Seven months earlier, during the preliminary hearings, Robert Shapiro had tried to argue that if Simpson had been on the south pathway, he wouldn’t have had to walk around to the front door to get back into the house. This was because two other doors along the south pathway led inside. I’d made a note to myself to check that out.
What I’d discovered in examining the photos and talking to Kato was that neither of those doors was operable. One of them, which led into the garage, had been blocked from the inside by a large dresser that supported a television set. The other, which led into the laundry room, was kept bolted from the inside and blocked by a stepladder and a laundry basket.
Today, however, the laundry-room door, free of obstacles, was standing wide open.
They’d altered the conditions. The defense team had deliberately changed things, both to pander to the jury’s racial prejudices and to obscure the facts in the case. I turned to Chris. “We have got to have them put this place back to the way it was, or else cancel the whole damned viewing,” I said.
Chris predicted that this would not sit well with the Little Prince, his pet name for Ito. I knew he was right, but we had to try.
When I demanded that Lance call a hearing right then and there to consider my motion, he was visibly irritated. He’d orchestrated this sound-and-light show down to the last detail and he didn’t want to change the program. He also knew that if he canceled the viewing, the defense would go nuts. Never mind that the Bundy condo had been rendered a lifeless husk. Forget that Rockingham had been transformed into a soundstage for
Leave It to Beaver
. Lance still seemed to be worried about pissing Johnnie off.
Under protest, however, Ito convened a hearing on the front lawn. Both sets of attorneys stood in a semicircle around the court reporter while I argued, ticking off the items, that the scene had been materially altered.
“This is a sympathy play on their part. That’s all it is,” I concluded. “There’s no evidentiary value to it.”
Ito allowed that he was a little worried about the photographs. He asked Johnnie about them. Cochran’s response was interesting in light of what was later documented in Larry Schiller’s
American Tragedy
. Schiller, appointed scribe of O. J. Simpson, writes that the defense team had supervised every step of this extraordinary effort to tamper with the jury view. Cochran himself is quoted as demanding that the white faces be replaced with black ones—in fact, the Norman Rockwell print came from his office!
Now, put on the spot, Johnnie equivocated.
“As to the photographs, Mr. Douglas is in charge of that,” Johnnie said. “I don’t want to respond to the argument… . This is preposterous.” Then he turned the question over to Carl Douglas, whose response was equally evasive: “I was not here on June the thirteenth, so I am unable to adequately respond specifically to what pictures were up and where they where. I don’t know for a fact.”
“Your Honor,” I put in, “I
was
here on the thirteenth, and I know—”
Johnnie cut me off. “I would not ask Miss Clark to tell you anything,” he said to the judge. “Gigi the housekeeper, she would be the one to tell you.”
Rising to the bait, Lance turned to the housekeeper and asked if anything had been changed.
“Just add his mother picture there,” she said in broken English.
“She’s not a detective,” I protested, “she’s a
housekeeper!
”
Of course, Ito refused to cancel the viewing. In the end, the only thing he was willing to do was to order the defense to take down the photo of Mama Simpson and to put out the fires.
“Nice try, guys,” he told them.
“
Nice try?” That’s
a reprimand? You’ve got to grab these guys by the collar and demand respect, Lance. They’re only lawyers.
The result of all my objections? Lance climbed onto the jurors’ bus and told them to “ignore anything you see in the photographs that are inside the residence.”
Great. Like “Ignore the pink elephant in the living room.”
Ito ordered the deputies to escort the jurors as they went through the trophy room, so that they wouldn’t linger over the mementos of the defendant’s glory days. Of course no warning issuing from the lips of Lance Ito could keep them from gawking. And they did. Openly. Michael Knox, the guy in the 49ers gear, all but pressed his nose against the photographs.
It was the only sign of animation I saw in our jury all day.
CAR TAPE.
February 15. I haven’t had a day off, not even one day off, in about a month. I’m so exhausted right now I can’t even think… . Bailey took on this cop yesterday, a really mild-mannered guy that was only there to make sure the crime-scene tape was up properly. And he starts thumping him about all this stuff that’s got nothing to do with him. About when to notify the coroner. And instead of sustaining my objections, the judge lets him go running wild with it
. . . .
