His Name Is Ron (30 page)

Over the phone Michael told us that the prosecution had done a great job. “I don't see how the defense can counter any of it,” he said.

At dinner Patti was nervous and scared. “It's now time for the defense bullshit,” she warned. “There will be plenty of it flying everywhere. There's going to be a lot of smooth talking and slithering movements across that courtroom, and lots of diversions from the hard evidence. They will point blame at anyone and everyone they can come up with. And there will be a slew of racial implications.”

TWENTY-TWO

It was family day in court. For the first day of its presentation, the defense would call the defendant's daughter Arnelle, his sister, Carmelita Simpson-Durio, and his mother, Eunice. All three arrived in court dressed in pale yellow.

Johnnie Cochran lost no time in reminding the jury of the defendant's glorious football past, eliciting a response from Arnelle that she “was born the same day my dad won the Heisman Trophy.” She recalled that Nicole had been ill—sometime around Mother's Day of 1994—and her father “went over to her house one day to help … with the kids and to bring her some soup and medicine.”

Arnelle said there was “an ongoing joke within the family” that her father would never prepare for a trip ahead of time. He always hurried around at the last moment.

On the day after the murders, she described her father as “very upset, emotional, confused.” That evening he sat on a couch, next to his mother, muttering about the television coverage. “He was numb,” she said.

Throughout her testimony, Arnelle frequently locked eyes with her father, who listened with a wide smile on his face.

Carmelita Simpson-Durio echoed this testimony, characterizing her brother as “shocked and dazed” that night.

Finally Carl Douglas helped the ailing Eunice Simpson into the witness chair. She spent only about twenty minutes on the stand, telling the jury how she treated her son's childhood rickets with “tender loving care,” detailing
the family history of arthritis, and describing her son's behavior on the night following the murders.

When the prosecutors decided not to cross-examine the defendant's mother, Douglas helped her back to her seat. Cochran brought her a cup of water.

In contrast to the plodding pace of the prosecution, the defense sped through numerous early witnesses in their own hectic version of a “rush to judgment.” The prosecution argued that the murders occurred about 10:15 or 10:20
P.M
. But the defense produced various Brentwood residents who claimed that they heard no barking or wailing dog until after 10:30
P.M
. One by one Marcia and Chris wore them down during cross-examination, getting them to admit that they had not really paid attention to the time or had originally told police a different story. One witness was forced to admit that he wanted to peddle his story to a tabloid magazine or talk show.

Robert Heidstra's testimony backfired on the defense. He claimed that he had heard two men arguing that night, near the scene of the crime. One man exclaimed, “Hey, hey, hey!” The other responded, but his words were drowned out by two dogs barking loudly.

When Michael heard this, he knew that it was Ron shouting, “Hey, hey, hey!” It was Ron, trying to save Nicole's life. That was in his character. He stood a little over 6 feet tall and weighed 171 pounds, but he did not hesitate to take on a former pro football player. “Ron was definitely a hero,” Michael said. “He is my hero.”

Patti agreed. “Ron was not a fighter and he was not a confrontational person, but he would not have shied away from someone in trouble.”

Heidstra originally said that he heard the shouts about 10:30
P.M
., but under cross-examination, admitted that he had not looked at his watch, and thus could not be sure of the time. Then Chris drew out a damaging admission. The witness testified that he had seen a white sport utility vehicle fleeing the area. He described it as a Jeep or a Chevrolet Blazer, but he conceded that it could have been a Ford Bronco.

Here was curious testimony. Jim Merrill is an employee of the Hertz Corporation. Before dawn on June 13, 1994, he met his company's famous spokesman at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport as his red-eye flight came in from Los Angeles. He described the defendant as relaxed and cordial.
Merrill took the defendant's golf clubs, in preparation for the scheduled match.

A few hours later the defendant called Merrill to inform him that he had to return to Los Angeles immediately and that he wanted his golf clubs back. His voice was “cracking,” Merrill said. “It sounded like he was crying.”

Merrill raced to O'Hare in an attempt to return the clubs. But he missed the defendant's departure, and sent the clubs back to Los Angeles on a later flight.

Carl Douglas asked Merrill if he subsequently spoke to the defendant about his clubs.

“Yes,” Merrill replied.

“What day was that?”

“That was the following day. Tuesday.”

Douglas asked, “Did you call him, or did he call you?”

“He called me,” Merrill answered.

Golf clubs? We wondered what kind of man is worried about his golf clubs when his ex-wife has just been butchered? Is he that obsessed with the stupid game? Or was there something about the golf bag and its contents that was of deep concern?

The defense brought Dr. Robert Huizenga to the stand. In the week following the murders, Robert Shapiro had hired Dr. Huizenga to examine his client twice, and to evaluate his “mental status.” The doctor, a former team physician of the Los Angeles Raiders, testified that the defendant “looked like Tarzan” but walked like “Tarzan's grandfather,” and suffered from a host of football injuries that limited the movement of his knees, ankles, elbows, wrists, and hands. However, the doctor's examination revealed “no evidence of bruises, scrapes, or other injuries” that could have resulted from a struggle. The doctor said that the cuts on the defendant's left hand “appeared” to have been caused by broken glass, but could have been caused by a knife.

On cross-examination Brian Kelberg focused on the key point. He forced Dr. Huizenga to admit that the defendant “certainly could hold a knife.” At another point Brian asked if the doctor had discovered anything during his examination that would have prevented the defendant “from murdering two human beings on June 12.”

“No,” the doctor replied.

