Just before she took the stand, David asked Shively if she had told anyone that she had been called to testify. “No,” she told him. “Just my mother.”
“Are you sure?” he pressed her.
“Absolutely,” she said without hesitation.
If she could pin Simpson to that location, in that car, at that hour, it would be almost as good as having an eyewitness. So it was essential to nail down the time she saw him. On the witness stand, she did this beautifully. “I left my house at ten-forty-five P.M.,” she said.
“Why are you so certain?” I asked.
“Because I was trying to get to the store that closed at eleven and I wanted to get something to eat,” she said. Bingo. Vannatter and Lange had even checked with the store to confirm their closing time—another assurance that Shively was on the level.
Then she told her story. “A white Bronco runs the red light and goes through the intersection and almost hits me,” she said.
“Were you able to see the person seated in the Bronco?” I asked.
“Yes, I was,” Shively said. “It looked like he was mad, or angry.” She explained that the Bronco driver was unhappy because a third car—a Nissan—blocked his path. The Bronco driver screamed at the Nissan, “Get out of the way! Move the car!” Finally there was room to pull around the Nissan, and the Bronco sped away.
“Now, that whole intersection where you witnessed all these events, is it dark or is it well lit?” I asked.
“It’s well lit by streetlights and a gas station there,” she said.
“So were you able to see the driver very clearly?”
“I recognized him right away.”
I paused for a beat, because I wanted this next answer to have some dramatic effect.
And who is he?” I continued.
“I saw O. J. Simpson,” she said.
You get a jolt of adrenaline from a nice courtroom moment.
There was no reason to believe that I had just presented the grand jury with a flat-out lie.
But I had.
The next morning, I’d barely stepped out of the elevator on the eighteenth floor when reporters began asking me whether I’d seen the tabloid TV show
Hard Copy
the night before. It turns out that Ms. Shively—our alibi killer—had made an appearance. Despite having insisted to us that she had told only her mother about the Bronco incident, our star witness had found time to address several million television viewers, proudly displaying her grand jury subpoena for the cameras.
The news sent me reeling. But things got worse. On my desk was a fax from a television actor named Brian Patrick Clarke. He was claiming to have lost money to Shively and considered her a consummate liar.
Normally, you take the imprecations of a disgruntled business partner with a grain of salt. But Clarke’s story had a paper trail to back it up. According to Clarke, Jill had presented herself to him as a screenwriter and asked him to read a script she had purportedly written. She’d said a production company was about to buy it for $250,000, and she wanted Clarke to star in it. Before this bonanza arrived, though, Jill allegedly managed to borrow $6,000 from Clarke. And guess what Clarke later discovered? The script wasn’t Shively’s. In fact, it was the screenplay for a film in pre-production titled
My Life
, which starred Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman. Clarke filed a suit against Shively in small-claims court and won a judgment of $2,000.
“Get that woman back in here!” I hissed to Phil.
We hauled Shively back into David’s office and started grilling her about
Hard Copy
. It turned out that she’d done the television interview the day before her grand jury appearance—for $5,000. At the time she appeared before the grand jury, she explained nervously, the show hadn’t aired. It wasn’t going to air until afterward. She thought it was okay. She just “forgot.” She hadn’t slept well, and she was nervous, and she “really wasn’t thinking.”
We’d been duped. This was a serious screwup. We had no choice but to cut Shively loose.
I was more loath to do this than anyone. I did not, as one commentator would later suggest, ditch her in a “fit of pique.” There was a far more serious principle at work here. If I allowed Shively’s testimony to stand without amendment, suspecting as I did that it was fraudulent, the grand jury proceeding would be tainted. If an indictment against Simpson resulted, the defense would be entirely justified in asking that it be thrown out. It was my responsibility to preserve the integrity of the record.
And so I made Ms. Shively return to the witness chair the next day and made her repeat her squirming explanations to the grand jury. It was an uncomfortable experience, cross-examining my own witness and watching her credibility crumble.
