Our whole team worked like maniacs preparing for the prelims. I had no time to worry about how big the case was getting; it was all I could do to gather and organize all the material. After all, we had a week to do a job that normally we’d have had three months to complete. The day before the prelims were set to start was especially hectic. Shapiro filed his motion to suppress the evidence seized at Rockingham before Phil tried to get a warrant. We’d expected this, but just not so soon. So we got a judge to postpone testimony on the motion until we had some time to prepare. Then we went back upstairs to work.
We stayed until after nine on the eve of the prelims. I was sure that most of the press would have retreated to their respective hotel bars by then. Instead, as Suzanne, Bill, and I walked out the back of the CCB, we saw that the parking lot was more crowded than a tailgate party on homecoming weekend. For the past week, it had been jammed with vans, satellite dishes, and lunch wagons. ABC, NBC, CBS had all erected scaffolds that resembled medieval assault engines. The correspondents themselves, however, displayed the more modern enthusiasm of fans vamping behind the bleachers before the big game.
Suzanne wasn’t surprised: for the past few days her office had been handling hundreds of calls every hour, from every corner of the world. Just about all the callers, of course, wanted interviews.
Out of nowhere, a reporter with a video cameraman behind him shoved a mike in our faces.
“How do you feel tonight? Are you ready for court tomorrow? he asked.
Bill tossed off an innocuous one-liner as we hustled out of range.
I’d begun to realize that no matter what happened in court, the sheer amplitude of media coverage would distort these proceedings like never before. It made me feel out of control, angry and helpless.
I tried not to dwell on those things the next morning as I scrambled to get Matt ready for school and organize my thoughts at the same time.
Just do what you always do
, I told myself. I would repeat that many times to myself in the next year.
I arrived on time that morning. I believe I was even early. Bill and I had witnesses stashed all over the eighteenth floor and we ducked in and out of offices, touching base with them, reassuring them. Our last stop was the room used for press conferences. When Bill opened the door, I found myself face-to-face with a roomful of strangers. They were tense, their faces expectant. The victims’ families.
Usually, I meet with the next of kin almost immediately after I get a case. I go out to their homes or they come in to the office to meet me. Wherever they feel more comfortable. It’s important to make that connection right from the start. The unusual circumstances of this case had caused me to proceed more cautiously. For most of the first week after the murders, the case was not officially mine. It was a bad idea, I thought, to make contact and set about establishing rapport with these deeply hurt people when there was a chance that I might not be assigned to the case for keeps. The District Attorney’s office should convey to a victim’s family the feeling of strength and certainty. And that could not happen if they were being passed around from deputy to deputy.
The cops had interviewed them, of course. Gil had spoken to them to convey his sympathy. They had been commended to the care of our “victims’ coordinator,” whose job it is to accompany them to court and answer their questions. I had had brief phone conversations with the Browns and the Goldmans several days earlier, but only to introduce myself. I was hoping they would forgive the awkwardness of meeting under these circumstances.
On one side of the room were the Browns, awesomely handsome and erect. Lou and Juditha, flanked by Denise, Dominique, and Tanya. The suspect was their son-in-law, their brother-in-law. Exactly what stance they were taking toward him was still unclear to me. I found them very hard to read.
On the other side of the room stood the Goldmans. Ron’s father, Fred; his stepmother, Patti; and, of course, Kim, a reed-thin girl whose pretty features were red and swollen from crying. Looking at her made me recall the pang I’d felt upon seeing her brother’s face for the first time, in the coroner’s photos.
“What’s going to happen now?” asked Patti Goldman. She was a petite woman with large, lovely green eyes. Fred stood with his arm draped around her protectively.
“We’ll have some motions to begin with, nothing major,” I said. “The defense has filed a motion to suppress evidence, but that will be heard later during the hearing.”
“Suppress the evidence!” Denise Brown snapped. “What do you mean?”
I could understand why this idea offended her. She would later express her concerns to reporters in even stronger terms. “If he’s innocent,” she would ask, “why does he want to suppress evidence?”
