“We speak of justice for a defendant, but what about the victim? If the tragic deaths of Eddie Mae Lee and Patronella Luke mean anything, the punishment must be fitting. The death penalty may be the most you can do, but, ladies and gentlemen, in this case it is the least that you can do.…
“Their voices are forever silenced and the love they gave so freely and to so many is now cut off, and now mine is the only voice that is left to speak for them, to cry out for justice on their behalf, and on their behalf and in the name of justice I ask you to impose the only punishment that can possibly fit this crime. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, for both of these defendants, Anthony Oliver and Albert Lewis, to impose the punishment of death.” The jurors did.
For many prosecutors, the Mount Olive case would have marked the culmination of a career. For Clark, however, it simply comprised many of the elements that had run through her cases. Like the Hawkins and Johnson cases, it featured a mountain of scientific evidence that the defense lacked the expertise or wherewithal to challenge; like the Bardo case, it featured victims whom a jury would understand and admire. And like virtually all her cases—indeed, like most murder cases prosecuted in a big-city D.A.’s office—it involved utterly unsympathetic defendants. In all these respects, however, these cases could not have differed more from the one against O.J. Simpson.
Marcia Clark couldn’t wait to charge O.J. Simpson with murder. From the moment Vannatter called her on that Monday morning, she had thought there was enough evidence to arrest Simpson for the murders. Nevertheless, in what she regarded as an abundance of caution, Clark agreed to put off filing the case against Simpson until the initial blood tests were reviewed. But she didn’t want to waste any time.
No one did. Shortly after seven the following morning, June 14, Dennis Fung was hunched over a lab bench in the serology unit of the Scientific Investigation Division of the LAPD. Fung had gathered before him what he regarded as some of the best evidence he had collected the previous day—the gloves and various samples from the trail of blood that appeared to go from Bundy to Rockingham. He also had a blood sample from O.J. Simpson. After the detectives interviewed Simpson the previous afternoon at Parker Center, they had taken him to police nurse Thano Peratis, who had drawn a blood sample from him. Peratis had given the sample to Vannatter, who had then traveled the twenty miles back to Rockingham in the late afternoon and given the test tube to Fung.
At the lab bench, Fung handed Simpson’s blood and the rest of his samples to Collin Yamauchi, the LAPD criminalist who would perform the initial testing. Yamauchi had been tipped off the previous day that he might be involved in the Simpson case, so he had watched the television news that evening with considerable interest. As far as he could tell from initial news reports, Simpson was in Chicago at the time of the murders—he had an “airtight alibi.” So Yamauchi expected his tests would exclude Simpson as a possible source of the blood from the crime scenes.
Yamauchi spent two days, June 14 and 15, testing the samples. (During that time, he also was given reference blood samples from Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, obtained during their autopsies.) Ordinarily, in an initial test like this, Yamauchi might have used conventional ABO typing to categorize the blood samples; these experiments, which have existed for decades, separate blood types into six basic categories. But because of the high stakes involved in the Simpson case—particularly the risk of making a very public mistake—Yamauchi’s boss had asked him to use DNA typing on the blood samples. Yamauchi conducted one of the simplest kind of DNA tests, one known as DQ-alpha. Instead of merely dividing blood types into six categories, DQ-alpha uses finer discrimination, placing individuals into one of twenty-one categories.
The results surprised Yamauchi. The blood drops on the pathway at Bundy matched Simpson’s type—a characteristic shared by only about 7 percent of population. And the blood on the glove found behind Kato’s room at Rockingham was consistent with a mixture of Simpson’s and the two victims’. The prosecutors learned of the results late on Wednesday, June 15.
Thursday was decision day on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building in Los Angeles, where the top county prosecutors have their offices. The corridors on the floor are decorated with completed jigsaw puzzles, and Marcia Clark felt that by the morning of June 16 they had enough pieces of the Simpson puzzle to arrest him. The bloody trail led from the murder scene to his house; the blood on that trail was consistent with Simpson’s; and the glove found behind his house appeared to have the blood of the victims as well as his own blood on it. Further, more refined DNA tests would surely tie the noose tighter around Simpson’s neck. All that—plus O.J.’s history of abusing Nicole—meant that he should be brought in immediately. Clark’s supervisor, David Conn, agreed.
