does all this mean?
JEFFREY TOOBIN, ABC News Legal Analyst: Well, the bottom line is, Simpson’s lawyers are pleased by this request, because what it means is that they are taking seriously two of the most controversial claims by the defense in this case. First, this appears to be useful only to look at the famous photographs, and …
ELIZABETH VARGAS: Right, contact sheets, similar to …
JEFFREY TOOBIN: Contact sheets.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: … something like we’ve got here.
JEFFREY TOOBIN: And the — what the defense has claimed is that the photos on these contact sheets are phony, are fake, doctored. And this would appear that they mean they’re looking at it carefully and seeing if they can tell, based on their own observations, whether they are, in fact, phony pictures.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: And the other controversial claim is that, in fact, OJ Simpson, he donated his blood, gave this blood as a sample to the police, and that they may have taken that blood and planted it. Is that why they’re looking at this photograph of the test tube?
JEFFREY TOOBIN: The test tube has a purple top which contains a preservative called EDTA. There’s a lot of very complicated evidence in the trial about whether it was EDTA found in the blood on the murder — at the murder scene. What that means is, again, the jury is considering the issue, it appears — and we don’t know if it’s one juror or all 12 jurors — of whether the blood was planted.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: We should say the judge denied the request to see the photograph. They said — Judge Fujisaki said, “You’ve got a test tube, in fact, available to you to look at in person.” I know we’re asking you to read tea leaves in all of this, but what do you suppose this means? You said earlier you think they — looks like they’re settling in.
JEFFREY TOOBIN: Right, well, the other sort of interesting thing we learned yesterday is, the jury has said, “From now on, we want to break at 4:15,” as op-posed to 4:30, when the trial had previously end. You wouldn’t think a jury that’s about to decide tomorrow is sort of making its schedule. You know, it’s important to remember that for all that the first jury room was out for only about two hours, the Oliver North jury, which was a trial of about the same length that this — as this case, was out for 16 days.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: Wow.
JEFFREY TOOBIN: So, you know, juries can, you know, take some time.
ELIZABETH VARGAS: Jeffrey Toobin, we could be in here for a long haul. Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
Sleuths Set To Try Any Leads O.J. Has
Daily News (New York)
May 27, 1996, Monday
A team of sleuths from the land of Sam Spade has offered to probe the slay-ings of O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife and her pal for free but said yesterday they’ll need the athlete’s full cooperation.
The crack crew of six, led by legendary private eye Hal Lipset, was spurred by Simpson’s recent comments that there were leads in San Francisco the football great’s hometown but that he couldn’t afford to follow them up.
“We want to get to the bottom of it,” Joel Michel, a San Francisco investiga-tor and a vice president of the World Association of Detectives, told the Daily News.
“We’re not here to judge anyone, just to seek the truth,” he said, adding that the detectives were willing to forgo their usual $ 100-per-hour fees.
The gumshoes hatched the idea over lunch recently with the renowned Lipset a former Watergate investigator famed for designing a bug that looked like a mar-tini olive.
“We’ve talked about it, and we feel very good about what our offer is,” Sam Webster, WAD executive director, told The News. “We don’t think anyone has ever done this.”
Lipset, who turns 77 today, told the San Franciso Examiner, “If there are leads in San Francisco that somebody is not looking into, then I think they should be.
“We’re serious,” he added. “But if I find something, I want the right to tell the public and the San Francisco district attorney.”
Bill Pavelic, a former LAPD detective who worked for Simpson, 48, during his successful defense of double-murder charges, told The Examiner he welcomed the offer and would discuss it with the gridiron star.
He confirmed there were investigative leads in San Francisco, but declined to offer details.
Simpson is going to have to come clean with the San Francisco supersnoops if they are to determine whether the leads in the June 12, 1994, murders are real or just stuff that dreams are made of.
“We can’t get started until he gives us something to go on,” said Michel. “But so far, we haven’t heard diddly from him.”
The football star was widely mocked for his vow to devote his life to hunting down the “real” killer following his Oct. 3 acquittal in the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
During his publicity tour of England earlier this month, he cryptically re-ferred to the San Francisco leads in a speech at Oxford University, where he complained he was virtually broke.