“So you associated that with anger?” Johnnie persisted.
Duh
.
I have to believe that left to his own devices Johnnie would have been more effective with Edwards. He could have taken the tack, “Did you ever have the occasion to go out to Rockingham again, Officer Edwards?”. . . .“No, I did not, sir.” That would have suggested to the jury that his client was reformed and repentent. I suspected that he did not do this because his client was pressuring him to take Edwards down. Still galled by the New Year’s Eve incident, Simpson was looking for any opportunity to rewrite history. (This perverse impulse, in fact, persisted into the civil trial, when, in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, he continued to insist that he’d never struck Nicole. Never!) Unfortunately for Simpson, kicking Officer Edwards around was not his ticket to rehabilitation. It only served to repeat the facts of a crime to which he ultimately had pled “no contest.”
“Amateurish,” I scribbled on a Post-it to Chris. He rolled his eyes in agreement.
I wondered if the jury was taking all this in.
The 911 dispatchers and Detective Edwards had laid a credible foundation for our next witness, Ron Shipp. Chris and I were pinning a lot of our hopes on Ron. Of all of our domestic violence witnesses, he was potentially the most damaging to the defendant. His testimony was also the hardest won.
Back in July, the cops passed me a tip about Ron. A former LAPD officer, he’d suffered from a drinking problem and left the force about five years earlier. Since then, he’d apparently tried his hand at acting, without much success. The really interesting thing about him was that he’d been a longtime friend of O. J. Simpson’s. He’d even worked security details for O. J.—and, in fact, had had some contact with him after the murders. The cops suspected that Shipp knew “something very important.” I sent out the word that I wanted to speak with him.
Shipp showed up at the CCB on Thursday, July 28, in the company of his attorney, Bob McNeil—as it happened, a law school buddy of mine. Shipp was a compact black man, a few years younger than O. J. Simpson. His honest, open face, strewn generously with freckles, radiated decency.
I motioned them to an office down the hall from mine. Phil Vannatter joined us. He and Ron went back a long way on the force; I let him do the questioning.
“You know why we’re here, Ron,” Phil said. “We’re here to talk about O. J. Simpson and Nicole… . And what I would like you to do… is just tell me what you know about their relationship. What was going on between them.”
Ron hesitated.
“I met Nicole before they were married and were living together… fifteen years [ago]. . . . As far as I was concerned… they had a great marriage. A great relationship.”
So far, no good.
Shipp explained that he’d known Simpson for twenty-six years. When he was working patrol, he’d bring his cop friends over to play tennis at Simpson’s house. Ron insisted he hadn’t known about any problems in the Simpson marriage before the New Year’s Eve incident. A couple of days after that happened, Nicole had telephoned him for help. Ron, she knew, taught classes at the Police Academy dealing with spousal abuse. She wanted him to talk to her husband. Ron came over to the house with some lesson plans from the class, including a profile of the victim and the batterer.
“And she sat there and she pointed out hers and what she thought was his [profile],” Ron told us. At this point, he stopped. He was clearly uncomfortable.
“You would feel better if you know that you’ve told the truth,” I said gently. “You could not have prevented what happened… no matter how hard you tried… . The only thing that you can do now… is to tell the truth.”
Ron took a deep breath. “I told her before she let him back in the house to get counseling,” he said.
At Nicole’s request, he arranged to talk to Simpson and show him the batterer’s profile. “When he first saw it,” Ron recalled, “he says, ‘It’s not me.’ ” Then Simpson backed up to admit he saw a “little bit” of himself in the category of “pathological jealousy.”
Simpson was terrified that bad publicity from the New Year’s battering would ruin his career. Ron suggested that he make a bold move. Simpson should go public with his problem. If he did that, Shipp predicted, women’s groups would rally behind him.
“He acted like it sounded good to him,” Ron recalled. “The next day, I don’t know who he talked to, but he was advised by someone… not to touch it with a ten-foot pole. And that was that.”
We asked Shipp what happened after Nicole and Simpson split up. Ron said, “She had this thing about who was going to be her friend.” Most of the couple’s mutual friends, he said, threw their loyalties to the Juice. But even at the risk of offending his hero, Ron would check in on Nicole from time to time to see how she was. This I found touching. I could see that Ron Shipp was a man of integrity and courage.
