Without a Doubt (7 page)

Ron Goldman, “decedent 94-05135,” had been found to the north. He’d fallen or been pushed backward and was slumped against the stump of a palm tree. He was wearing blue jeans and a light cotton sweater. Lying near his right foot was a white envelope containing a pair of eyeglasses. Goldman had injuries to the neck, back, head, hands, thighs. He’d apparently put up a fierce struggle.

I absorbed the contents of these reports without emotion. Over the years, I’d learned to do that. I imagine that emergency-room physicians approach their work the same way—first treat the symptoms; only after the bleeding stops, notice the human beings. I knew with painful certainty that if I caught this case for keeps, the deaths described in these pages would become personal. And, like it or not, I would begin to grieve for the victims. Just as I’d written to Rebecca’s mother, Danna Schaeffer, once you start letting yourself feel, the misery is endless.

But at this moment, the facts were all I needed or wanted.

Cause of death? “Sharp force injuries from some kind of knife or bladed instrument.”

I hated that. With a bullet you can match striations to the barrel of a gun and be 99 percent sure that you have the murder weapon. Blade wounds are usually sloppy. The injuries often can’t be traced to a single instrument.

Murder weapon? No sign of one yet. The cops had checked trash receptacles and luggage lockers at LAX and were in the process of searching the fields around O’Hare. They apparently had a line on a German hunting knife that Simpson had bought at an establishment called Ross Cutlery close to the time of the murder. Promising, but a long shot. Barring some anomaly—like some pattern on the handle that got pressed into the victims’ skin—we would never get a 100 percent match.

Time of death? Coroner still working on that.

Suspect? I lit up a Dunhill and took a deep drag. Then, on a clean sheet of yellow notepaper, I wrote: “O. J. Simpson.” And after that, “ALIBI?”

During the first couple of days after the murders, Simpson’s attorney, Howard Weitzman, had been telling reporters that Simpson was en route to Chicago at the time of the murders. Weitzman put it at eleven o’clock. Turns out, however, that the red-eye left LAX at 11:45 P.M.

When was Nicole Brown last seen alive? I skimmed a report taken from the bar manager at Mezzaluna. She’d seen Ron Goldman leave the restaurant at about 9:30 or 9:45, on his way to Nicole’s house. Goldman had been talking to Nicole on the phone a few minutes earlier, so it was probably safe to say that she was still alive at around 9:45 P.M. O. J. Simpson’s plane is lifting off at 11:45. That’s a lot of time in between.

What else have we got here?

“FENJVES, Pablo.” One of Nicole’s neighbors is watching the Channel 5 news at ten. I like witnesses who peg their memories to the
TV Guide
. They’re usually reliable. At about a quarter past to half past the hour he hears a dog barking “uncontrollably.” The dog continues barking for over an hour.

Nicole Brown’s dog was a big white Akita. His name was Kato. I’d learned that… God, where
did
I learn it? From the evening news? Probably. Anyhow, I’d learned that Kato—related in some loony but as yet unspecified way to the houseguest, Brian Kaelin—had been wandering the neighborhood with bloody paws when another neighbor walking his own dog had found him.

If you assumed, for argument’s sake, that the hound was Nicole’s Akita and that he began to bark when his mistress was murdered, that put the time of death—conservatively speaking—somewhere around 10:15 P.M. to 10:30 P.M.

What about O. J. Simpson? Was there any time during which he was unaccounted for?

The witness who seemed to have the most intimate knowledge of Simpson’s whereabouts on June 12 was Kato Kaelin. He’d told detectives at the West L.A. Police Station that Simpson had gone to his eight-year-old daughter Sydney’s dance recital, which had begun at five P.M., then returned home at…

The officers had not noted the time.

Kato then related—in what would become a familiar litany—how he and Simpson had gone out at about 9:30 P.M. to a McDonald’s on Santa Monica Boulevard. Kato wasn’t sure when they’d gotten back. Ten P.M., he thought. That was the last he saw of Simpson until around a quarter to eleven. Kato was back in his room on the phone to a friend when he heard “a thump” against his wall. When he went out to investigate, Kato said, he saw a white limousine sitting outside the gate.

