But the rest of the statement was a disaster for us. Not only were the cops’ questions real softballs, but when Phil asked whether Nicole ever got any threatening phone calls, Simpson responded, “You—you guys haven’t told me anything. I—I have no idea what happened… . Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit.”
Nice bit of sympathy grabbing. The defense was sure to play it for maximum schmaltz: “Poor Juice. Mean old cops won’t tell him anything. Is that any way to treat a grieving man who’s had no sleep in the past two days? He’s doing everything he can to cooperate. He’s giving a statement without an attorney present—surely not the action of a guilty man. And a blood sample? Why, he’d rolled his sleeve right up. Now, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: why would he be so cooperative if he were guilty?
The only strategy worth considering was whether we should try and get into evidence that one snippet of tape where Simpson talked about getting his car phone out of the Bronco just before he left. That short excerpt would be limited enough to prevent the defense from getting the rest of the statement in. Nothing else was needed to explain or qualify it, according to the evidence code. Of course, the downside to playing one brief segment was that the jury would naturally wonder why we didn’t want them to hear the rest of the tape.
On the other hand, if we didn’t play the statement, we could still put on the phone records showing that a call had been made from Simpson’s cell phone to Paula at 10:03 P.M. A reasonable juror would infer that he’d been in the Bronco. The defense would have no way to counter that but to call Simpson and get him to try to explain it.
That was an idea we all liked. If we could force Simpson into the blue chair, we just might be in fat city.
It’s not that I thought Simpson would be an easy mark. I never thought that. I had him pegged as a pretty cagey guy. True, he’d botched the murders, leaving a trail of evidence rimmed in neon lights all the way to Rockingham. But then, he wasn’t an experienced killer. He’d managed, at least, not to get caught in the act. And by the time he’d talked to the cops, he’d clearly regained enough composure to hide the ball from two experienced homicide detectives.
But if he were to find himself being questioned by a hostile female… well, that might be a different story. Simpson would never be able to hold it together if he thought a woman had control over him. And when you can compel a guy to sit on the witness stand and answer questions, that’s control.
Beyond that, he seemed to have a special bug up his ass about me. Every so often I’d catch him trying to make eye contact. When he’d managed to sneak in his little speech to the court during jury selection, he couldn’t resist turning his head to address me, personally. Did he imagine he could charm me? What Simpson didn’t realize was that I had no special feelings for him. Not even a particularly intense hatred. This may have been the Trial of the Century, but to me O. J. Simpson was a common criminal. I felt no more repulsed by him than by any of the other scumbags I’d prosecuted over the past thirteen years.
Don’t get me wrong. I would have loved—believe me,
loved
—to take my shot at him. Had I gotten him on that stand, I would have kept him there for as long as it took. Because
eventually
he’d do something to hang himself. The upshot of the “alibi” episode with Collin was anticlimactic. By the time I returned to court, it had already fizzled like a damp charge. Ito had apparently come to his senses. He’d had a chance to review Simpson’s statement and he ruled that Collin had not “opened the door.” He denied the defense’s request to introduce the statement. We kept it out for the rest of the trial.
CAR TAPE.
Let’s see. It’s Thursday, June 8. Yeah. June 8. And Brian Kelberg is up there doing the coroner’s stuff. He’s doing a fabulous job. Just a brilliant job. I find myself very jealous though, because… he had four months to prepare for two witnesses and I have weeks to prepare for about thirty. But
. . .
hey, what can you do
.
We’d decided, during our marathon mapping session back in January, that there was no way we could put the assistant coroner, Dr. Irwin Golden, on the witness stand. At least not alone. He’d been so thoroughly trashed during the preliminary hearing that we’d need to put him on in tandem with a stronger witness. Our best gambit, we felt, was to import a well-respected medical examiner from another jurisdiction—but none of them wanted to risk being torn limb from limb in the lion’s den. All the while, Dr. Golden’s report was being reexamined and corrected under the supervision of the L.A. County coroner, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran. He concluded that the fundamental work was sound.
