The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Today, at some remove from the controversy, it is not clear that Time should have been judged so harshly. (It is also interesting to ponder whether anyone would even have commented on Time’s cover had Newsweek not used an unaltered version of the same mug shot on its cover that week.) Magazines have used doctored photographs for years; as long as they are properly labeled (as Time’s was) they have prompted little, if any, debate. Journalists make implicitly political choices every time they run a photograph—should President Clinton be smiling or frowning this week?—and these decisions generally pass unnoticed. The cry of racism about the Time cover is especially perplexing. Were Chavis et al. suggesting that darker-skinned blacks are more threatening, more evil, than their lighter-skinned brethren? If so, that seems far more racist than anything conveyed by the editors at Time. In any event, Time’s transgression does seem to have prompted a disproportionate response. Still, the magazine did what the mainstream press always does when faced with the charge of racism: It denied any malign intent, offered a tepid justification for its actions, and then fell on its sword. “It should be said (I wish it went without saying) that no racial implication was intended by Time or by the artist,” Gaines wrote in a full-page apologia the following week.

  The fallout from both the Time cover and the Sentinel’s coverage lasted the entire duration of the case. Regardless of Simpson’s feelings for the black community—on CNN, Jesse Jackson had referred to him as “a kind of de-ethnicized Negro”—the first week saw his case immediately move to the top of the civil rights movement’s agenda. For Dennis Schatzman and the black press generally, Simpson’s cause became their own. For the mainstream press, fearful of enduring a Time-like ordeal, the priority became how to avoid giving offense to that black leadership. No one recognized these developments faster, or exploited them more, than O.J. Simpson’s lawyers.

  Marcia Clark received Vannatter’s call on the morning of June 13, and she learned a great deal about O.J. Simpson over the course of that day. Vannatter asked her to come out to the Rockingham house and monitor the situation while detectives executed the search warrant. The magnitude of the case dawned on Clark gradually. She had helped plan a bridal shower in honor of her closest friend, fellow deputy district attorney Lynn Reed Baragona, for lunch on that Monday. Clark called at the last moment to say she couldn’t make it.

  “How can you cancel?” Baragona asked. “You’re throwing this thing.”

  “I have to do this search warrant,” Clark answered. “It could end up being kind of big. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  It didn’t take long for Clark to size up the situation to her satisfaction. The following morning, back in her office downtown, a friend stopped Clark and asked whether she thought O.J. had committed the murders.

  Of course, Clark snapped. She was confident the tests on the blood at Bundy and at his home would come back to implicate Simpson. “He’s evil,” Clark said. “He beat his wife. He’s evil.”

  It was a characteristic reaction—atypical only in that Clark did not describe Simpson as “fuckin’ evil.” Quick-witted and quick to judge, cheerfully and relentlessly profane, Clark was the paradigmatic “lifer”—the term prosecutors use to describe those among them who cannot conceive of switching sides to criminal defense work. She saw her cases—and the Simpson case in particular—as struggles between good and evil, Us versus Them. O.J. had killed Ron and Nicole; that was all that mattered to her. But for better or worse, trials, especially this trial, are about something more than whodunnit. The Simpson case blurred the lines between the good guys and the bad in a way that Clark had never before encountered.

  Marcia Clark belonged to the smallest, and most intense, subspecies of lifers, the trial addicts. She learned this about herself the hard way. By the spring of 1993, when she was almost forty, Clark had been trying cases in the D.A.’s office for twelve years, the last four of them in the special-trials unit, which handled the county’s most complex and sensitive investigations. Around the time she was prosecuting two men charged with murdering two parishioners during a church service in South Central Los Angeles, Gil Garcetti, the district attorney, felt that Clark had earned a promotion. She became a supervisor, overseeing the bulk of the office’s career-criminal cases and advising the deputy district attorneys who would actually be appearing in court. Her salary, which had been around ninety thousand dollars a year, broke into the six-figure bracket, with the prospect of more increases to come. Relieved of the pressure and stress of trying cases, Clark moved into management.