“It’s a motion we see a lot,” I explained. “The defense claims the police got evidence illegally, and they’ve asked the judge to throw it out. We’re prepared for that and I don’t think there’s any chance that the judge will grant it.”
We talked a little more about the sorts of things that the defense was likely to do. No matter how hurtful it might seem, I told them, they shouldn’t take it personally.
Easy for me to say.
At 9:10 A.M. on June 30, 1994, Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell bade us good morning and looked over her courtroom. It was packed—the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Only ten seats were available to the general public, and the media folk had to scramble to secure one of the twenty-five seats set aside for them. But no one had to miss a thing: the best seat in the house was reserved for the cameras.
I’d never appeared before Judge Kennedy-Powell before, but I’d actually worked with her in the eighties when she was deputy D.A. I knew her as a hardworking, conscientious prosecutor who took her job very seriously. She looked at ease on the bench. But we couldn’t get down to business. Someone was missing.
“Well, I guess the defendant is not out yet,” Judge Kennedy-Powell observed.
“This is the quietest courtroom I’ve ever been in, Your Honor,” Shapiro quipped, trying to fill the dead time.
“I don’t know how long that will remain, but we’ll see,” Kennedy-Powell smiled.
At last, the door opened. The courtroom went silent. O. J. Simpson strode in, impeccably dressed, looking surprisingly fit. What an impressive transformation from the bedraggled, confused defendant who had appeared for his arraignment. His new role was the O.J. You Know and Love, Falsely Accused. And no Shakespearean actor would play this one better.
Judge Kennedy-Powell asked the record to reflect the defendant’s presence and asked counsel to present themselves.
“Marcia Clark for the People,” I began.
It’s hard to believe that my first act that day was arguing about the hairs on O. J. Simpson’s head. But it’s true.
we’d requested hair samples from Simpson, so we could determine whether his matched several found at the crime scene. Shapiro had offered us a ludicrously insufficient number: three. It was up to me to argue first.
Oblivious to the hype and cameras, I launched right into my reasoning. This was my job; I had been doing it for years. Carefully, I explained how we needed samples from various parts of the head; the usual quantity is a hundred hairs. But only the criminalist taking the samples could determine how many were needed.
“Mr. Shapiro?” asked Judge Kennedy-Powell.
“Your Honor,” he said soberly, “according to Dr. Henry Lee, our chief criminalist, who is the head of the Department of Criminology in Connecticut, he tells us one to three hairs are sufficient.”
Judge Kennedy-Powell mused aloud that she had never seen a case where the prosecution was limited to a sample of three hairs. But then she faltered. She would not let us take more than ten hairs unless we could present expert witnesses who could establish how many hairs were required for a valid sample.
I was ready. Our expert was Michele Kestler, director of the SID crime lab. She backed me up in saying that a case like this commonly required seventy-five to one hundred strands.
On cross-examination, Shapiro immediately assumed the glacial pace that would become his trademark. He insisted upon a detailed recitation of Kestler’s credentials, her résumé, her experience—everything but what she ate for breakfast. He had her recite all sorts of minutiae about her profession and the specific samples of blood and hair she had received from our searches. Shapiro again cited the source for his contention that only a single hair was required.
“Are you familiar with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Henry Lee?” he asked her.
She was.
“Have you seen his fifty-page curriculum vitae lately?” he asked.
Give me a break
. And then Shapiro asked Kestler what sources
she
had relied upon for her opinion that seventy-five to one hundred hairs were required.
Michele produced a book co-authored and edited by none other than Dr. Henry Lee.
Judge Kennedy-Powell gave us our hundred hairs.
I savored that small victory even as I realized what this skirmish meant: nothing in this case would be conceded without interminable bickering.
Bill, bless his heart, had agreed to put on the knife salesman, Jose Camacho. It was predictably painful. Bill walked Camacho through a straightforward account of selling the stiletto to Simpson the morning of May 9. Then Bill fronted the
Enquirer
business. The clerk seemed like a harmless little man. I don’t think he was a liar, just a sellout. How he would have looked in the eyes of a jury, I don’t know. That question was rendered academic by the advent of a mysterious manila envelope.