Dr. Lucky was a meticulous man. The only reason we hadn’t drafted him right off the bat as a stand-in was the fact that he was Golden’s superior and the jury might see him as having an interest in protecting one of his own people. In the end, however, we figured that Dr. Lucky’s benign manner and obvious integrity would overcome any initial skepticism.
The coroner was originally Bill Hodgman’s jurisdiction. But after his health difficulties in January, Bill had been working behind the scenes as case manager, a job that was itself becoming more and more demanding. I gave the coroner to Brian Kelberg instead.
Brian was the logical man for the job. Brilliant, methodical, and knowledgeable in the field of medicine. When I first brought him into the case, he’d come kicking and screaming. Brian just didn’t like team prosecutions. I’d called him in to consult on several of my earlier cases when I’d had plenty of time to confer with him. Back then, things were great. He’d come in, plonk down, put his feet up, and we’d vivisect every minute scientific detail of the case. We both loved that. But by the time he was front and center in the Simpson case, the pace had already hit overdrive.
Before I could devote myself to preparations with Brian, I had had to put on my own twenty-five witnesses. Then I had to spend hours with Hank preparing for Fung. Hank had needed a lot of support, and I couldn’t afford to look away for a moment. That frustrated and annoyed Brian. He’d complain to Bill about my inaccessibility. He left notes warning, “You’d better find some time.” To make things worse, Brian and Chris absolutely hated each other. The team had begun polarizing into the Brian camp and the Chris camp. Throughout May, the infighting was reaching epic proportions. Luckily, by the time we’d moved on to the DNA testimony, things had settled down a bit. I started meeting regularly with Brian and that got us back on track.
Brian’s mission was twofold: one, to lay out medical hypotheticals showing how one man could have committed both murders; and two, to demonstrate how quickly those murders could have occurred. The first point, of course, was to dispel the defense’s contention that there could have been two assailants; the second point was to establish that the murders had occurred between 10:15 P.M. and 10:40 P.M.
Over the course of a week, Brian guided the coroner through a plausible death scene scenario. It went something like this: At the outset of the attack, Nicole had confronted her killer face-to-face and struggled very briefly. Then she’d turned and had been struck in the back of the head, which knocked her against a wall. That accounted for the concussion that rendered her unconscious. After her attacker delivered one vicious slash to the throat, Nicole fell or was dropped onto the second step. She remained there unconscious, moving little or not at all, bleeding profusely.
Judging by the condition of the brain at autopsy, Dr. Lucky concluded that Nicole had lain there for at least a minute before her assailant resumed his attack, this time pulling her head back by the hair and administering the coup de grâce.
“How did the fatal wound occur?” Brian asked the coroner.
“My opinion,” replied Dr. Lucky, “is that the head was extended backwards and the knife was used to cause this incised stab wound from left to right.”
The killer had apparently encountered very little resistance.
“Doctor,” Brian said, “. . . if you could use me and my head and hair, would you demonstrate what is your opinion as to the manner in which that last major incised stab wound was inflicted?”
Dr. Lucky left the stand, walked over to Brian, pulled his head back by the hair, and demonstrated a throat slashing by drawing a ruler across his neck.
Among the spectators, there was a rustle of discomfort.
So what was the killer doing during the minute or so between the first and second cuts? Lakshmanan left open the possibility that he had used this interval to murder Ron Goldman. Further into his testimony, he gave a second demonstration, this time going through the motions of stabbing a “victim”—once again, Brian—to show how it was entirely possible to inflict fifteen knife wounds in as many seconds. Clearly, the killings could have happened very quickly.
Later on, critics would claim I let Brian keep Lakshmanan on the stand too long. Let me set the record straight. If Brian had been less thorough, we would have been rapped for that instead. As it happened, he took an A-bomb and disarmed it, wire by wire, before the American public. He left no stone unturned, no question unaddressed. And by the time he was through, he’d converted what could have been a devastating liability into an asset.
