The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Cowlings started screaming and pounding his left hand on the side of the door. “Fuck, no!” he said. He was banging the car so hard that it was rocking in place. “Put away your guns! He’s in the backseat and he’s got a gun to his head.”

  Fearing bloodshed, the officers held their ground and watched Cowlings drive off as the traffic ahead of him cleared. The Bronco began moving again at moderate speed, still heading north. Returning to their black-and-white squad cars, the Orange County officials simply began following the Bronco, and radioed for backup assistance. The chase was on.

  Cowlings turned on his car’s four-way flashers and called 911 from his car phone shortly after the confrontation. “This is A.C.,” he told the dispatcher at 6:46 P.M. “I have O.J. in the car.”

  “Okay, where are you?” the dispatcher asked.

  “Please,” Cowlings said. “I’m coming up the Five freeway … Right now, we all, we’re okay, but you got to tell the police to just back off. He’s still alive. He’s got a gun to his head.”

  “Hold on a moment. Okay, where are you?” the dispatcher responded. “Is everything else okay?”

  “Everything right now is okay, Officer. Everything is okay. He wants me to get him to his mom. He wants me to get him to his house.”

  The dispatcher patched through another voice, who asked Cowlings his name.

  “My name is A.C.,” he bellowed. “You know who I am, goddammit!” Cowlings hung up and continued driving north, in the general direction of Brentwood.

  The police, of course, were not the only people looking for Cowlings that afternoon. As soon as the LAPD announced that O.J. was missing, Bob Tur, the dean of the L.A. media’s helicopter journalists, also began scheming to find O.J. and A.C. Mulling over Simpson’s predicament with his wife, copilot, and video cameraperson, Marika, Bob Tur reached the same conclusion as the doctors who were treating Simpson. Tur guessed that he would try to visit his ex-wife’s grave in Orange County. So he and Marika steered their KCBS chopper to Ascension Cemetery in Lake Forest. Tur noticed that the cops had staked the place out, likewise waiting for Simpson. Then Tur drifted over to the Santa Ana Freeway and caught sight of the Bronco, apparently just after Cowlings’s confrontation with Pool and Sewell. The backup units—there would be a dozen in all—were falling in at a safe distance behind Cowlings and Simpson as they headed north. KCBS began broadcasting live, and the other stations, with their own helicopters, picked up the chase a few moments later.

  It was, to be sure, an unusual moment in journalism, but not quite as rare as many people thought. The freeway chase, broadcast live by cameras mounted in helicopters, is a staple of television news in Los Angeles. Local stations break into programming on a regular basis to follow the most routine chases, even some that emerge out of traffic infractions. Bob Tur had had 128 previous journeys like this one, and local pilots all know the drill; they follow police transmissions on their scramblers. Even though the Bronco was picked up on camera about seventy miles from the house on Rockingham, the helicopter pilots’ intimate knowledge of the local terrain meant that they could, and did, project exactly where the Bronco was going. As a result, for those watching in the Los Angeles area, there was no mystery about Simpson’s plans or his route.

  For the national audience, however, it was another story. One after another, the networks broke into their regular programming to pick up the chase live. (NBC skittered back and forth from the Bronco to the fifth game of the National Basketball Association championship series, between the New York Knicks and Houston Rockets.) The network anchors were far less familiar with the customs of these helicopter chases and completely ignorant of Los Angeles freeway topography. Their narratives, accordingly, reflected only bewilderment at the scene unfolding before them. On ABC, for example, Peter Jennings repeatedly confessed that he did not know where the Bronco was or where it was going. These uninformative nondescriptions somehow made the chase even more hypnotizing for the rest of the nation.

  Simpson’s televised journey into the unknown transformed a tabloid murder into an international phenomenon. Approximately 95 million Americans watched some portion of the chase on television, which exceeded that year’s Super Bowl audience by about 5 million.

  With the helicopters gathering above, the Bronco continued north on the Santa Ana, passing Disneyland in Anaheim, and then headed west on the Artesia Freeway. It was here, in the period just after 7:00 P.M. Pacific Time, that word of the chase spread and television coverage became ubiquitous. Seven news helicopters followed the Bronco’s trail.

