Since then, the site has been transformed into an outdoor memorial—a soothing, well-manicured place that seems almost pastoral, an anomaly in a city. It is hard to believe that the park-like memorial was ground zero for an attack of deadly terror. Standing as sentinels at either end of the outdoor memorial are bronze “Gates of Times,” one marked 9:01 and the other 9:03, designating the minute before the bombing and the minute after. A long, shallow reflecting pool shimmers in the midst of the memorial, delineating where Northwest Fifth Street used to pass in front of the Murrah Building. On the plaza above the reflecting pool stands an old American elm tree that was so buffeted by flames and debris on the day of the bombing that it was thought to have been killed. But in the spring after the attack, it sent out buds and then leaves. The elm soon came to be known as the Survivor Tree. It is a talisman, a battered but living symbol of the city’s resilience. A likeness of the Survivor Tree has become the emblem of the nearby Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum.
FIGURE 12. The site of the Oklahoma City bombing has been transformed into a contemplative, open-air memorial dotted with 168 glass, bronze, and stone chairs—one for each person who died in the attack. The empty chairs face a shallow reflecting pool and stand as mute testimony to irrecoverable loss. (Photo by author)
The site of the bombing is commemorated by what is called the Field of Empty Chairs. There, 168 glass, bronze, and stone chairs—one for each person who died in the attack—are arrayed in rows that roughly correspond to the floors of the Murrah Building. The empty chairs project a solemn and dignified ambiance, offering mute testimony to absence and irrecoverable loss. The outdoor memorial is a contemplative place, especially so at night when the base of each chair is softly illuminated.
For all its ingenuity and quiet appeal, the outdoor memorial is somehow anodyne. There are few obvious or specific references to the havoc and horror of the attack. There are no reminders about the perpetrators or their names. There is nothing obvious that tells visitors where McVeigh parked and locked the Ryder truck, fuses burning into the cargo hold. There is nothing explicit about the perfidy of the man who in his delusions dealt so much death and destruction at this site in 1995. The central figure in the 1995 bombing is neither demonized nor condemned—just improbably absent and ignored.
3
O.J., DNA, and the “Trial of the Century”
Nineteen ninety-five produced two flashbulb events in America—moments so powerful and memorable that for years afterward people remembered where they were, and what they were doing, when they heard about them.1 One was the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The other came on October 3, 1995, when verdicts were announced in the O. J. Simpson double-murder trial in Los Angeles, proceedings that had become so protracted and at times so graphic and repellant that they had spread like a stain across the year.
A jury of nine African Americans, two whites, and one Latino had, on October 2, 1995, decided the fate of Simpson, a popular black football star turned movie actor and rental car pitchman who was accused of the gruesome fatal stabbings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, both of whom were white. The presiding judge, Lance A. Ito, deferred unsealing and reading the verdicts until the following day at 10 a.m., Pacific time. As that hour approached on October 3, almost everything in America went on hold, in an astonishing national vigil.2
To be in a position of not knowing the outcome was intolerable. So almost everyone, it seemed, found a place near a television set or a radio receiver to get the news of the verdicts,3 which were to be announced live from the ninth-floor courtroom in downtown Los Angeles where the trial had played out since January 1995.