  The change was a disaster. This is not altogether uncommon, since many good trial lawyers make weak administrators. But most prosecutors are so eager to escape trial work (and to get a raise) that they hang on to their new jobs and, thanks to the civil-service system, take root in them. Trials wear lawyers out—especially prosecutors, who must orchestrate what happens in a trial—everything from making sure the witnesses show up in the correct order to putting the exhibit stickers on the evidence. The logistical burdens are enormous. The hours are long. Witnesses are usually uncooperative or, almost as often, criminals themselves. The police, ostensibly prosecutors’ allies, may be lazy or incompetent or both—or worse. And prosecutors bear the burden of knowing that it is essentially up to them whether a murderer (or other criminal) walks out the door when it’s all over. Small wonder, then, that many supervisors content themselves with war stories, second guesses, and long lunches.

  What happened to Marcia Clark’s career as an administrator was unusual. “I hated it,” Clark said not long after she took on the Simpson case. “I begged them to let me back in the courtroom. I learned that all I wanted to do was try cases.” As it happened, she had returned to the special-trials unit just a few weeks before the murders on Bundy Drive. So when Vannatter called, Marcia Clark had some time on her hands.

  Marcia Clark graduated from Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles in 1979, then worked briefly as an apprentice criminal defense attorney in a top-flight firm. At first her cases involved mostly drugs—sale and possession—and as a child of her era, she had few qualms about defending participants in these “victimless,” if illegal, transactions. But early in her tenure, she also drew the assignment of helping to defend James “Doc” Holiday, a leader of the notorious Black Guerrilla Family. The case against Holiday included a charge of attempted murder. According to Clark, “Doc had lured this woman called Vicki D into a car, and then stabbed her about a million times and left her for dead—just a horrible, vicious crime. That’s what happened, but the fact was that the government’s proof was very thin, and I was assigned to draft the brief asking the judge to dismiss the case. I knew that it was a winner of a motion, and one night I was working on it and I just choked. I said to my husband, ‘I can’t do this kind of work.’ My husband said, ‘Pick up your pen. We have to pay the rent,’ and, of course, I did. But when I heard that we really did win the motion, I just said, ‘Oh my God!’ My boss at the firm said I should probably join the D.A.’s office. When I went for my interview with John Van de Kamp, who was the D.A. at the time, I basically threw myself at his feet. I said to him, ‘You’re going to decide whether I practice law. I can’t do criminal defense, won’t do civil. This is the only job I want.’ ”

  Clark joined the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office in 1981, and she took to the work immediately. “Marcia and I were hired around the same time, and we were the only two deputy district attorneys in the Culver City courthouse for a year,” said her friend Diane Vezzani. “From the start, she just loved trying cases. I never saw anyone with more energy. And it wasn’t just in court. She’d read the advance sheets”—reports of appellate-court decisions—“and boil them down to an index-card file. She must have twenty-five boxes of cards now. I used to tease her that she’d have a nervous breakdown if she didn’t get a chance to read the advance sheets.” Clark’s dedication quickly won the attention of her superiors. The turning point in her career came when she foun
d herself under the wing of one of the office’s legendary prosecutors.

  By the time of the Simpson trial, Harvey Giss, who has the angular face of a film-noir detective, spoke with a valedictory air about his years as a top homicide prosecutor in Los Angeles. Like many lawyers who try murder cases, he tired of the strain and shifted to a lower-stress existence, in his case fighting auto insurance fraud. Clark was assigned to work with Giss in 1985, just four years after she joined the D.A.’s office. The defendant in the case that brought them together was, like O.J. Simpson, a widely admired figure in Los Angeles. According to Giss, “James Hawkins was a big local hero here for a while. He worked at his father’s grocery store, in Watts, and one day in 1983 he shot a gang member who was accosting passersby. After the shooting, the gang firebombed the store, and everyone, including the mayor, praised Hawkins for standing up to the gangs.” But Giss subsequently obtained evidence that Hawkins had actually killed the gang member not by accident, as Hawkins claimed, but intentionally, about half an hour after the attack on the passersby. What was more, Giss charged Hawkins in an unrelated double murder. “I knew I needed some help in the double murder,” Giss said. He got Marcia Clark. “We were like two peas in a pod,” he went on. “As I got to know her, I could see she was the real deal. I told her I didn’t believe in working with anyone who wasn’t my equal, so I told her we were going to try it halfsie-halfsie.”

