I spent very little of that weekend at home. I worked all day Saturday. And on Sunday morning I drove out to Bundy, to the little condominium on the downscale side of Sunset.
For the past few days I been increasingly anxious to scope out the condo. I had not been to Bundy since the morning after the murders, and then I’d been detained at the perimeter, like a bystander. The condo’s various appointments—the security gate, the dog leap stairway, the landing where Nicole lay, the fenced-in corner where Ron was killed—had all become part of the public’s collective consciousness. Yet to me they remained abstractions.
I met up with Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter at the rear of the condo. Bill was there, too, as were Patti Jo and several officers from Robbery/Homicide. We were all silently relieved that the media hadn’t trailed us.
We’d gathered in the lane at the rear of the condo, when Lieutenant John Rogers noticed blood—drops of blood, on the back gate. What the hell? We stopped dead in our tracks and looked at one another. Could Dennis Fung have overlooked this crucial evidence on the morning of the thirteenth? We stopped everything and called for a criminalist.
The realization that we’d probably just stumbled upon another incredible fuckup cast a pall over the party.
Tom led us down the walkway toward the front of the condo. I could still see some of the blood droplets and the faint outlines of the bloody shoe prints, mere ghosts of the images I’d seen countless times in photographs. What had it been like, I wondered, for the officers that night to see all this evidence lying before them? I’d never seen so much left at a crime scene. This murder was obviously the work of an amateur.
At the front of the condo I stood on the upper landing and looked down on the area enclosed by the front gate. It was cramped and dark, even smaller than photos could convey. I turned to Bill and said, “The jury has to see this. When they realize how small it is, they’ll understand how impossible it would be for two men to have fit in here to commit the murders.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” he replied, clearly as moved as I was. Then, ever practical: “We’ll have to get a motion going on it.”
We’d been told by Nicole’s friend Ron Hardy that the intercom controlling the lock on the front gate was broken. If Nicole had wanted to let a visitor in, she’d had to go down and open the gate manually. If this was true, it was easy to conceive how Nicole and Ron were both at the front gate when Simpson moved in for the kill.
He could have attacked Nicole from behind, hitting her on the head, making a quick cut to her neck, and slamming her into the staircase wall. She would have been knocked unconscious long enough for him to deal with Ron before going back to dispatch her with the coup de grâce.
Frankly, I favored a slightly different scenario: Nicole Simpson hears something outside—the sounds made by her ex-husband lurking in the shrubs around her condo. Nicole steps outside to investigate. She ventures down to the front gate, looks down the walkway and into the shrubbery to the north. Nothing. And then, when she turns to mount the steps, to reenter the house where her children are sleeping, she walks right into him, smack into the man who she had vowed would no longer be the center of her life. He is dressed for silent combat—dark sweats, knit cap, gloves. He has come to take her life.
Somewhere during this time, Ron Goldman, on his innocuous errand, appears. Perhaps Ron has come up the walk while Simpson is in the midst of his stiletto mêlée. Why doesn’t he flee? Perhaps he has come too close and can’t escape. Or perhaps—and this seemed a stronger likelihood—Ron feels compelled to come to Nicole’s aid. He is about to engage in an act of selflessness that will lead to his death.
In either case, my strong feeling is that Simpson did not have to confront both of his victims simultaneously.
He murders first one, then the other.
The blood pools on the sidewalk.
The dog howls.
How many minutes for each?
How many times on other cases had I worked through this same gory calculus? You can never quite capture the factor of pain.
Like Rockingham, the interior of Nicole’s condo at Bundy was white with some muted pastels for accent. It had the tranquil, static quality of a photograph from
House Beautiful
. The kitchen was tidy, nothing out of place. In the center of the sunken living room sat a large square table. On it stood several candles, which had been burning on the night of the murders. The spent wax had dried in a pool around them. But everything in that room seemed like wax. Cold. Solid. Lifeless.