Nothing that day could compete with the announcement of the Simpson verdicts. Beaches near Los Angeles seemed almost deserted, even though the weather was pleasantly summerlike.4 In San Francisco, truck drivers pulled to the side of highways to concentrate attention on their radios.5 At international airports in Atlanta and Chicago, airline passengers refused to board flights and gathered around television monitors in waiting lounges.6 The trading pits of the Chicago Board of Trade fell uncustomarily silent.7 Boston was reported to be “strangely still” at the hour of Simpson’s reckoning; business of all kind seemed to grind to a halt.8
At the White House, President Bill Clinton made his way to a secretary’s office to listen to the outcome; he worked a crossword puzzle rather than watch the television screen.9 Elsewhere in Washington, events were canceled or postponed so as not to compete with the Simpson verdicts. The State Department’s midday briefing was delayed.10 Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut rescheduled a news conference. “Not only would you not be here,” Lieberman told reporters, “but I wouldn’t be here, either.”11
Electric consumption climbed as television sets were clicked on across the country. Long-distance telephone calls dropped off. The communal-like anticipation on that October day was remarkable: no news event in recent American history—save, perhaps, the first lunar landing in July 1969—was anticipated by such vast audiences and characterized so thoroughly by uncertainty.12 It was a moment of drama both unpredictable and absorbing, and shown live on television. The audiences awaiting the verdicts that day were more than merely curious: they felt invested somehow in the fate of an African American sports star and celebrity who long ago had transcended race, who once told the New York Times: “My biggest accomplishment is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man.”13
The national vigil was an extraordinary close to a trial that had transfixed the country. It was a televised saga around which much seemed to revolve in 1995.14 The trial, it seemed, was always on, always up for discussion, and inevitably smothered in hyperbole: it was called, and not without some justification, “The Trial of the Century,” an epithet invoked both in irony and in all seriousness.15 There were other outsize and extravagant characterizations, too. The trial was likened to “a modern day Greek tragedy”16 and to “a great trash novel come to life.”17 It was described as “a lens through which we saw ourselves.”18 It was “the year’s most ignoble spectacle,”19 freighted with searing allegations of domestic violence, police corruption, lawyerly excess, and overt racism.20 It was “the Othello of the Twentieth Century,”21 the “Super Bowl of murder trials.”22 It was, wrote David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times, “a Bayeux tapestry of contemporary American culture.”23
It was hardly surprising, then, that nearly everyone in America stopped what they were doing on October 3, 1995, when time came for the reading of the verdicts. The Simpson case had embraced those rare and salient features that make for an exceptionally high-profile trial: The defendant was well-known and well-liked, at least before the trial. The crimes were appalling and the victims were especially vulnerable; they had had little chance to defend themselves from their killer. Hot-button social issues, such as domestic abuse, police misconduct, and race relations, crowded into the case.24
No less important was multimillion dollar wealth, which enabled Simpson to recruit a high-powered legal team that went toe-to-toe with prosecutors for months, and usually got the better of them. The trial was notable, too, for the prominence it gave to an emergent evidentiary methodology, forensic DNA analysis. The Simpson trial was hardly the first in which complex genetic evidence figured prominently, but it was the first widely followed, high-profile criminal trial in the United States in which evidence about DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid, the complex and distinctive genetic material found in blood, hair, saliva, semen, skin tissue, and elsewhere—was a crucial component. At the Simpson trial, DNA testing was on display as never before.25 As will be discussed in this chapter, the trial’s most important and lasting contributions centered around DNA: the Simpson trial helped to settle disputes about the value and validity of DNA evidence and anticipated popular interest in the potency of DNA testing.
Precise data are elusive, but perhaps 100 million people or more were watching on television in the United State
s as the clerk in Ito’s courtroom began to read the verdicts, the culmination of a trial that took more than eight months to complete, far longer than had been reasonably expected. It had produced more than 850 exhibits, heard from more than 120 witnesses, and generated a court transcript that exceeded 50,000 pages.26 Yet the jurors reached their verdicts after deliberating less than four hours—far fewer than almost anyone had anticipated.27 And now, on October 3, Simpson was told to stand and face the jurors. His lawyers, unbidden, stood, too. Simpson was well turned-out, but he looked slightly befuddled as the clerk read the first verdict, to the charge that he had killed Nicole Simpson: not guilty. He sighed deeply and smiled slightly. To the second charge, that he had killed Goldman: not guilty.
FIGURE 13. Americans held their collective breath on October 3, 1995, as they awaited the verdicts in O. J. Simpson’s double-murder trial in Los Angeles. News of Simpson’s acquittal made headlines around the world.
