Another argument the prosecutors have floated for their not introducing the slow-speed chase and the evidence subsequently seized is that, as William Hodgman said on television, “it was coming at a point in time when we were also starting to lose jurors. So we felt, on balance, a need to conclude our case, and get into the defense case if they were going to present one.” As much as I respect Bill Hodgman, I can’t tell you how much total and complete nonsense this is. Number one, there’s never a valid reason for not offering powerful, incriminating evidence against the defendant. Even if, in a given case, the jury’s fatigue is an issue, on balance, you
always
, 100 percent of the time, offer the strong incriminating evidence. It’s not even a close call.
Secondly, that argument doesn’t even apply here. The jury in the Simpson case started getting antsy after the first half of the trial. The normal point in the trial to offer the slow-speed chase would have been near the
beginning
of the DA’s presentation of evidence. Thirdly, evidence of the chase, and the seizure of the defendant’s gun, passport, etc., would have taken very little time to present on direct examination, perhaps one to two hours. (Mind you, these are the prosecutors who took eight
days
of direct examination of the coroner to elicit testimony, the important parts of which could easily have been introduced in two hours.) And, of course, relative to all the extremely technical and boring
DNA
scientific evidence in the Simpson case that went on for months, the jury could have been counted on to perk up and listen very attentively to the testimony about the chase and the seizure of all the incriminating items in Simpson’s possession at the end of it.
These excuses, of course, are merely an effort by the DA’s office to explain away an incredible tactical blunder on its part.
During the slow-speed chase, Simpson also supposedly told his mother, “It was all her fault, Ma.” Since we know Simpson committed these murders, we can just about know what Simpson meant by this. Poor Nicole had said or done something to him which so enraged him it led to her murder. Of course, the defense would have argued that what Simpson meant was that unsavory types Nicole allegedly hung around with were responsible for her murder. Let them argue it. They still couldn’t come up with any evidence to support it, inasmuch as it never happened.
Also, the police booked the cash under Cowlings’, not Simpson’s, name and the prosecutors, afraid of their own shadow throughout the trial, thought this could hurt them. “The detectives’ decision to book the cash as Cowlings’ personal property and not as evidence would be damaging to the prosecution at the trial,” an October 27, 1994, DA internal memo said. But how? When Cowlings took the $8,750 in currency out of his pockets, and the police asked him why he had all this money on him, he told them Simpson had given him the money when they were in the Bronco.
All of this, of course, is a nonsensical discussion. When you have exceedingly powerful evidence of guilt, you automatically offer it. You don’t stumble on your way to the courtroom over the smallest thread in your path. Of course, the defense will always raise some arguments against your incriminating evidence, even if they are totally spurious. If a defense attorney doesn’t do this, he would have pled his client guilty. And sometimes your evidence actually does have a carbuncle or two on it. But you balance the strength of your evidence against its weakness. Here, the passport alone is very strong evidence of guilt, against which there is no
valid
defense argument. Why would Simpson have his passport on him if he wasn’t at least thinking of escaping? And why would he
think
of escaping if he was innocent and being framed? He, of all people, would know he would be able to offer, through himself and his attorneys, all types of evidence to prove his innocence and expose the frame-up. It should be noted that Simpson would even be deprived of making the argument that he always kept his passport in his Bronco (which seems highly unlikely in the first place), because this wasn’t his Bronco the passport was in. It was Cowlings’ Bronco.
One of the unanswered questions which has fascinated Simpson case addicts is whether Simpson decided to kill Nicole on the night of the murders or had contemplated it for some time. Nicole’s close friend Faye Resnick, who knew Simpson very well, is convinced Simpson had planned the murder for some time. And there is a solid piece of documentary evidence circumstantially supporting Resnick’s view which the DA had, but again chose not to introduce.