  Giss assigned Clark the toughest part of the case—the ballistics evidence. Ironically, the prosecution’s biggest break came after Hawkins escaped from jail just before jury selection. The police tracked him down and then engaged him in a huge shoot-out, where 180 rounds of ammunition were fired. Police thought one of the guns seized from Hawkins after the shoot-out was the same one he had used in the double murder. As ballistics experts examined the gun, however, they discovered that its barrel had been scraped with an instrument, perhaps a file. Knowing that the grooves on gun barrels are unique, like fingerprints, Hawkins had evidently tried to alter them before he used the gun again. But Clark, by presenting meticulously prepared expert testimony to the jury, was able to make a strong case that the murder weapon in the double homicide and the altered gun seized from Hawkins after the shoot-out were one and the same.

  According to Barry Levin, who represented Hawkins, “The trial was like a war. There were six months of jury selection, and the actual trial in front of the jury lasted thirteen months. Marcia was very junior at the time, so what’s unusual about her is that she cut her teeth on murder cases. Harvey was the most tenacious prosecutor in the L.A. D.A.’s office. You could just see Marcia grow in the course of the case. Not only was she competent, but she was unflappable. It was a death-penalty case, and after my client was convicted, Harvey had Marcia get up and do one of the summations in the penalty phase. In truth, I wasn’t too worried, because she had been so low-key up to that point, but then she made the most impassioned plea about why my client should die. As it turned out, the jury gave him life instead. But you could see Harvey’s influence on Marcia. She was a tiger.”

  Giss’s influence was great, and traces of it linger in Clark’s style. The thorough preparation of both testimony and scientific evidence; the aggressive response to defense attacks; the passion and the fire for the jury—all became Clark’s hallmarks, as they were Giss’s. But differences between the two also stand out. For Giss, trials were basically about defendants; for Clark, they were, for the most part, about victims. This was apparent in Clark’s most celebrated trial before the Simpson case.

  In 1989, Rebecca Schaeffer was an up-and-coming twenty-one-year-old actress who had starred in the television comedy My Sister Sam. On July 18 of that year, Robert John Bardo, an obsessive fan of Schaeffer’s who, unbeknownst to her, had been stalking her for two years, rang the doorbell of her home. When Schaeffer opened the door, Bardo shot her dead with a .357 magnum.

  “Rebecca was killed Tuesday morning, July 18, 1989, and my husband and I flew down that afternoon,” Danna Schaeffer, Rebecca’s mother, said later. “The next morning, we went into Wilshire Homicide, and she was sitting there in a pink suit looking very beautiful and serious, and she said, ‘My name is Marcia Clark and I’m going to be your prosecutor.’ ” Bardo was caught within a day of the murder, and he immediately confessed to the shooting. The major issue in the case—a nonjury trial before Judge Dino Fulgoni—was whether Bardo was mentally fit to commit the crime of first-degree murder. According to Danna Schaeffer, “There were a million hearings and continuances, and many times afterward Marcia called us and reported to us what was going on.” Finally, as the trial was set to begin, in September 1991, the victim’s mother received a letter from Marcia Clark.

  It was three pages long, handwritten on a yellow pad—and a very unusual thing for a prosecutor to do. “Even as I’m writing this I’m crying again—as I feared, once you start letting yourself feel, it’s an endless thing,” Clark wrote. “If all goes well the miserable, slimy piece of cow dung will be convicted of everything.… I will do everything in my power to see that her loss is avenged—I cannot promise justice because to me justice would mean Rebecca is alive and her murderer is dead.” Clark concluded, “The one thing I can promise you is that when this is all over I will honestly be able to tell you that I gave it my all, my very best, without reservation. Beyond that you have my love and empathy forever.”

