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Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada)

July 28, 1994 Thursday Final Edition

L.A. police ‘clue chaser’ handling 250,000 tips

SOURCE: FROM SPECTATOR WIRE SERVICES

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A10

LENGTH: 494 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES

OS ANGELES — Encouraged by the promise of a huge reward or the chance to contribute to a historic investigation, 250,000 callers have flooded a newly created hotline with tips about the O.J. Simpson murder case, while similarly besieged police have designated a full-time “clue chaser” to run down the leads coming to them.

“It’s beyond belief,” Mr. Simpson’s lead attorney, Robert Shapiro, said of the hotline deluge. He said calls have become “so overwhelming” that the opera-tors have had to install a special back-up recording system to keep up with the crush.

Tipsters have included private investigators with clues based largely on news reports, amateur detectives with theories implicating other would-be suspects and people claiming to have witnessed the events surrounding the grisly murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, 35, and Ronald Lyle Goldman, 25, on June 12 outside her apartment in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.

Although some of the tips are seemingly credible, many appear to be the prod-ucts of overactive imaginations. One Maryland woman has called repeatedly to tell of dreams in which she sees another killer. To her frustration, Mr. Simp-son’s camp has not gotten back to her.

“We’re hearing from every psycho and every crazy person,” said Bill Pavelic, an investigative consultant working with the Simpson team.

“But if I get one call in a hundred that’s a good lead, it’s worth it.”

Thin promise
Rising to that thin promise, investigators on both sides of the nationally publicized probe are painstakingly chasing down each of their leads, reluctant to pass up any information that could later prove important.

The pace of tips has convinced some Los Angeles Police Department officials that Mr. Simpson’s camp may be fuelling the fires in part to occupy detectives who might otherwise be building a case against Mr. Simpson, 47.

Any tip that is not checked out could be used against the prosecution at trial. Mr. Simpson’s camp already has made clear its intention to attack the thoroughness and competence of the investigation into their high-profile client.

“There’s people that are giving us theories, there’s psychics, that kind of thing,” said Detective Dennis Payne of the police department’s Robbery-Homicide Division.

With the stakes so high for both sides, police detectives and Simpson inves-tigators are simultaneously pounding the pavement, occasionally running into one another at the crime scene and other locations.

According to sources in both camps, the most recent wave of tips has featured several from eager private investigators trying to ferret out new clues in the case.

While most of the tips — founded and unfounded alike — are about the prin-cipal players in the celebrated whodunnit, many come from people with a dizzying array of thoughts on other issues.

One Santa Barbara woman, for instance, hypothesized that a large dog might have carried a bloody glove to Mr. Simpson’s home.

LOAD-DATE: October 13, 2002

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

TYPE: News