First, he tried to suggest that if Simpson had really dropped the glove on the south pathway at Rockingham, there should have been shoe prints in the leaves. Bill explained patiently that in all his years, at hundreds of crime scenes, he’d never been able to detect shoe prints in leaves.
Undeterred, Bailey went on to probe the outer limits of absurdity, suggesting that someone had either stolen Simpson’s shoes or two killers had worn identical pairs of shoes to the crime scene.
The premise was preposterous. First of all, Bodziak pointed out, criminals simply don’t think of their shoes as a possible source of incriminating evidence. That’s what makes shoe-print identification so useful. Beyond that, it was unlikely that two criminals would be wearing identical pairs even of common shoes like Reeboks, let alone Bruno Maglis.
“To conjecture… that two people independently bought size-twelve Bruno Magli shoes… and just happened to come to this crime scene together is impossible for me to believe,” Bodziak said firmly.
“Would it be possible,” Bailey persisted, “for two people to arrange… to arrive at a crime scene in the same footwear…?”
“. . . I don’t believe it happens, intentionally or otherwise.”
Bailey wouldn’t let it go.
“But it’s possible?”
“In my opinion,” Bodziak replied, “it’s not even possible because it’s so ridiculous.”
Bailey had wanted to end with a flourish. Instead, he’d succeeded only in casting the two-killer theory in the silliest possible light.
I was madly putting the finishing touches on hair and trace. “Trace” refers to clothing fibers, carpet fibers, dandruff—in short, anything microscopic that a criminal might track onto or take away from a crime scene.
Prosecutors love trace evidence. It’s almost as compelling as DNA in its ability to link a defendant to a crime scene. In some respects, it’s even better than DNA because it’s jury-friendly. You can blow up photomicrographs to eight-by-tens so that jurors can actually
see
the similarities between the defendant’s head hair, for example, and what the killer left behind.
For about three months now, I’d remained in close telephone contact with Doug Deedrick, director of the FBI’s hair and trace unit. Doug had a fantastic sense of humor and a gift for making the complex seem simple. He flew in four days before he was scheduled to begin testimony, bringing with him his blowups of the evidence.
One large poster-board display showed photos of the hairs removed from Simpson’s head by the LAPD. The row above it showed several eight-by-tens of hairs removed from the blue knit cap found at Ron Goldman’s feet. Doug had also prepared a board of Negroid hair samples, chosen at random from FBI files. The samples all looked very different from each other. It was obvious at first glance how Simpson’s hair matched the hair from the cap.
One thing troubled me slightly. One of the file samples appeared, at least to my untutored eye, to look a lot like Simpson’s. Maybe Doug could see the difference, but I sure couldn’t.
“This is truly beautiful stuff,” I told him. “But—this one down here…” I pointed to the hair. “It looks just like Simpson’s. I’m just a lay person, what do I know. But don’t you think the jury will think so, too?”
“Yes, I do.” Doug grinned. “And there’s a very good reason for that. Because that
is
his hair.”
Gotcha! I burst out laughing. We could go through the same shtick in front of the jury.
Just as there had been blood where blood shouldn’t be, there was hair where hair shouldn’t be.
•Simpson’s hair on the knit cap, Ron’s shirt, the Rockingham glove.
•Nicole’s hair—“forcibly removed hairs”—on the Rockingham glove.
•Ron’s hair on the Rockingham glove.
Things got even more interesting when we moved into the area of fibers. LAPD investigators had found beige fibers at both Bundy and Rockingham. They appeared to match the carpet in O. J. Simpson’s Bronco. According to Doug, carpeting of that sort had been used only in Ford Broncos manufactured between June 1993 and June 1994. Simpson’s, of course, was a 1994 model.
That was incredible news. Bronco fibers had been found
both
on the knit cap at Bundy
and
on the glove at Rockingham—potentially linking Simpson to both scenes.
On the day Doug Deedrick was scheduled to appear, the defense got a look at his poster boards and went ballistic. They claimed they’d never seen these hair photos before.
That, of course, was complete bull. So we sent one of our minions to track down the defense expert who’d examined them. Sure enough, he’d gotten those photos months ago.
While we were wrangling over this, Johnnie caught sight of Doug, sitting inside the rail, holding a binder.
