by Kim Goldman
Patti’s so-called boo-boo became so infamous that it even made the ten o’clock news. “Can you believe this?” she said. “Another day at the circus.” She wrote a brief note of apology to Judge Ito, but was never given the courtesy of a reply.
The prosecution continued to paint a portrait of the defendant as a wife beater and a stalker.
Nicole’s sister Denise testified, tearfully recalling how the defendant had humiliated Nicole in public, slammed her around, and berated her.
At one point in her testimony, Denise described the defendant as having a “huge ego.” From what we had seen, that was a massive understatement. Even during this testimony, he sat in court with his chin in the air, rolling his eyes.
“He really believes he’s above it all,” Patti commented. “So he was a big shot in his football days, so what? He thinks he can get away with anything.”
Kim echoed her sentiments: “He is a narcissistic beast; it is so obvious that he only thinks of himself.”
The trial became a daily ritual. Patti and Kim—and whoever else was attending that day—needed to be at the courthouse by 8:00 A.M., so they rose early, showered, packed a lunch, and grabbed a bagel or a banana and coffee. They were in the car and on the road by 6:30. Often I could join them later; often I could not.
It was about an hour’s drive to our designated parking spot at Parker Center Police Headquarters. The parking-lot guard, Ron Zito, was always helpful and friendly and scurried to move the parking cones that reserved our place. D.A. investigators met Patti and Kim there and escorted them to the courthouse. Their policelike jargon was amusing. “We are picking up the package,” they would say into a walkie-talkie, or “We are now delivering the package.” It took us a while to realize that they were there to do more than act as simple escorts; they were there to protect as well. We all shared a fantasy—that just once we would get a chance to see the defendant being led out of the prison van in shackles.
Before the day’s session began, everyone waited upstairs in Patty Jo’s office, where there was always time for friendly and very down-to-earth small talk. Chris Darden always made time for us. The lead detectives, Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter, answered our questions patiently and thoroughly.
Susan Arguela was replaced by Mark Arenas as our Victim-Witness Assistance advocate. All of us warmed to him immediately. Mark was a compact, dark-haired young man of Hispanic descent, honest and clean-cut, who effectively shepherded us through some of the roughest times imaginable. The judicial system in this country is complicated for the initiated. For neophytes like us, it was nearly impossible to navigate. Mark not only saw to our needs, he often anticipated them, and we will be forever grateful to him.
When it was time for the day’s session to begin, Mark accompanied Patti and Kim to the elevator that would take them downstairs to the courtroom. They often arrived in the hallway outside the courtroom at the same time as the defense lawyers, and this inevitably produced a mad dash to see which side could get through the metal detector first. Members of what we now referred to as the “Scheme Team,” especially Johnnie Cochran, would elbow their way past, preparing to strut for the camera. To be fair, Robert Shapiro occasionally stepped back, allowing Patti and Kim to enter first, but those times were infrequent.
Kim preferred sitting in the first row so that she could be closer to Marcia and Chris. Occasionally our family sat in the second row, and when that happened Kim was usually on the end. That placed her closer to the defendant, with the result that she found herself focusing on him instead of the trial. This bothered her. She did not want the defendant to drain any more energy from her than he already had.
We understood the rules against eating and drinking in the courtroom. Judge Ito did not want the camera to record a sea of spectators in picnic mode, but it was also annoying to watch the prosecutors and the defense attorneys drinking coffee, eating pretzels and candy, and sipping Diet Coke while the families of the deceased were not allowed a sip of water or a cough drop.
The arrogance that permeated the courtroom was suffocating. You could smell it, taste it. Every member of the “Scheme Team” was an individual whom we would have instinctively avoided in everyday life. We never saw a shred of humanity or decency. It was a cockfight, plain and simple. And it was calculated and orchestrated.
We decided that Defense Attorney Robert Shapiro needed a third eye. As the camera panned, he and Carl Douglas constantly monitored it, so that they could alert the defendant to stop joking and grinning and tapping out a tempo with his fingers. Lights! Camera! Action! Time to wipe the eye. Time to bite the lower lip.
