Without a Doubt (37 page)

The box also contained several letters, one written by Nicole to O.J. very early in their relationship, complaining that he neglected her. There were three others from him to her, apologizing for having abused her and taking responsibility for having gone crazy. Implicitly acknowledged in one of those letters is the fact that he beat her because she refused to have sex with him.

Why would a woman keep those things in a lockbox? There was only one explanation. Even as she was trying to break free of O.J., part of Nicole accepted that she would never really escape, that O. J. Simpson might murder her. The message in the box was clear:
in the event of my death, look for this guy
.

I kept coming back to her eyes. She was so young at the time those pictures were taken that her eyes still reflected authentic emotion. I compared the photos mentally to those hanging by the stairs at Rockingham. A decade or more had passed between those two shots. The pain in her eyes had gelled into a glassy, deadened stare. Seventeen years of denying terror and clinging to hope, only to have that hope destroyed time and time again.

On Sunday afternoon, December 18, Chris and I drove out to Dana Point to confront the Browns. Phil and Tom went with us, although they were not real happy to be there. For starters, they were ticked off at Chris and me because we had used D.A. investigators, not the LAPD, to drill the box. But I’m sure they were also dreading the encounter with Lou, who by now had learned that we’d done an end run around him.

As always, Juditha Brown was gracious. She laid out a plate of pasta for us. I sat across from Lou. He didn’t appear angry, but there were tears in his eyes.

“Why didn’t you just ask me?” he said.

Tom and Phil were only too happy to let someone else answer. I was trying to come up with a reply when Chris stepped into the breach. He could be very good under pressure. He mumbled something plausible: “We weren’t sure that you could get into it legally. We could. We just felt it would be better for everyone if we went ahead and did it.”

That diplomatic fiction seemed to ease the tension. Juditha sat down with us for a long taped interview. I pressed her for specifics on the battering incidents we were trying to document. By her own admission, Juditha had no head for dates. And she had no memory at all of that harrowing incident following “Disney on Ice” when her son-in-law had called the pregnant Nicole a “liar” and a “fat pig.” I showed her Nicole’s letter to refresh her memory. Nicole had been clear about the fact that her mother and Mini had been there when O.J. flew off the handle, “rattling 100 mph.”

“I don’t remember anything about that at all,” Juditha told me.

I was flabbergasted.

“You were there,” I reminded her. “And he was calling her a fat liar.”

“Yes,” Juditha acknowledged, “but, you see—the problem with all these things is that all this stuff happened so many times, it… didn’t mean anything anymore after a while.”

It didn’t mean anything?

The thing that seemed to upset Juditha most was her son-in-law’s treatment of his children. After Nicole and O.J. fought, she would go often to a beach house they owned. “That was always her refuge,” Juditha explained. “And then when she left him, that was the first lock that he changed. So she couldn’t go down to the beach house anymore. That’s how much he loves his kids. You know, all this circus about ‘I love my kids.’ That was their favorite place!”

Juditha was warming to the subject. It seemed curious to me that she could work up more outrage over the ill-treatment of her grandchildren than over the very obvious abuse of her own daughter.

“And another thing that upset me about him was, when she once said she cannot afford the school anymore, it’s just so much money. And he says, ‘Then put ‘em in regular school. Other kids survive.’ So there was no consideration to the kids as long as he could get to her. This is something I hold against him, and I always have. Just out to hurt Nicole. If Nicole didn’t do how O.J wanted, it was always money and it was how to get to her then.”

After the murder, the Browns received a call from Simpson’s lawyer. “Don’t expect Nicole’s alimony check,” Juditha recalled hearing, “because the children just have to get used to a lower lifestyle.”

This would have appalled me if I had not already formed an opinion as to what a selfish, unfeeling creep Orenthal James Simpson really was.

Lou promised to give Phil and Tom permission to search the storage facility where he had put the contents of Nicole’s condo. Before we left, I showed him one of the photos taken from the lockbox. As he looked at it, his expression did not change.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

“Well, they’d had a fight,” he replied.

Inside I was screaming:
Why didn’t you encourage her to leave? Why didn’t you say to her, “Baby, you shouldn’t be with this monster?
” But I didn’t. I’m sure in his own way, Lou Brown was suffering terribly. Maybe he was saying those same things to himself. Maybe. But I had to keep my mouth shut. You cannot afford to alienate a witness.

