The Search for Justice

by Robert L Shapiro

  Where does a man turn when he is faced with two terrible realities: one, the violent death of an ex-spouse; and two, the fact that he is considered the prime suspect in the murder? He ’d had no time to grieve, let alone be alert enough to focus on the details that were necessary to both prepare for a court fight and deal with his other obligations, which were significant. His overwhelming concern for his children—the adult ones, Jason and Arnelle, who had dearly loved Nicole, and the little ones, Sydney and Justin, who had lost her—had O.J. in complete turmoil. The questions about what was going to happen to him, what was going to happen to his kids, and what the future had in store for him were all coming up now on a minute-to-minute basis. For years he had provided financial support to his large extended family, supporting his mother, helping his two sisters, and being significantly responsible for the Browns, the parents as well as Nicole ’s sisters. How would he be able to maintain that? He wasn ’t sleeping, and in addition to being exhausted, he seemed to be sinking further into shock by the hour.

  In fact, while we were at Dr. Huizenga ’s office, I received a call from the L.A.P.D. “We ’ve just had a very, very distressing report that O.J. has committed suicide.”

  “That ’s very interesting,” I answered, “because I ’m here with his doctor, and we just took his blood pressure. Oh, Dr. Huizenga,” I said, loud enough for them to hear, “was he dead or alive when you took his blood pressure?” So much for that rumor.

  In the process of the examination, Huizenga found a swollen lymph node in O.J. ’s armpit, which gave him reason for concern. He ran some tests and said he wanted a follow-up exam within the next two days. O.J. then left with Bob Kardashian for his first appointment with Dr. Faerstein.

  In the meantime, Bill Pavelic was trying to find out who Ron Goldman was and where he fit into the mystery. Was he a boyfriend? Was he a bystander? Aside from Nicole ’s close friend and Brentwood neighbor Cora Fischman (who cooperated both on the phone and in person), the women who comprised the core of Nicole ’s group—Faye Resnick, Robin Greer, Candace Garvey (Steve Garvey ’s wife), Cynthia “CiCi” Shahian (Kardashian ’s cousin), and Kris Jenner—all simply refused to talk to us. They were in shock, of course, and grieving the death of their friend. And because of their own suspicions, they ’d quickly closed ranks against anyone having to do with O.J. Their hostility was tangible.

  There was some tension among these women that O.J. told the police had existed before Nicole ’s death. “They ’ve got some things going on right now…. Something ’s happening because one of the girlfriends is having a big problem with her husband. Everybody was beefing with everybody.”

  We heard through the grapevine that Cora Fischman had become somewhat paranoid, saying to a friend of hers, “If the murderer ’s not O.J., then we ’re all in trouble, because we know too much.” When I interviewed Cora, we discovered that Faye Resnick had been staying with Nicole on Bundy, that there had been a drug intervention on the part of Faye ’s concerned friends, and Resnick had gone into a drug-rehabilitation program —her third—just four days before the murders. In addition, we knew that Ron Goldman had arrived at Nicole ’s carrying an envelope that, although it was found to contain her mother ’s glasses left behind at the restaurant, might have been interpreted by an observer as containing something else, possibly drugs.

  So initially it appeared that we might have a reasonable basis for exploring a narcotics angle. Bill Pavelic was looking into the record of 911 calls in the area on the night of the murders; there had been reports of prowlers, and we couldn ’t dismiss the likelihood that if they were borne out, they could have some connection to the crime. At the very least, we had an obligation to investigate further, if only to rule out the possibility. Ultimately, our investigation was to discover much information about Nicole that was of an intimate and possibly inflammatory nature. It was relevant to the case and we chose not to use it as part of the defense. I choose not to use it now.

  O.J. ’s life, in fact, was completely opposite of what many people believed. Hardly the party-going, run-around single guy, he preferred to be with girlfriend Paula Barbieri and his close friends most evenings, heading to bed surprisingly between eight and nine every night so that he could play his beloved golf at five in the morning.

