I’ve thought about that moment often. How ironic: Mark Fuhrman, the man who supposedly lived and breathed to frame O. J. Simpson, stood beside me in the bright June sunlight, indulging in a moment of outright hero worship.
Fuhrman would later claim to have found a bloody fingerprint on the back gate at Bundy, as well as an empty Swiss army knife box on the edge of the tub in O. J. Simpson’s master bathroom. It’s worth noting here that during our tour of Rockingham, he did not
once
mention either the print or knife box to me. (Later we found a line concerning the print in his notes, but by the time those reached my desk, the Bundy scene had long since been washed down.)
“Hey, Marcia, come upstairs. I want to show you something.”
It was Brad Roberts. I followed him up the spiral staircase, where the wall was lined with photographs, mostly shots of O. J. Simpson with various white fat cats.
It was on that stairway that I got my first look at the face of Nicole Brown Simpson.
She was blond, with handsome, almost mannish, features. Her hair, teeth, and skin all had that gloss peculiar to the West Side elite. In some of the photos she was with a pair of lovely brown-skinned children, a boy and a girl. They all wore ski attire. Her face was difficult to read. The expression in all the photos was uniformly happy, but her eyes were glazed. She had—how would you describe it—a thousand-yard stare.
By now, I knew that the Simpsons had been divorced for two years. I found it peculiar that he still had her pictures everywhere. The photos of
my
ex were long gone from walls and end tables. I peeked into the master bedroom suite. From that vantage point I could see only the top and one side of the bed. Brad Roberts knelt on the floor. He reached under the box spring and, using his fingertips, pulled out a framed photo. It showed Nicole and her husband in evening dress.
“Is that the way you found it?” I asked.
“Yep,” he replied. “Just like that. Facedown. Under the bed.”
“Make sure they get a photo of that,” I told him.
By now, it was almost one o’clock, and the search team still had not returned. What the hell was going on? Bundy was on my way to the freeway, so I decided to swing by. And there I found the real mob scene. Jammed into the intersection of two winding residential streets were scores of neighbors, reporters, and lookie-loos straining for glimpses of a modest Mediterranean-style condo partially obscured by a screen of foliage. I muscled my way past them to a uniform guarding the perimeter and gave him my card.
“Vannatter called me,” I told him. “I just came from Rockingham. Any chance I can get in there?”
“Sorry, no one’s allowed,” he told me apologetically.
I suppressed my irritation. I hadn’t been formally assigned to this case, so I was in no position to pull rank.
“Okay if I look from here?” I asked him.
“Sure,” he said. “But watch out for the press.”
No shit. Pretty soon they were going to need riot police to keep this bunch in line.
Relegated to the status of a spectator, I stretched my neck to get a look past the front gate at what was left of the killing ground. From outside the yellow tape, I could see the stain that covered the landing of a set of cement steps. Someone had bled rivers here.
At every crime scene there’s some detail that catches your eye. It’s not necessarily the most significant in terms of its importance to the investigation, but it’s the thing that stimulates your first visceral connection to the case. This time—for me—it was the bloody paw prints of some animal, probably a large dog, that had tracked through the pool of blood on the landing, leaving a cockeyed trail down the walkway toward the street. Had the animal belonged to the victim? The killer?
What had happened here?
I couldn’t see the members of the search team; they were too deep into the property. (Later, I would see many, many photos of the two criminalists, Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola, in their latex gloves and shower caps, combing the grounds for evidence.) What I could see was a police photographer standing at the top of the steps, his camera set on a tripod. He was taking careful perpendicular aim at something on the lower landing. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I guessed he was documenting the blood trail that Phil had described to me earlier that morning: the shoe prints leading away from the bodies to a gate at the rear of the property—and the drops of blood running parallel to the shoe prints.
It’s almost impossible for a criminal to get away from a crime scene without leaving something of himself there or taking something away. Usually, these things are traces, often invisible to the naked eye. In law enforcement circles this is known as the Locard exchange principle. It holds that when you enter an environment, the environment affects you, and you affect it. In this case, the killer had practically left his calling card.
This one could get interesting
, I told myself. I couldn’t wait to tell David.
