This appearance would be particularly difficult since my own role in the case remained ambiguous.
For the past week, the media had been referring to me as “lead prosecutor.” Yet as Gil had emphasized so pointedly at Thursday night’s meeting, I was nothing of the sort. I was more of a co-prosecutor, with a partner to be named later. And so I was feeling overwhelmed and unsure of my mandate. I also felt that my energies should be focused not on this little tap dance but on the chamber upstairs where twenty-three jurors were twiddling their thumbs, waiting for me. Didn’t matter. I found myself being herded toward the cameras.
Press conferences were usually held in an antechamber off the D.A.‘s office, but this one had been slated for the much larger western lobby on the ground floor. David and I took the slower-than-weight-loss freight elevator for a few final seconds of strategizing. Suzanne Childs fussed with my hair and straightened my suit. “There’s going to be a lot of press,” she warned me. That was the under-fucking-statement of the year.
The elevator door opened onto a mob scene. The lobby was jammed wall-to-wall with bodies—broadcast androids trying to muscle out the print scruffs. Photographers were dangling from the mezzanine. I don’t think there had been a crush like this at a D.A.‘s press conference since the death of Bobby Kennedy.
For a moment I thought fright would get the best of me. That my voice might quaver. But then something remarkable happened. As I drifted toward that sea of reporters and cameras, I was enveloped by a sense of calm. All my life I’d felt sure that something would happen to me that would make my life bigger, more profound. As I walked toward the lectern, I felt I wasn’t even moving under my own power. To say that I felt a sense of destiny might be overstating it. But I do remember thinking,
This is it. You were meant to do this
.
“It was premeditated murder,” I heard myself saying. When one reporter asked me if the killings might be considered an act of passion, a “spontaneous meltdown,” I shook my head. “It was done with deliberation and premeditation. That is precisely what he is charged with, because that is what we will prove.”
“Are there plans to charge anyone else?” someone called.
“Mr. Simpson is charged alone,” I answered, “because he is the sole murderer.”
I’d blown it. Man, had I blown it. What I had meant to say, of course, was that Simpson was not the sole murderer, but the sole
suspect
. I realized my slip almost immediately, but by then I was fielding other questions and correcting my error would only call more attention to it. I was sure I’d take heat for not using the word “suspect.”
As it turned out, I did get heat—but not for that. The word that Robert Shapiro almost instantly seized upon when reporters spoke to him later that day was not “murderer,” but “sole.” The D.A.‘s office was not investigating other suspects, he charged. In fact, this was completely untrue; the investigation was still wide open.
That was no excuse for my blunder, however. I should have said that O. J. Simpson was the “prime suspect.” That first news conference alerted me to the unique perils of this case. I knew that from this point on, every word I spoke would be analyzed, scrutinized, and dissected in detail. Lesson learned. I had to move on. The grand jury was waiting.
Normally, I have weeks or even months to prepare for a grand jury. By the time a session formally convenes, I will have interviewed every witness at least once, often more. But now, the clock was ticking. We had to get the grand jury indictment within the ten days before the preliminary hearing was set to begin. If we didn’t, we’d have the same set of witnesses running between two courts to testify. You can imagine what a mess that would be. On the other hand, if we could just get that grand jury indictment, the entire matter would be settled. We could dispense with the preliminary hearing altogether. And so the need for haste.
David and I would have to grab our witnesses as we could get them. We went into court virtually cold, with only a few mounted photographic displays. These, as I look back upon them, were pretty damned impressive, considering we’d had to pull them together over the period of a couple of days.
Almost all of our first meetings with witnesses, even our expert witnesses, had to be done on the day of their appearance. David and I would usher them into the small conference room off the grand jury room, or, if there wasn’t even enough time for a fifteen-minute session, we’d huddle in the hallway. I’d do a quick rundown of the witness’s story, and try to make an instant assessment. Much of the time, really, was spent instructing them not to give any indirect evidence that might taint the record: “Only answer the question—don’t volunteer anything, don’t tell me what anybody told you,” I’d advise them. “That’s hearsay, and it’s inadmissible.”