  Crowds began forming in Compton, a small, heavily black city just south of Los Angeles. The numbers were small at first, just a few dozen people drawn to the spectacle by what they had seen on television. Cowlings turned off the Artesia, traveling less than a mile south on the Harbor Freeway, and then west on I-405, the San Diego Freeway. These moves confirmed what Cowlings had told the police; though he still had a good thirty miles to go, he was en route to Simpson’s house in Brentwood. The San Diego Freeway took Simpson through Torrance, a community not at all like nearby Compton. Mark Fuhrman, in his distinctive style, once explained the difference. His taped interviews with aspiring screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny contained the following description: “Westwood is gone, the niggers have discovered it.… Torrance is considered the last white middle-class society.” The reaction to the Bronco was different in “the last white middle-class society.” No supporters lined the highway, and O.J. and his helicopter entourage passed through without fanfare. In Inglewood and at the edge of Watts, the largely African-American communities to the north, the spectators returned. They were shouting encouragement at this point. “Go, O.J.!” many screamed. “Save the Juice!”

  The helicopters had to pull back briefly when the Bronco, curving gently north along the contour of the Pacific Ocean, passed by Los Angeles International Airport. The scene on television became even stranger for a moment when the cameras from the choppers showed several jetliners landing beneath them. Their airspace clear, the helicopters then resumed the chase as the Bronco moved into the densely populated West Side. Hundreds of people lined the overpass at Venice Boulevard, another area with a heavy minority population. Several people held up encouraging signs, and many were yelling in support of O.J.

  Knowledgeable television broadcasters had been speculating for some time that Cowlings would leave the San Diego Freeway at the Sunset Boulevard exit, since it was the most direct route to Simpson’s home in Brentwood. Yet notwithstanding the advance notice, the crowd of people at the Sunset exit was modest, perhaps a couple of dozen. That area, of course, is the edge of Bel-Air, perhaps the wealthiest and whitest community in all of Los Angeles. Only a handful of the people there turned out to cheer for O.J.

  Cowlings indeed left I-405 at Sunset, then he dodged traffic for about a mile until he could make a right turn into the privileged, hilly precincts of Brentwood. He knew a shortcut. Instead of making a right onto Rockingham, he turned north off Sunset one street earlier, onto Bristol Avenue. With the helicopters still tracking him among the gated homes, Cowlings then made a left onto Ashford, from which he could turn into O.J.’s driveway. Cowlings, however, almost didn’t make it. There were so many television satellite trucks parked on tiny Ashford that Cowlings had to slow to nearly a full stop to inch his way past them. With dusk fast approaching, Cowlings finally managed to pull into the driveway at 360 North Rockingham. The Bronco’s flashers illuminated the cobblestones in the driveway from which, earlier that week, police had scraped blood samples. It was shortly before 8:00 P.M.

  At about 7:15 P.M., when A.C. and O.J. were still wending their way to Brentwood, Detective Tom Lange had reached Cowlings on the cellular phone in the Bronco. In their conversation, Cowlings confirmed that he was heading to O.J.’s home and that Simpson remained suicidal. Lange did his best to calm the situation. Without telling Cowlings, Lange also arranged for the LAPD’s SWAT team to go to the Rockingham house and prepare to arrest Simpson t
here. A team of about twenty-five SWAT specialists, with their arsenal of stun grenades and night-sighted weaponry, arrived at Rockingham about fifteen minutes before Cowlings did. Several of Simpson’s friends had set up a vigil there, but the officers evicted everyone except Kardashian and O.J.’s twenty-four-year-old son, Jason. True to form, though, the LAPD did invite one outsider to tag along: Roger Sandler, a photographer for Time and Life magazines.

  The SWAT team’s plans nearly went awry immediately. As soon as the Bronco stopped in the driveway, Jason sprang from the front door and began yelling at Cowlings, who seemed to be equally hyped up. The 6-foot-5-inch Cowlings, a defensive lineman taken out of USC by the Buffalo Bills the year after they selected Simpson, stuck his long arm out the driver’s window and pushed Jason away. There was a considerable poignancy to the scene. Jason’s relationship with his father had long vacillated between poor and nonexistent. Cowlings’s pokes made clear the status of the pudgy and unathletic son: He was not wanted in his father’s moment of crisis. A pair of officers gingerly approached Jason and all but dragged him back into the house.

  Jason’s approach unnerved Cowlings. He started screaming that the police had to get back, get away. He even stepped out of the car and caught sight of one of the officers posted on the wall along Ashford. “He’s got a gun!” Cowlings screamed before he reentered the car. “Don’t do anything stupid! Get the police away!”

