Collin was another matter. I had confidence that Collin would turn out to be a pretty good witness at trial. (And, indeed, he was.) In the meantime, however, he needed some prep time to get down the lengthy technical explanations of DNA. I felt it would be better all around to hold off on DNA testimony until trial, when we could put on the sophisticated results from Cellmark. In the meantime, I suggested to my comrades, why not go with more conventional tests? I knew the person to do them.
“Think Special Investigations would let loose of Greg Matheson?” I asked, looking around the room.
Greg was a highly esteemed serologist at the Special Investigations Division. He was scrupulously honest, and I knew from his previous appearances on the witness stand that if we used him to augment Fung, he could present the evidence in a simple, straightforward way. He could also fend off attacks on cross without becoming irritable.
Someone asked whether Greg’s tests might use up too much of our blood samples. Good point. If we tested all the blood drops taken from Bundy for the prelims, we’d consume too much to allow for both the prosecution and the defense to do separate tests later on. And I
wanted
to have enough for both sides to do their own tests. Maybe it was a throwback to my days at the defense bar, but I always felt the prosecution should welcome independent verification of its lab work. If their results supported ours, we’d be golden.
Brian Kelberg offered a suggestion: “Why don’t you have Greg test just
one
of the blood drops at Bundy?” he asked. “A single drop on the trail would be enough to establish identity for the prelim. And if those drops are Simpson’s, he’s made.”
I saw nods all around the room. I scrawled a note to pull whatever strings necessary to get Greg Matheson assigned to us.
For the time being, we decided to hold off on one major category of evidence: DV, domestic violence. We all agreed that the physical evidence alone demonstrated enough premeditation to warrant murder in the first. That meant we did not necessarily have to introduce any battering incidents to support the charge. And to tell you the truth, I was just as glad to stay clear of this issue for the moment. The only way DV might be thrust to the fore was if Simpson attempted to plead insanity, or tried to float some other kind of heat-of-passion defense. In that case, we had to be ready to refute. Lydia Bodin authoritatively cited several cases in which murders that arose from violent domestic quarrels were nevertheless prosecuted at first-degree. So even if Simpson tried to worm his way out of this by claiming temporary insanity, we could still charge murder one.
Early the following week, we served a second warrant on Rockingham.
I began to write this one myself, but thankfully, Curt Hazell took over to make sure that it was airtight. This was an abundance of caution, but caution was necessary. By now, of course, I had had an opportunity to read carefully through Phil’s affidavit in support of the first warrant served on Rockingham the morning of June 13, and was distressed to find several glaring errors.
Phil had written, for instance, that Simpson had left town unexpectedly, when, in fact, his trip to Chicago had been planned in advance. Phil had apparently gotten that misimpression as the result of asking Kato where Simpson was. Kato had passed him off to Arnelle, who’d said something to the effect of “Isn’t he here?”
Phil had described the stain on the Bronco’s door handle as “human” blood. But the criminalist had only done a presumptive test, which showed the presence of blood. In theory, it could have been animal blood.
The most serious thing I saw in that warrant, however, was not an error, but an omission. For whatever reason, Phil had failed to put in the affidavit that they’d had to leap the wall that morning to unlock the gate. He certainly hadn’t mentioned it to me when he’d called me for advice on the warrant. I was seriously annoyed by this.
Even though the warrantless entry seemed, under the circumstances, justified, the omission of it on the affidavit could serve to seriously undermine his credibility.
Both Curt and I knew that come the preliminary hearing, we would end up doing battle to justify the cops’ entry and defend their integrity. For now, I was content to see that the second warrant was done right. I wanted a thorough search for the items we now knew Simpson had on the night of the murders. Principally, we were looking for the knife from Ross Cutlery and the dark sweats Kato had seen Simpson wearing during the early evening, neither of which had turned up. I also wanted to search the Bentley. If we found no blood there, it would indicate that Simpson had not wounded his finger until after the outing to McDonald’s; that, in turn, would place the cut closer to the time of the murders.
The five of us—Tom, Phil, David, Bill, and I—arrived in a single car at Rockingham on the morning of Tuesday, June 28. Reporters blocked the gates. Overhead, I could hear the thrum of copters. The scene looked like something out of
Apocalypse Now
.