David Conn was my boss; he was also my good friend. Head of the Special Trials Unit, David was witty, temperate, and an excellent judge of character. He was a forceful trial attorney and a cunning tactician. But he didn’t have the screw-them-over mentality of so many aggressive prosecutors. I admired that. David had real strength.
When I got back to the CCB, I went directly to David’s office and dropped into one of his armchairs.
“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him. I laid out the details. The glove, the hangings on the wall. The blood on the walkway. The blood in O. J. Simpson’s foyer.
“Where’s he now?” David asked.
“Phil and Tom took him downtown. He’s at Parker Center.”
David was intrigued, I could tell.
“Sounds good,” he said. And a second later, “Do you want to take it?”
I have this superstition about running hard to get a case. Nothing good comes of it. Sometimes trouble will find you when you’re just running in place, so why go looking for it? But I’d been hoping for something bigger to fill out my caseload. And if I was going to catch this case eventually, better to be in on it from day one.
“Sure,” I told him. “I’m free. I mean, if you think it’s okay.”
“You’ve got it, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You think Gil’s gonna care about this one?”
Technically speaking, it was up to David to make this assignment. But, of course, his choice was subject to approval by the D.A. Frankly, I didn’t know if Gil Garcetti would warm to the idea of my taking this case. During my year in management, I’d been assistant to Bill Hodgman, the director of Central Operations. It had been my job to sit in on meetings with the D.A. when Bill couldn’t make it. I enjoyed a good working relationship with Gil, but I spoke my mind freely, sometimes a little too freely for the comfort of the brass.
Garcetti couldn’t fail to see my qualifications in terms of handling the DNA stuff. I had a strong record of convictions. I was willing to put in long hours. But it was also no secret around the D.A.‘s office that I had just filed for divorce, and consequently had incurred all the single-parenting complications that went along with it. I had also bailed out of a management position, which might cause him to doubt my political fealty.
I also knew that Gil had felt burned over assignments he’d made in recent years. The deputies he’d chosen to prosecute certain cases were tough but, from Gil’s perspective, too independent. They’d cut him out of the decision-making, and then it was Gil who’d taken the rap for a series of high-profile acquittals. I could see why he might worry about me. I’m no one’s idea of a lapdog. It wasn’t that Gil couldn’t tolerate assertive women; in fact, he went out of his way to promote them. But I could see how he might look at me and think,
Loose cannon
.
“I’ll talk to Gil,” David promised me. “In the meantime, you stay in touch with the cops.”
Patience is not my strong suit. Wherever I go, I bring a file or book with me in case, God forbid, I’m stuck waiting for someone. By now, I was beginning to feel edgy. Nearly five hours had passed since I’d last spoken with Phil Vannatter. I supposed that he and Tom Lange were finished interrogating Simpson and had him in lockup somewhere. Best not to bug them, I told myself.
So I held off calling. As I was looking back over my notes from the morning’s conversation with Phil, I suddenly realized I hadn’t called my friend Lynn. I’d completely missed the lunch in her honor. I rang her up and apologized.
“No big deal,” she assured me. Considerate, given that her upcoming wedding was a very big deal to her.
“So,” she said, “what do you think?”
“Of what?”
“Of this guy Simpson.”
It was the first of an infinite number of queries about this case that will likely continue until I am lowered into my grave.
“The evidence is looking pretty strong so far,” I said. “I can’t wait to find out what he’s saying to the cops.”
As I was signing off with Lynn, David poked his head into my doorway. “Why don’t you give them a call?” he said, sitting down across from me.
He was right. Why sit here like some deb waiting for a prom date?
I rang Parker Center.
“Lange, here.”
“Tom, it’s Marcia. Just called to find out what our man had to say.”
“We talked to him for a while. Took his blood. Got some photos.” Typical Tom, wasting no words. He did tell me that Simpson’s attorney, a local heavy hitter named Howard Weitzman, had gone to get coffee or something, leaving his client to go into the interview alone. That was odd. What could Weitzman have been thinking?
“Did you tape?” I asked him. This was really important. If they got the thing on tape, we wouldn’t have to cope with challenges to their note-taking or memories.