When Brian turned his attention to the defendant's mental status during that fateful week, Dr. Huizenga waxed poetic. “The tack I took,” he said, “was to address his mental status problems and his insomnia and his difficulty handling this incredible, incredible stress that maybe no other human being short of Job has endured.”

Excuse me, Patti thought. You want to talk about stress?

Kim could only mutter, “Waah, give him a tissue.”

Brian's voice grew hard. He asked, “If he had murdered two human beings, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, would that be the kind of thing that would cause a great weight to be on a man's shoulders?”

After Judge Ito overruled Robert Shapiro's objection, Doctor Huizenga replied, “If someone hypothetically killed someone, they certainly would have a great weight on their shoulders.”

Brian produced evidence that “someone” literally killed “someone.” When he showed the doctor the autopsy photos of Ron, Dr. Huizenga appeared rattled. He had to take a few deep breaths before he could continue. Brian asked him, if Ron had suffered hand injuries while backing away, could that explain why the defendant's body showed no evidence of a struggle.

“Yes,” the suddenly subdued doctor answered.

Brian presented the now-famous exercise video that the defendant had recorded about three weeks prior to the murders. It seemed to produce a mixed reaction in the courtroom. We saw a man dancing across the screen, flashing his phony smile, demonstrating aerobic exercises with apparent ease. Others saw a man having difficulty with his knees. The defendant himself laughed and chuckled and pointed to his own image on the screen.

We were not laughing when the tape picked up the killer's sick attempt at humor. As he was shadowboxing, jabbing with his fists, he quipped, “I'm telling you, you just gotta get your space in if you're working out with the wife, if you know what I mean. You could always blame it on working out.”

Two horrible events reminded us once again that life is fragile.

Reporter Robin Clark was covering the trial for
The Philadelphia Inquirer.
His colleagues regarded him as a fantastic wordsmith. On those rare occasions when Dominick Dunne could not attend the trial, Robin would take his seat. A genuinely nice guy, he was usually attired in blue jeans and a sport jacket. He was always pleasant to us, and, like Dominick, he seemed to be in our corner.

Robin's cousin Nicole Weaver and her friend Melissa Penn were visiting L.A., and on Friday, August 4, Robin decided to take them for a drive along the Pacific Coast Highway. They were in the Santa Monica area when Robin's Volkswagen van collided with a Volvo, and all three were killed. We were very saddened when we heard about the accident.

Judge Ito recessed the proceedings in Robin's memory, saying, “He was liked and admired and, most importantly, respected by his colleagues. I think that's the highest tribute that anybody can pay in the journalism profession.”

And then on Sunday, Dominick Dunne's son Alex was reported missing. Thirty-eight-year-old Alex Dunne was from San Francisco, but he was visiting his ailing mother at her home in Nogales, Arizona. On Saturday morning he borrowed his mother's beige 1980 Toyota Corolla station wagon and drove to a rugged area along the Mexican border to go hiking or bicycle riding in the Santa Rita Mountains. He had not been seen since. On Monday Dominick caught a plane and headed for Arizona to help in the search.

In court Judge Ito kept Robin Clark's seat empty, and a deputy hung his press pass on the back of the seat.

We ached for both families.

Throughout the trial, Dominick, especially, had been a wonderful stabilizing force for us. Every morning he had a sincere smile on his face and would give us a warm “Hello.” He was always concerned that we were doing okay. He gave us advance copies of his
Vanity Fair
articles, which we read with rapt attention because he often came up with new pieces of information that invariably turned out to be true. Because he had lost his own daughter to a murderer, we knew that if he lost his son, too, he would be completely destroyed.

We called him several times in Arizona to offer our moral support. There did not seem to be any indication of foul play, but Dominick worried about sunstroke, snake bite, or worse.

On Wednesday Dominick, peering down from a private plane, spotted the car parked near the head of a trail on rugged Madera Canyon in the Coronado National Forest, forty-five miles south of Tucson. Search crews began to concentrate on the area.

On Thursday evening, dehydrated and exhausted, Alex Dunne walked out of the forest and encountered a Nogales police officer who was guarding the station wagon. He explained that a weak ankle had buckled on him and a nasty twenty-five-foot fall had caused a previous back problem to flare up so that he could barely move. Sometime during the past several days he had heard searchers calling for him, but his throat was so parched he could not
answer loud enough to be heard. It was an afternoon rain on Thursday that had revived him enough to rise and endure a four-and-a-half-hour trek down the mountain. He was taken to a hospital for observation and X rays on his ankle.

The next day, as he was interviewed by reporters, he acknowledged that his—and his family's—ordeal would undoubtedly be chronicled in his father's book about the Goldman-Brown murders. “I'm now one of the subplots,” he quipped.

Of course, we were very relieved for Dominick, and looked forward to seeing him back in court.

The defense continued its case with a series of witnesses designed to bolster their absurd theory that virtually the entire law-enforcement community of Los Angeles was attempting to frame the killer. During direct testimony, each witness seemed to add tidbits to the theory, but the prosecutors did a wonderful job of tearing them down on cross-examination, frequently drawing out bits of damaging testimony.

Phil Vannatter commented publicly, “The police conspiracy theory is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life.”

As the case plodded on, Judge Ito and the attorneys from both sides grew increasingly short-tempered. In our view, it was the judge's own fault. He had lost control of the courtroom from the very first day, and he seemed clueless how to regain any judicial muscle.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the United States, developments were taking place that would—in some people's minds—render meaningless the weeks and months of technical testimony. These would set the trial completely off course, hand the defense a dubious trump card, and ignite our family's indignation to the point of explosion. Early on, Robert Shapiro had promised that the defense would not play the race card, but when Johnnie Cochran took over, race became one of the key issues.