For the first time during the trial, we’d brought out the photos taken at Bundy by the coroner’s investigators. The heads of the victims had been pulled back, exposing their neck wounds. In their own way, these photos were even more awful, more affecting than the autopsy photos. The jurors were clearly moved. Even the elderly black man from Mississippi, certainly no fan of the prosecution, wept openly. For the first time, it seemed it was getting through to the jury that this was a
murder
case. Two people had died.
And I thought I saw them opening their minds to the possibility that the defendant could have done this terrible thing.
It was Chris’s turn up. With the gloves.
We’d unearthed evidence that in December 1990 Nicole had bought gloves exactly like those found at Bundy and Rockingham. She’d picked them up at Bloomingdale’s in New York—one of the couple’s favorite shopping grounds, we’d learned. The receipt showed that she’d purchased two pairs of gloves and a muffler at the same time. The gloves were cashmere-lined and cost $55. The style and price alone dramatically narrowed the pool of suspects. At least in California.
Phil Vannatter had lined up Richard Rubin, a former executive of Aris Isotoner, the company that manufactured the gloves, to establish that the pair we had in evidence were exactly the same model as those purchased by Nicole in 1990. He would testify that they were sold at only
one
store in the country. Bloomingdale’s.
I found this whole business incredibly sad. It was clear to me that Nicole had bought those gloves as a Christmas gift for her husband. And he’d used them to murder her?
Oh, man, what a world
.
I fully intended that Simpson would put on the gloves:
not
the actual evidence gloves, but a duplicate pair. Since the AIDS crisis, anything bloodstained required protection. I figured the court would never let anyone try on the bloody gloves without wearing latex beneath them. Latex would screw up the fit. So we’d asked the glove manufacturer to send us duplicates of their Aris Leather Lights, extra large, just like the ones found at the crime scene, to try on Simpson when the time was right.
On June 15, however, the time was definitely
not
right.
Richard Rubin had flown in the night before his testimony was to begin. We needed some time to work out the logistics of how and when to perform the glove demonstration. Now, Simpson was not likely to cooperate with this experiment. From ongoing interviews with my FBI shoe expert, Bill Bodziak, I’d learned that a subject could contort his feet, or in this case, his hands, to make the fit appear too tight. I didn’t need Bodziak to tell me this: I’d spent enough time struggling to get shoes on reluctant little boys to know it from experience.
I knew we needed to talk about laying the legal foundation for this demonstration, to plot it as carefully as the Normandy invasion. But Chris was pumped up. The accolades Brian got for his handling of Dr. Lucky irked the hell out of Chris. He’d never liked Brian much, but now that Kelberg was being hailed as a returning hero, Chris’s competitive instincts were aroused. He wanted to score a coup of his own. He wanted to do the glove demonstration at what he thought would be the most dramatic possible moment. During Rubin’s testimony. Problem was, we hadn’t received the duplicate gloves.
I didn’t know this until the morning Rubin was scheduled to testify. This was Chris’s baby, so I asked him where the duplicate gloves were. He didn’t know. I called Bill to ask him if he knew.
“I’ll check with Phil,” he told me. “I believe he has them.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Have him bring them down.”
I didn’t want to be late to court. Chris was on a testosterone high—I didn’t know exactly where that might take him. I didn’t want to leave him alone too long.
When I got to the counsel table, I whispered to Chris that the duplicates were on their way.
“Cool,” he said as Ito came out. We’d just taken our seats when Phil showed up with the evidence box. He passed it over to us from behind the rail. Chris peered into the box. Then he asked to approach the bench.
“I would like to lay the foundation,” he told Ito, “to show that they [the reputed duplicates] are the exact same size, similar make and model, so that perhaps we can have Mr. Simpson try them on at some point.”
Whoa, Chris
, I thought, a little alarmed. We needed to talk to Rubin about how to make sure Simpson couldn’t screw this up.
At that moment, Johnnie cut in, “We object to this, Your Honor… . We’ve had no time to deal with this. At some point, if Mr. Simpson testifies and we want to have him try the gloves on in evidence, that is one thing… . Are you going to allow them to have the defendant try [the duplicates] on?”
“I think it would be more appropriate for him to try the other gloves on,” Ito put in. He meant, of course, the bloody gloves.