Often, during prosecution testimony, some of the defense lawyers would position themselves within earshot of the jury. Barry Scheck was a master at this. As Marcia questioned a witness, Scheck made certain that the jury heard him say to an associate, his voice laden with sarcasm, “That’s bullshit,” or “This is total crap.” Simultaneously he shook his head in mock disbelief. Judge Ito let him get away with it. We worried about the effect these theatrics were having on the jury.
Johnnie Cochran was clearly the worst offender. He was the consummate showman, a fake, constantly playing to the crowd. He snickered at the witnesses and mocked the prosecutors. If we could hear his stage whispers—“What bull,” “Oh my God,” and “That’s crap”—we knew that Judge Ito could hear him and that the jury could hear him as well. As with Scheck, we were concerned that by not reprimanding Cochran, the judge was sending the jury a message of tacit agreement and it bothered us tremendously. The prosecution remained professional and did not resort to this kind of trickery, but we constantly wondered how the jury was internalizing these messages.
Judge Ito was never in charge of that courtroom, Cochran was. His movements were choreographed and predictable. Whenever he rose from the defense table, we knew exactly what he was going to do. He pushed his chair in, straightened his shiny, colorful suit jacket, tugged at his African-motif tie (with matching pocket handkerchief), and strutted across the courtroom with the air of a bantam rooster. He glanced at Judge Ito, smiled, nodded his head, and waited for the judge to return the smile. The judge always did. The unspoken conversation said, “Hey, buddy, how ya doing?” Every time we saw this performance, we cringed, knowing instinctively that Judge Ito was sending a message to the jury: This guy is just peachy. Cochran also had a tendency to schmooze with Marcia and Chris, a tactic that drove Kim crazy.
After these nauseating niceties, Cochran stationed himself near the jury, at the podium, and made blatant eye contact with the jurors.
We did not know if Judge Ito was inept or stupid or starstruck, or if he was concerned because the trial was televised around the world, but he coddled the defense and Cochran played against this judicial weakness. Cochran objected. Judge Ito overruled. Five or ten minutes later, Cochran argued the same issue again and the judge called for a sidebar conference. Cochran would walk toward the bench, turn his shoulders, thrust his chin in the air, and again gaze at each and every jury member with what Patti called “that Cheshire cat grin” on his face.
In sum, we began to realize that we were up against the most conniving, slimy, deceitful, unethical, immoral lawyers in the country. Perhaps they will take that as a compliment.
After the long, long days, Patti and Kim faced the drive home, often through rush-hour traffic, listening to the never-ending trial recaps on the car radio. Depending upon what had happened during the day, they would scream and otherwise vent their anger or ride in depressing silence. Often one of them would call me during the drive home and request that a bottle of wine and two straws be waiting for them when they arrived. Then, there was the obligatory stop at the grocery store, and dinner to prepare. If I had not been able to attend court that day, I wanted to know everything that had happened. Our dinner-table conversation would center on a blow-by-blow description of the day’s events.
Patti was acutely aware that Michael and Lauren, although they too were vitally interested in
the trial, had other needs. They were teenagers, one a freshman and one a senior, experiencing the normal, daily triumphs and frustrations. Patti felt that she should be spending more time with them, and guilt began to gnaw at her. Patti and I also knew that we should try to find some private, quiet time for each other, but it was nearly impossible. There were still only twenty-four hours in a day, and we had no energy left to deal with the usual issues of life.
We had always been such an open and talkative family, never wanting things to simmer and go unresolved. Now it seemed that we had all become closemouthed and afraid of stepping on one another’s toes. All our feelings were raw, as if our nerve endings were exposed to a frigid blast of air.
Early in the trial we discovered that Judge Ito had incited jealousy among the pool of reporters by assigning the seat next to us to a man who introduced himself as Dominick Dunne. He explained that for the past eighteen months he had been writing articles about the murder case of Lyle and Eric Menendez, and was working on a fictionalized book about it. Now he had been assigned by both Vanity Fair magazine and CBS news to cover this trial.
