Archive for March 30th, 2026

Obit watch: March 30, 2026.

Monday, March 30th, 2026

Dr. Henry C. Lee, forensic scientist. He may have been most famous for testifying at the OJ trial.

Dr. Lee testified for the defense, saying that there was “something wrong” with the way the Los Angeles Police Department had handled the blood that was collected as evidence.
His testimony supported the defense team’s suggestion that the evidence could have been tampered with and that officers might have planted Mr. Simpson’s blood at the crime scene.

In the mid-1980s, in the so-called preppy murder case, Dr. Lee was hired by the team defending Robert E. Chambers Jr., who was accused of murdering Jennifer Levin in Central Park. Dr. Lee was never called to testify because he told Mr. Chambers’s lawyer, Jack Litman, that his client was “guilty as hell.” Mr. Chambers pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 1988.

In 2007, the judge in the murder trial of Mr. Spector ruled that Dr. Lee, a consultant for the defense, had removed something from the crime scene and hidden it from the prosecution.
Prosecutors contended that it was a piece of fingernail that would have shown that the actress Lana Clarkson had resisted having a gun placed in her mouth before being shot at Mr. Spector’s California home. The defense claimed that she had shot herself.
The judge did not hold Dr. Lee in contempt, and Dr. Lee denied taking anything from the crime scene. After the first trial ended in a hung jury, Mr. Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009.
In 2023, Connecticut’s attorney general agreed to a $25 million settlement with two men who had spent three decades in jail after being convicted of murder. Those convictions, which were overturned in 2020, had been based in part on testimony by Dr. Lee regarding the supposed presence of blood on a towel. A federal judge ruled that Dr. Lee had fabricated the evidence, saying that there was no corroboration that he had conducted any blood tests on the towel.
Dr. Lee defended himself in a statement, saying, “I have no motive nor reason to fabricate evidence.”

Mary Beth Hurt. Other credits include “Law & Order”, “Law & Order:SVU”, and “Lady in the Water”.

James Tolkan. Other credits include “They Might Be Giants”, “Bone Tomahawk”, “Serpico”, “Prince of the City”, and “The Hat Squad”.

Letizia Mowinckel, historical footnote. She bought clothes for Jacqueline Kennedy.

Impressed by her friend’s style and thrift, Mrs. Kennedy enlisted Mrs. Mowinckel to obtain clothes discreetly from French designers and send them to the White House. During the election, the press had criticized the chic Mrs. Kennedy for favoring foreign designers. She chose the American designer Oleg Cassini, long known for his work with Hollywood stars, as her personal couturier during her husband’s presidency, but her taste for Parisian fashions was unabated.

Among the clothes she bought: the pink Chanel suit.

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One just before it returned to Washington, and Mrs. Kennedy, who stood next to Mr. Johnson, refused to remove the suit. Mrs. Johnson recalled, “Then with something — if you can say a person that gentle, that dignified, had an element of fierceness — she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’”