“Did you guys request those?” I asked Tom.
“It’s the media,” he replied, disgusted.
We parked on Rockingham and were ushered in by a couple of uniforms. I met up with John Stevens, a photographer for the D.A.‘s office, whom I’d asked to come on this search to videotape the grounds. I wanted him to record Allan Park’s view of the driveway and front door from his position facing the Ashford gate. This would allow me to demonstrate to a jury how Park’s vantage point allowed him to see Simpson entering the house. I also showed John a couple of other areas we should document—for instance, the south pathway where the glove had been found. If a case takes months to come to trial, you can forget little details of layout. You find yourself clinging to frames of videotape. It’s essential to capture those images right away.
As Tom and I walked through the kitchen I noticed a pretty young black woman standing in a small desk-and-bookcase nook. She looked uncomfortable. I hadn’t expected any civilians, so at first I assumed she was a cop.
“Marcia,” Tom said, “this is Arnelle Simpson. Arnelle, Marcia Clark is the D.A. on the case.”
Arnelle had no reason to like me. I’m sure she saw me as just one more intruder tramping through her home. I didn’t know what to say except “I’m sorry for all this. We’ll get out of your way as soon as possible.” She said nothing—just smiled weakly and shook my hand.
When Tom and I got to the pool area, we found Phil and Mark Fuhrman standing near a round glass table. I thought we might be able to grab a few minutes to talk. Sometime before the hearings we would all have to sort out the events of the detectives’ first trip out to Rockingham on the morning of June 13. I would need a solid, lucid accounting, not only of their actions, but of their frame of mind, in order to defend that search.
But as we spoke, the din of the news copters grew so loud that we were having to shout in one another’s ears. We stopped that when someone warned us that the media might have parabolic mikes pointed in our direction. “Let’s try writing notes to each other,” I shouted at Mark, and he nodded back, pulling out his pad. But before he’d managed to set anything on paper, one of the detectives motioned to us that some eye in the sky might be able to read them. I gave up. We agreed to meet later in my office to finish the interview.
We retreated inside, where I happened to glance at a television mounted on the wall in Simpson’s living room. The day’s news fare was… us. Local programming had been canceled in order to bring the viewers of Los Angeles a live, on-the-spot broadcast of the scene at Rockingham. The image on the screen was the exterior of the house. And I was inside the house, watching them watching us. Could this get any weirder?
I went through that house room by room to see how the search was going. Simpson’s bedroom was thoroughly tossed, but the day’s results were to be measured mainly in the negative: No knife; no bloody sweat clothes. Nor were there bloodstains in the Bentley.
We did, however, seize some additional pieces of evidence, among them a single leather glove, this one black, which I’d seen lying on a table in the living room during the first search. It had a different lining from the pair found at Bundy and in the south walkway, but both the single glove and the bloody pair in evidence had been manufactured by Aris. I thought this would tend to suggest that Simpson favored the brand.
When I reached the foyer, a cop called out to me, “I found his divorce file.” He handed me a letter typed on the letterhead of “O. J. Simpson Enterprises.” It was from Simpson to Nicole and was dated June 6, 1994. It put her on written notice that she did not have permission or authority to use his permanent home address at 360 North Rockingham as her residence or mailing address for any purpose, including tax returns. “I cannot take part in any course of action by you that might intentionally or unintentionally be misleading to the Internal Revenue or California Franchise Tax Board,” he wrote. It was signed “O.J.” and cc’ed to his attorney, LeRoy Taft.
Until now Simpson had been claiming that at the time of Nicole’s murder, his relationship with her had been amicable. But in this typed sheet I was holding, he was ordering her in icy legalese to steer clear of Rockingham. This pair had been divorced for two years, and they were still arguing over assets. When I saw the letters “IRS,” I knew we had our flashpoint.
I took the letter outside to show David. His eyes widened as he read it.
“See the date?” I asked him.
“Incredible,” he agreed. But neither of us knew exactly how to proceed.
