“Are you familiar with what is known as a stride analysis?” I asked him.
“Yes, I am,” he replied.
Whenever shoe prints or footprints are found at a crime scene, the criminalist may decide to do a stride analysis to determine whether the suspect was walking or running. Fung claimed he had done such an analysis. Naturally, I asked him if he could tell us whether the person making the footprints was moving quickly or at a normal pace.
“Not really,” Fung said.
The stride analysis may also say something about the size of the person, based on the size of the print and the distance between the steps. The prints at Bundy were from size 12 men’s shoes. And so, when I asked Dennis if the bloody footprint on the walk at Bundy seemed to come from a man or a woman, all I expected was a very qualified answer that tended to favor a man. Either it was a really big woman, or a little woman or man in a pair of big man’s shoes, or a big man. There weren’t that many realistic options.
“I haven’t been in the shoe analysis assist unit for about three years,” he replied. “So I’m kind of rusty on that aspect.”
I was stunned. If he was too “rusty” to make such no-brainer observations, what the hell was he doing at a murder scene as our criminalist? This was not good at all.
“So you are disqualifying yourself?” I asked him incredulously. “Telling us you are
not
qualified to render an opinion as to that because of a lack of experience or training?”
“Yes, at this point,” he replied.
At that moment, I realized that I had no idea what might come out of Dennis Fung’s mouth next. I was flying blind. All I could do was continue questioning him, and hope that there were no more ugly surprises.
No such luck. Throughout the testimony, I watched helplessly as Fung fumbled through his notes, constantly losing his place. We went through all the presumptive blood tests he had taken. A presumptive blood test is simply a quick, though not infallible, procedure to determine whether a stain is indeed blood. Several stains at Rockingham had given a positive result, including stains in the foyer, on the door handle of the Bronco, and on the glove found on the south pathway. Fung had also done the tests on the drains in the master bathroom sink and shower—and they, too, had indicated blood! This could mean that Simpson had washed himself off before heading to the airport.
But Fung blew it. As we got deeper into the questioning, I learned to my dismay that he had not tested
all
the drains at Rockingham, only those that had appeared to be in “recent use.” When you do presumptive tests for blood, you should always be aware that the results can be impeached in court, because they can sometimes also give a positive result for things like rust and vegetable matter. Fung’s failure to test all the drains would play right into the defense’s hands. I could already hear opposing counsel crossing him: “Oh, you mean you didn’t test the other drains? So you don’t know whether they, too, might have given a positive result, do you, Mr. Fung? And if they had, you might have concluded that the positive result you got in my client’s bathroom was nothing more than rust, isn’t that so? Or would you try to tell this jury, Mr. Fung, that blood had been washed down every sink in that house?”
Fung had failed to obey the criminalist’s first commandment: be thorough. His tendency to test selectively would later cripple our efforts to get important blood evidence into the record. And his demeanor on the stand wouldn’t give a jury the confidence that he could change a lightbulb, let alone supervise a forensic investigation.
After he left the stand, I called my people and said, “This guy’s a fucking disaster.”
Here’s the bottom line: Fung and his colleague, Andrea Mazzola, a trainee with only four months’ experience, should have been supervised as they went over both crime scenes. Tom and Phil should have returned to oversee that search. When I’d spoken to them mid-afternoon after they’d interviewed Simpson, they’d assured me they were on their way back out to Rockingham. They didn’t make it back there until after five. Too late. By that time Fung and Mazzola were packing up and heading home.
We’d be doing damage control on that sloppy search for a long time to come. We still are.
At the outset, I had assumed we would be offering the cops’ taped interview with Simpson into evidence. But there was more foot-dragging by the LAPD. Not until the week the grand jury hearing began in earnest did I finally get the cops to fork over the cassette tape of that interrogation.
In the privacy of my office, I slipped the tape into my player, grabbed a legal pad, and pulled my knees up into my oversized leatherette chair to listen to what I assumed was at least a two-hour interview. It was a shock, therefore, when after thirty-two minutes, I heard Lange say, “We’re ready to terminate this at 14:07,” and then heard nothing but the white fuzz of unrecorded tape. I didn’t get it—Simpson had spent three full hours at the station. What could they have been doing all that time?