  Nicole, however, liked her tequila now and then, liked to go out with the girls once in a while, dancing at the Roxy, a Hollywood celebrity hangout, or Bar One or the Renaissance in Santa Monica. But they were divorced, and she was a young, attractive woman of comfortable means. A few nights out, in the scheme of things, and in the world they lived in, didn ’t mean anything particularly negative. Although they had been divorced at the time of her death, there had been attempts at reconciliation, the first at his instigation and the second at hers, in 1993, when O.J. agreed to give it another year. In mid-May on 1994, they finally agreed that they would go their separate ways while doing what was best for their children.

  In addition to the press coverage we ’d seen already, with everyone from attorneys to entertainment reporters issuing television commentary every night, the tabloid coverage had begun. O.J. ’s house on Rockingham looked like a round-the-clock film shoot, with sound trucks, lights, photographers, and reporters, not to mention casual onlookers, tree-climbers, fence-scalers, and autograph hunters. Someone would later take long-lens shots of the children at the funeral. Film crews and reporters were becoming the nearly constant companions of everyone having to do with the case.

  I live in a gated community, so at least they weren ’t camped on my doorstep, but as soon as I drove out through the gate, it was like a military action forming behind me. Keno Jenkins, my longtime driver and security person, has a black Isuzu Trooper identical to mine. At times, just to get to court or my office, I would have our housekeeper drive one car while Keno drove the other, and I would be down on the floor in the back of one of them. Once through the gate, they would each turn in separate directions, to try to throw off the press parade as they played “Find Shapiro.” We all got a kick out of it the first couple of times we pulled it off, but very quickly it became tedious and a waste of time.

  On Wednesday evening, June 15, I went with O.J. and Bob Kardashian to Laguna Hills for the small, private wake for Nicole at the funeral home; the funeral itself would be held the next day at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Brentwood.

  O.J. was distraught and tearful the entire time he was at the wake. People were coming up and hugging him, talking with him, sitting with him, sharing private moments and memories. The casket was open—it would be closed for the funeral the next day—and he kept drifting toward it. After the service, mourners had been invited back to a quiet reception at the Brown home. As we were leaving, O.J. said he wanted to spend some time alone with Nicole. I stood outside the door and watched as he went up, knelt down next to the casket, and spent the next fifteen minutes quietly talking to her.

  The Browns live in a lovely home in the upscale Laguna community of Monarch Bay, adjacent to the beach. Juditha and Louis (who with O.J. ’s backing had secured a Hertz franchise at the Ritz-Carlton in Laguna Beach) were gracious and welcoming to their guests, in spite of what they were going through. After I paid my condolences, I continued to talk with Juditha.

  Even when his marriage to Nicole was troubled and then ultimately failed, O.J. had maintained a very close relationship with Juditha, and she had always been his friend and ally. “I ’m so glad O.J. has you on his side,” she said to me. “The children need their father.”

  I asked her, and Nicole ’s sisters Denise and Tanya as well, about the last time any of them had talked to Nicole. I was trying to narrow down the time of her death. “I talked to her shortly before 11:00 that night,” said her mother.

  “How do you know that for sure?” I asked.

  “Because when we got home from Los Angeles, I looked at the clock,” Juditha said. “I had to call her about leaving my glasses at Mezzaluna, but I didn ’t want to call her too lat
e. I remember that it was just a few minutes before 11:00.”

  With that information, and knowing that Allan Park had picked up O.J. at Rockingham a few minutes after 11:00, it seemed to me that it was clear that the murders on Bundy had taken place while O.J. was verifiably at home on Rockingham.

  I kept checking back with Juditha, to make certain that she was certain. Later I was criticized for questioning her and the family so intensely the night before they had to bury their daughter and sister. However, the Browns wanted to answer these questions as much as I needed to ask them. Everybody wanted to find out who had committed these murders.

