Maybe I’ll go to hell for it. But I had no patience with Hansel and Gretel.
Denise Pilnak’s assertions were flat-out comical. She was a Bundy neighbor who professed with certainty that she’d looked at a clock at 10:18, and had heard no barking. She’d glanced out her window. It was quiet on the street.
Denise staked her claim to credibility on the fact that she was a fanatic about time. On the witness stand, she’d rolled up the sleeve of her blazer to show that she wore not one but two watches. She’d spun out this elaborate story about having been with her girlfriend that night and having looked at the clock every ten seconds. She’d even gone so far as to type out a time line of the evening, including where she and her friend had had dinner. When we checked out this document, we found that she’d actually gotten the restaurant wrong.
On cross-examination I asked her, “Do you recall how long you’ve been here today?”
Denise Pilnak, clockophile, couldn’t remember what time she’d arrived at court.
My favorite was Mark Partridge, a lawyer who sat next to Simpson on the airplane home from Chicago.
Partridge, who seemed sympathetic to the defendant, apparently decided that his seating assignment was a potential gold mine. He handwrote eight pages of memories from the flight. On cross, I made a point of putting part of this valuable intellectual property on the overhead projector—specifically the notice he affixed to each page that read “©1994 PARTRIDGE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” and had him explain, as an attorney, why he had affixed a copyright notice to each page.
“In an effort to prevent people from distributing them without my consent,” he said.
“Doesn’t it also mean you have a financial interest in the privacy of that matter you copyright?” I continued.
He professed not to understand. I found this an unusual response, considering he was an attorney specializing in trademark and copyright law. Finally, I managed to wheedle from him the admission that, yes, copyrights are sometimes used by authors to ensure they profit from the work.
With that out of the way, I asked him to describe the nature of the phone calls his seatmate had placed during the flight. Partridge provided a bit of information that somewhat contradicted the image of a distraught mourner headed home to console the children of their dead mother: Simpson was repeatedly calling his lawyer.
By this time the law clerks watching all this on TV upstairs in our offices were rolling on the floor with laughter. And it was all Chris and I could do to keep a straight face.
The next performance was perhaps the weirdest of all. Robert Heidstra, a wizened little Frenchman who lived in a converted garage and earned his living detailing luxury cars, claimed to have been walking his dog near Nicole’s condo at 10:30 P.M. when he heard a young man shout, “Hey, hey, hey,” followed by the screaming of an older man who sounded black. Heidstra’s testimony was fully consistent with our time line. We had, in fact, considered calling him as a prosecution witness. But after I’d spent about five minutes with him, I decided he was not credible. People who lived right next door to Nicole heard nothing but a dog barking, and he heard all that? No way. If I needed further corroboration for my skepticism, it came when I learned he’d been boasting to people that he was going to make some money from being a witness. We declined to put him on. Instead, the defense did.
After testifying that he could have heard the shouts as late as 10:40, Heidstra went on to say that “a white car came out of the darkness into the light.” On cross, Chris asked him if he had not told a friend of his that the vehicle looked like a Ford Bronco.
“Might have said maybe a Bronco…” the Frenchman admitted nervously.
On the other side of the room, the Dream Team had sunk low into their chairs. The guy couldn’t have done a better job for us if
we
had called him.
But the jewel in the crown was Robert Huizenga, who came at the end of the defense’s first week of testimony. I’m sure the Dream Team thought he would play splendidly. A former doctor for the NFL, Huizenga, at forty-two, was one of those archetypal Southern Californians who, even into middle age, retain an unnatural, almost creepy youthfulness. Shapiro had called him into the case two days after the murders. He’d examined the defendant at Kardashian’s house and was there, in fact, when Simpson and Cowlings split in the Bronco.
The defense called Huizenga to establish that Simpson didn’t have the physical strength to commit a double murder. Under Shapiro’s friendly questioning, Huizenga started out smiling and confident. His bias was unbelievable: he compared the suffering of O. J. Simpson to the biblical trials of Job.