Neither Patti nor Kim were familiar with his work, but he seemed like a gentleman.
In one of his pieces for Vanity Fair, he wrote that the case “is like a great trash novel come to life, a mammoth fireworks display of interracial marriage, love, lust, lies, hate, fame, wealth, beauty, obsession, spousal abuse, stalking, brokenhearted children, the bloodiest of bloody knife-slashing homicides, and all the justice money can busy.”
This man who sat beside us was in a state of perpetual motion, always in a hurry. We did not understand his passion until he gave Kim a copy of one of his first books, People Like Us, and it explained a lot. It was the story of his daughter Dominique, an actress best known for her role in Poltergeist, whose boyfriend, John Sweeney, strangled her to death in 1982. After learning that he understood the indescribable depths of our pain, we warmed to him very quickly.
Unlike many of the other reporters covering the case, Dominick was not required to be impartial or neutral. In fact, he was quite outspoken about the way he felt. One morning later in the trial, as the door to our left opened, he wrote us a note: “Here comes the ‘killer.’”
The term worked for us. So did “murderer.”
After establishing the killer’s penchant for beating up his wife, prosecutors began to document the events of June 12, 1994.
Marcia Clark asked Kim to bring in the clothes that Ron had worn to work on the last day of his life. Kim did not understand the reason for the request, but she complied.
The morning of February 7, Kim grabbed a brown grocery bag from a kitchen cupboard and went through Ron’s personal effects, which we had stored, untouched, in our garage. The fact that she was finally able to do something gave her a positive feeling. Thus far, none of us had been able to provide any help whatsoever to the prosecution. But as she looked through the items in the boxes and realized once again that this was all that was left of her brother, an overwhelming melancholy took over. Her hand rested on a pen that was still in the pocket of the vest he had worn to work, and she drifted into a kind of dreamlike state, picturing Ron as she had last seen him, laughing and very much alive. She had to will herself back to the present.
She took the requested items to court. When she handed over the paper bag, she was surprised that Marcia asked her to testify as to where she had found the slacks and shirt in Ron’s apartment. Kim agreed, and theorized that Marcia either wanted to humanize Ron to the jury or perhaps show that he had changed clothes quickly that evening, leaving his work clothes hanging haphazardly on the bathroom door.
Kim knew that all she had to do was tell the truth. She was nervous but happy to contribute, and was especially pleased when she learned that Cochran did not want her to testify. Perhaps he was worried that she would play upon the jury’s sympathies.
We were sure that Kim’s testimony would be little more than a footnote to the trial. Nevertheless, nothing was simple in this case.
First, we heard the testimony of the other witnesses describing the events of the evening of June 12. Karen Crawford, the former Mezzaluna manager, said that she saw Ron leave the restaurant about 9:50 P.M. Reaching into the paper bag, now marked “People’s 30,” Marcia displayed Ron’s slacks and shirt, and asked if they appeared to be what Ron had worn to work that night. The witness broke into tears.
Ron’s friend and co-worker Stewart Tanner testified that he and Ron had had plans to go to a Mexican restaurant in Marina del Rey later that night.
After a break, Kim was called. But as she walked toward the witness stand, a bailiff suddenly held up his hand and commanded, “Hold up.” She realized that she was standing directly behind the defense table. She was only inches away from the defendant. F. Lee Bailey brushed against her as he took his seat. Gross, Kim thought. Where’s the bug spray?
Marcia conducted a simple, straightforward direct examination. Exhibiting the bag, the white shirt, and black pants, she asked Kim, “Can you tell us where you found them?”
Kim answered, “They were draped over his bedroom door, the shirt and the pants … He obviously had taken them off and just swung them over the door.”
“Not on hangers?”
“No. My father and I put them on the hangers.”
Marcia asked, “Did you see any other white dress shirt or black pants like that in the apartment?”
“No, I did not.”