  Much later, it turned out that Juditha was mistaken. We were confident that the phone records would verify her version, but when we saw them during the preliminary hearing, they indicated that the call had actually been made at about 9:45 P.M., not 10:45. So she was off by an hour. But it would be a while before I would know that. We ’d heard that the district attorney ’s office had some damning evidence: blood, gloves, maybe a hat. That ’s okay, I thought. We have the phone call.

  Nicole ’s funeral was held on Thursday morning at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Brentwood, and O.J. of course attended with his children, the Brown and Simpson families, and his close friends. But my place that day, I had decided, was at my office. One of the first calls I made was to Gerald Uelmen, the retiring dean of the law school at the University of Santa Clara.

  Gerry, although he began his career as a successful prosecutor, first came to public attention in 197, defending Daniel Ells-berg in the Pentagon Papers case, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the law had been invaluable on the Christian Brando case; in fact, he ’d successfully argued a motion to prevent Christian ’s early interview with the police from being used against him in that trial. Gerry has been rightly called a “scholar of the state ’s and nation ’s higher courts,” and I was glad to hear that he, too, was willing to join our team.

  I tracked down Alan Dershowitz in Israel and asked him, and later his brother Nathan, to come in as consultants on motions and possible appellate issues, which they agreed to do. The Dershowitzes, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Alan is a professor at Harvard Law School, had also worked on the Brando case with me, but I had known Alan as a colleague and valued his constitutional knowledge for years before that, often calling him for advice and feedback. Because of his expertise on appeals (which by definition are preceded by a conviction), we nicknamed Alan the “God Forbid!” lawyer. Passionate to a fault about the Constitution, the appellate process, and his advocacy of his clients, Alan has more brains—and, at times, less common sense—than almost anyone I know. Sometimes his passion leads him to take positions that are painful to watch.

  One afternoon a few months into the trial, I got a call from Larry King. “You should come over to the studio tonight, Bob,” he said. “Alan Dershowitz is in town, and he ’s gonna be on the show, arguing about police brutality with the head of the Police Protective League.”

  I immediately tracked Alan down and tried to caution him about the need for discretion, that we should avoid slamming the police while O.J. ’s case was making headlines every day. “Please tone it down,” I asked him. “The lawyers on the team need to be a little more circumspect these days, especially about the L.A.P.D.”

  Alan assured me he understood. That night, however, I winced as he spoke on Larry ’s show of police conspiracies, “testi-lying,” and the way cops are “trained to lie at the police academy.”

  Clearly, Alan Dershowitz is the man you want on your side where appellate and Constitutional issues are in question, and he was a boon to this case. As the case evolved, he would be the one player who was always on good terms with everyone on the defense team. He wasn ’t afraid to stand up to O.J. when he was angry, calm him down when things got rough, and play peacemaker when the occasion warranted. And given the opinions and egos on the defense team on any given day, the occasion warranted quite often.

  In a high-profile case, the job of a defense attorney expands beyond advocate to include manager and, when appropriate, spokesman on behalf of the client. And from June 1, to the morning of June 17, my job certainly did expand. I was managing a growing team of law professionals, and struggling to manage the information as well. The reporters and TV cameras were everywhere, of course, but O.J. was no stranger to publicity, and with many athletes, entertainers, and public figures as clients, I had dealt with publicity before. I knew that I wasn ’t the celebrity here, O.J. was. They couldn ’t get to him, so they came after me and anyone having to do with the case. However, the sheer number of cameras, reporters, and interview requests amazed us all. Wasn ’t anything else happening in the country? And then came Friday, June 17.

  At 8:30 that morning I was on the phone with Michael Nasatir, a noted criminal defense attorney and old college friend, who naturally wanted to know what was going on with the case. What were the police going to do? Was there going to be an arrest?

  “I have very little information at this point,” I told him. “The unofficial word is that nothing ’s going to happen for a while.” At that point, I had to put him on hold and pick up the other line, to hear the voice of L.A.P.D. Detective Tom Lange.

  “We are going to charge O.J. Simpson with two counts of first-degree murder,” Lange said. “We want you to surrender him here by ten o ’clock.”