The crimes that gave rise to the “Trial of the Century” were committed on the night of June 12, 1994, in the well-to-do west Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood, outside the townhouse of Nicole Brown Simpson where she awaited Ronald Goldman. He was a waiter, delivering to Nicole Simpson the prescription eyeglasses that had been retrieved outside of Mezzaluna, a small, trendy restaurant in Brentwood. She had dined there that night with family members, including her mother, who misplaced the eyeglasses that Goldman was returning.
The attacker nearly beheaded Nicole Simpson and stabbed Goldman repeatedly in the face, chest, and thigh. The victims’ battered bodies were found in pools of congealing blood in the small front yard of the townhouse. A trail of bloody footprints and blood droplets led from the murder scene to an alley behind the townhouse. In bedrooms inside, the two young children Nicole had with O. J. Simpson slept through the savage attack.
Late that night, O. J. Simpson left his mansion in Brentwood and traveled by stretch limousine to Los Angeles International Airport to board a flight to Chicago. He had a promotional engagement the following day. Los Angeles police reached him by telephone at his hotel room in Chicago and told him about the slaying of his former wife.28 He promptly returned to Los Angeles, was questioned by police, and was released. As the investigation proceeded that week, evidence increasingly pointed to Simpson’s culpability; his lawyer, Robert Shapiro, agreed that Simpson would surrender on June 17, 1994. When the appointed hour came, however, Simpson had slipped away, and authorities declared him a fugitive, a “wanted murder suspect.”29
Simpson was spotted hours later, a passenger in a white Ford Bronco driven by a friend and former football teammate, Al Cowlings. A phalanx of police cars followed the Bronco at low speeds across Southern California freeways, a pursuit that went on for sixty miles and was followed by millions of people watching on television. Simpson sat in the back seat during the chase, at times holding a handgun to his head.30
The surreal drama ended on the cobblestone driveway of Simpson’s estate in Brentwood. Simpson remained in the Bronco for about an hour before stepping out with a framed family photograph in hand. He went inside his mansion for a few minutes, then surrendered and was taken by a motorcade of police cars to jail in downtown Los Angeles.31
The Simpson case was nothing if not sui generis, an anomaly built on anomaly—“a distorted example of American justice, in the same way the Playboy Mansion is a distorted sample of American housing,” wrote David Dow, a journalist who covered the trial.32 Susan Caba, another journalist, said “watching the Simpson trial and using it to draw conclusions about trials in general is like reading War and Peace and saying, ‘Gee, this must be what all novels are like.’”33
Most murder cases do not go to trial. Those that do usually are concluded quickly; few of them drag on for months and months. Most defendants are poor and plead guilty; they cannot afford the high-priced legal talent that Simpson assembled in his defense, lawyers who cost him millions of dollars in fees. It was a high-powered team that included Shapiro and Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., a black lawyer well known in Los Angeles for representing victims of police brutality. It included luminaries such as F. Lee Bailey, a trial lawyer who won fame in the “Boston Strangler” case in the 1960s; Alan M. Dershowitz, an appellate expert at Harvard Law School; and Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, authorities on forensic DNA evidence. It was a “Dream Team” of legal talent, journalists declared, a characterization more hyperbolic than precise.34
The prosecution—led by Deputy District Attorneys Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden—proved little match for the “Dream Team.” By the close of the trial, Clark and Darden were exhausted and clearly overwhelmed by the defense lawyers, who had kept them off-balance and had effectively and shrewdly turned the trial into an indictment of the conduct, practices, procedures, and personnel of the Los Angeles police.
The Los Angeles Police Department was certainly a source of controversy and racial tension in the early 1990s. The brutal police beating in 1991 of Rodney King, a black motorist, was captured on videotape and shown around the world. Four police officers accused of assault and excessive force in the King beating were acquitted in 1992, setting off riots in Los Angeles that left more than fifty people dead. In the O. J. Simpson case, as well, police conduct was questionable from the outset. In the hours after the slayings of Nicole Simpson and Goldman, detectives scaled a wall and entered Simpson’s compound without a warrant. They testified that a spot of blood on Simpson’s white SUV parked outside prompted fears that there were other victims of the grisly attack. While inside the compound, a veteran detective named Mark Fuhrman found a blood-stained leather glove, the mate to the blood-stained glove that had been found near Goldman’s body.