Bill Hodgman thought it over. From his corner office, Hodgman, the director of central operations, supervised most of the prosecutors in the Criminal Courts Building. Cautious, sober, methodical to the point of occasional dullness, Hodgman didn’t want to rush into anything. Yet there was substantial evidence that Simpson was a murderer, and prosecutors arrest murderers—period. Clark and Conn were right. It was time to bring Simpson in.
Late Thursday, Hodgman planned logistics for the next day with Clark and Conn. Vannatter and Lange had already spoken briefly with Simpson’s new lawyer, Robert Shapiro, who had replaced Howard Weitzman. Shapiro had secured the detectives’ promise that they would not arrest Simpson in the event they decided to file murder charges against him. In return, Shapiro had vowed that he would arrange for Simpson to surrender at any time the detectives chose. This was a fairly standard arrangement between prosecutors and defense lawyers in cases where both sides agreed that the defendant posed no risk of flight. While these agreements are routine in white-collar crime cases, they are rarer when violent crimes are involved.
At 8:30 A.M. on Friday, June 17, the prosecutors agreed, Lange would telephone Shapiro at home, inform him of the charges, and demand that Simpson surrender at 11:00 A.M., at Parker Center. At 11:30 A.M. Simpson would be transported the two blocks to the Criminal Courts Building for his arraignment—a legal proceeding that usually takes less than five minutes. At 11:45 A.M. the prosecutors would hold a news conference in their eighteenth-floor conference room. Fifteen minutes later, the police spokesman would answer questions at Parker Center.
Hodgman felt matters were well in hand when he left for home on Thursday night, so he decided to take the next day off to go to a Father’s Day celebration at his children’s preschool. Hodgman thought the events of Friday, June 17, 1994, would be rather routine.
5. “MR. SIMPSON HAS
NOT APPEARED”
At 8:30 A.M. on Friday, as planned, Lange reached Shapiro at home. He and Vannatter had worked nearly all night to prepare the paperwork for the arrest, and Lange was tired and in no mood for a long conversation. He told Shapiro that the police had an arrest warrant charging O.J. Simpson with the double homicide, with “special circumstances,” of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Under California law, “special circumstances” refers to a list of designated aggravating factors that change the legal landscape of a murder case. The special circumstance charged against Simpson was a double homicide. Two implications jumped out immediately at Shapiro. First, the charge made Simpson eligible for the death penalty. (The final decision on whether the prosecution would seek execution would come later.) Second, California law does not allow for bail in special-circumstances cases. So Shapiro knew immediately that O.J. Simpson was going to jail on June 17 and that he would remain there for the duration of his trial—many months at the least.
The conversation between the two men was polite, and each heard what he wanted to hear. Lange did not view the call as an invitation to negotiate. He knew that it should take less than an hour for Simpson to travel from his home in Brentwood to Parker Center. He told Shapiro that Simpson had two and a half hours to surrender—that is, until 11:00 A.M. Shapiro saw Lange’s comments a
s more of a request than a command. The lawyer mentioned some concerns about his client’s mental state—he might be suicidal—but said that he would do his best to bring Simpson in on time. The two men agreed to stay in touch as the day progressed.
When he received the call from Lange, Robert Shapiro had been O.J. Simpson’s lawyer for less than seventy-two hours. He had been hired in a way that revealed much about his client, himself, and the case as a whole. It was Howard Weitzman, of course, who had represented Simpson when he returned from Chicago and went on to be interviewed by the police on Monday, June 13. Word that Simpson had given a statement to the police leaked out that evening, and the news prompted a strong reaction in wealthy television executive Roger King, who was monitoring events from New Jersey. King, the chairman of King World, which syndicates Oprah and Wheel of Fortune, among other television shows, was a sometime resident of Los Angeles and knew Simpson from playing the occasional round of golf with him. Appalled that Weitzman had allowed Simpson to be questioned by the police, King called O.J. and told him so—and recommended that Simpson find a new lawyer. “I’ll get you Bob Shapiro,” King promised. He then tracked Shapiro down to where he was having dinner, at the House of Blues, a popular Hollywood nightspot, and asked him to take the case. Shapiro agreed. He was hired by Simpson on Tuesday and entered the case officially on Wednesday.