“You bet,” he assured me.
“So where’re you holding him?” I asked.
“We let him go.”
Let
. . .
him
. . .
go??
I couldn’t fucking believe it!
“You let him…
go?
” I was looking at David, whose jaw had dropped.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Tom told me, sounding a little defensive. “He’s too famous.”
Give me a break. Sure, he was famous. Sure, it seemed unlikely that he might bolt. But we had a lot more to worry about than whether O. J. Simpson could find a place to hide. “
What if he decides to destroy evidence?
” I wanted to ask Tom. “
What if he starts to intimidate witnesses?
” But I kept it buttoned. The last thing you want to do is get into a pissing match with your investigating officers. I told myself, unconvincingly, that Phil and Tom were doing the best they could, considering that they’d been up since at least two or three A.M. Lange handed me off to Vannatter, and I could hear the fatigue in Phil’s voice as he summarized, rather disjointedly, the interview with O. J. Simpson.
“Suspect has a golfing date… . Suspect attends his daughter’s dance recital… . Suspect drives aimlessly in his Bronco making calls from a cell phone.” From there it was back to Rockingham, a limo to the airport, and then a flight to Chicago.
“I don’t know whether you heard about it,” Phil paused to say, “but when we met him at Rockingham, he had a big old bandage on the middle finger of his left hand.”
Of course. The blood drops running parallel to the footprints on the drive.
“No shit!” I said. “Where’d he say he got it?”
First, Simpson told them he’d gotten the cut in Chicago, which left him having to explain the blood in his driveway and foyer. But then he seemed to cover himself, saying he’d noticed the bleeding before he left, as he was rushing to get to the airport for the outbound flight. The way Phil told it, it was difficult for me to figure out whether we had an incriminating slip or just a confused explanation. I needed to hear that tape.
“What’s doing with the search?” I asked him, hoping earnestly that the search team was not rooting around Rockingham unsupervised.
“We’re on our way out there now,” he assured me.
“Keep me posted.”
“Sure thing.” Phil hung up.
I looked at David. For a minute, the two of us said nothing, both silently assessing the magnitude of the cops’ blunder. Why had they let Simpson walk? It was true that once the police formally arrest someone, they must be prepared to charge him within forty-eight hours. If they’re not sure of their evidence, they can cut him loose, then pick him up later when they have something more solid. But why in this case, where the evidence seemed so strong?
I had never seen the cops this jittery. It was not so much what they said as the reticence in their voices. Something in Phil Vannatter’s tone reminded me of Mark Fuhrman’s as, earlier in the afternoon, he’d gone out of his way to tell me about Simpson’s record on the playing field. At one level, I was hearing the perfectly ordinary sound of people talking. And beneath it, the cackle of
It’s the Juice, man. Can you believe it? It’s the fucking Juice!
I didn’t work late that night. The cops had made it clear that they weren’t going to let me into the loop until they were good and ready.
I caught sight of my baby’s head bobbing behind the crocheted curtains of the picture window. The sight of him always gave me a rush of joy.
No sooner had I gotten into the house than a tiny hand grabbed mine and dragged me down the small flight of stairs to the crudely appended addition that was my bedroom. I called it the Swamp. Whenever it rained, water cascaded down the wall behind my four-poster bed, causing mold to grow. I was allergic to it. During the rainy seasons, spring and fall, I was sick all the time with respiratory infections. There seemed to be nothing I could do to get rid of either the dampness or the mold.
There on a patch of well-discolored wall behind the bureau was an evil-looking arachnid the size of a pinball. She was starting a web, apparently at home in the squalor.
Oh, swell.
For the millionth time, I told myself, “We gotta get outta this place.” What invariably followed was the dismal realization that we had nowhere to go. I was struggling just to make the mortgage payment on this dump.
Thoughts like these usually triggered an orgy of self-reproach. But not tonight. I found, to my surprise, that I was in an indestructibly good mood. True, the cops had cut loose the suspect in a double homicide when they had a mountain of evidence to hold him. True, they were holding me at arm’s length. But you work with what you’ve got.