It was a sobered, marginally more cooperative Kato Kaelin who returned to testify the morning of June 20. I led him back through the story of how he had met Nicole and convinced her to rent him the guest house. And I had him explain why, when Nicole later moved to Bundy, Simpson balked at Kato’s taking a room there. “He said it would probably not be right to be in the same house,” said Kato, who then accepted Simpson’s offer of quarters—rent-free—in the Rockingham compound.
Kato had mentioned to police that he’d witnessed a scuffle between Simpson and Nicole in the fall of 1993. Only later would I get the police report documenting that fight. A unit from West L.A. responded to a 911 call from 365 Gretna Green and found a terrified Nicole. “He’s in the back,” she told them, “He’s my ex-husband, he’s O.J.—
I want him out of there!
” She showed them to the back door, which, she said, Simpson had smashed. “French doors—wood frame splintered, door broken, still on hinges,” the cops wrote. Simpson was railing angrily out back in the guest house. “She’s been seeing other guys!” he yelled to the cops. The cops had recorded that Kato had apparently been trying to calm him down.
But today, Kato downplayed the episode. “I saw maybe an argument,” he admitted, twitching insistently.
“Do you recall the nature of the argument, or just that it was one. I asked.
“That it was one,” he said. He insisted that he didn’t know about any other fights.
Still, Kato’s testimony advanced us a few notches. He had admitted that Simpson was a jealous guy. Certainly jealous enough to manipulate his wife by buying her friends’ loyalty. And during my questioning about the night of the murder, Kato had substantially widened the time period during which Simpson was unaccounted for. Now the window was open between 9:45, when they’d returned from McDonald’s—which was fifteen minutes earlier than the estimate Kato had given the cops—and about 10:53, when Simpson responded to the limo driver.
Kato also gave a fuller account of the now-famous thump on the wall of his guest house, which he now recalled as a “three-thump noise.” I asked him to demonstrate what it sounded like, and he made a fist and pounded three times on the table in front of him. “Like that,” he said. It had been strong enough, he added, to tilt a picture on his wall, and scary enough to make him search the grounds for an intruder.
He would never actually say “intruder.” Back in the office when I’d tried to get him to tell me what he thought had caused the thump, he’d danced all around the question.
“Uh, uh… I don’t know what I was looking for.”
“A prowler,” I probed.
“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe.”
(Later, he would volunteer for the benefit of the plaintiffs in the civil trial that the thumps sounded like a body falling against his wall.)
On the stand, however, he did reveal, for the first time, having seen a “knapsack” lying on the grass. What happened was this. Kato had rounded the corner of the main house, flashlight in hand. He checked out the area behind the garage and, finding nothing, started back toward the front yard and then opened the gate to let the limo driver in. He noticed a golf bag on a bench by the front door. He went back to check the area behind his own room, and by the time he ventured out front again, Simpson himself was talking to the limo driver. But now Kaelin noticed something else on the grass near the driveway. It was “like, a bag,” he said, in Kato-speak. He didn’t recall the color, except to say it was dark.
“To the best of my recollection, it was like a knapsack-type bag,” he said.
That knapsack had not been found among the pieces of luggage Simpson brought back from Chicago. Could it have held evidence from the crime scene?
Not bad for a recalcitrant witness. But I was convinced even then that Kato knew a lot more than he was telling.
Outside, in the waiting room beyond the grand jury chamber, were a half-dozen prospective witnesses, crowded on benches like applicants for passports. These were Nicole’s neighbors, the limo driver, Ron Goldman’s co-workers, and our own technicians and criminalists.
Since I’d had the experience with DNA evidence in other cases, I told David I’d take the criminalists. Meanwhile, David debriefed the coroner, Dr. Irwin Golden.
Had this been a preliminary hearing, we wouldn’t even have bothered calling the coroner. Cause of death is almost never in dispute, so the defense usually agrees to stipulate to the medical examiner’s testimony. The prosecutor usually reads the coroner’s conclusion into the record. Since there are no defense attorneys present at a grand jury proceeding, however, a prosecutor has to protect the record, and the rights of the defendant, by giving all the witnesses a critical questioning.
