Henry C. Lee, renowned forensic scientist who testified in defence of O.J. Simpson, dies at 87

NEW YORK - Dr Henry C. Lee, a renowned forensic scientist who testified in numerous high-profile criminal cases, most notably the 1995 murder trial of former football star O.J. Simpson, died on March 27 at his home in Henderson, Nevada. He was 87.

His death, following a brief illness, was announced by his family and the University of New Haven in Connecticut, where he was a professor for more than 50 years.

Dr Lee served as a consultant to some 600 law enforcement agencies and testified more than 1,000 times in criminal and civil court in the United States and abroad, the university said. In 2000, The New York Times called him “perhaps the world’s most highly regarded forensic criminologist”, though his reputation was called into question later in his career.

Many of his cases were widely publicised, but none drew more attention than the Simpson case, which became a deliberation about race in America. Dr Lee testified for the defence, 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 defence team’s suggestion that the evidence could have been tampered with and that officers might have planted Simpson’s blood at the crime scene. Simpson was acquitted of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, his former wife, and her friend, Ronald L. Goldman.

Dr Lee served as a consultant on other cases that drew extensive public attention, including the 1996 killing of six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey in Colorado and the 2007 murder trial of record producer Phil Spector.

But it was in 1976, when he identified a murdered woman based on the fragments of bone, teeth and fingernails he was able to find after her body had been put through a wood-chipping machine, that he began to make a name for himself. He helped to convict her husband in what became Connecticut’s first murder conviction without a corpse.

Dr Lee also once managed to have 11 miles of one of the nation’s busiest highways shut down overnight to re-create a shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike. His career, the Times wrote in 2000, “tipped the balance in favour of crime-fighting as science rather than art”.

He did not, however, hesitate to use theatricality in the courtroom when he considered it necessary. He dropped red ink from a fountain pen held at various heights and angles to show jurors how blood splatters could reveal the way a crime had been committed. He used ketchup and mustard as props to demonstrate how a sequence of multiple stabbings could be determined.

He also used his dry wit on the witness stand. In 1991, he testified for the defence in a sexual assault trial that resulted in the acquittal of William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of former President John F. Kennedy.

When asked by the prosecution why he had used a silk handkerchief to rub on the grass in front of the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach, Florida, to see if the grass would have left stains on the accuser’s panties, Dr Lee replied: “Usually, I do not carry panties. I carry handkerchief.”

Henry Chang-yuh Lee was born Nov 22, 1938, in Rugao, China, north-west of Shanghai. His father, Homing Lee, and mother, Annfu Wang, were business owners. The family fled to Taiwan in the 1940s, during a period of conflict between the nationalists and the communists in China.

While travelling separately to meet the family in Taiwan, his father was killed in a shipwreck, and his mother had to raise 13 children alone, Dr Lee said in 2016, during an appearance at a Connecticut high school.

Their once-affluent family was left with little money. As a child, he owned one pair of shoes, he said, and he took them off during his 2-mile walk to school to keep them from wearing out.

His mother, who lived to be more than 100 years old, pushed him to succeed, spanking him when he didn’t do his homework. “Today, they would call it child abuse,” he said. “But I thank her for it.”

After finishing school, he enrolled at a police academy, one of the few opportunities available to him, and became a captain with the Taipei City Police Department. He married Margaret Song in 1962, and in 1965 they left for New York at the urging of his sister Sylvia Lee-Huang, a biochemistry professor at New York University.

At the time, he knew four words of English, he told the Times in 2000, and worked as a server, groundskeeper, stock boy and martial arts instructor while attending the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in forensic science in 1972.

He went on to earn a master’s degree in biochemistry in 1974 and a doctorate in 1975, both from New York University, before joining the University of New Haven, where he founded the forensic science programme.

From 1978 to 2000, Dr Lee served as the chief criminalist for the state of Connecticut and the director of the state’s Police Forensic Science Laboratory. From 1998 to 2000, he also served as commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Public Safety and the Connecticut State Police.

Dr Lee’s first wife died in 2017. He is survived by Xiaping Jiang, whom he married in 2018; two children, Sherry Hersey and Stanley Lee, from his first marriage; two stepsons, Yan Liu and Tianchen Liu; four grandchildren; and his sister Sylvia.

Later in life, Dr Lee faced scrutiny himself, as his work on two cases and his reputation were challenged.

In 2007, the judge in the murder trial of 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 actress Lana Clarkson had resisted having a gun placed in her mouth before being shot at Spector’s California home. The defence 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, Spector was convicted of second-degree murder in 2009.

In 2023, Connecticut’s attorney general agreed to a US$25 million (S$32 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.” NYTIMES