Nicole’s bedroom was done in the same white and pastels, but the room felt anything but tranquil. Attached to one of the posts of her large four-poster bed was a pair of toy handcuffs. Something else interested me about the bed: the blankets and sheets. They lay in a rumpled heap, just as they’d been found by the first officer on the scene. Until now I had left open the possibility that Nicole had sexual designs on Ron. If so, I figured it had been a spontaneous idea, occurring after Juditha Brown lost her glasses. But the sight of Nicole’s messy bed made me doubt this theory. What woman plans an intimate night with a man and leaves the bed unmade? You just wouldn’t do it. Not even if you intended to limit your fooling around to the couch downstairs.
Ordinarily I would not have allowed myself such intimate speculations about a woman I’d never met. And yet a couple of times of late I’d been surprised by a sense of connection to Nicole. Looking back on it, I don’t know why it seemed so improbable that I might identify with a woman who was taking her first toddler steps into the world after divorce. And yet it seemed strange to me at the time. The sight of Nicole’s chaotic bed and the cold dead wax of her candles chilled me. So did the memory of her pale, bloodless face. And so I did what I always do with emotions too painful to confront: I pushed them to the back of my mind.
Things continued going well for us the following week. The limo driver, Allan Park, was concise and unimpeachably credible. I even managed to extract some new information from the eternally stumbling Kato Kaelin. His recounting of Simpson’s activities that night preserved our time line, and the description he gave of the thumps outside his cottage and the confusion around Simpson’s attempt to hook up with the limo driver made a clear pitch to the judge—and to millions on television—that something undeniably suspicious was afoot at the Rockingham residence.
Then, late on Tuesday, July 5, we began arguments on the defense’s search-and-seizure motion. A lot was riding on it. The main target, of course, was the Rockingham glove. Shapiro would have tried any kind of crazy stunt to keep that out of the record. At the heart of his argument to suppress was the allegation that all four officers went out to Rockingham that morning believing Simpson was a suspect. In that case, they might have needed a warrant to enter the grounds.
By now I’d looked thoroughly into these allegations. In follow-up interviews, all four detectives led me through their individual movements during the early-morning hours of June 13. I’d read all of their reports and made notes on my informal conversations with each of them.
What I heard was encouraging: the four were acting under official orders to make a humanitarian notification—and that in itself went a good distance toward discrediting the defense’s claim. In murder cases, you
always
try to notify the next of kin personally. Sometimes cops will drive two hours to make the contact. And when the case involves a celebrity, there’s even more urgency—you don’t want the first notification to come from the media.
The officers had just come from a scene where two victims had been savagely slain. Simpson’s two young children had been roused from their beds at Bundy and were at West L.A. Station waiting for their father or some other member of the family to pick them up. Where was he? Was he all right? The uncertainty mounted when they reached Rockingham and rang the buzzer at the Ashford gate. No answer. For nearly ten minutes, no reply.
Finally, Ron Phillips got Simpson’s phone number from the private security service. He called it on his cell phone, letting it ring over and over again. No response. The detectives fell back to try and figure out what kind of situation they had. It didn’t feel right that the place should be deserted at 5:30 in the morning. Especially considering that the lights were on and cars were in the driveway.
They were reviewing their options when Mark Fuhrman walked down to the white Ford Bronco parked just outside the Rockingham gate. The way it was parked, rear wheels jutting out from the curb, struck him as odd. He pulled out his penlight and began to examine the vehicle more closely. A package in the cargo area was addressed to Orenthal Productions. Fuhrman moved around the car with his penlight and when he came to the driver’s door he stopped. On the clean surface he noticed a tiny dark spot. He called Phil over. They both agreed: it looked like blood.
There was a real possibility that someone was in danger. Their choices: leave and get a search warrant, in which case precious minutes would be lost, or go in right away and hope they weren’t too late. Everything spelled urgency. Phil decided to go in. He asked Mark, who was the youngest and fittest of the four, to climb over the wall and open the gate. Fuhrman did so and opened the gate from inside. The detectives knocked on the front door and got no answer, so they went to the back of the house, fanning their flashlights around the pool area looking for signs of disturbance—or more victims. Nothing.