CAR TAPE.
December 16, 1994. We have to go out and see the Browns again this Sunday. This case is kicking all my personal issues
. . . .
That little girl, Nicole, never had a chance. What a tortured life she led. I don’t think she ever had much peace
.

I can’t talk about this anymore
. . . .

I was dashing around Glendale trying to run a month’s worth of errands in two hours and log a few minutes of car tape in the process, when the earth seemed to give way under me. I felt queer and shaky. I had to pull into a parking lot.

That little girl, Nicole, never had a chance
. . . . I shut off the tape and rested my head on the steering wheel. I really
couldn’t
talk about it anymore.

The case was taking its toll on me. The stress. The long hours. That’s the punishment you expect as a prosecutor. But the type of battering this case was giving me was of a more hurtful, insidious order. It had come to the point where the mention of Nicole’s name caused me pain.

On the face of things, there were not many points of similarity between Nicole and me. She’d been a WASP goddess in a white Ferrari. I was a scrappy Jewish civil servant with a swamp for a bedroom. What are the odds that two such dissimilar women could experience anything close to the same kind of misery? And yet, so many details from her brief and tormented life seemed to resonate with my own.

In early December, Nicole’s divorce lawyers at had messengered us a packet of documents. These included a deposition Nicole had given Simpson’s attorneys in the interest of establishing her own inability to support herself. Within its pages, Nicole’s true helplessness showed through with painful clarity.

She told how she’d tried her hand at interior decorating, but her only “clients” had been her husband and his friends. She’d thought about going into the restaurant business or starting up a coffee bar with Faye Resnick. You could see her turning over and over in her mind the alternatives that would reduce her dependence upon O. J. Simpson’s money. She was looking not only for a job, but tor a career—one that would support her and give a sense of purpose to her life.

“I’m sure I’ll get a goal someday,” she’d told them. That plaintive line struck me to the heart.

Nicole had the right instincts. She knew the way to save herself was to find a career. She just couldn’t connect, somehow. Lack of talent? Lack of drive? I don’t know. When all is said and done, not enough of Nicole was revealed in these documents to answer those questions. Whenever I was tempted to fault her for having stayed in that awful relationship for fifteen years—seventeen if you count the fitful two years after the divorce—I took stock and realized that my own first marriage had lasted for five, eight if you count the time Gaby and I lived together. What tricks do we play on ourselves, to linger so long in hell?

These were not thoughts I shared with anyone at the office. At least not directly. Whenever I met with our domestic violence experts, Lydia Bodin and Scott Gordon, I’d ply them with questions.

“Why the hell didn’t she cut and run?” I’d ask Scott.

“Minimizing” was what he called it. He told me, “Women who are in abusive relationships downplay the seriousness of their own circumstances. They deny it to themselves. They present a brave front to others, trying to hold things together. It’s a coping mechanism.”

Minimizing. That certainly hit me where I lived.
Nothings wrong here. I can get this thing back under control. Just don’t admit that there’s a problem
.

Scott, of course, was delighted by my newfound interest in DV. Since the beginning, he’d been arguing to me and anyone else who’d listen that domestic violence was the cornerstone of this case. I’d remained aloof, but through sheer persistence, he’d picked up advocates. When, in early October, I finally assigned Chris Darden to this detail, the domestic violence movement within our office gained even more momentum.

Chris, Scott, Lydia, and Hank Goldberg, a fellow D.A. who was terrific at writing motions, worked like Trojans to document incidences of O. J. Simpson’s brutality toward Nicole. This was not easy to do. As I’ve said, an abuser does not normally hit his victim in the presence of others. So, as a starting point, they turned to an inventory Nicole had compiled at the suggestion of her divorce lawyers. According to this document, she’d gotten her first beating right after she started to live with O. J. Simpson. A year or so later, while they were staying at the Sherry Netherland in New York City, Simpson beat Nicole for hours as she crawled for the door. From her diaries we had Nicole’s own description of how he “hit me while he fucked me.” How he called her mother a “whore.” These violent episodes continued throughout the eighties.