“Limo… limo… limo…”

I flipped to the police interview with the limo driver who took Simpson to LAX for his 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago. You’ve gotta figure that the livelihood of a limo driver depends upon close attention to the clock. Allan Park, as it turned out, was extremely conscientious about time.

He’d been scheduled to be at Rockingham by 10:45 P.M., but just to be on the safe side, he arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule. After waiting around for a bit, he rang the buzzer at 10:40. He got no answer. For the next ten minutes he continued ringing without success. At 10:50 he called his boss for instructions. He was still on the line three minutes later when he saw a white male walk from the back of the house carrying a flashlight. Obviously, Kato checking out the thumps.

Simultaneously, Park saw a black man—he believed it was O. J. Simpson—walk quickly from the far side of the driveway to the front door. Park got out of the limo and rang the buzzer again. This time Simpson answered, saying, “I’m sorry, I overslept. I just got out of the shower and I’ll be down in a minute.”

I made a big mark through this with orange highlighter. Here was a crucial witness. One who could attest that up until 10:50 or so Simpson was not answering his buzzer. He could also attest that someone resembling Simpson walked into his house around 10:53 P.M. Shortly after that, Simpson answered the buzzer. O. J. Simpson, it appeared, had lied about having been in the shower!

If you believed Park’s account, it placed the suspect in his own front yard at 10:53 P.M. According to my rough calculations, Simpson had been off the radar for close to an hour. If Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had been killed as early as 10:10, or even as late as 10:40, Simpson would have had time to drive the three miles or so from Bundy to Rockingham.

From where I was sitting, O. J. Simpson had no alibi.

And still, the police would not arrest.

By the next day, Thursday the sixteenth, the tension in our office was pushing into the red zone. I got a call from SID. The stain on the brown leather glove from Rockingham contained genetic markers from
both
victims, with a strong possibility that Simpson’s blood was in the mix. They’d also found Simpson’s blood on the interior of the door of his white Ford Bronco. The case was getting stronger by the hour. I’d never seen so much damning physical evidence. What were the cops waiting for? A sign from God?

If you ask the LAPD brass, they’ll probably tell you they were in no hurry to arrest because they knew exactly where the suspect was that day. In fact, most of the world knew where O. J. Simpson was that day: he was attending the funeral mass of Nicole Brown at St. Martin of Tours in Brentwood, and later, her burial in Orange County.

I caught a few minutes of news showing the Brown family at Nicole’s graveside. Simpson was there, all right. And he made a plausible show of grief. The slumping shoulders; dark glasses hinting at eyes too swollen with tears to look fellow mourners in the eye. I felt a jolt of revulsion when I saw him steering his two children toward the bier. They looked so innocent. So trusting. I had a momentary vision of them upstairs sleeping while their mother struggled with her killer.

In the months to come I would flash from from time to time on the image of those children sleeping. Sometimes a photo of them would trigger it. Sometimes it would be a document. Several weeks after the murders, I finally received a report I’d been requesting from an Officer Joan Vasquez. She’d been assigned to escort the Simpson children out back through the garage, never allowing them close to the crime scene.

Officer Vasquez reported that as the children sat in the back of the cruiser, Sydney whimpered, “Where’s my mommy? . . . I’m just tired and I want my mommy.”

Sydney and Justin stayed at the West L.A. station for almost five hours! Officer Vasquez, clearly a kind soul, tried to distract them with soda, candy, paper hats, paints. Over that long morning, she’d taught the children to spell their names in sign language and to play Hangman.

“I like the Power Rangers because I’m a green belt in karate,” six-year-old Justin told her. “My mommy is going to start going with me again.”

Sydney knew something was terribly wrong. At one point, she turned to her brother and said, “Justin, you know something happened to Mommy, or she would have come for us by now.”

“Why can’t Dad just come for us?” Justin asked her.

“Because he doesn’t stay with us sometimes,” she replied.

At about 6:30, their older stepsister, Arnelle, picked them up, and they left.

When I read this, I found it hard to keep back the tears. That may have been where the misery hit me in earnest. On the day of Nicole’s funeral, however, I was simply struck by how surreal it all seemed. You had Nicole’s California-perfect mother and sisters embracing and comforting O. J. Simpson. What was going on here?

