OJ Case: Defense Expert Says Bloodstains Had Preservative EDTA

By JIM NEWTON and BILL BOYARSKY

July 25, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Moving to shore up their argument that police planted evidence in the murder case against O.J. Simpson, the former football star’s attorneys elicited testimony Monday from a nationally renowned scientist who said two bloodstains were laced with traces of a preservative.

The expert, Fredric Rieders, patiently lectured an attentive jury on the scientific methods used to screen blood samples for a preservative known as EDTA. Rieders’ testimony was on a dense subject, but one that goes to the heart of the defense’s much-discussed conspiracy theory in the Simpson case. According to Rieders, traces of the preservative turned up in blood stains found on a sock in Simpson’s bedroom and on a gate near the scene of the crimes.

EDTA is contained in the purple-topped test tubes used by the Los Angeles Police Department and the county coroner’s office to keep blood from coagulating after it is drawn. The blood of Simpson and the two victims was placed in EDTA tubes.

The traces of EDTA on the gate and socks, according to the defense, suggest that drops from the test tubes were used to stain those items. Under cross-examination, however, Rieders said he was surprised to learn that an FBI agent had tested his own blood and found similar levels of the preservative, raising questions about whether the preservative may be more concentrated in blood than Rieders believed was normal.

If the jury accepts the expert’s conclusions about the presence of the preservative–as opposed to the FBI’s findings–it could cause the panel to believe that the blood on the socks and gate was put there by police rather than splashed there during the murders. That could offer the defense circumstantial evidence of a conspiracy and one basis upon which the Simpson team would argue that the jury should acquit Simpson of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Simpson has pleaded not guilty, and his attorneys have attacked the prosecution’s physical evidence by suggesting that some of it was mishandled and that other evidence was deliberately planted to implicate the famous defendant. They have produced no direct evidence to support the evidence-planting theory, but Rieders’ testimony on Monday offered the first hint of support for the defense contention.

After two weeks of halting and sometimes unproductive defense testimony, Rieders’ low-key presentation–delivered by an experienced witness who made frequent eye contact with the jurors and spoke in a low, authoritative German accent–appeared to set the defense case back on course. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark’s cross-examination raised some questions about his findings and appeared to hold the jury’s interest.

“Do you have an opinion,” Simpson attorney Robert Blasier asked during the morning session, “on whether there is EDTA present in the stain from the back gate?”

“In my opinion,” Rieders responded, staring over his reading glasses at the lawyer, “yes, it demonstrates that there is EDTA present in that stain.”

Rieders delivered the same findings with respect to a stain from a sock–blood that DNA tests strongly linked to Nicole Simpson and that forms one of the strongest pieces of prosecution evidence against Simpson, since that sock was found in the defendant’s bedroom on the day after the murders.

During a break in Monday’s proceedings, lead Simpson trial lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. cheerfully proclaimed that Rieders’ testimony had helped establish important points for the defense.

“I think today was a plus day,” said Cochran. “He’s very qualified, doing a good job.”

Cochran also criticized Clark’s cross-examination of Rieders. Cochran, who has frequently baited the government lawyers, accused prosecutors of using the opportunity to re-establish Clark’s connection with the jury even though he said another member of the government team, Rockne Harmon, would have been better equipped to conduct the questioning.

“They’re trying to showcase her for the jury,” said Cochran. “But Rock should have done it.”

Debating Blood

Prosecutors say the reason that blood with Nicole Simpson’s genetic markers turned up on her ex-husband’s sock is simple: Simpson splashed blood from his ex-wife on his socks as he strode away from the scene of the crimes. Defense attorneys suggest a more complicated scenario: That police eager to frame Simpson for the murders brushed Nicole Simpson’s preserved blood on the socks found in the defendant’s bedroom.

Although Rieders did not address that question directly, his testimony generally bolstered the defense theory by stating that enough preservative was in the blood from the socks to preclude it having come directly from a bleeding person as opposed to a test tube laced with the preservative.

“Do you have an opinion whether that could have come from a purple-topped tube?” Blasier asked him at the end of his direct examination.

“Yes,” Rieders responded. “Of course it could.”

But under cross-examination, the same witness acknowledged that he was surprised to learn that an FBI agent had tested his own blood and found traces of the same preservative, an admission that cast a shadow across his testimony that the blood would likely have come from a test tube, not a person.

“Isn’t it true, doctor,” Clark asked, “that his own unpreserved blood came up very similarly in results to the bloodstains found on the gate and the sock. Isn’t that true, doctor?”