After a moment of silence, David looked at me. I could tell what he was thinking. This piece of evidence lay in a gray area. The letter was clearly not specified in the warrant. There had been no way we could have been aware of its existence. And yet we were standing with a piece of evidence that went clearly to the defendant’s state of mind during the days before the murders.
“I think the law is on our side,” David said finally. “I think we can take it.”
So we did.
Months later, at trial, the trial judge would thwart our first attempts to present the IRS letter as evidence. Because it was not mentioned in the affidavit to the search warrant, he ruled, it was inadmissible. He was right, or course. But by then I’d figured out a lawful way to procure that document. I promptly sent Attorney Taft a subpoena for the letter.
I was not losing that letter. No way. No how.
I set about our preparations for the prelims with my usual anal-retentive devotion, but it was like trying to neatly crayon in one of my sons’ coloring books while riding in a bumper car. I’d just get up to speed, and I’d be knocked outside the lines.
Case in point: it took a lot of phone calls and a lot of politicking before I finally persuaded SID to assign Greg Matheson to do the initial blood analysis to determine whether the blood might be Simpson’s. Conventional tests will usually narrow the number of possible donors to only 10 to 15 percent of the population. In a city like Los Angeles, with nearly three and a half million people, that’s still a whopping 450,000 candidates.
But we caught a real break. The blood type that came up on the drop at Bundy was fairly rare: it could have come from only one half of one percent of the population. Only one person in 200 had that blood type. And Orenthal James Simpson was one of them. Yes!
I carried my good news down to a meeting with Bill and some of the brass. But before I could utter a word, I was stopped dead in my tracks by their somber faces.
“I’ve got rather disturbing news,” Bill said to me. “The knife salesman sold his story to the
National Enquirer.”
Jose Camacho was the salesman who’d told the cops how Simpson had purchased a stiletto only days before the murder. He had testified before the grand jury, where he’d come off as a pretty decent guy. Now he’d pulled a Shively? Oh, damn! How many times had we told our witnesses to stay away from the media? We’d even admonished them not to talk to
anybody
, because in this overheated atmosphere you couldn’t predict who might sell a story heard secondhand. But what good were our threats? If someone wants to talk to a reporter, there is no legal way to stop him. When the hand holding the mike is dangling a $10,000 check in front of a witness who barely makes minimum wage, it’s easy to see how abstractions like justice and integrity can get shoved aside.
Camacho’s interview-for-profit now limited our options. Technically, we could try to prosecute him for contempt. Unlike Shively, Camacho had sold his story
after
testifying before the grand jury, where he was instructed not to discuss his testimony with anyone. But I doubted that we could get a contempt ruling to stick. Camacho was a Spanish-speaking witness; he was already setting the stage to claim that he did not understand the admonition. Which was nonsense. Camacho had felt confident enough of his English to testify without an interpreter at the grand jury hearing. In fact, his English was excellent.
Was he ruined as a witness? Anything he said on the stand would be tainted by the fact that he’d sold his story, a story that was worth more to the tabloids if it incriminated Simpson. If we had the knife itself, it might have been worth our effort to overcome this taint. But we didn’t have the knife.
“I say we don’t call him,” I blurted. I looked around the table for reaction. Gil, as usual, was hard to read. Dan Murphy, one of the D.A.‘s top assistants, was leaning back in his chair, eyes turned to the ceiling, hand to cheek. Frank Sundstedt was slumped into his chair, hands folded together against his chest—his characteristic contemplative pose.
“Trial’s a long way away,” Frank said finally. “By the time you start picking a jury, this story won’t even be a blip on the screen. If we do turn up the knife, Camacho’s testimony will be important. I think we ought to preserve it, just in case he takes a powder.”
Frank had a point. If a witness testifies at a preliminary hearing, that testimony is usually admissible at trial even if the witness has absconded. That would be useful if by some chance we found the knife. Gil agreed: we’d put Camacho on. I understood their reasoning, but I doubted it would be worth the nasty hits we were going to take for putting on such a damaged witness. More specifically—the hits
I
was going to take. It was one thing to agree in principle around a conference table. But somebody has to stand up there with a straight face and present this opportunist as a witness for the People.