Chris, it turned out, had an excellent way with the domestic violence witnesses. He was calm, reassuring, patient. He managed to get Denise Brown to recall an upsetting episode. The scene was Rockingham, where Denise and her date were hanging out after an evening with O.J. and Nicole. Everybody was drunk. Denise blurted that she thought O.J. took Nicole for granted—and Simpson blew. He grabbed his guests and his wife and flung them, one by one, onto the lawn.

Chris also turned up a woman named Connie Good, whose boyfriend had lived next door to Nicole’s apartment in 1977 or 1978. She told how on one evening in particular, while she was visiting, she’d heard screaming from Nicole’s apartment. She’d also heard thuds.

“Sounded like it was either on the floor or against the wall,” she recalled. Simpson was shouting, “Fucking bitch!” Later, Good ran into Nicole in the elevator; the girl had two black eyes.

The DV dragnet turned up something else especially heartbreaking. Sojourn, a battered-women’s hotline out of Santa Monica, reported taking a call five days before the murder from a woman in West L.A. Her name was Nicole. She had two children and she was frightened because her ex-husband was stalking her. She’d called the cops more than eight times. Their response? “Nothing much ever done.”

As the evidence mounted, Chris and Scott put more pressure on me to give domestic violence a bigger role in the case.

“This is not some murder that incidentally involved domestic violence,” Scott would tell me. “It’s a domestic violence case that ended in murder.”

I had to admit that this approach afforded us a solid legal advantage. If we identified this as a domestic violence case that ended in murder, we could argue that the incidents of abuse that led up to the crime should be admissible. Being able to present those attacks in open court might have two beneficial effects: one, to strip the jury of their rosy illusions about the defendant; two, to give us the opportunity to present a compelling motive for murder.

Scott was pressing me to meet with a couple of domestic violence experts he’d brought in from out of town, Angela Brown and Dr. Donald Dutton. I kept putting him off. Finally, we’d run out of time. I remember very clearly one afternoon in mid-December when both experts had been hanging around all day to meet with me and Chris. Dr. Dutton had to get back to British Columbia. I looked at my watch. God—it was 8:30. They’d been waiting for me for more than five hours. I felt horribly embarrassed.

I grabbed my notebooks and ran to Scott’s cubicle. There, I found Donald, in his tweedy jacket and sensible shoes, and Angela, in her long, flowing skirt and silk drape blouse, sitting on the floor in Scott’s cubicle, surrounded by their binders and notes. I threw myself on their mercy.

“Do you have another hour or so of energy to talk to me?” I asked.

“I think we’re kind of bushed, to tell you the truth, Marcia,” Don replied. “But if you want to join us, we could probably continue our discussion for a bit over cocktails, hey?”

We went over to the Inter-Continental Hotel, where Chris joined us. There, we ended up engaging in one of the liveliest and most perceptive discussions any of us had ever had about the case.

The question pressing most heavily on my mind was whether, given all we knew of the Simpsons’ relationship and the events leading up to June 12, the experts would have predicted that Simpson was about to erupt into a homicidal rage. Was this murder the result of a long-standing plan, or one formulated on the night it was committed?

The critical variable, Don Dutton explained, was “estrangement.” When Nicole didn’t invite Simpson to sit with her at Sydney’s dance recital, when she declined to invite him to join them at Mezzaluna, she made a public declaration of her independence and embarrassed him in front of friends and family.

“A rebuff equals incitement to murder?” I asked, still incredulous. A month ago I would have had a hard time buying this proposition. But Don now made a cogent argument for how O. J. Simpson would have overreacted to rejection. His overweening ego and controlling behavior masked a fundamentally flawed, insecure, and extremely immature personality. To such an unstable man, violence would seem a justifiable means of reestablishing control.

Still, I wondered silently, why would
these
snubs,
this
evening, have proved so incendiary? Two years earlier, Nicole had divorced him, a development that he appeared to take with comparative equanimity. I suspected that there had to have been something else that incited him—and that it had to do with a string of calls made from the cell phone in his Bronco that night to Paula Barbieri. Paula, of course, was continuing to elude us, so I didn’t know for sure what had gone down. But my guess was that Simpson’s frustration over his inability to reach her that night had spilled over in rage against Nicole. The first time Nicole dumped him, he’d had Paula to catch him. The second time, he went into free fall.