  The trial, one of the first to be covered by Court TV, featured extensive psychiatric testimony from experts on both sides. Judge Fulgoni convicted Bardo of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Clark’s trademark became her facility with complex scientific evidence, whether psychiatric or, later, DNA. In 1992, for example, she won the conviction of a man named Christopher Johnson in a “missing body” murder case (the one on which she had worked with Detective Vannatter). Johnson had been arrested driving a car in which investigators found a single drop of blood under the rear passenger seat. In a more ambitious use of DNA technology than the prosecution would ever attempt in the Simpson case, Clark used evidence from members of the family of the man presumed to be Johnson’s victim to establish that the blood in the car belonged to the missing man.

  The case that best summed up Clark’s career before Simpson was the double homicide at the Mount Olive Church of God in Christ. Even in a city that had grown increasingly inured to violence, the facts of that case stood out as particularly appalling. On the evening of Friday, July 21, 1989, a man wearing a mask and carrying a twelve-gauge shotgun walked into the Mount Olive Church. In the chaos set off by his arrival, a seventy-six-year-old woman named Eddie Mae Lee panicked and tried to run to the ladies’ room to hide. The man pumped the shotgun and fired, killing her. Then, as he appeared to be searching the pews for someone, he stopped when he saw a man named Peter Luke, and shot him, too. (Luke survived.) Before the gunman left the church, he noticed Patronella Luke, Peter’s wife, who was sitting toward the back of the church, and he shot her dead.

  Though none of the eyewitnesses could identify the masked gunman, police quickly fixed on a pair of suspects. One was Albert Lewis. After his wife, Cynthia, left him, he began stalking her, sometimes in the company of his half-brother, Anthony Oliver, the other suspect. On July 21, Cynthia was supposed to be playing the organ at Mount Olive, but—unbeknownst to Lewis and Oliver—she had taken the night off. Peter and Patronella Luke were Cynthia Lewis’s cousins. “We set up a surveillance on Lewis’s house, and we saw Lewis and Oliver taking a barrel of a shotgun out,” Richard Aldahl, the detective in charge of the case, said later. “After that, we got a search warrant and found the rest of the gun and shotgun shells that matched those at the crime scene. At that point, we were certain we had our guys.” One problem remained, however. “Albert Lewis had an alibi,” said Aldahl. “He said he was with his girlfriend, Jeanette Hudson, and she stuck with him on this. We had a real issue in dealing with the alibi.”

  Clark assigned herself the task of refuting
the alibi. According to Aldahl, “It turns out Jeanette had been living in fear of Albert for ten or fifteen years. She was really a battered woman. Marcia started spending a lot of time with Jeanette, talking with her, learning about her situation. Some prosecutors want you to interview the witnesses yourself and then just ignore them until they’re brought in for testimony at the trial. Marcia was different. She wants to meet everyone in person, get to know everyone. When she puts a witness on the stand, she wants to know there will be no surprises.” The work with Jeanette Hudson paid off, and in more ways than one. “After Marcia started talking to her, she came around and admitted not only that the alibi was a lie but also that she had seen the two guys with the guns right after the murders,” Aldahl said. “It broke the case open.” But Clark’s efforts did not stop with recruiting a witness. “Marcia got Jeanette into a program for battered women, and Jeanette got her life back together as a result.”

  The trial, which took place in 1993 in the courtroom next door to the one where O.J. Simpson would be tried, was a tour de force for Clark. “These criminals violated the one safe haven we have in this troubled world, the place where we go to enrich and glorify what is best in us, where we reaffirm our faith in all that is good and righteous, where we renew our souls and seek solace in the spiritual from a troubled world, a house of God,” Clark told the jury in her summation in the penalty phase of the trial, on March 15, 1993. “This was no liquor-store robbery. This was no bank-robbery murder. This was murder in a church.…