The blood.

Another piece of evidence that was handled by a variety of different members of the investigation team was blood. Some of the blood evidence was taken from the actual scene of the murder, Simpson’s Ford Bronco and more was taken from Simpson himself in order to make comparisons to the blood suspected to be from the suspect, and to compare to blood found at the scene. The detectives, scenes of crime officers and forensic scientists handled this evidence.

The detectives were the first members of the investigation team to actually handle the blood evidence. The detectives handled the evidence after they performed a search of the scene. This was done to make a list of evidence in their notes. This list was of evidence that the detectives felt were most significant, and needed to be secured within the audit trail. Detective Mark Fuhrman was the main detective who was involved with the walk-through of the scene. Yet after Fuhrman was involved, mistakes were being made in regards to the actual securing of the evidence. Fuhrman was supposed to brief the detectives who were taking over his shift about any significant evidence that he had found at the scene. This was so that the SOCOs could correctly preserve, collect and log the evidence into the chain of custody. However detective Fuhrman had failed to do this, which then left the blood to be overlooked as nobody was aware of anything significant. Fuhrman had found blood on the gate of the scene, yet he failed to pass this information on to the next detectives who were taking over. Because of this mistake, the blood did come back indicating that it belong to Simpson, yet it was thrown out of court after speculations that it had been planted by the police officers due to it not being shown in the chain of custody. This was another of many factors that contributed to the jury acquitting Simpson.

Detective Vannatter also handled the blood evidence. He was also the detective who had accompanied Simpson to the police station in order for him to have a blood sample taken from him. After this, Vannatter’s role gave him the responsibility of securely taking the blood evidence to the exhibits officer, so that it could be logged into the chain of custody, meaning a secure audit trail would be established. However, a mistake was made when Vannatter placed the blood sample in his pocket, and took it back to the crime scene where he stayed for the next few hours. He eventually gave this to the senior SOCO, who then labelled the evidence and booked it into the log.

This mishandling of evidence proved to be damaging to the case as at the trial, questions were asked about the blood that had gone missing from the sample, and as the blood was not correctly labelled, and a secure audit trail was not established until hours later, the missing blood could not be counted for, and detective Vannatter could not explain why he entered the crime scene carrying the blood.

The scenes of crime officers who were members of the investigation team also handled all of the blood evidence. Their job role gave them the task of swabbing blood samples from the scene of the murders and other areas, such as inside Simpson's ford bronco. They were then required to bag these samples separately and securely with the suitable evidence bags and label the swabs correctly stating exactly where the blood evidence had come from, and who the person that had handled it was. All of these procedures should have been followed in order to ensure that the evidence was a part of a secure audit trail.

However, in the OJ Simpson case the scenes of crime officers made many mistakes when collecting the blood evidence. Firstly many of the blood swabs collected by the SOCO’s were placed into the same evidence bag instead of all being placed into their own evidence bag. This meant that all of the swabs that were packaged together were cross-contaminated. Another mistake made by the SOCO’s was that the majority of the blood evidence was not labelled, which resulted in a great struggle to know where the blood samples has originally came from. Another huge mistake made was the logging of the evidence. Only a few samples had been logged into the audit trail, yet the forensics laboratory had received a much higher amount of samples than what was recorded. This meant nobody knew who collected the sample, and who bagged and labelled it. Due to this, it was difficult to tell if the evidence had been tampered with, or whether some had been misplaced or lost. Because of the mistakes made, a secure audit trail was not established. This further lead to the jury questioning the validity of the evidence, and questioning how reliable it was against O.J. Simpson. This mistake was another contributing factor to the acquittal of Simpson, even though a great amount of evidence suggested that he did actually carry out the murder of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.