Neither David nor I had worked with Dr. Golden before. The truth is, most coroners are not Quincy. After all, what happens if they screw up? The patient lives?
The morning we put Golden on we had not given his file a thorough going-over. David, in fact, received the report only minutes before putting him on the stand. One thing immediately struck us as strange. The coroner’s investigator had reported that Nicole Brown Simpson was alive at eleven P.M., when she had spoken to her mother. If this were true, of course, Simpson would be in the clear, since he had been spotted at Rockingham at that hour. The coroner’s estimate seemed too late. (In fact, phone records would show that Nicole and her mother had spoken at around 9:45 P.M.) Now, a coroner’s report is not like a police investigative file, and these kinds of mistakes are common. Still, they give the defense something to seize upon. And we would learn, in the days and weeks ahead, that the coroner’s report was, in fact, riddled with errors.
I sat at counsel’s table while David questioned Golden, a serious, horse-faced man whose speech was marked by long pauses. What I remember most about the testimony that afternoon was not the witness, but the exhibits—the pictures of the victims. David had organized and mounted the autopsy photos on a strip of cardboard. It was a stroke of superb lawyering. Up until then, I’d been busy with the criminalists and hadn’t even seen those unforgettable, gruesome photos.
“Good God,” I whispered to myself. For the first time, I saw the wreckage of Ron Goldman’s body. The gashes to the head, the gaping slices cut into his neck from ear to ear. Stab wounds to the left thigh and abdomen had soaked his shirt and pants in blood. In death, his eyes remained open. The killer had waged a merciless assault against an unarmed, unsuspecting victim, a victim who was rapidly trapped in a cagelike corner of metal fencing and slaughtered. Whether the motive was sexual jealousy or the need to eliminate a witness, this killer had made a ruthless determination: Ron Goldman would die.
While Goldman’s wounds suggested that the killer had been in a frenzy to kill him, Nicole’s did not. The attack had been swift, smooth, and efficient. There were no hesitation marks, no half cuts or superficial throat wounds that might have shown uncertainty. Her killer did not romance the deed. Nicole had apparently been swept up, thrown down, slashed at the throat, and dropped at the foot of the steps.
I had looked on literally thousands of coroner’s photographs over the years. None were worse than the last pictures taken of Nicole Brown. Her face was a grotesque white—no wonder, since she’d bled out nearly 90 percent. The slash across her neck had nearly decapitated her. She lay there, disjointed, like a marionette discarded by the puppeteer. I had a mental flash of the photo of her that hung by the stairs at Rockingham. I recalled her bright, glossy features. That was a rich man’s wife, someone to whom I couldn’t relate. Now, as I saw her frail and broken in death, I felt a surge of helpless anger.
I fought back the feeling. Times like this call for cool reason. The last thing you can afford is too much feeling.
I drove home that night feeling dejected. Next to me was a stack of files and documents high enough to qualify me for the car-pool lane. The cell phone rang, but I didn’t pick it up. I’d answer calls when I got home, after the kids were asleep. That was when the night shift began. First priority was the grand jury. But I also had to start drafting replies to a blizzard of motions coming our way from Shapiro’s office. Most of them were absolute garbage. I didn’t get to sleep until the early-morning edition of the
L.A. Times
was hitting the streets. On the front page, a story that read:
The task facing Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in the O. J. Simpson case is daunting and unparalleled: he must try to win murder convictions against an American sports legend well-known to the public for his grace and charm.
You’re tellin’ me.
If the grand jury was to indict, we needed to demonstrate that O. J. Simpson had the opportunity to commit these two murders; then we’d have to place him at the scene of the crime. That’s why I led Tuesday morning’s session with Jill Shively. Jill, a clerk for a film-supply company, had called the police the preceding week and told them she’d spotted O. J. Simpson in a white Bronco speeding northbound on Bundy right around the time of the murders. Talk about an alibi killer!
Jill Shively, I must say, seemed like a real gem. She was dressed neatly and conservatively for her testimony. She was articulate. She was confident. In fact, Scott Gordon, one of my fellow D.A.s, knew her because their children went to the same school.