His Name Is Ron (39 page)

One evening we played a game called “What If?” One of the questions was “What if I only had an hour left to live?”

I responded, “For the first five minutes, I would do the obvious, then I would do something else for the remaining fifty-five.”

Kim was not so charitable. “I would beat him, take him into a corner, and torture him until he was dead, and I would take the full hour to do it.”

In my wildest fantasy I see myself alone with the killer. No one sees me come into the room and no one sees me leave. I put a gun to his head and I say, “You have one chance to tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you will live. If you lie to me, you will die. The question is this: Did you murder
my son?” And if he says, “Yes,” I say, “I lied, you piece of trash, and you're out of here.”

I recognize this as the fantasy of a father in agony. In reality, I could never do this. It is not who I am or who we are.

However, sometimes fantasy and reality come too close for comfort. I had just completed a business meeting in a pleasant, modern office complex in L.A., and as I walked through the parking lot, I heard someone call out, “Mr. Goldman?”

I turned and saw a man walking toward me. He introduced himself and said, “I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am about your loss. How are you doing?” Before I could answer, he continued. “I have an office right up there.” He pointed to the second floor of the building I had just left and kept talking. “Look, if you ever decide you want to kill that son of a bitch, just let me know. I can get you a high-powered rifle and scope that will never be able to be traced and you can take care of him.”

“No, no, no,” I stammered quickly. “I don't have any interest in anything like that.” I desperately wanted to exit myself from this conversation.

“Yeah, well, I understand,” the man said. “If you don't want to be the one to do it, I'll find you somebody who can do it for you.”

My mouth was agape. I could not believe what I was hearing. A total stranger was standing here, in the middle of a parking lot, in the bright California sunshine, offering to commit, or arrange for, cold-blooded murder. And he was deadly serious. “Thanks, but no thanks,” did not seem quite strong enough, but that was all I could muster.

As I walked away he called out, “If you ever change your mind you know where to find me.”

I was deeply shaken. A whole family of things came to mind as I drove home after this freakish encounter. For an instant I wondered if this could be a setup, a sting of some kind designed to get me into trouble, but upon reflection, I doubted it. You only have to pick up the newspaper or watch the news on television to realize that there are many people who perceive violence as a legitimate solution to their grievances.

A long-suppressed memory returned to me.

My mind transported me back to Army basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. We were there for one reason. We were being taught to kill.

The instructors “armed” us with a rifle-bayonet mock-up—little more than a stick, padded at both ends. We looked like hockey goalies, wearing helmets, padding on our chests, and crotch protectors. Two by two, young soldiers entered a sandpit.

The training sergeant grew frustrated with the ineptitude of the combatants. None of the men were mastering the techniques to his satisfaction. He looked at me; I was a squad leader. “Get in there, Goldman,” he ordered. “You show 'em how it's done.”

So I suited up and entered the pit. Instantly my opponent whacked me on the side of my head.

I went berserk. Survival instinct took over, and I flew through the motions I had been taught. After I knocked my opponent on his butt, the sergeant sent in another, and I dispatched him quickly. The sergeant continued to throw men into the pit and, one after another, I crushed them into submission. The illusion was very powerful; I truly felt as if I were fighting for my life.

Not until later that night did the emotional impact of the training exercise descend on me. I realized that if I was placed in a kill-or-be-killed situation, I was capable of violence. If I had to, I would fight for my life. If I had to, I could kill. But I would be left with a dismal sense of remorse. I wondered: How can someone consciously decide to kill someone else and not think twice about it? It is beyond my understanding.

Now, many years later, as I drove home on the Ventura Freeway, I recalled other memories from my military training. A young soldier learns to kill in a multitude of ways. The belt that holds up your pants can be used to strangle an enemy. If you put a lemon-sized rock into your sock, it can crush a skull with one powerful swing.

But the most troublesome techniques then, and especially now, were the uses of knives and bayonets. They can slash a windpipe or pierce a heart with chilling speed and efficiency.

I believe that we learn things throughout our lives that never leave us. Those things come to the surface when we need them. We surprise ourselves, often, with bits of information and pieces of knowledge that we had not thought of, consciously, in years. They are there, etched into some hidden corner of the mind. And I believe that phenomenon came into vicious play on the night of June 12, 1994.

During the fifth day of the killer's deposition, Dan had asked about the time he was in Puerto Rico to play the role of a character named Bullfrog in an action-adventure movie entitled
Frogman.

There was one scene where he wielded a serrated knife. Dan asked, “Did anybody show you in connection with that particular scene how to perform the physical actions?”

The killer replied, “How they wanted it to be done, yes.”

Dan produced excerpts from the
Frogman
script and read them aloud:

Without a sound, Bullfrog has entered the dive show shop. Doesn't turn on the lights. Doesn't have to…. Bullfrog comes up with a lethal, serrated dive knife…. Bullfrog cases the area. All clear…. Looking toward the back of the shop. Through the mazes of counters and gear, he sees a shadow…. Bullfrog steals past. Silent. Bullfrog's made a circle. He's behind the shadow. He lunges and, in one swift move, has the intruder on the floor, one arm twisted back in a punishing hold.

That scene was filmed two months prior to Ron's murder.

THIRTY

We joined three other couples for dinner one evening. I had not seen one of the men there in several weeks. He asked me a few questions about the trial, and we ended up sitting at the end of the table, ignoring the others, and discussing the criminal and civil cases for hours. On the drive home, Patti was very frustrated with me. “This cannot be the focus of everything we do,” she said.