Item 146 of the
LAPD
property report in the Simpson case lists a fake goatee, fake mustache, bottle of spirit gum (to put the disguise on), and bottle of makeup adhesive remover (to remove the disguise). While the goatee and mustache have been widely reported, what hasn’t been is Item 147, three receipts found inside the same bag in the Bronco along with Item 146. The receipts for the purchase of the disguise materials are from Cinema Secrets Beauty Supply at 4400 Riverside Drive in Burbank. The date they were purchased is what is so incriminating. It was May 27, 1994,
just over two weeks prior to the murders!
And just a few days after Nicole returned to Simpson earrings and a bracelet he had given her for her birthday, May 19, telling him their relationship was finally over.
Again, let Simpson explain, on the witness stand, why he felt the need for a disguise just prior to the murders. Then let’s see if there is any evidence that Simpson has ever worn a disguise at any other time in his life. Was this the first time in his life, at age forty-seven, and just before the murders, that he had a need for a disguise? And if he had bought the disguise for some innocent purpose, why was it necessary for him to bring it with him in Cowlings’ car?
There’s an old observation that celebrities are people who have spent all their time and energy trying to become famous, and when they do, they wear dark eyeglasses so no one will recognize them. This very definitely didn’t apply to Simpson. By all accounts, he loved the attention of fans and people who recognized him. And when he didn’t get it he would actually become depressed. Faye Resnick, in fact, who was with Nicole and Simpson on many occasions in public, said that whenever Simpson wasn’t noticed, “his mood would change and he would become angry.” Simpson himself, in his biography
O.J., the Education of a Rich Rookie
, says about his celebrity: “I loved it when people recognized me on the street.” So why did Simpson purchase the disguises shortly before the murders? The DA never offered this evidence of guilt to the jury.
What makes the prosecutors’ failure to do so all the more astonishing is that they were alleging in their criminal complaint that Simpson had premeditated these murders, and they suggested to the jury that the premeditation commenced long before the night of the murders. For instance, defense witness Jack Mackay, an executive for the American Psychological Association, testified at the trial that he had played golf with Simpson
four days before
the murders at a celebrity golfing event sponsored by Simpson’s employer, the Hertz Corporation. Simpson, he said, appeared cordial and happy to sign autographs, shake hands, etc. Clark asked Mackay on cross-examination: “If someone was planning to commit murder would you expect him to come to you if he wanted to get away with it and grumble about the person he wanted to kill?”
But the prosecution presented no evidence at all that Simpson had premeditated the murders that far back. All it had to offer the jury was its speculation. The lone piece of documentary, circumstantial evidence it had to support its contention remained in its files, and the jury never learned of it. Is it possible the prosecutors hadn’t read the police property report closely and missed this evidence? Things like this happen in life.
One parenthetical observation about the slow-speed chase. The
LAPD
had notified Simpson’s attorney, Robert Shapiro, at 8:30 in the morning on Friday, June 17, 1994, that they were ready to charge and arrest Simpson for the murders. The
LAPD
gave Shapiro until 11:00 that morning to have Simpson voluntarily turn himself in at Parker Center, LAPD’s downtown headquarters. As we know, Simpson didn’t do this, and sometime before noon, he and Cowlings disappeared from the Encino home of his friend Robert Kardashian. At 5:56 p.m. that day, the police, responding to a citizen’s tip, pinpointed the location of Cowlings’ Ford Bronco on an Orange County (just south of Los Angeles) freeway. It was about sixty miles from Simpson’s Rockingham estate. After a two-hour slow-speed chase, Simpson returned to his home, where he was subsequently arrested. The whole incident of Simpson’s not turning himself in and the slow-speed chase should definitely have been offered by the prosecution. It could only have helped, and since the jury, like everyone else, already knew about it, it must have looked downright strange to them that the prosecution did not introduce it as an integral part of its case. But contrary to the view of many laypeople, the slow-speed chase itself was not greatly incriminating because it was somewhat ambiguous.
