Parker Center

Parker Center, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department at 150 North Los Angeles Street, served as the central hub for the investigation into the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was here that detectives from the Robbery-Homicide Division, including Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange, coordinated the case from what became known as the "Simpson war room." The building also housed LAPD crime laboratory facilities where DNA amplification and evidence processing were conducted, separate from the department's Piper Tech facility located one to two miles away. On the afternoon of June 13, 1994, O.J. Simpson was brought to Parker Center with his attorneys Howard Weitzman and Skip Taft, and Detective Vannatter's decision to leave the building that day carrying Simpson's reference blood vial — rather than booking it on-site, a process that could have been completed in as little as ten minutes — became one of the central disputes at trial. The defense argued across both the criminal and civil proceedings that this detour to Rockingham, where Vannatter handed the blood to criminalist Dennis Fung, represented a critical break in the chain of custody and opened the door to evidence contamination or planting. Parker Center's evidence handling procedures were scrutinized repeatedly through the testimony of Vannatter, Fung, criminalist Collin Yamauchi, and tow truck driver Bernie Douroux, whose account of the Bronco's retrieval further underscored defense claims that the investigation's chain of custody was unreliable from its earliest hours.