Beyond problematic policework, the prosecutors faced formidable challenges in making a case against Simpson. The killer’s knife was never found. No witnesses to the slaying ever came forward. Simpson’s statement to the police contained a few ambiguous hints of culpability35 but was no confession. No murder weapon, no witnesses, no guilty plea: all were major impediments to proving Simpson was the murderer. But the prosecution did have considerable DNA evidence, in blood stains and blood droplets retrieved from the crime scene, from inside Simpson’s SUV, and from the driveway at his mansion. Prosecutors theorized that Simpson cut a finger on his left hand during the attacks, and blood from the wound was left at the crime scene. Moreover, Simpson could offer no good explanation or alibi for his whereabouts during the time when the slayings took place.
Motive for the killings, the prosecutors argued, was Simpson’s obsession with his former wife, whom he had stalked, beaten, and threatened on several occasions during their marriage and after their divorce in 1992. Simpson had been convicted of spousal abuse in 1989. He was, the prosecutors asserted, “a batterer, a wife-beater, an abuser, a controller.”36 They theorized that Simpson went uninvited and unannounced to Nicole Simpson’s townhouse after 10 p.m. on June 12, 1994, and surprised her as she stepped outside to greet Goldman when he arrived with the eyeglasses. Simpson, prosecutors argued, stabbed her repeatedly and slit her throat after overwhelming Goldman, who also was stabbed repeatedly. Simpson fled, the prosecutors said, and returned home where the limousine was waiting to take him to the airport and the flight to Chicago.
Defense lawyers maintained that Simpson was a well-liked celebrity wrongly accused and framed by corrupt and racist police officers. Defense lawyers tracked down audiotapes made in 1986 that revealed Fuhrman to be racist and a perjurer. Fuhrman, the detective who had found the blood-stained leather glove at Simpson’s estate, was heard on the audiotapes boasting about planting evidence and abusing suspects in other criminal cases. In excerpts of the tapes played for the jury, Fuhrman was heard uttering the racial slur “nigger.” In testimony early in the trial, Fuhrman had denied using racial epithets. He was a rogue cop and a godsend to the “Dream Team.”
Simpson never took the stand at his trial.37 Even so—in a striking anomaly of an anomalous case—Simpson at trial was never
very far from center stage, certainly not at key moments in the proceedings. He was a dominant presence in the courtroom, projecting “undeniable star quality,” as one frequent observer said.38 Simpson’s words, actions, and lifestyle commanded frequent attention during the trial, sometimes spontaneously, sometimes in scripted ways. Rarely did Simpson recede into unimportance as the trial wore on in Ito’s crowded and cluttered courtroom.
Simpson wanted center stage from the outset. Through his lawyers, he sought Ito’s permission to address the jury in late January 1995, during opening statements at the trial. Simpson also proposed showing jurors evidence of scars, injuries, and physical limitations, to suggest he was incapable of committing the vicious attacks of which he was accused.39 Although his request to speak to jurors was rejected, Simpson was permitted to roll up his pants leg to show them scars left by surgeries to his left knee.
A few days after that, a slapped-together book under Simpson’s name came out and shot to the top of the best-seller lists, passing works such as Pope John Paul II’s question-and-answer book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope. Simpson’s book, I Want to Tell You: My Response to Your Letters, Your Messages, Your Questions, was a largely unrevealing, self-serving response to some of the 300,000 letters he had received since his arrest. I Want to Tell You was based on tape-recorded interviews with Simpson while in jail and contained his pledge, never redeemed, to give testimony at the trial. “Let me get in front of the jury,” Simpson stated. “Let everybody say what they’re going to say, then I’ll get up there and say my piece—and let them judge.”40
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