I asked all the cops whether they’d done a thorough search of the grounds—waded through shrubbery or gone inside the pool house. They all told me no. That wasn’t their goal. They were looking for bodies or for someone who could tell them how to reach O. J. Simpson.
When they found Kato Kaelin and Arnelle Simpson in their respective guest houses, they learned that Simpson wasn’t there. Mark told me how he and Ron Phillips had approached the first of the guest rooms at the back of the house. Ron looked through the glass door and saw someone on the bed. When they knocked, a white man in his thirties came to the door. He appeared dazed and confused.
I laughed to myself when I heard this. Kato always seemed that way. Mark had shone a penlight into his eyes to see if he appeared to be under the influence of drugs. Not visibly. Mark then checked his clothes and boots for blood. Clearly, Mark, at least, considered him a potential suspect. Kato told Mark Furhman about the thump on the wall. When Mark went outside to investigate, he saw a small lump, barely visible, on the ground. As he drew nearer, the lump began to take the shape of a glove. Earlier that morning, he’d seen a glove lying on the ground between the victims at Bundy.
Was this its mate?
Until that point, no one inside the house had been searching for evidence. Only when Mark returned to tell them what he’d found did that change. Fuhrman escorted the others to the site, one by one. By the time it was Phil’s turn, the sky had lightened so that he was able to see without the aid of a flashlight. As he looked toward the Bronco parked just outside the Rockingham gate, he noticed spots on the cobblestoned driveway. He moved for a closer look. Again, blood. The drops stretched between the Bronco and the front door.
That was enough for Phil. He declared Rockingham a crime scene and called for a criminalist. Shortly after that, he left to prepare the warrant.
The big question seemed to be whether Vannatter, Lange, Fuhrman, and Phillips had gone to Rockingham early that morning to notify Simpson—or to investigate him. Believe me, I grilled Phil with plenty of hard questions.
“Phil, man,” I said. “You’re tellin’ me straight that you didn’t think that Simpson might be a suspect when you went out there?”
Phil was unshakable. All that he would say was that Simpson was a “potential suspect,” just like everyone else who had come in contact with the victim. He was not an actual suspect, meaning they had no actual evidence linking him to the murders.
“We took Mark and Ron along so they could stay with him, get his kids out of the station, and calm him down when we went back to the crime scene,” he insisted.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But really, Phil, didn’t you consider him a suspect after Mark told you he’d been out to the place before?”
This was one aspect of the case that puzzled me. Back in the mid-eighties, when he was still a patrolman, Mark Fuhrman had been called out to 360 North Rockingham for some unspecified family-dispute call. This was a fact that he apparently had confided in his superior, Ron Phillips, on the morning of June 13. Ron, in turn, told Phil, who professed not to know quite what to make of it. Later I would receive, among documents sent over by the City Attorney’s office, the copy of a letter Fuhrman had written at that office’s request to shore up its 1989 battery case against Simpson. In the letter, Mark had mentioned how he’d come upon O. J. Simpson pacing in his driveway. Nicole sat on the hood of a Mercedes-Benz, its windshield shattered, apparently by Simpson wielding a baseball bat. When Fuhrman inquired as to what had happened, Simpson replied, “I broke the windshield… it’s mine… there’s no trouble here.” Fuhrman had asked Nicole if she’d wanted to make a report, and she’d said no.
The most curious part of the letter was its closing: “It seems odd to remember such an event, but it is not every day that you respond to a celebrity’s home for a family dispute. For this reason this incident was indelibly pressed in my memory.”
This squared perfectly with the Mark Fuhrman I had seen admiring the bronze statue of Simpson on the morning of June 13. Clearly, Fuhrman adored the Juice and was not about to arrest him if he didn’t have to. Still, didn’t the mere fact that Fuhrman knew of prior domestic violence between the Simpsons color the cops’ thinking about Simpson as a suspect on the morning they left Bundy for Rockingham?
“Frankly, all I remember was him saying he’d been there a long time ago and it may have involved domestic violence. It was a passing remark and it didn’t mean much at the time. A call from ten years ago sure didn’t add up to what we saw at Bundy.”