  The police, of course, were not going to go away. Lange had handed over negotiating duties to the SWAT team’s Pete Weireter, who was posted inside O.J.’s house. Weireter reached O.J. on the cellular phone and attempted to talk him into surrendering.

  Minutes passed, and the world waited to see if O.J. Simpson would blow his brains out on live national TV. Unaccustomed to chases of this duration, the local television stations agreed that they could share one another’s pictures of the scene so each helicopter would have a chance to refuel. Suddenly, there was very little to see: just the Bronco parked in the driveway. Close observers noticed one spectator with the best view of all. Jason had brought Kato, the white Akita that had apparently witnessed the murders, to live at Rockingham. The dog, which Jason would later rename Satchmo, wandered around the Bronco as O.J. and A.C. lingered inside it.

  The silence at the driveway standoff contrasted dramatically with the scene unfolding at the foot of Rockingham, on Sunset Boulevard. A raucous crowd several hundred strong had gathered there, drawn to the drama. Sunset was impassable; even residents of the area couldn’t get home. (Shapiro had asked Michael Baden and Saul Faerstein to meet him at O.J.’s home, but the wall of people prevented either doctor from reaching Rockingham.) Local reporters broadcasting live from Sunset found a stark racial division at the scene. The whites, a minority of the revelers, were curiosity seekers—“looky loos” in the LAPD phrase—who had come simply to experience the bizarre scene. The African-Americans, on the other hand, had mostly come to show solidarity, and their chants and shouts made their feelings clear. “Free O.J.!” they repeated again and again. Interviewed on KCBS, one of them said, “I feel that the black people ought to come together. They’re trying to make us extinct.” A woman then added, “First it was Michael [Jackson] and Mike Tyson and Rodney King. I’m calling for the unification of the black race!”

  Up at the Rockingham house, Weireter eventually obtained Simpson’s promise that he did not intend to hurt anyone except himself. The negotiator told O.J. that his children needed him. Simpson asked to speak with his mother, who had checked into a San Francisco hospital for stress-related symptoms. No problem, said Weireter, just come inside. He seemed to be making progress when the battery in O.J.’s phone went dead. Cowlings went into the house to fetch a replacement. Finally, Simpson agreed to give up.

  “You’ll have to come to us,” said Mike Albanese, chief of the SWAT unit. After a pause, Simpson hesitantly put a foot out the door of the Bronco. It was 8:53 P.M., nearly an hour after Cowlings had arrived at Simpson’s home. In his hands, O.J. held a couple of family pictures, which he had been clutching in the car. He staggered into the foyer and collapsed into the officers’ arms. “I’m sorry, guys,” Simpson kept repeating. “I’m sorry I put you through this.” Albanese allowed Simpson to use the bathroom and gave him a glass of orange juice to drink while he called his mother on the telephone. Deferential even then, the officers finally asked whether Simpson was ready to go. He nodded. The officers put handcuffs on him and led him out the front door—with Roger Sandler behind them, recording the moment for posterity and Time. The police had forbidden the news helicopters from shining their powerful lights down on the scene, so the public never saw Simpson being placed in an unmarked cruiser for the trip downtown.

  With Simpson gone, other members of the SWAT team examined Cowlings’s Bronco. (When he was booked at the police station, Cowlings had $8,750 in cash in his pockets.) In what appeared to be Simpson’s travel bag, they found O.J.’s passport and a plastic bag that contained a fake goatee, a fake mustache, a bottle of makeup adhesive remover, and three receipts from Cinema Secrets Beauty Supply, dated May 27, 1994. The officers also found a fully loaded Smith & Wesson .357 magnum blue steel handgun. It was registered to Lieutenant Earl Paysinger, yet another of Simpson’s friends on the LAPD. About five years earlier, at a time when Paysinger was providing security for O.J., the lieutenant had bought his client the gun.

  An eighteen-car caravan escorted Simpson to his booking at Parker Center. He was then transported to the L.A. county jail for his first night in custody, which he spent on suicide watch. In his book I Want to Tell You, Simpson wrote, “The first week I was in jail I thought about Jesus being crucified.”