I was even more disturbed by what was on the tape. Phil and Tom both sounded exhausted—that was understandable. They’d been up since three the morning of June 13. But that was no reason to allow a potential suspect in a double murder to set the program for the interview.
Any Monday-morning quarterback can now see that Simpson lied to Tom and Phil all through that interview. Of course, some of the lies weren’t apparent to them at the time. For instance, Simpson claimed that he’d been invited to dinner with the Brown family after the recital, which Nicole’s mother would later deny. Tom and Phil couldn’t have known that yet. But on other, more elemental points, like where and when he’d parked the Bronco, there was plenty they could have done.
Lange: “What time did you last park the Bronco?”
“Eight something,” replied the suspect. “Maybe seven, eight o’clock. Eight, nine o’clock. I don’t know, right in that—right in that area.”
The follow-up should have come hard and fast: “Well, what the hell was it? Seven, seven-thirty, eight, or nine? You knew you had a flight to catch, so shouldn’t you have been aware of the time? What time did you park? What did you do then?”
And what about Simpson’s apparent lack of concern after Kato told him that he’d heard thumps on the wall? Kato was so worried that he’d taken a dim flashlight and searched the grounds for an intruder. And yet Simpson seemed strangely unconcerned—he was more intent upon finding a Band-Aid for the cut on his finger. On that one Vannatter and Lange should have dug deep: “Did you check it out? Did you call your security people to check it out? Why not? Wasn’t your daughter Arnelle staying at Rockingham? Weren’t you concerned for her safety?”
Such pointed questions would have highlighted Simpson’s evasiveness. Instead, the detectives responded to Simpson’s tentative statements by saying “I understand,” or simply “Yeah,” or “Okay,” or a mumbled “Mmnh-hm.” On some fundamental level, I think, Tom and Phil wanted to hear a plausible explanation that would eliminate Simpson from suspicion.
Just when they got a big opening, they’d move on to something else. For instance, when they ask Simpson if he would take a lie-detector test, he vacillates:
“I’m sure I’ll eventually do it,” he says, “but it’s like, hey, I’ve got some weird thoughts now. And I’ve had weird thoughts—you know, when you’ve been with a person for seventeen years, you think everything. And I don’t—” He stopped himself.
And what do Lange and Vannatter say? “I understand.” Not once but
twice
. And then they drop the subject!
Why didn’t they swoop down on that? “What sort of weird thoughts? Thoughts of hurting Nicole? Did you ever share those thoughts with anyone?”
I’d seen plenty of people whose family members had been murdered. An innocent man who’s just learned about the death of his children’s mother—when the children were asleep in the house—would most likely be stunned, distraught, even hysterical. And he wouldn’t hesitate to take a polygraph. He’d be demanding, “How can I help you catch this monster?”
But the O. J. Simpson who emerged from that police interview struck me as cold and detached—fundamentally unaffected by the news of his ex-wife’s murder.
Simpson chuckles as he shoots the shit about his relationship with his girlfriend, Paula Barbieri. He volunteers a story from after his last breakup with Nicole. She had returned an expensive diamond bracelet he’d given her as a birthday present. Simpson then presented it to Paula and pretended he’d bought it for her. Scamming one woman immediately after his breakup with another, who, at that moment, was lying on a cold metal coroner’s table! I couldn’t believe the way he told Vannatter and Lange about that. “I get into a funny place here on all this, all right?” he says.
Wink-wink nudge-nudge
. “Yeah,” they chime back. You could practically hear the towels snapping in the men’s locker room.
That jocular, almost flippant tone pervaded the entire interview. Simpson tells them about how an endorsement deal gets him Bugle Boy Jeans for free—“I got a hundred pair,” he brags. He also tells them his preference in sneakers—“Reebok, that’s all I wear.” He even gives a little rap, referring to himself in the third person, about how he rushes for a plane, just like in the Hertz commercial—“I was doing my little crazy what-I-do. I mean, I do it everywhere. Everybody who has ever picked me up says that O.J’s a whirlwind at the end, he’s running, he’s grabbing things.”
