LOS ANGELES - O.J. Simpson's lawyers are working to build a defense aimed at establishing other suspects in the grisly slashing deaths.
Thursday, CBS News reported the defense has shipped photographs of a human bite mark on the back of Nicole Simpson's body to a forensic dentist in Florida. Defense lawyers want to establish the bite was made by someone other than their client.
The Tamarac, Fla. dentist, Robert Fish, was unavailable.
Irwin Golden, the Los Angeles deputy coroner who performed the autopsies on Simpson and Ronald Goldman, never mentioned a bite mark in his report or at the defendant's preliminary hearing.
The disclosure intensified criticism of the coroner's office, already characterized as the prosecution's weakest link.
"A real disaster hole," Cyril Wecht calls it. A past president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Wecht says, "There was much more that could have been done and should have been done" by Golden to weigh the possibility of other suspects or multiple assailants.
A key criticism remains Golden's failure to conduct tests to see if a single knife could have caused all the wounds. His testimony at the preliminary hearing left that unanswered.
He described two kinds of wounds - one with a sharp edge and blunt edge, the other with a forked edge - but couldn't say whether that meant one or two weapons were involved.
"It's the kind of peg a juror will grab onto, especially one looking for a reason not to convict," Wecht says. "They'll argue that the prosecution zeroed in on O.J. to the exclusion of the rest of the world."
Jury consultant John Gilleland agrees: "That's enough for reasonble doubt. It's very typical for jurors to fall back on one line of reasoning. It becomes their mantra."
Former federal prosecutor Laurie Levenson says the prosecution will be in trouble if "it just tries to ignore the issue." But she adds that a second person "doesn't get Simpson off the hook . . . Simpson still has to explain how his blood was at the murder scene."
Her argument against the multiple-assailant theory: Only one set of footprints. "I don't see how someone could walk away from all that blood without leaving prints."
Defense lawyers have pushed the idea of other suspects from the start. They've had a tip line, demanded police records on similar killings and cited unidentified fingerprints at the murder scene.
Talk about multiple assailants has bounced around town all week, driven largely by a mystery witness who says he has second-hand information three people visited the condo the night of the murders.
The witness, John Dunton, also said a private detective was across the street and may have witnessed the killings.
But on Thursday, private eye Anthony Pellicano characterized Dunton as a liar.
Pellicano says Dunton told police he was the detective outside the condo. That, said Pellicano, is "a fabrication and blatantly untrue. I have never worked for . . . any lawyer on behalf of O.J. Simpson."
Dunton, twice convicted of forging checks, was jailed Wednesday after refusing to testify before the grand jury investigating Al "A.C." Cowlings.
Pellicano contends Dunton made up the story and then was told by his lawyer to "shut up" when the grand jury summoned him.