“What’s he got?” he whispered to me.
“I don’t know,” I whispered back.
So Johnnie and I went over to check it out. To my dismay, it contained the notes of a detailed investigation Doug had done on the Bronco fibers. What I thought had come from public records accessible to the defense had actually been unearthed by Doug through private sources. Doug thought it was exempt from the laws of discovery. Under California law, unfortunately, it was not.
This put me in a very bad spot. The defense was screaming about my “egregious” discovery violation. We stood to lose the extremely valuable carpet fiber evidence because of it.
I pleaded with Ito. “If the Court feels that we have been remiss, then I would urge the Court to penalize [me] personally. But please don’t—please don’t penalize the proof of the case.”
Ito was irritated. But for once, his irritation didn’t seem to be directed my way. He apparently realized—even Johnnie seemed to realize—that this report business had caught me by surprise. Besides, Ito seemed honestly fascinated by the hair and trace evidence and annoyed by having to exclude it.
Once again, we got half a loaf. He would allow us to introduce the fibers. We could tell the jury that Simpson’s Bronco fibers were “consistent” with those found on the Bundy cap and the Bundy glove, but not that they were so incredibly rare.
I could live with it.
“Sir,” I addressed Doug, “with respect to the nine or ten hairs that exhibited the same microscopic characteristics as those of the defendant inside the knit cap, do you have an opinion as to… how those hairs got there?”
There was an objection. Overruled.
“Because hats are worn on the head, it’s certainly consistent and reasonable to believe that their presence indicates that they came from the wearer of the hat, yes,” Doug replied.
“When individuals have contact through a violent struggle, have you in your past experience found the hairs of the attacker on the clothing of the victim?”
Objection. Overruled.
“Yes, I have. That’s why… I look at clothing from victims of crime… .”
“If you were to assume the following events, sir. That the killer pulled back Nicole’s head with his hand, with his left hand, in order to slit her throat with his right hand and then went over to Ron Goldman for [the] final attack, touching him in the process with the hand that held Nicole’s hair by the head, could that account for the hairs that you found on Ron Goldman’s shirt?”
“Yes,” Doug replied. “That could account for the presence of those hairs.”
I put the poster with the photos of Simpson’s hair on the easel and asked Doug to step down and show which ones came from the samples taken from the defendant and which ones came from the evidence. I watched the jurors’ faces. They actually looked interested.
The fibers proved equally graphic.
“Now assume further [that the killer] while wearing the Rockingham glove, stabbed Ronald Goldman—in a manner that brought his glove into contact with Ronald Goldman’s shirt, say, stabbed him in the left abdomen… . Would that… be a reasonable explanation for your finding of fibers consistent with Ronald Goldman’s shirt on the Rockingham glove?”
“Yeah,” Doug replied. “I would expect a transfer in this instance, especially on a damp bloody glove… .”
“Now,” I continued. “If the attacker wore these gloves during the murder, and during the struggle with Ronald Goldman one of those gloves was pulled off, would there be fibers from the lining of that left glove on his bare hand?”
“Yes,” came the reply.
“And if the murderer continued to pursue [his] attack on Ronald Goldman after that glove came off his left hand, would those fibers on his hand be transferred to the body of Ronald Goldman, if there was contact?”
“Yes.”
There was in fact one fiber from the glove’s lining on Ron Goldman’s shirt. I had made darn sure the jury knew about it. What Doug had just told them was that the glove came off during the attack, and that the attack had continued barehanded. That was how the cashmere fiber ended up on Ron’s shirt.
But even more damning was the fact that identical blue-black cotton fibers were found on Ron Goldman’s shirt, the Rockingham glove, and the socks Simpson left on his bedroom floor. Those telltale fibers—obviously from the clothes of the killer—linked Simpson directly to the Bundy crime scene. More particularly, to the body of Ron Goldman.
If I had been in Bailey’s shoes, I would have confined my questions to a few pointed jabs about the fact that hair and fibers ain’t fingerprints, and sat down. Instead, Bailey launched into a discussion of the definitions of “random,” same,’ and “similar” that seemed to leave everyone, including himself, confused.