His sexism
, their
sexism, has gotten so irritating. It’s funny, you know. I never, never used to cry sexism. But this case is rampant with it. The judge makes these cute little corrections to me about “personpower” instead of “manpower.” That’s just a change of a word, Judge. How about your fucking attitude? And Cochran is so condescending and patronizing. We got to sidebar and I’m arguing against him and he starts calling me “hysterical.” I mean, Jesus. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s absolutely frightening. I mean… I don’t think we
have
come a very long way, baby
.
Ito continued to let the defense bash away at the first cops on the scene: Riske, Rossi, and Phillips. And then they kept Tom Lange on the stand for four painful days of cross-examination.
I had entertained the possibility of not even calling Tom. We really didn’t need him for anything except to identify the crime-scene photos and key pieces of evidence, and that could be done by others. Still, it’s customary to call your lead investigator; my colleagues pointed out that it would look kind of odd if we didn’t.
Tom’s upside, to my way of thinking, was that he didn’t have much of a downside. Since the Fuhrman business surfaced, we’d had to ask each and every cop, “Do you have a package at Internal Affairs?” “Do you have a package at SID?” We’d had to run background checks on our officers—a process formerly reserved for shady witnesses and known ex-felons.
Tom came out squeaky clean. His only
possible
error in judgment at the crime scene was the blanket he’d use to cover Nicole on the scene. Nicole had lain uncovered in full public view for more than three hours. In a gesture of decency, Tom had found a blanket in a closet to spread over her. Now, of course, the defense was going to argue that the incriminating trace evidence found on Ron’s body and the knit cap—hair and fibers that matched Simpson’s—had somehow come from that blanket. Unfortunately, the LAPD had disposed of the blanket after the coroner arrived. Still, I felt we could defuse this by pointing out that neither Ron nor the knit cap had ever come in contact with the blanket.
Tom and I got through direct in about one day. I used the opportunity to put on some real evidence, like the glove and the knit cap. It was the first time the jury had really gotten a good look at this stuff.
Johnnie’s cross was scattershot. He accused Lange and his colleagues of the routine imperfections of any investigation: for instance, why was it, he asked, that a key drop of blood evidence—found on the Bundy rear gate—wasn’t discovered until July 3? That was a reasonable question. Others were totally bogus. Like demanding to know why Lange hadn’t insisted that a rape test be performed on Nicole.
“Sex was the last thing on the mind of this attacker,” said Lange. “It was an overkill… there’s no evidence of rape.”
Come on, Johnnie, how many rapists put their victim’s panties
back on?
Then Johnnie lit into him for the blanket. He took Lange to task for not picking up a piece of bloody paper that lay between the victims. Tom had felt it had no evidentiary value. Which it didn’t—it was obviously just a scrap of trash that happened to be lying there.
And then Johnnie flipped a race card into the mix. At one point, he rolled Lange back to the moment he first got called to the murder scene, at three A.M. on June 13.
“And then you drove from your home in
Simi Valley
down to the location, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And how long did it take you to get from
Simi Valley
to the location in Brentwood?”
Simi Valley, of course, is Whitetown, the suburb where the Rodney King jurors acquitted the cops caught beating a black man on videotape. It’s code for “racist frame-up.”
But Johnnie couldn’t leave it at that. He opened a line of questions concerning a pair of Reeboks Tom took from Simpson’s closet and stowed in his trunk overnight. It was inappropriate for Tom to do this, and
would
have led to trouble if the shoes had turned out to be importance evidence. But those shoes led to nothing; they were a total red herring. To Johnnie, it was another opportunity for a jab at the detective’s race.
“You took those shoes home to
Simi Valley
with you?”
Underhanded son of a bitch!