Shapiro called the doctor’s attention to a photo of Simpson in his underwear. “This appears to me as a layperson to be a man in pretty good shape,” Shapiro lobbed. “Would that be your evaluation?”
“Although he looked like Tarzan,” Huizenga joked, “he walked like Tarzan’s grandfather.”
Brian Kelberg, who took Huizenga on cross, quickly wiped the smarmy smile off the witness’s lips.
For the benefit of the court, Brian ran the raw footage of Simpson’s exercise video. It had been shot only two weeks before Nicole’s and Ron’s deaths, and our man was leaping around like, well, Tarzan. Brian then screened a video of Simpson doing a product endorsement for some elixir that he claimed had ended his arthritis problems and had him “immediately feeling better.” It had even added ten yards to his golf drive.
One by one, Brian reduced Huizenga’s assertions to rubble. He used him to document extensive cuts on Simpson’s hands. Under Brian’s pressure, the doctor admitted he’d seen no evidence of a disability that would impede Simpson’s movements; that he’d suffered no “acute” episodes of arthritis. Then Brian leveled him with the big one.
“Doctor,” he asked, “was there any finding by you… which dealt [with] any physical limitation of Mr. Simpson’s which, in your opinion, would have prevented him from murdering two human beings using a single-edge knife on June twelfth of 1994?”
“Objection, objection!” Shapiro yelped. But Ito overruled him.
“No, there was not,” the witness replied.
It was Huizenga who ended up limping from the witness stand.
At this point, we were beginning to get excited. The defense was making our case for us, tossing us meatball after meatball. The jury
had
to be thinking that an innocent man would have a better case to present.
Next up to bat for the defense, the experts-for-hire.
It is worth noting here that never, during the entire case, did the defense perform one single test on any of the blood found at Bundy, in the Bronco, or at Rockingham. The reason was perfectly clear.
They knew the results would point directly to their client
. Under law, they’re allowed to keep those results confidential, but if the word somehow got back to the jury that they’d done the tests and weren’t putting their findings into evidence, it could be mighty incriminating.
They elected, instead, to have their own expert, Dr. Edward Blake, observe our testing. But they quickly realized that if he were put under oath, he would have to tell the truth: that the prosecution’s blood results were unimpeachable.
As I’ve said, Dr. Blake disappeared from their witness list. Instead, we got Dr. Fredric Rieders.
Rieders, an Austrian-born toxicologist now working in Philadelphia, was called to support the very essence of the defense’s “conspiracy” offensive. He would argue that the blood on certain evidence—like the rear gate at Nicole’s condo and the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed—contained a preservative called EDTA. He would assert that this meant it came from a test tube. Rieders was there to back up the theory that the blood taken from Simpson after his police interview had been subsequently sprinkled on crime-scene evidence. He was basing his claims on his own interpretations of data that had come back to us from the FBI lab.
The challenge sounded serious enough that I wanted to handle this witness myself. That meant getting up to speed very quickly on the science of EDTA. Several weeks before Rieders’s scheduled appearance, an FBI toxicologist, Roger Martz, flew in from the East Coast to brief me. Agent Martz gave me a chart with two sets of results. One showed the results from the blood taken from Simpson the morning he’d been brought to Parker Center. That reference blood, of course, had been treated with EDTA to preserve it. The presence of the preservative manifested itself as tall, unmistakable bars. Next to it were the readings from blood on the rear gate and Simpson’s socks. Here the EDTA showed up as tiny bars.
The question the defense would ask, of course, was “Why was there any bar at all? Why was
any
trace of EDTA in the blood on the gate and socks?” And that’s exactly the question I asked Roger Martz.
Roger explained to me why the low-level readings were meaningless. As a “negative check” against the readings, he’d lifted a bloodstain from Nicole’s dress. Now that
had
to be her blood. Right? No one had a reason to plant it; it hadn’t come from a test tube. The results on that sample came back with the
same EDTA reading
as the disputed blood from the gate and socks. Agent Martz had gone a step further: he’d drawn blood from his own arm and tested it. Sure enough, there it was again. The same low-level reading of EDTA.