What makes this transaction curious is that none of the participants really knew one another. O.J. and Roger King saw each other rarely, but King was the kind of man Simpson admired. O.J. believed King when he said that Weitzman had let him down. (This also allowed Simpson to blame someone else for his own decision to speak to the police.) More remarkably, King had never even spoken to Shapiro before he reached him at the House of Blues. The entrepreneur couldn’t name a single client the lawyer had represented, but he had some general sense of Shapiro as a skilled defender of celebrities. For his part, Shapiro did not hesitate before saying he wanted the case. And to Simpson, as always, image was everything: Robert Shapiro became his lawyer because he fit the image of a smart lawyer in the eyes of a fellow who fit O.J.’s image of a smart guy. (The Shapiro-for-Weitzman exchange also provided grist for these two lawyers’ longstanding feud, one that was based largely, it seems, on their similarity to one another.) Shapiro took over the case on Tuesday, June 14, and the following morning Weitzman issued a public statement saying that he had resigned from the case because of his friendship with O.J. and his obligations to other clients. Shapiro delighted in telling friends that Weitzman’s statement was a lie and that he had in fact been fired. The truth probably lies somewhere between the two versions—along the lines of a job departure once described by Casey Stengel: “We call it discharged because there is no question I had to leave.”
Shapiro had a very busy first week, organizing his initial efforts with Simpson’s medical and legal well-being in mind. Simpson told Shapiro that he was innocent, but lawyers are used to hearing this sort of thing from clients, especially at the beginning of a case. The first thing Shapiro did was arrange for Simpson to take a polygraph examination, which is something many criminal defense lawyers do. These tests are generally inadmissible in court, but lawyers often use them to force their clients to come clean, face reality, and make the best deal they can. Shapiro called his friend F. Lee Bailey, who is a national authority on polygraphs, for a recommendation on which expert to use. Bailey suggested Edward Gelb, who ran a firm called Intercept out of a set of nondescript offices on Wilshire Boulevard. (Bailey knew Gelb because they had hosted a short-lived television series together in 1983. Called Lie Detector, the program showcased Gelb and Bailey examining UFO sighters and other fringe figures to determine whether they were telling the truth.)
Gelb was out of town, so the test was administered by his top deputy, Dennis Nellany. Simpson took what is known as a “zone of comparison” polygraph examination, which measured three of his physiological responses to questions—heart rate, breathing, and the electrical sensitivity of his skin. Lie detectors do not, strictly speaking, detect lies. Rather, the examiner interprets the subject’s responses on a sliding scale in which negative numbers indicated deception and positive numbers, truthfulness. According to the test Nellany administered, any score higher than plus-6 meant that Simpson was telling the truth; any number lower than minus-6 meant he was lying. A score between plus-6 and minus-6 would be ambiguous.
Simpson scored a minus-24—total failure. The score was so catastrophic that some people around Simpson tried to attribute it to his distressed emotional state at the time of the examination. Bailey in particular tried to say that Simpson was so upset that the result should not be seen as dispositive. Nellany, however, regarded the polygraph as conclusive evidence of Simpson’s guilt in the murders, and he reported that view to Shapiro.
Shapiro weighed his options—which included an insanity defense. To that end, he called in another expert on Wednesday, June 15, one who could serve two purposes. As a respected psychiatrist with a private practice in Beverly Hills, Saul Faerstein could examine O.J. and prescribe medication. But Faerstein also had a national reputation as an expert witness in the field of forensic psychiatry. Shapiro thus viewed him as a hedge in case Simpson wanted to raise a diminished-capacity defense to the murders.
