PHILIP LEWIS VANNATTER
POLICE DETECTIVE
18-4-1941 - 20-1-2012

PHILIP Vannatter, who as a Los Angeles police detective helped lead the investigation into the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, and who was a major prosecution witness in the failed attempt to convict O. J. Simpson of the crime, has died of cancer in Los Angeles. He was 70.

Vannatter was a 25-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department and no stranger to high-profile crimes - he arrested film director Roman Polanski in 1977 for having unlawful sex with an under-age girl - when he was called to the home of Nicole Simpson, the former wife of former football star O. J., on June 13, 1994. There he found the slashed corpses of Nicole and her young acquaintance Goldman.

Much of the police probe was criticised in the media and used by defence lawyers to paint a portrait of an inept and vindictive police team that may have fabricated evidence against O. J.

Vannatter and fellow officer Tom Lange defended their work in a 1997 book, saying they had provided a ''mountain of evidence'' for O. J.'s guilt but the defence had ''used a handful of police errors and the racist views of one rogue detective, Mark Fuhrman, to create a courtroom firestorm that, in the eyes of the jury, caused our 'mountain of evidence' to melt down like a cup of Ben & Jerry's ice-cream''. Vannatter was born in Griffithsville, West Virginia. His father was a coal miner who died when Philip was a boy.

He moved with his mother to Los Angeles and was working at a car parts store when he met nurse Rita Freeman, whom he soon wed. He served in the army in South Korea, and after his discharge in 1968 joined the police.

After O. J. Simpson's acquittal, many of Vannatter's critics were inclined to give him a break. He was cast as an honest policeman who had made some mistakes and run into bad luck and a tide of ill will towards the police.

He is survived by his wife, brother Joe, son Matthew, daughter Donna Thomas and five grandchildren.

NEW YORK TIMES