That was all the information that Marcia wanted to get into the record.
Judge Ito turned to the defense table and said, “Mr. Cochran.”
Johnnie Cochran replied, as usual, “Just a second, Your Honor.”
What would come next? Thus far the defense had found some reason to cross-examine every witness. Often the attacks were lengthy, vigorous, and vicious.
Kim hoped that Cochran would find some picayune reason to doubt her simple story. She did not know how she would respond. She might say something unreasonable and counterproductive, but she just wanted to “let him have it.”
Perhaps Cochran sensed this. Perhaps he read the message in Kim’s eyes or body language. After a brief pause, Cochran declared, “No questions of this witness, Your Honor.”
Before leaving the stand, Kim stared directly at the killer. He turned his head away quickly, refusing to return her gaze.
FOURTEEN
Nicole’s sister Tanya had purchased several small angel pins and distributed them to us and members of the prosecution team to wear in remembrance of the victims. Kim wore hers when she testified, but her long hair covered it from the jury’s view.
Now Cochran complained about Marcia wearing hers in open court because it showed obvious sympathy with the victims’ families. “She shouldn’t have it on,” he said. “And she knows she shouldn’t have it on.”
Judge Ito commented, “Jewelry is not my forte, as one who wears plastic watches.” However, he ordered Marcia not to wear the pin anymore. We were livid. Isn’t Marcia supposed to be on the side of the victims? we asked ourselves. We were incensed that the same logic did not apply to Cochran and the rest of the “Scheme Team” sporting their ties, pocket handkerchiefs, and pins with African motifs. Also, members of the defendant’s family had their own pins demonstrating their support of him.
Bill Hodgman finally returned to work. He would remain part of the prosecution team, but he would generally stay out of the courtroom. Bill said to Patti, “The thing that upsets me most is that I feel I have let you down.”
Patti was deeply touched by his sincerity. “Don’t be ridiculous, Bill,” she said, “your health is more important than this case. Just worry about taking care of yourself. We know you’re here for us, working behind the scenes.”
Patti and Kim were still in the D.A.’s office, waiting for court to convene, when Chris Darden entered. We had not met him yet. Patti walked over, reached up, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Hi,” she said, “I’m Patti and this is Kim.” Patt
i told him that we desperately wanted to be involved in whatever way we could.
Chris seemed quite shy. He nodded his head slightly, smiled, mumbled, “Nice to meet you,” and quickly left the room.
Patti and Kim wondered if they had offended him or if there were some other problem. Later we learned why he had appeared a bit standoffish. Kim found out that she made Chris uncomfortable because she looked so much like Ron.
After hearing from a succession of brief witnesses who testified about the “plaintive” wailing of Nicole’s Akita about 10:15 the night of the murders, and the dramatic testimony of Sukru Boztepe, who found the bodies, the prosecution called Officer Robert Riske, the first police officer on the scene.
I was able to come to court with Patti and Kim that day. We were accompanied by Erika Johnson. She had been one of Kim’s closest friends when we lived in Chicago, and Ron had always thought of her as a little sister.
Officer Riske would provide necessary testimony, but we knew that it would be extremely difficult to listen to. What’s more, the prosecution team warned us that several crime scene photographs would be displayed. We had seen two photos during Marcia Clark’s opening statement; they were brutal. We had discussed this at length and came to the conclusion that if Ron had gone through this terrifying experience, the very least we could do was to be there for him now. As we took our seats in the front row of the spectators section, we placed a small box of Kleenex on the railing in front of us, knowing that we would need it. Very shortly one of the bailiffs came over and said, “Excuse me, Judge Ito wants you to take the box of Kleenex off the railing—the camera is picking it up.” Unbelievable, I thought. With all that is happening, Ito is concerned that the courtroom ambience would be ruined by a box of Kleenex? How bizarre. The judge is supposed to be tuned in to the testimony, and he’s looking around the courtroom to make sure that everything is in order. God forbid the TV camera should reveal a Kleenex package in front of us.