Then I took a deep breath.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said, “because it is our duty as prosecutors to present only that evidence of which we are 110 percent confident as to its truthfulness and reliability, I must now ask you to completely disregard the statements given and the testimony given by Jill Shively in this case.”
It was a tough lesson for us, but a necessary one. In the Simpson case—as with no other case in history—there was an incentive for people to come up with phony stories in order to cash in on sudden fame.
In the end, the loss of Shively, thank God, was not ruinous. We had other time-line witnesses, and they turned out to be first-rate. The very best of the lot was the limo driver, Allan Park.
As usual, I got to talk with Park for only a few minutes before putting him on the stand. He struck me as a real straight shooter, well-groomed, well-spoken. He wasn’t eager to be there, but he wasn’t resisting. And unlike Kato Kaelin, he wasn’t beholden to Simpson and he had no ax to grind.
I had prepared a diagram of the Rockingham estate, and once Park was on the stand, I walked him through his story, marking where the limo was, and his line of sight, at every moment. He told the grand jury how he’d arrived at Rockingham twenty minutes before the 10:45 P.M. pickup time, and waited until 10:40 to ring the buzzer on the front gate.
“Did you notice any car parked in front?” I asked him.
“No, I did not,” he replied.
This was important, because Simpson had told police that the Bronco had been parked there since early evening.
Park recounted his repeated, futile buzzing, calling his boss, seeing Kato wave. He recalled seeing the black male crossing the lawn. In the police report, he’d pegged the time at 10:53. Since then, we’d had the opportunity to consult cell phone records, which placed the sighting of the black man at around 10:55 or 10:56 P.M. A minute later, Simpson answered the buzzer.
Park then described a bag that he had seen sitting by the Rolls. Kato, he recalled, had reached for it, but Simpson said, “No. No. That’s okay. I can get it.” This had to be the missing “knapsack” that Kato had mentioned earlier.
On the way to the airport, Park testified, Simpson kept complaining of being “hot.” He’d rolled his window down and turned on the air-conditioning. In fact, the night was unseasonably cool. Simpson then asked Park where the light was. In the rearview mirror, Park could see that Simpson was “checking his bags.” What was in those bags, I wondered. Perhaps… a murder weapon? Bloody clothes? I could see the grand jurors focusing closely on Park’s words; were they wondering the same thing?
All in all, Park’s testimony dovetailed snugly with Kato’s. And it had the effect of strengthening both.
Mezzaluna’s weekend bar manager, Karen Crawford, was up next. She testified that Nicole and her party left the restaurant between 8:30 and nine. Shortly afterward, she’d gotten a call from “the older woman in the party”—obviously Juditha Brown—saying she’d lost her glasses. Karen found them lying by the curb outside the restaurant and sealed them in an envelope.
“About five minutes later, there was another phone call,” she said. This one from Nicole.
“What time was that, approximately?” I asked.
“I would say it was between nine-thirty and nine-forty-five,” she answered. Crawford called Ron Goldman over to the phone to make arrangements to deliver the glasses. Then he left the restaurant carrying the envelope.
So where did that leave us in terms of time? Nicole and her mother spoke at around 9:45 P.M. Police had talked to the neighbor, Pablo Fenjves, who had reported being bothered by the wailing of a dog on the night of the murders. The barking, he thought, had begun between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M. By midnight the victims were dead. That’s when Sukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen, came upon the body of Nicole Simpson.
Sukru and his wife were one of those Mutt-and-Jeff couples. He was large, burly, and dark, with a long ponytail. She was slender and fair, her blond hair cropped short just below her ears. The few minutes I had with Sukru before testimony were tense. He still hadn’t gotten over his discovery of a murder scene. He stammered and groped for words until finally, when he got to the point of telling how he’d first seen the body, his voice broke and he covered his eyes with one hand.
Taking the witness stand somehow seemed to calm him. He told how he’d come home to his apartment on Montana Avenue—only about six hundred feet from the crime scene—at around 11:40 P.M. He found his upstairs neighbor sitting with a big white Akita. This, though Sukru didn’t know it, was Nicole Brown’s dog, Kato. Sukru and Bettina offered to keep the dog until they could get it over to an animal shelter the following morning.