It seemingly materialized from thin air. One minute, in the middle of Camacho’s testimony, Judge Kennedy-Powell left the courtroom, and the next minute she was back, producing with a flourish a yellow manila envelope containing some sort of solid object. She’d received, she said, an envelope containing evidence collected by a special court master at the defense’s request. She intended to open it. Shapiro shot out of his seat with an objection. I chimed in with one of my own. You didn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to guess what was sealed inside: a knife. But I couldn’t be sure. And for months down the road I wouldn’t be sure. Periodically, we would file motions to compel the defense to reveal the contents. The defense would object and our motion would be tabled. This happened time and again.
We were well into the criminal trial by the time we were allowed to learn that the envelope did indeed contain a stiletto. The report said that it had been discovered by Jason Simpson in the medicine cabinet of Simpson’s bathroom. Then it had been turned over by Shapiro to a special court master, who gave it to Judge Kennedy-Powell. (Shapiro was unhappy that she introduced it at the prelim—apparently he’d been hoping to blindside us with this evidence during the trial.) The knife’s discovery was supposedly made
after
our second search of June 28.
I never believed the medicine cabinet story. I’d been at Rockingham all through the second search, and the rooms had been taken to pieces by officers looking specifically for that knife. But the question was largely academic. The knife didn’t matter. It is too easy to boil a knife to destroy traces of blood and tissue. It is not difficult to go out and buy a duplicate. No coroner could say with certainty that it was the murder weapon. Knives, unlike guns, do not smoke: they do not leave proof-positive evidentiary calling cards. If I’d really pressed to get it into evidence, however, I’m sure that all I would have gotten was a spanking-clean knife, property of a known collector of weapons. In the end, we let the stiletto rest in its eight-by-eleven manila envelope—where, I believe, it remains today.
Eventually, I imagine, O. J. Simpson will reclaim it and auction it off on
Larry King Live
.
After the knife interlude, we were finally able to begin proving that there was sufficient cause to charge our defendant. We clicked through the civilian witnesses briskly. Shapiro’s cross-examination was uniformly ineffective, so there was little or no cleanup needed on redirect. Every single witness helped our presentation.
One key witness was Steven Schwab, the dog walker who had first encountered Nicole’s Akita running loose in the neighborhood. We hadn’t been able to get him up before the grand jury, but his testimony was crucial to our time line. If the murders were committed after eleven o’clock, Simpson would be home free: he couldn’t possibly have done the killing and hooked up with the limo driver in time. The problem was that the first time Schwab talked to police, he said that he believed he’d first seen the Akita around 11:15 P.M. This statement was made to the cops at about five on the morning after the murders; Schwab had been awakened from a deep sleep and was slightly confused about times. Upon more clear-minded reflection, however, he realized he’d actually seen the dog at about 10:45.
Usually a prior inconsistent statement by a witness is a credibility killer. At best, you’re left doubting the witness’s memory; at worst, his honesty. But Schwab was so sturdily forthright you just knew he’d made an honest mistake. He endeared himself to the spectators in court by recounting the process by which he had verified in his own mind the Akita encounter. He had an unvarying nightly routine, centered on old reruns. A cable network showed his favorites and he always watched the
Dick Van Dyke Show
, which ended at 10:30. Then he would take his dog for a half-hour walk, returning in time to catch the opening minutes of the eleven P.M. showing of
Mary Tyler Moore
.
Such banal details mark all of our daily lives and give our days some predictability. Schwab’s recitation drew laughter, but no one could doubt the truth of his testimony. He had seen the dog at 10:45,
not
11:15. Our time line was secure.
Pablo Fenjves was my essential “dog bark” witness, the neighbor who heard the Akita’s “plaintive wail” starting at 10:15 P.M. His description of that sound lodged in the memories of reporters and public alike. Taken in tandem with Sukru Boztepe and Bettina Rasmussen’s solemn, emotional account of finding Nicole’s body, it seemed to cast an eerie spell over the gallery. We were still in that state of morbid dislocation when Judge Kennedy-Powell dismissed us for the Fourth of July weekend.