In defense of Phil and Tom, I do know there’s something to be said for developing rapport with your suspect to get him talking. It’s just that at some point, push has to come to shove. And during this interview the shove came way too late and way too gently.
“O.J.,” Phil says uneasily. “We’ve got sort of a problem.”
“Mmnh-mmh,” the suspect replies.
“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.”
Tom puts in, “Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at Nicole’s house?”
“No,” Simpson replies. “It was last night.”
“Okay, so last night you cut it?”
“Somewhere after the recital…”
“What do you think happened?” Phil asks him. “Do you have any idea?”
O.J. subtly puts the detectives on the defensive.
“I have no idea, man. You guys haven’t told me anything. I have no idea… . Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit…”
“
Did you ever hit her, O.J.?
”
“Uh, we had—that one night we had a fight.”
“
Mmnh-mmph
.”
“That night—that night we had a fight. Hey, she hit
me
.”
“
Yeah
.”
“You know, and—and, as I say, they never took my statement, they never wanted to hear my side… . Nicole was drunk, she did her thing, she started tearing up my house, you know. And I—I didn’t punch her or anything, but I—I—you know—”
“
Slapped her a couple times?
”
“No. I wrestled her is all I did—”
“
Uh, okay
.”
Nicole is dead, his children have no mother, he’s talking about the time he was arrested for beating her—and once again, Simpson is whining about how
he
feels mistreated. As I sat listening to this crap, I thought:
This guy is going to deny everything all the way. He’s never going to confess
. There wasn’t one shred of remorse there; not enough real soul for him to need to unburden it by telling the truth. Some killers have a need to confess, at least to themselves. But I don’t think he ever did.
That interview was one of the worst bits of police work I’d ever seen—but I kept my thoughts to myself. I couldn’t afford to alienate my chief investigators. Besides, it was spilt milk. Complaining about their ineptitude would not help me get through this case.
I had serious qualms about playing this interview tape before the grand jury. And in the months to come I would debate endlessly whether to play it at trial. It was a very risky gambit. That decision would rest largely upon the composition and sentiment of the jury. If we ended up with jurors who were star-struck by the defendant, would they be offended by his callousness toward his wife and lover, or would they be beguiled by his crude jocularity? Would they take his loss of memory and vague responses for evasion, or would they see an innocent man willing to talk to police despite his pain and exhaustion, and who got nothing but suspicion in return?
I decided to hold off.
Instead I had Phil summarize the interview. He touched briefly on Simpson’s self-pitying explanation of the beating on New Year’s, 1989, and then on what Simpson called an “altercation”—the 1993 incident that had also resulted in a 911 call. “I kicked her door or something,” Simpson had said.
That was as far as I intended to go into the issue of domestic violence for now. I’d handled DV cases before, and I knew they were very tricky. Husbands usually do not batter their wives in front of others. If a wife is killed, there is rarely an eyewitness to the murder. Or to the years of abuse that preceded it.
In this case, there was just too much we still didn’t know. Had friends ever seen them fight? Had they fought since the divorce? How recently? What were the flashpoint issues between them? I was willing to put domestic violence on the back burner for the time being—until Keith Zlomsowitch forced our hand.
Zlomsowitch, a thirtysomething restaurateur, was passed on to us by the LAPD. He claimed to have witnessed O. J. Simpson stalking and harassing his wife. Zlomsowitch lived out of state and was due to board a plane home the next day. Like it or not, David and I had to bring him in before the grand jury to preserve his testimony.
I had no idea what Keith Zlomsowitch intended to say, and didn’t get a chance to find out before he took the stand. Instead I spent our pre-interview trying to make sure he didn’t taint his testimony with hearsay evidence. Since his story involved the victim, I had to make sure that he didn’t repeat anything she might have said to him.
“Keith,” I told him, “please listen very carefully to my questions. Anything that you heard O. J. Simpson say is fair territory, but don’t tell me anything which Nicole may have said to you.”