“Well, he asked me,” I countered. “He wanted to know.”

“Well, next time it happens, could you just say you appreciate their interest but you don't want to spend the majority of the evening discussing it? Tell them you're trying to focus on other things during the weekends. It's so consuming.”

Patti busied herself building a clientele for her electrology business and was finally able to rejoin her tennis league. Michael and Lauren were immersed in high school activities and their respective social scenes. I tried to attend to the details of the civil case and, in the meantime, sell point-of-purchase displays.

But Kim's life had been on hold since she had dropped out of school and moved back home. After the criminal trial she was in limbo. She signed up for some additional college courses to, as she put it, get her brain functioning again, but she no longer wanted to major in psychology.

None of us had ever sought the limelight, but bits and pieces of our
lives continued to be on display. Ron's picture—and sometimes ours—regularly appeared on the covers of various tabloids, alongside screaming headlines that often reported erroneous information. So many people, all over the world, were so hungry for scandal that we never knew what would surface next. Kim, especially, felt naked.

Tricia Argyropoulis, a cousin of Ron's friend Pete Argyris, was one of the many who had left a message on Ron's answering machine the weekend that he died. She and Kim grew close. Tricia is an up-front, in-your-face kind of woman. Once, she and Kim visited a club called Roxbury that Ron used to frequent. They were enjoying themselves, dancing, when a woman intentionally pushed Kim. Kim just stood there, frozen. Tricia saw what had happened and immediately told the woman off. After her tirade, Kim said, “Gosh, you're tough!”

Later, they joked about the incident. “Oh, God,” Kim said, “I can just see the headlines in the tabloids: ‘Goldman Brawl in Bar: Lesbian Lover to Rescue!' ” It was a facetious comment, but the tabloids were always a concern.

Kim remained close to Chris Darden as well as several of the trial reporters, including Dominick Dunne, Cynthia McFadden, Shoreen Maghame, and Dan Abrams. The tabloids exploited this, reporting that Kim and Dan were “an item.” This was not true, and it underscored the difficulty of filtering friendships through such a public funnel.

Thanks to a recommendation from one of her reporter friends, Kim accepted a job with the TV production company that produces
The Larry Sanders Show.
She was nervous about going back to work full time. After so much public exposure, she worried about preconceptions that people might have about her. “Fate must have been smiling on me,” she said later, “because as soon as I arrived, I met Joanne Geller, and within an hour, it felt as though we'd been friends for years. My moods can change from upbeat to sadness to fiery anger very quickly, and Joanne rides those waves with me—never complaining, always supportive.”

Although she never knew Ron, Joanne quickly pinned one of our Remember Ron buttons to her purse. She says that she talks to him sometimes, and feels a connection.

Kim shared with Joanne a realization that haunts her. If it had not been for Ron's death, she would never have landed this job, and she would never have met Joanne. As much as she values the friendship, she would give it up in a heartbeat just to have her brother back. Joanne understood completely.

There is one other special friend who has remained in contact. Sometimes
when we come home after a long day, we press the
PLAY
button on our answering machine and hear Barbara Walters's distinctive voice say, “Just wanted you to know I'm thinking about you.”

During an unscheduled early-morning call to radio station KJLH-FM on February 29, the killer uttered the absurd statement that he knew that I felt “the same way” as he did about the murders.

We were in court that day. During a brief hearing, both sets of attorneys informed Santa Monica Superior Court Judge David D. Perez that they would not be ready by the previously scheduled trial date of April 2. Our lawyers sought a new date in mid-July, but Robert Baker claimed that previously scheduled trials in other cases would make him unavailable until autumn.

There was another hitch. Baker told the judge that he had been informed this morning that co-counsel F. Lee Bailey “may not be available for some time.” Evidently, earlier in the day, a federal judge in Florida had ordered Bailey to begin serving a six-month jail sentence for contempt of court. This was for failing to comply with the judge's order to turn over millions of dollars in cash and stocks that federal prosecutors said he took without permission from the assets of a former client, confessed drug smuggler Claude Duboc.

I chuckled when I heard the news; it warmed my heart. I loved the thought of him in jail. I just wished that his client could share the cell with him.

The upshot of all this was that Judge Perez postponed the civil suit for more than five months, ordering that it would begin at 8:30
A.M.
on September 9.

I was very upset. At a news conference on the courtroom lawn I declared: “I am disappointed that it has been moved back…. My family, and I'm sure the Brown family, would like to get this as much behind us as we can. This just makes for additional pain.”

Privately I asked Dan, “Can't we get this thing rolling?”

He took a deep breath and replied, “It's okay.” He knew that our case would benefit from the extended preparation time.

Then someone asked me how I felt about the killer's radio remarks earlier in the morning, that he and I felt the same way about the murders. “My answer is bullshit,” I said. “He's got a lot of nerve saying we feel the same. He didn't lose a son.”

*   *   *

As the parade of pretrial depositions and procedural hearings continued, the
Los Angeles Times
reported that the Internal Revenue Service filed a tax lien with Los Angeles County, warning that it might seize the murderer's home if he failed to pay $685,248 in back taxes from income earned in 1994—the year of the murders.

This raised the ugly issue of money. Some experts estimated that the killer had spent between $5 million and $6 million on his criminal defense, and of course our civil case was adding to his legal fees. Just how much money did he have left?