LOS ANGELES — Philip Vannatter, the Los Angeles police detective who led the investigation of the 1994 slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, has died.
Vannatter died of complications from cancer Friday in Santa Clarita, Calif., his wife, Rita, said. He was 70.
“He was a real blue-collar detective,” O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden said in an emotional interview Sunday. “He did his job the best he could and he was a fine detective, one of the best.”
Vannatter was among the first detectives to arrive at former football star Simpson’s mansion in June 1994 after the stabbing deaths of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Goldman.
In 1977, Vannatter arrested film director Roman Polanski in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on charges of having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.
One colleague told the Los Angeles Times in 1994 that Vannatter was a bear of a man who once kicked a door off its hinges while arresting a robbery suspect. When Vannatter worked as a detective in Los Angeles’ Venice section in the 1970s he would have contests with colleagues to see how long they could hold a sledgehammer with one arm outstretched.
But his work was challenged repeatedly during the Simpson trial, and Vannatter often responded testily on the stand when Simpson’s attorneys questioned him.
Simpson’s defense team branded Vannatter a “devil of deception” and said he had used a vial of blood from Simpson to plant evidence at the former football star’s estate. The detective acknowledged that he had a vial of Simpson’s blood in an unsealed envelope in his car during a visit to Simpson’s home, but was unapologetic about the matter and said he was simply carrying it to a criminalist.
Vannatter was perhaps more enraged by a member of his own team: Detective Mark Fuhrman, whose racist rants had been recorded in interviews with a screenwriter and who invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination under questioning by the Simpson legal team about whether he had ever planted evidence.
In 2008, Simpson was convicted in Las Vegas of criminal conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, robbery and using a deadly weapon.
“We got great pleasure seeing him incarcerated. But we didn’t need that by then anyway,” said Vannatter’s wife, Rita.
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