“How did it behave in your apartment?” I asked.
“He was pretty nervous, and he was going to the doors and windows, running around in the house.”
“Did you see anything unusual about his legs or his body?” I asked.
Sukru swallowed hard. “On the legs, there was blood.”
About midnight, the couple decided to take the animal out to see if they could find its owner. The animal headed toward 875 Bundy. Home.
“When we got closer to the place, he started to pull me a lot harder than normal,” Sukru said. “We were walking on the right side of Bundy and the dog stopped and turned right and looked at—”
There was silence in the courtroom as Sukru tried to go on.
“—and I turned right and looked, too. And I seen her body.”
The Akita’s role in all this was eerie, to say the least. You had to wonder what that poor animal had witnessed. Had he tried to defend his mistress? Probably not. Police canine experts later examined Kato, summarizing their conclusions in a “witness statement.” Kato, they concluded, was such a low achiever that he probably could not have defended himself, let alone a human. The chief trainer for the LAPD’s K-9 unit reported that Kato had a “very nice disposition… [but] inadequate instincts or courage to protect his territory, owner or himself.”
Thanks to his primitive loyalty, however, we were able to postulate that the murders had occurred between the time he began to howl and the time he was discovered wandering on Bundy with bloody paws—a window of perhaps an hour. That dog, it seemed, had a better handle on time of death than the coroner did.
I only wish he could have spoken for the criminalists.
A case like this—with no eyewitnesses save, possibly, a white Akita—clearly would hinge on physical evidence, especially blood evidence. That’s why I had been so concerned from the start about which criminalists we could get assigned to the case. It was critical that we establish two things: first, that the blood samples had been collected and preserved properly; and second, that the samples had undergone reliable analysis. The criminalists had to do their job competently, and it was essential that they be able to present themselves credibly to a jury. Phil’s tepid assurance that criminalist Dennis Fung was “okay” had set off alarm bells in my head.
My first meeting with Dennis Kirk Fung had been on Monday, June 20, in the waiting room outside the grand jury chamber. He’d come with Collin Yamauchi; Fung was the criminalist on the scene, and Yamauchi the criminalist/analyst in the lab. They’d handed over their reports to me, and I’d scanned them quickly, trying to envision them as testimony that would be coherent enough for a juror to follow. Fung’s task was relatively straightforward: to tell where he collected the blood and how he packaged it. I’d told him to review his reports so he’d be prepared when I took his testimony later in the week. He bobbed his head up and down as I spoke.
Then I’d turned to Collin Yamauchi. In theory at least, he had the more difficult task.
The LAPD crime lab had just recently begun to do DNA testing. None of its technicians was all that experienced in the process. They were perfectly capable of performing the simplest test, called PCR DQ alpha. But it had to be done correctly. When contamination occurs, you get wildly erratic results. That was why I breathed a sigh of relief when I read Collin’s report: in this case, the results were perfectly consistent. Every blood drop on the trail at Bundy displayed O. J. Simpson’s genetic markers, and
only
his genetic markers. Bull’s-eye.
It was even possible that his blood was on the Rockingham glove. Preliminary tests indicated that this was the case. We had already found markers on that glove from Ron’s and Nicole’s blood. If we could establish that the glove bore a mixture of blood from both victims
and
from the defendant, that would be very powerful evidence. For that, however, we would need to send the samples away to Cellmark for more sophisticated testing.
On the witness stand, Collin turned out to be pretty effective. He handled the glove business well, leaving open the possibility that it had been stained with a mixture of the blood of both killer and victims. He did stumble at explaining the fundamentals of DNA testing, but it is very complicated stuff and he hadn’t much experience on the stand. I assumed he would get better with practice.
Dennis Fung was another story.
When Dennis took the witness stand on Wednesday, June 22, I led him through a pro forma description of how he collected the blood samples by wetting swatches of cloth with distilled water, then applying them to each bloodstain. We established that he’d handed them over, as the protocol required, to Yamauchi, back in the lab.