Phil asked whether he had any opinion about Simpson’s guilt or innocence. It was obviously a tough question. Ron paused.
“Whoever did this did a heck of a job of framing him,” he finally replied.
There were tears in his eyes.
I knew even then that there was way more that Shipp could tell us. I told Phil to stay on top of him. Months passed. Meetings were set; meetings were canceled. But Shipp, it turned out, hadn’t been so elusive with everyone.
Suzanne, Patti Jo, the law clerks, everyone was constantly dropping must-reads on my desk. In December one of them had deposited Sheila Weller’s
Raging Heart
. My first impulse was to dismiss it as sensationalism. But things had reached the point where, in order to keep up with the latest developments in this case, I had to check out the best-seller list. So late one night, as I was doing a turn on my exercise bike, I propped the book on the handlebars and started skimming.
I hadn’t gotten ten pages into it before a passage leaped out at me. It concerned a man named “Leo” who’d spent time with Simpson at Rockingham the evening after the murder. Leo was identified as a man with a “good working knowledge of criminal forensics.” Simpson had asked to speak to him privately that night in his bedroom.
“How long does it take for DNA to come back?” Simpson had supposedly asked him. Leo thought it took a couple of months. Simpson then told him that the police had asked him to take a polygraph but that he’d refused, ” ‘Cause I
have
had some dreams about killing her.’ “
I read this account with dawning amazement.
Leo was Ron Shipp!
Ron had told us he’d been to Rockingham that night to pay his respects to O.J. and his family. But he certainly hadn’t passed along any conversation that he might have had while alone with Simpson in his bedroom. And he certainly hadn’t mentioned the dream.
The following day, I had Chris bring Shipp in. This time we got the full story—the one he had told Weller. After hearing about the murders on June 13, Shipp had driven to Rockingham. At first, he was turned away at the gate, but later, around six o’clock, he’d managed to get in.
The house was full of people—Arnelle and Jason; Simpson’s sisters and their husbands; Simpson’s personal assistant of many years, Cathy Randa; Bob Kardashian. At one point Simpson said he wanted to go to bed. He asked Ron to come upstairs with him. Shipp told us how Simpson took off his shirt and pants and folded them carefully. Simpson was apparently meticulous about his clothes. As he was undressing he’d asked Ron about polygraph tests. How reliable were those things?
“Very reliable,” Ron had told him.
And Simpson had replied with a chuckle, “To be honest, Shipp, I’ve had some dreams of killing her.”
Had Ron taken any money from Sheila Weller? Chris asked. Ron insisted he hadn’t. He’d told Weller about Simpson’s dream because he wanted to unburden his conscience. He wanted the information to get out, but he didn’t want to be fingered for it. Weller had promised him anonymity.
So much for anonymity. We intended to put Ron Shipp on the stand.
Actually, there were pros and cons involved in Shipp’s testimony. It looked pretty bad that he’d originally withheld the information from us. But it was also apparent that he was telling the truth. The “dream” conversation had allegedly occurred on Monday night—the same day that Vannatter and Lange, in the course of taking Simpson’s original statement, had asked him if he’d consent to a lie-detector test.
Remember, Simpson had told them, “I’m sure eventually I’ll do it. But it’s like I’ve got some weird thoughts now… . You know, when you’ve been with a person for seventeen years, you think everything. I’ve got to understand what this thing is. If it’s true blue, I don’t mind.”
The “dream” mentioned to Shipp obviously fell into that “weird thoughts” category. What he wanted, no doubt, was to argue that his angry thoughts about Nicole aroused such internal turmoil that it might make a polygraph needle jerk. Even then, the son of a bitch was working up an alibi in the event he failed the lie-detector test.
The defense lawyers, of course, had access to our interview with Shipp, and the prospect of this “dream” evidence clearly agitated them. Out of the presence of the jury, Carl Douglas argued strenuously that it shouldn’t be admitted because dreams could not “predict behavior.” Of course, we were never suggesting that they could.
