High-profile attorney F. Lee Bailey, who defended such celebrity defendants as OJ Simpson and Patricia Hearst, died Thursday at his Massachusetts home, the AP reports. He was 87.
Bailey’s client list included Simpson, accused of the brutal murders of his ex-wife and her friend; Hearst, a socialite heiress who went on a crime spree with her kidnappers; Army Capt. Ernest Medina, a military officer charged in connection with the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War; and Dr. Samuel Sheppard, whose alleged murder of his wife was the inspiration of the movie and television show The Fugitive. One of Bailey’s most notorious clients was Albert DeSalvo, the so-called Boston Strangler, for which he was sentenced to life in prison. Bailey said his disappointment in the guilty verdict stemmed from the lost opportunity to study DeSalvo psychosis: “My goal was to see the Strangler wind up in a hospital, where doctors could try to find out what made him kill. Society is deprived of a study that might help deter other mass killers who lived among us, waiting for the trigger to go off inside them.”