But Johnnie had still another item on his agenda. He was itching for the jury to hear about Faye Resnick’s drug habit, and what the defense would imply was her hypnotic influence over Nicole. Johnnie wanted to plant the notion that the real killer lay somewhere in Faye’s circle of associates—a drug dealer to whom she owed money, perhaps. He surmised correctly, however—that Chris and I were not going to call Faye to testify. Johnnie could have called her himself, but she was a double-edged blade. If the defense got her up on the stand, she would doubtless end up telling the jury about O.J.‘s brutality to Nicole.
So he decided to use Lange to introduce the totally unsupported idea that this was a drug killing. Johnnie asked Tom if he’d ever heard of something called a “Colombian necklace.”
“I believe so,” Tom replied.
“And it’s true, is it not, that a Colombian necklace is a situation where drug dealers will slice the neck of a victim, including the carotid artery, in order to… instill fear and send a message to others who have not paid for their drugs or been informing to the police… .”
Tom said he’d heard that.
Tom was driving me up a wall. He just wouldn’t stand up for himself. Every time Johnnie threw out some preposterous theory, he’d answer with, “Yes, that’s possible.” He was hoping to come across as cool and unbiased, but he ended up conceding things that could not possibly have been true: that the murders could have been a drug hit or a Mafia contract killing. What he should have been saying was, “No, Counsel. I disagree with you. This didn’t look anything like a drug hit to me. And here’s why. Drug dealers, Mafia hit men, will off their victims with a bullet to the brain. They don’t leave behind physical evidence smeared from pole to pole.
This
was a rage killing.”
During the break I pulled him aside and said, “Tom, what are you doing, man?”
“Well”—he shrugged—“you can clean up on redirect.”
“Baby,” I told him, “by the time I get back to you on redirect, that jury’s gonna be off thinking about Colombian cartels. You gotta take your shot now!”
Redirect is never as impressive as cross. On cross, jurors are listening carefully to see whether the witness is backing down from the assertions made on direct. By the time we do redirect, the jury tunes out because they expect the witness to clean up his testimony under friendly questioning. You’ve got to hold your own on cross! But Tom didn’t seem to get that.
During the break, however, someone slipped Tom the word that Johnnie had bungled his drug-lord argot. The “necklace” was actually a “necktie.” So when Tom got back on the stand, he triumphantly gave the actual definition of “necklace”—a South African political killing, in which assassins place a burning tire around the victim’s neck, a modus operandi that had absolutely nothing to do with our case. I was glad to see Tom finally showing some spunk. But I’ll tell you, it was a rare moment.
I have since seen him stick up for himself admirably. During the civil trial, when Simpson’s attorney, Robert Baker, showed him the photo of some smudge he claimed was an unidentified footprint, Baker tried to trap him by asking, “There had to have been a second assailant… isn’t that true?”
“No,” Tom shot back. “I don’t know that that is a shoe print… . If there were a shoe print, you’d expect to find others around it, and there weren’t.”
During the criminal trial, however, Cochran danced Lange all over the lot. He held Tom to account for all the deficiencies of the coroner: why there weren’t plastic bags over the victims’ hands, why the contents of the stomachs were discarded, and so on. Question after question went beyond the scope of the witness’s expertise. I objected until I was hoarse. The witness is not a medical examiner! But Ito allowed all of it.
Even now, when I read the transcript of Tom Lange’s testimony my stomach twists into knots. That cross-examination should have been handled in the space of an afternoon. It took four days.
Ito’s timidity played havoc with our trial strategy. Normally you can prepare your direct testimony with an eye to limiting what can be brought out in cross-examination. (The rules of evidence state that cross is limited to the subjects raised on direct.) But since Ito let the defense go anywhere during cross, that tack was useless. Instead, we had to fix things afterward, which meant we were having to spend hours and hours of preparation on lengthy redirect.
After the verdict, when pundits started using Chris and me as their personal punching bags, they would point to the expeditious pace of O. J. Simpson’s civil trial and ask, “Why is it that in the civil trial, these people can go straight from A to B? Why did you guys wander all over the map?” The answer is very simple. Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki routinely cut off Simpson’s attorneys with the message, “If you want to grill these witnesses, you’ll have to call them on your own, and not waste our time in cross.”
Lance Ito didn’t have the strength to do that.