“EDTA is used as a preservative in foods and detergents,” he explained to me. “A small amount of EDTA can stay in your system when you eat preserved foods. Or on your clothes after you wash. It’s everywhere then. It’s the matter of degree that tells the story. You see this huge bar?”
He pointed to the reading from the vial of reference blood taken from Simpson.
“If the blood on the rear gate and the socks had come from the preserved tube, the EDTA indicators would have been just as high. Instead, they’re about a hundredth the size.”
Wonderfully clear and graphic. But could I get this across to the jury?
Since the defense had done no tests of their own, we knew they would have to call Agent Martz as their own witness—after all, he had performed the case’s only EDTA testing. Only he could give the testimony that would get the results into evidence. Had they been interested in getting to the truth of the matter, they would have called him first to explain his testing, then followed up with Rieders offering his own interpretation, obviously one more favorable to the defense.
But of course they weren’t interested in the truth. Late in the day on July 17, we got notice that they wanted to call Dr. Rieders first, and only then call Agent Martz. Worse, they waited until that moment to release a dense technical report on Rieders’s interpretation of the test—which we’d have to analyze closely before responding to it. It would be very tough, but at that point the defense was listing seven or so witnesses ahead of Rieders.
At nearly eight o’clock on the evening of July 19, however, we got notice that they might be calling Rieders as early as
the next day
. This flew in the face of Ito’s rule requiring both sets of counsel to give a few days’ notice before they called a witness. We’d complied, but the defense virtually ignored the rule. They knew all they had to do was give some lame excuse, and Lance would shrug his shoulders and let them off the hook.
I was pissed, and made no bones about it.
“I’m really outraged at the way the defense has proceeded,” I charged in court the next morning, so angry I was stammering. “It is a trial by ambush.” I outlined the history of this issue, noting that Rieders had received the test results in February, giving him months to prepare his report. There was no excuse for springing it on us just before he testified. Furthermore, I explained why it was unacceptable for the defense to put Rieders on before Martz. They had a guy who was going to put his own twisted spin on a set of scientific tests —
before
the tests themselves were presented to the court.
“I think it is scandalous what has occurred here,” I said. “I think it is a very deliberate attempt to try to… prevent the people from adequately meeting this testimony… . I mean, where is the fairness?
The defense, of course, acted stunned and accused me of trying to manipulate their witness order. They even tried to insinuate that Lisa Kahn had told them that we were ready for Rieders anytime. When I called that “the biggest bald-face lie we have heard yet in this case,” Ito warned me about making personal attacks. But Lance knew what was happening. “If the shoe were on the other foot,” he said to the defense, “I would be peeling you off the ceiling right now.”
Damned straight.
Nevertheless, Ito was loath to give me the prep time I needed. The jury was restless; the case had already dragged on way past its original estimated four months. Bob Blasier had the gall to mock my argument that Martz should go first: “I can’t believe that Miss Clark says she’s ready for Martz but she’s not ready for Rieders.”
“Oh come on,” I charged. “That’s so obvious it doesn’t even bear addressing. Agent Martz is going to be an
honest
witness who’s going to testify
truthfully
to the results. That’s a little easier—” (I had not intended to suggest that Rieders was lying so much as that he was distorting the evidence to such an extent that it would have the same effect.)
Lance cut me off. “Miss Clark, earlier today I cautioned you about personal attacks.” I began to apologize but he stepped on me again. “Sanction is two hundred and fifty dollars. Don’t leave court without writing a check.”
Thanks, Lance.
At the end of the day, he ruled that the defense could put Rieders on first, and they could do it on Monday, July 24. This gave me only three or four days to prepare an incredibly complicated cross. With the witness order inverted, the defense would use Rieders to distort the test results before Martz, an honest and knowledgeable witness, could explain what they meant. Instead, I’d be forced to try and extract simple explanations of scientific evidence from a hostile witness bent on confusion and distortion. At the same time, I’d need to use my now bulging dossier on Rieders’s professional history to impeach both his ethics and his expertise.