For the rest of the case, hair and trace would stand unrefuted. The defense could apparently find no expert who would take the stand and argue that this evidence had been contaminated or planted.
I’d gotten the ending I wanted, clean and strong.
On July 6—after five months, 58 witnesses, 488 exhibits, and 34,500 pages of transcript—the People rested.
C
hain of Fools
If Orenthal James Simpson had really hired a Dream Team, Johnnie Cochran would have stood before the judge on July 10, given one of his dramatic, world-weary sighs, and proclaimed, “The defense rests!”
Why
not
rest? Johnnie and company had been able to put some dings in our witnesses along the way. If it was true that these jurors were hell-bent on acquittal, the LAPD had logged in just enough screwups to lend credence to that loony conspiracy theory and provide them with a credible pretext for a verdict of “not guilty.” The smart bet would have been to take the leap and say, “We rest”—and watch this jury hand Simpson his freedom on a silver platter.
But as often as not, the defense can’t resist. They have to strut their stuff. I love it when this happens. I call it “defense to the rescue.” Usually, it’s at the client’s insistence. After being pounded by accusers, a defendant wants his buddies up there telling everybody what a great guy he is. A smart jury with lingering reservations about the defendant’s guilt will often find those doubts dispelled when they see a flimsy defense. They say, “Wait a minute. If this guy was really innocent, he would’ve had a better story than this.”
At least, that’s what happens in a normal trial. But that wasn’t the case here. After all, it wasn’t a Dream Team that would acquit O. J. Simpson. It was a Dream Jury.
Ironically, those hot dogs at the defense table could not leave well enough alone. Even though they had no coherent case of their own to present, Cochran and company were determined to put on a show. And as a result, they nearly blew it.
Because the evidence against their client was so strong, Johnnie was, in effect, unable to call honest, credible witnesses to the stand—their candor and ethics would wind up hurting the defendant. A case in point was Dr. Edward Blake, who appeared on the defense’s original witness list. He had observed all the scientific testing and was in a position to comment on whether it was aboveboard. Since there
was
no conspiracy, of course, by the time the trial began, Dr. Blake not so mysteriously had disappeared from their witness list. (We would have loved to call him ourselves. It was a sure bet, however, that Ito would rule Blake was shielded by the attorney-client and work-product privilege, and therefore off-limits for us.) Instead, the Dream Team put on a string of weak, unconvincing, and irrelevant witnesses. And we had one of our best streaks during the entire trial, batting them down one by one.
Following cameo appearances by Simpson’s daughter, sister, and aged mother, the defense presented a series of witnesses whose job it was to push the murders later and later toward the hour of eleven. They started with Ellen Aaronson and Danny Mandel.
This couple had been on a blind date the night of the murders. On the surface, they seemed benign enough. Mandel was a junior executive at Sony Pictures. Aaronson worked in toy licensing. (She apologized to the court for her part in the proliferation of Power Rangers.) They testified that on the way back from dinner at Mezzaluna, they’d passed Nicole’s condo around 10:26 P.M. They’d seen nothing. No bodies, no bloody pawprints, no signs of mayhem.
On the stand, I blasted the lights out of Aaronson. The reason wasn’t, as pundits later suggested, that her recollection of 10:26 played havoc with my time line. This murder could have occurred as late as 10:40, and O. J. Simpson would still have gotten home in time to be seen skulking in through his front door.
It was simply that, when Ellen and Danny had first been interviewed by the LAPD, Mandel wasn’t even sure what time they’d left the restaurant. Aaronson remembered looking at her watch on the way home and seeing that it was eleven o’clock.
Not
10:26 P.M., as she later testified. During that first interview, they’d described taking an entirely different route to Aaronson’s apartment. On the stand I pointed out these inconsistencies with a vigor that was, I have to admit, excessive. Particularly when I asked Aaronson whether she’d been drinking at dinner. (Turns out she hadn’t.)
Critics have taken me to task for my aggressive cross of this pair. But try to put yourself in my position. For a year now, I’d been coping with publicity seekers and showboats willing to say just about anything to get themselves on the witness stand. Aaronson and Mandel had given inconsistent statements. If the defense team was not going to give its own witnesses a rigorous screening before throwing them up there, then it fell to Chris and me to expose their flaws.