I hadn’t yet met the Browns. Given the media frenzy surrounding this case, we all agreed it was proper that Gil make the first contact. During the chaos of the first week after the murders, however, he and Nicole’s father, Louis, had continually missed each other’s calls. How the Browns felt about their son-in-law now was unclear. I knew that they had suspicions. When Tom Lange called Denise Brown to tell her of her sister’s murder, the first words out of her mouth were “I knew that son of a bitch was going to do it!”

They had to know about the New Year’s Eve beating Simpson gave Nicole. And yet there he was being welcomed as a son and brother, holding the hands of his two children, weeping over the casket of their mother. Could the aura of a celebrity blind even the family of a murder victim?

During the four days since he’d been cut loose, Simpson had been the bereaved widower. He’d spent his time in seclusion, “under a doctor’s care for depression,” according to his new attorney, Robert Shapiro. Bob had surfaced when Howard Weitzman bowed out of the case citing his “personal friendship” with the suspect.

I’d always considered Weitzman a decent guy and a good attorney. I could never figure out why he didn’t insist upon being at his client’s interview with Vannatter and Lange. (Much later in the case, I found myself talking to Howard at a dinner party in West L.A. He told me that he’d cut out because the cops threatened not to talk to Simpson if he had an attorney present. That made no sense to me. What really happened, I suspect, is that Simpson’s colossal ego, combined with his confidence in his ability to sweet-talk and manipulate cops, had led him to dismiss his own attorney from the interview. Weitzman, or course, would have had no choice but to comply.)

When Weitzman dropped out of the picture, Robert Shapiro stepped right in. I was flabbergasted.
O. J. Simpson’s got bucks coming out the wazoo, and this is the best he can do?
Weitzman, at least, had credibility. Shapiro, to my way of thinking, wasn’t even a serious trial attorney. He had a stable of celebrity clients, Tina Sinatra, Christian Brando, and Erik Menendez among them. Still, he had a reputation around the Criminal Courts Building as a deal-maker, not a litigator. A lightweight.

One of Shapiro’s first moves was to write a letter to Vannatter and Lange saying that his client “would be willing to consider” taking a lie-detector test. The cops faxed me a copy and asked for my opinion.

Polygraphs are risky. A subject can dope himself up to pass, which is why cops don’t like to administer the test unless they’ve had the suspect in custody for a while. (Unbeknownst to me or the cops, Simpson had
already
taken a polygraph and scored a minus 22, meaning he failed every single question about the murder. I did not learn this until well after the verdict. Then I shook my head in amazement. It’s hard to imagine that a lawyer would be stupid enough to offer his client up for a second poly after he’d failed the first time.)

The offer seemed fishy. My advice: “Stay away from it.”

Shapiro also offered the services of his own experts—Dr. Michael Baden, director of forensic sciences for the New York State Police, and Dr. Henry Lee, director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory—to “aid in the investigation.” Specifically, he was asking permission for Baden to reautopsy the bodies. “We… would like you to contact the next of kin for permission in this regard,” he wrote, “since I feel it would be inappropriate for me to contact them directly during this period of grief.”

I never answered him. But Nicole’s mother, Juditha, would later tell me that during the funeral Shapiro came up and flat-out asked her for permission to exhume the body. She was too taken aback to reply. Shapiro, no doubt realizing how unsympathetically this request would be viewed by the public, wisely let the matter drop.

After the funeral, Simpson dropped off the screen. He’d apparently attended a gathering at Nicole’s parents’ home down at Dana Point before returning to “seclusion” at Rockingham. By Thursday evening, I was climbing the walls. I called the cops to check up on him. That’s when I learned, to my amazement, that they did not have him under surveillance.

“Lack of manpower,” they said. “Besides, where’s he gonna go?”

This was too much even for Gil. He called us all into his office that evening and put the question to us: “Do we go to the grand jury or wait for the police to file?”

We all agreed the case was well past the stage of being filable. The cops were playing strictly cover-your-ass politics, which might have been fine if they’d had the luxury of working without the constant scrutiny of the press. But that wasn’t the situation we had here. The media was broadcasting every tidbit it could get its hands on, and a lot of that information was amazingly on target. Some creep with access to documents was leaking like a rusty tub.