What we wanted to show was Simpson’s general mind-set on the day after the murders. Here you have him suggesting to Tom and Phil in the police statement that he and Nicole were totally cool about their failed reconciliation. A few hours later he’s telling Ron Shipp that he’s had dreams of
killing
her. That day, Ito rejected Douglas’s arguments, allowing us to present Shipp’s testimony. Lance caught flak for that ruling among the talking heads and eventually he wimped out and instructed the jurors to ignore the dream comments. Too bad—he got it right the first time.
I ran into Ron moments before his testimony. He was sitting in the little foyer outside the War Room. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping well. I went up to him and gave him a hug.
“We’re behind you,” I assured him. “And we can party when you’re done.”
He laughed, but I could tell he was heartsick. I really felt for the guy. He was not just an admiring fan about to bring down his hero. He was a black man testifying against another black man. Ron knew—we all knew—that he’d catch some hell for turning on Simpson. But none of us had any idea how much he’d end up paying.
When Ron took the stand, Chris laid a brilliant foundation for his long, adulatory history with Simpson.
“And do you and the defendant remain friends today?” Chris asked him.
“I still love the guy. But—um… This is a weird situation,” Ron allowed.
Leading up to the dream episode, Chris asked Ron, “Did he [Simpson] ask you any questions about the investigation that night?”
“After he told me about what they found at his house,” Ron replied, “he asked me, ‘How long does it take DNA to come back?’ “
“And at that time, did you know the correct answer to that question?”
“I just off-the-cuff said two months.”
“And what did he say in response?”
“He kind of jokingly just said, you know, ‘To be honest, Shipp… I’ve had some dreams of killing her.’ “
I winced a little. The defendant’s dream comments had originally been made in the context of his having been asked to take a lie-detector test. But that couldn’t be said in court, because testimony relating to polygraphs is inadmissible under California law. So while the jury heard that Simpson had dreamed of killing his ex-wife, that comment now seemed to come out of nowhere. They couldn’t be told that it was part of a scheme to give himself an excuse for failing a lie-detector test.
What followed was one of the meanest cross-examinations I’ve ever seen. It was intended, I think, to send a message that no traitors from the Simpson camp would be tolerated; the defense was determined to destroy Shipp. Johnnie, it came out, was related in some distant way to Ron, and he couldn’t bring himself to make the kill. Carl Douglas was the designated hit man.
First, Carl tried to establish that Shipp didn’t know the defendant as well as he’d claimed. After all, they never double-dated with their wives. O.J. had never played a single game of tennis with him.
“I guess you can say,” Ron said slowly, “I was like everybody else, one of his servants.”
Far from compromising himself, Ron’s reply served to make him appear both humble and self-aware.
Carl hammered away at Shipp, trying to get him to admit that the dream story was nothing more than an attempt to call attention to himself and advance his own acting career.
“I’m doing this for my conscience and my peace of mind,” Ron replied calmly. “I will not have the blood of Nicole on Ron Shipp. I can sleep at night, unlike a lot of others.”
As Ron looked better and better, Carl’s jabs got meaner.
“Isn’t it true that you were never alone with O. J. Simpson that night at Rockingham? Isn’t it true that the defendant’s sister, Shirley, was the one who accompanied him upstairs alone that night?” Carl even offered a veiled hint that Ron might have been in on the police conspiracy to plant evidence.
Ron looked right past Carl, straight into the face of his former hero.
“This is sad, O. J… . This is really sad.”
Then Carl Douglas sank to a new low, even for the Dream Team. First he brought up Ron’s old drinking problem. We objected, of course—what was the relevance of a condition that ended years ago? Overruled.
Wasn’t it true, he asked, that a few days before the murders Ron brought a tall blond woman to Rockingham and asked to use the Jacuzzi?
Objection, irrelevant. Overruled
. Ron tried to explain that he
and
his wife were friends of hers. Didn’t matter. The message Carl intended to send to those five black women on the jury was perfectly clear:
Black man steps out on his black wife with a white bitch. Are you going to tolerate this, my sisters?
It was horrible.
I was unprepared for the reports that came back to me following Ron’s testimony. Black journalists in the newsroom below us were branding him a liar and a traitor. The next issue of the city’s black-owned newspaper, the
Sentinel
, ran a banner headline proclaiming Shipp a “drunk” and accusing him of joining “O.J.‘s Cast of ‘Addicts, Liars.’ ” For weeks thereafter, Ron received death threats against himself, his wife, and his children.