Normally, flight is highly incriminating evidence because it shows a consciousness of guilt. But in a typical flight case, the suspect is found in a place like an attic, or in the mountains, or in Canada, Mexico, or some other distant place. Here, Simpson and Cowlings, after being gone for five hours, were only sixty miles away. And the Bronco was driving north on Interstate 5; that is, in the general direction of, not away from, Simpson’s Brentwood residence. What this “flight” (coupled with evidence of the passport, money, etc.) shows is that Simpson only thought about escaping, but hadn’t definitely decided to do it. If he had, in the five-hour interlude before his whereabouts were picked up, he’d have been a lot farther than sixty miles down the road. Of course, the very fact that he thought about escaping was itself extremely powerful evidence of his guilt.
When you offer evidence like the suicide note, passport, cash, disguise, etc., you’re offering something that even the simplest of laypeople can understand. It’s the type of evidence upon which they have formed opinions throughout their lives. For instance, running away from anything, be it adults running from the scene of a liquor store robbery or children running away from a broken window at one’s home, is automatically associated by all humans with a guilty state of mind, and the passport, cash, and disguise, of course, fall into that category.
DNA
evidence, on the other hand, is totally foreign and alien to a jury. This is not to suggest that the
DNA
evidence should not have been presented (although the prosecution piled complex
DNA
evidence upon more
DNA
evidence, instead of condensing its presentation and simplifying it). But under no circumstances should it have been presented to the exclusion of so much conventional evidence that was available to the prosecution in this case.
These conventional pieces of evidence have been the basis for hundreds of thousands of criminal convictions throughout the years. In addition to jurors’ associating this type of evidence with guilt, it has two other built-in advantages. It’s the type for which there rarely is a legitimate answer other than guilt; and if the fleeing party attempts an innocent explanation, those words—usually a fabrication—not only sound silly, but can be shown and demonstrated to be silly in court. Secondly, this type of evidence confirms the scientific evidence (here, mostly
DNA
), and vice versa—i.e., the two types of evidence have a synergistic effect upon each other.
M
ost unbelievably, more so than the suicide note and gun, passport, cash, and disguise evidence put together, the prosecutors never presented the extremely incriminating statement Simpson made to the police on the day after the murders. Give me a yellow pad and one hundred hours, and I would have convicted Simpson on that statement alone.
The interview took place at Parker Center from 1:35 to 2:07 p.m. on June 13, 1994. It was tape-recorded by the interviewing officers, Philip Vannatter and Thomas Lange, and I have heard the entire thirty-two-minute audio. (The unedited transcript of the interrogation is in Appendix A.) The detectives were rather inexpert questioners who failed to pin Simpson down as much as they could have on his precise activities throughout the entire previous evening. They also did not ask good follow-up questions, and most unfortunately, it was they who terminated the interview. Since, at the time of the interview, they already strongly suspected he was guilty, why didn’t they try to elicit from him as much as they could, continuing until either he said he didn’t want to talk anymore or his celebrity lawyer finally deigned to enter the room and instruct Simpson or insist that he not answer any more questions? Isn’t this just common sense?
In any event, the detectives
did
succeed in getting enough out of Simpson to convict him out of his own mouth alone. Since Simpson’s left middle finger was bandaged, they asked him: “How did you get the injury on your hand?” Simpson responded, “I don’t know.” He then proceeded to say that the first time he cut his finger was in Chicago, but then immediately added words that suggested he had first cut himself the previous night, saying, “But at the house I was just running around.” He was “running around,” he told the detectives, the previous night (the night of the murders) while he was getting ready at his Rockingham estate to go
to
Chicago.
Lest there be any confusion in anyone’s mind that Simpson admitted cutting himself the night of the murders, i.e.,
before
he allegedly cut himself again later in Chicago, the following questions and answers clear this up.
bq.
Vannatter: We’ve got some blood on and in your car, we’ve got some blood at your house, and it’s sort of a problem.
Simpson: Well, take my blood test.
Lange: Well, we’d like to do that. We’ve got, of course, the cut on your finger that you aren’t real clear on. Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at Nicole’s house?