  6. HAIRSPLITTING

  Simpson was arraigned in municipal court on the following Monday, June 20. He was physically transformed from any O.J. Simpson the public had seen before. Looking dazed and bewildered, he staggered from the holding pen to the defendant’s table before Judge Patti Jo McKay. He wore a black suit and white shirt, but he was denied a tie, belt, and shoelaces—even, apparently, collar stays—for fear that he might turn them into instruments of suicide. Head cocked to one side, Simpson stared vacantly around the courtroom. Asked his name, he appeared confused, and Shapiro had to prompt his answer. Asked his plea, Simpson muttered quietly, “Not guilty.” The proceeding was over in moments, and in the only real business transacted, Judge McKay scheduled the preliminary hearing for ten days hence, June 30.

  Both sides held press conferences the same day. There was, of course, nothing that required the lawyers on either side to answer reporters’ questions at that time, and much to recommend silence. Shapiro had a client who had acted like a very guilty man the previous Friday. The circumstances seemed to call for a discreet weighing of options. Garcetti’s prosecutors, on the other hand, faced the prospect of convicting a popular celebrity. Their task seemed to call for a serious, untheatrical getting down to business. The worst thing they could do was appear unduly zealous. Yet the adversaries could not resist an attempt to posture and spin. Shapiro fancied himself a master at manipulating the press. Likewise, Garcetti—under the tutelage of his ever-present director of communications, ex-prosecutor and ex–local news anchorwoman Suzanne Childs—had similarly high regard for his own talents in this realm. In fact, throughout the case, many efforts at press management by both sides failed, and that was never more true than after the parties’ first day in court.

  Shapiro faced a bank of television cameras at his Century City office shortly after the arraignment. Looking almost as sorrowful as his client had in court, Shapiro offered Simpson only lukewarm support. Shapiro portrayed himself less as an advocate than as someone who was looking for answers just like everyone else. “At the present time,” he said, “I have not discussed at any great length the facts of the case with [Simpson].” The lawyer was asked about the possibility of raising an insanity defense—that is, one based on the premise that Simpson had committed the murders. “Every possible defense has to be conside
red by any trial lawyer,” Shapiro responded, “and I certainly would reserve all possibilities.” His lawyerly words made Simpson look even more guilty.

  Yet the prosecutors made even more trouble for themselves. Since the murders, Garcetti had turned himself into a virtual interview machine. In addition to his press conferences, he appeared on ABC’s Nightline, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Today, and a special nighttime edition of Good Morning America. Garcetti did use these appearances to focus, in part, on his longstanding and heartfelt devotion to the issue of domestic violence, but the promiscuity of his efforts suggested he was seeking attention for himself as much as for any issue. In an especially surreal touch, Garcetti appeared live on ABC to describe the freeway chase as it was happening. “We’re all hurting right now,” Garcetti told Peter Jennings as the Bronco sped on. “We’re all sharing a very painful experience.” But in truth, over these first fevered days, Garcetti didn’t looked pained at all; rather, he looked like he was exploiting the moment for all it was worth. He even strayed into some dubious ethical territory, predicting that Simpson would ultimately admit to committing the murders. Appearing on yet another national program, This Week with David Brinkley, on Sunday, June 19, Garcetti said, “Well, it’s not going to shock me if we see an O.J. Simpson, sometime down the road—and it could happen very soon, it could happen months from now—say, ‘Okay, I did do it, but I’m not responsible.’ We’ve seen it in Menendez. It’s going to be a likely defense here, I believe, once the evidence is reviewed by the lawyers.”

  Marcia Clark’s June 20 press conference only contributed to a perception that the prosecution camp was celebrating. It was the public’s first real view of Clark, and a revealing one at that. She was a formidable extemporaneous speaker. There was also no mistaking the sincerity of her passions—or the fixity of her beliefs. Like her boss, Clark did not even pay lip service to such legal niceties as the presumption of innocence. She was, if anything, more categorical than Garcetti in her judgments of the accused. Although it had been just two days since the arrest—and only eight days since the murders—Clark announced, “It was premeditated murder. It was done with deliberation and premeditation. That is precisely what he was charged with because that is what we will prove.” Thus, in a single breath, Clark wrote off the possibility of arguing that Simpson had murdered his ex-wife in a fit of jealous passion—a perfectly reasonable theory of the case. Asked about the possibility of accomplices, Clark again spoke with total confidence, even arrogance: “Mr. Simpson is charged alone because he is the sole murderer.” Of course, no responsible prosecutors would have filed charges against Simpson unless they felt he was guilty. But Clark and Garcetti put their case at risk when they let themselves, rather than the evidence, do the talking—and they heedlessly limited their options at trial by rushing into a single theory about how the crime had occurred.