Faerstein went to the house on Rockingham and joined Simpson on the couch in the living room. Simpson talked and talked—about himself. The press was out to get him now; his image would never recover; it was all so unfair. What struck Faerstein most were the gaps in Simpson’s narrative—there was no sadness for the loss of the mother of his children, no concern for his children’s future, no empathy for Nicole. Simpson worried only about himself. His reactions were inconsistent with what Faerstein would expect from an unjustly accused man, yet Simpson was obviously not insane in any legal sense. So, as with Nellany’s examination, Faerstein’s report offered Shapiro no help in constructing a defense. Faerstein returned to see Simpson many times over the next two months to continue his course of psychiatric treatment. Like Shapiro, Faerstein was convinced early on of Simpson’s guilt in the murders.
On that same Wednesday, June 15, which was also the day of the viewing of Nicole’s body at a funeral home, Shapiro asked an internist, Robert Huizenga, to give O.J. a detailed physical examination. Shapiro wanted Huizenga to check on Simpson’s medical condition, but he also asked the doctor to document with photographs any bruises or abrasions on Simpson’s body at that point, which was less than three days after the killings; his lack of any major injuries would become a central part of his defense at trial. Also in those first two days on the job, Shapiro had recruited two of the nation’s leading forensic experts to Simpson’s team—Henry Lee, the chief police scientist for the state of Connecticut, and Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner of New York City. By Thursday, June 16, both Lee and Baden had arrived in Los Angeles. In spite of all the activity, Shapiro found the time to make a characteristic gesture. On the night of June 16, he took Baden to a glamorous Hollywood screening of the Jack Nicholson movie Wolf, which was opening the next day.
Detective Lange’s call on Friday morning, June 17, presented Shapiro with a dilemma. What he could have done—indeed, should have done—was simple: make a direct effort to locate Simpson and then take him in to Parker Center, and thereby make the 11:00 A.M. deadline with ease. But the situation was more complicated than Lange knew when he made the call, for Simpson was not at home at Brentwood, as the police investigating his case had assumed. On Thursday, June 16, following Nicole’s funeral earlier in the day, Simpson had participated in an elaborate ruse to convince the vast media encampment outside his home that he had in fact returned to Rockingham. The person who was actually hustled into the property with a jacket over his head was his old friend Al “A.C.” Cowlings. Simpson had been taken to his friend Robert Kardashian’s home in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley. Remarkably, this operation was engineered by an off-duty LAPD sergeant, Dennis Sebenick, who was moon
lighting as a security guard for the murder suspect. Sebenick did not, of course, apprise his colleagues on the force of the whereabouts of their prey. This kind of solicitude typified Simpson’s relationship with the LAPD.
Shapiro, therefore, had to retrieve Simpson from Encino, which was slightly farther from downtown than Brentwood. In his years of dealing with celebrity clients, Shapiro had learned the value of deference. He did not, for example, telephone ahead to Kardashian’s place and tell O.J. to get ready to leave. Defending his actions later, Shapiro said that he had acted this gingerly because he feared Simpson might harm himself if he were dealt with more harshly. Shapiro also knew that Simpson’s friends had just orchestrated Howard Weitzman’s departure in part because they thought he had been insufficiently zealous in protecting Simpson’s interests. Shapiro did not want to meet the same fate. If the choice was between offending the LAPD or his client, Shapiro would take his chances with the cops. While still at home, Shapiro called Faerstein, the psychiatrist, and asked him to meet him at Kardashian’s house; together they would break the news to O.J.
At 9:30 A.M., Shapiro arrived at Kardashian’s vast white villa, a garish affair resembling a Teheran bordello, all marble and mirrors. Simpson, who had been sedated, was still in the first-floor bedroom he was using during his stay. His girlfriend Paula Barbieri was with him; she had been at his side for much of the week. (After Simpson’s criminal trial, in a deposition in the victims’ civil case against O.J., Barbieri testified that she had left a telephone message breaking off her relationship with Simpson on the morning of the murders, June 12. But her actions the following week seem inconsistent with the notion that she was trying to end their affair.)
The Run of His Life Page 10