  I took a deep breath. Here it comes, I thought. “I ’ll contact him immediately and make the arrangements,” I said, “and we ’ll be bringing him in to turn himself in voluntarily.” I hung up and switched back to Nasatir.

  “Well, I can answer your question right now,” I told him. “They ’re charging him, and I ’ve got to go over and get him ready to surrender immediately.” I started to think, This is happening way too fast. What have they got that they should be moving so fast?

  Although they could ’ve filed charges at any time, the information we had been getting from the police department and the district attorney was that the investigation was proceeding, they would probably need more time, and they were prepared to take as much as they needed. I thought, in turn, that this would give us more time—to prepare with O.J. and to conduct our own investigation. Now that time had run out.

  After the funeral the previous day, O.J. had gone into seclusion at Bob Kardashian ’s. I had never been there before, and so I called Bob to tell him what was going on and to get directions, asking that in the meantime he not tell O.J. anything until I got there.

  The directions to Kardashian ’s were complicated. On the face of it, he lives only minutes from my neighborhood, but with the hills and the side streets, it was difficult to find. It ’s a beautifully situated two-story home in the Encino hills, constructed of marble and granite, and when we finally found it, Bob met me at the door, telling me O.J. was still asleep upstairs. He was on some medication, antianxiety or antidepressant, something prescribed by Dr. Faerstein.

  Kardashian ’s house is enormous, perhaps ten thousand square feet, with many rooms and long hallways. He led me to the guest room where O.J. had been staying. When I woke him up, O.J. was groggy and somewhat confused as to why I was there. When he learned the reason, he was stunned. I immediately called Dr. Faerstein and phoned Dr. Huizenga as well. There had been no time to deal with O.J. ’s swollen lymph node, which could have been a precursor to cancer, and it was imperative also that Huizenga take our own set of forensic samples—skin, blood, hair—for our own analysis and comparison. I knew that once O.J. was actually in jail we probably wouldn ’t have the opportunity to do it. I also wanted Faerstein and Huizenga available for O.J. ’s support when he surrendered. In addition, I wanted him reexamined by Baden and Lee, with more photographs. These photographs wouldn ’t be for public consumption; they ’d be offered as defense evidence.

  As everyone converged on Bob Kardashian ’s house, the day began to take on a tone of controlled chaos. Not frantic or hysterical—there was too much to do, and too much at stake, for hys
teria. Rather, it was tense but controlled, like a war room might have been, or a hostage negotiation.

  Kardashian, of course, was there, as was Kardashian ’s girlfriend, Denice Shakarian Halicki, Cathy Randa, Paula Barbieri, and A.C. Cowlings, O.J. ’s old friend. I had known Paula for some time; she had once dated another client of mine. A sweet-natured and quite beautiful young woman, whose emotional support was invaluable to O.J., she was primarily concerned that those around him were doing what was necessary to protect him. I had known A.C. as well, running into him over the years. He had grown up with O.J. in the Portrero Hill Housing projects in San Francisco and played football with him at both USC and Buffalo. He was his oldest, closest, and most loyal friend. It seemed to be the kind of fierce, wordless friendship in which one man knows what the other is about to say or do before he says or does it.

  Los Angeles, for all its sprawl and speed, can often seem like any other town: a series of neighborhoods in which the same people can run into each other for years and in which people ’s lives overlap, in joy and tragedy, just as they do all across the country. On Friday, June 17, many of those lives were colliding under Bob Kardashian ’s roof. And each person thought that what he or she had to do was the most important.

  O.J. made endless phone calls; he needed to put his affairs in order, he wanted to talk to his kids, to his mother. By 9:30, Huizenga and his nurses were taking blood from both of O.J. ’s arms simultaneously. Henry Lee, who needed body samples that would address his investigation, was pulling out O.J. ’s hair and scraping his skin. Michael Baden, in the process of a painstaking pathological examination, was taking pictures of his body. Paula was in and out of the room, talking quietly to O.J., trying to comfort him.