Warning: This particular post graphically describes the wounds of the two Bundy homicide victims.
When a body is retrieved from the ocean, one of the things that a coroner must check for is whether the victim had aspirated, or inhaled water into his lungs. If not, or if there is fresh water in the lungs of the victim, that is proof that the victim did not die by drowning in the ocean. There was a scene in the movie "Chinatown" with just this kind of problem of evidence for those of you interested interested in fictional corruption in Los Angeles.
This line of investigation is a fundamental one for a coroner, and the theory behind it not only shows that the prosecution's theory of the case against O.J. Simpson was wrong, but also strongly suggests that there was something other than justice being pursued in those courts in Southern California a decade ago.
The prosecution claimed that Nicole Simpson's ex-husband, football star and actor O.J. Simpson, attacked and killed her by cutting her throat on the steps of her condomium on the night of June 12, 1994. As he was doing this, or soon after or immediately prior to her death, he was surprised by a waiter from the Mezzaluna Restaurant, Ron Goldman, whom Simpson killed by stabbing him in the back fatally.
The prosecution's theory fails in the deaths of both victims.
Nicole Simpson suffered a throat cut so deep that it nicked a bone in the spinal column. All major arteries and veins to and from the head were severed. She was almost completely "bled out" (most of the blood in her system was out of her) when she was found by police. Even her epiglottis, the flap of skin that covers the windpipe when someone swallows, had been cut. It was a devastating wound that could have killed her. But it wasn't cause of her death.
There was no aspiration of blood into her lungs. Simply, she was not breathing when her throat was cut. Even if she were unconscious when her throat was cut, she would still be breathing. More telling, there was no blood found in her mouth or sinuses. If she had been alive when her throat was cut, blood would have spurted out of her neck under great pressure, some of it going into her mouth and sinuses. The wound to the epiglottis alone should have produced blood in the mouth. She had already "bled out" when her throat was cut.
The ghastly throat wound was delivered to Nicole Simpson after she had stopped breathing and bleeding.
The wound that bled out Nicole Simpson was a puncture of the right common carotid artery on the side of her neck. It wasn't as dramatic as the throat wound, but because it was the only other potentially fatal wound that would have caused so much loss of blood, it is the only wound that could have killed her.
Ron Goldman's cause of death has similar problems. The wound that was supposed to have killed him was the stab in his back that cut his abdominal aorta, which carries blood from the heart to the lower torso and extremities. If that had been the death wound, Goldman's pleural (chest) cavity would have filled up with much of the blood in his system until he weakened and the heart stopped pumping. About a half cup of blood (100 to 200 milliliters), or the amount that drained from his heart, was found in his chest cavity. In short, that wound, like Nicole Simpson's throat wound, had been delivered after his death.
Goldman's body was found in a sitting position, slumped against a tree stump. Someone would have had to have lifted up the dead Goldman in order to deliver the back wound, and then place him against the tree stump.
Goldman also had a wound on the side of the neck that punctured his carotid artery.
Neither of the victims' wounds on the sides of their necks, the only wounds which could have killed them, would have produced death immediately. The victims could have continued to struggle, could have moved, could have vocalized shouts of help, with the fatal wound at the side of their necks.
Even if both victims had immediately gone into shock, it would have taken time for them to bleed to death, somewhere from five to ten minutes. This would require the killer to wait around the crime scene of his double homicide for precious minutes until both victims had bled to death, and then deliver ghastly but meaningless wounds to the dead bodies.
The autopsies do not make sense in the context of the crime scene, and they do not fit the prosecution's theory of the case or any imagined theory of a double homicide. Killers in the middle of Los Angeles do not stand around a crime scene waiting for people to bleed to death in order to inflict meaningless wounds. They don't lift up a dead body to stab it in the back.
This had to have been evident to the coroner when the bodies were first examined.
Dr. Irwin Golden, the coroner who examined the two victims, was nervous when he testified at a pre-trial hearing. By the time of the trial the prosecution replaced him with another doctor in the coroner's office.


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