“Surprisingly,” Rieders said. “Yes.”

“Yes?” Clark repeated archly, drawing attention to the answer and prompting a defense objection. Obviously irritated, Judge Lance A. Ito summoned the attorneys to the sidebar and conferred briefly with them before allowing the questioning to continue.

Clark returned to the agent’s test of his own blood time and again, a topic that brought her into increasingly tense conflict with the witness. Rieders, who had appeared comfortable and relaxed on direct examination, twisted in his chair, stopped making eye contact with the jury and glared back at the prosecutor as she belittled his research and challenged his findings.

By contrast, Clark seemed at ease, often working without notes but occasionally pausing to consult with the FBI agent, who was sitting in the courtroom.

The tension between Clark and the witness mounted and erupted in several sharp exchanges. At one point, Rieders objected to one of Clark’s questions, saying it was too complicated to answer. When Clark suggested that Rieders had misread a government report on EDTA in the bloodstream, the witness dismissed her interpretation as “absurd.”

And later, when she was trying to make a point about the presence of the preservative in certain foods and other items, he used the opportunity to make a cutting remark about his questioner.

“If you drink alcohol, you will become inebriated,” Clark said. “Correct?”

“You will,” he answered, drawing laughter from the audience and even the judge but not provoking so much as a smile from Clark. “I won’t. I won’t drink that much.”

Jurors Attentive

On a day when the release of new transcripts highlighted the divisions and allegations that plagued the jury just a few months ago, it was an attentive and focused panel that followed Rieders’ testimony.

At least half a dozen jurors took close notes during much of Rieders’ testimony, and all watched the witness carefully even as he reviewed the specifics of his long, distinguished resume.

Their attention was riveted throughout Blasier’s carefully scripted questioning. Working from a thick stack of notes, the attorney guided Rieders through a detailed set of questions intended to simplify the complicated topics.

Blasier illustrated many of his points with the defense’s familiar cobalt-blue slides, each breaking down complicated scientific concepts into relatively digestible nuggets.

Although the testimony broached a range of scientific topics, the jury in the Simpson case has spent months laboring over complex testimony, and even the witness deferred to the panel’s expertise at one point.

“You know more about this than I do,” he said, looking at the panelists, who met his gaze. “You’ve been so well educated in it.”

When it was Clark’s turn to cross-examine the expert, the jurors remained closely attentive. A few stopped taking notes at various points, but all of them watched the increasingly testy faceoff with great interest, their eyes darting back and forth between the lawyer and witness as they fired questions and answers at each other.

Witness Accused of Mistake

The day ended with Rieders still on the stand and Clark posing a particularly sensitive set of questions for the expert. Several years ago, Ventura County prosecutors, working with a specially designated prosecutor from Los Angeles, used Rieders as an expert in a case to determine whether a man who had died was poisoned by a business rival.

Outside the jury’s presence on Monday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian Kelberg said that Rieders had made a grave error in that case. According to Kelberg, who initially had opposed Rieders taking the stand at all, the witness concluded that the victim in that case had ingested a poison made from oleander, a common but poisonous plant.

But after Rieders announced that conclusion, another expert was brought in and said the victim had not in fact been poisoned. Charges against the defendant were dismissed, and Kelberg said Rieders had “put his professional standing . . . above the liberty interest” of the defendant.

Sitting a few feet away from the prosecutor on Monday, Rieders shook his head sadly and stared at the government team.

Defense attorneys objected to any questioning about that case, but Kelberg reminded Ito that the judge had allowed Simpson’s lawyers to ask government witnesses about mistakes made by the deputy coroner who performed the autopsies on Nicole Simpson and Goldman. Ito agreed to allow the questioning, but said the prosecution could not ask Rieders about the legal ramifications of his testimony, since the doctor could not say why the charges against the defendant had been dismissed.

As the court day concluded Monday, Clark was focusing on the Ventura County case, and the topic instantly drew heated and defensive responses from Rieders.

Clark, her voice raised, challenged Rieders directly by stating that another doctor–one whose credentials the prosecutor suggested were more impressive than Rieders’–had looked at the same tissue that Rieders had examined and come to different conclusions.

“That is incorrect,” Rieders said defiantly. Rather, the witness said, the subsequent test had examined decomposed tissue and thus was less reliable than his own.

The cross-examination was halted at that point because one of Ito’s courtroom deputies needed to leave early. It is scheduled to resume this morning, although Rieders said he had been hoping to leave town as soon as possible.