The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  I am in a moral dilemma that a 20-year-old receptionist should not be in. I can only identify the juror as female, once an alternate, husband became ill, about 40 years old, a white woman. She did not want to be on the jury, but her husband is the one driving this. She is very apprehensive and is worried this will become public. The husband wants her to stay on, but she wants off.

  My boss has met with the husband at the Intercontinental Hotel, which I assume is where the jury is staying. I know you are a very fair and decent man and judge. So I know and have faith that you will use this information in a way that you know best.…

  The letter, which was postmarked Los Angeles, was signed “Anonymous.” There was no mystery to anyone about the subject of the letter. Florio-Bunten was thirty-eight years old, and in late April she had asked to be removed from the jury because her husband was suffering from pneumonia. (At that time Ito talked her into remaining on the case.) Still, attempting to be thorough, Ito decided to undertake the by now familiar ritual of bringing the jurors into chambers one by one and asking them about the letter. Were they writing books? Had they spoken to a literary agent? All the jurors—including Florio-Bunten—said no.

  Just in passing, in the course of these interviews in his chambers on May 25, Ito told each juror not to discuss the subject of his questions with the jurors who had yet to be interviewed. But Yolanda Crawford, a twenty-five-year-old black woman, told Ito that she thought two jurors had violated that instruction. She said that when Farron Chavarria, a twenty-nine-year-old Hispanic woman, returned to the jury room from Ito’s office, she “wrote on a newspaper” and called Florio-Bunten over to read the note. “Just looked like they were trying, you know, to be secretive about it,” Crawford said.

  Ito sent his clerk into the jury room to collect all the newspapers, and sure enough, she found a copy of The Wall Street Journal on which was scribbled, “They asked me about a juror writing a book.” Ito brought Chavarria back into his chambers. At first she denied writing a note, but when the judge confronted her with it, she broke down in tears and confessed that she had written it to Florio-Bunten. Jury service had obviously been a rough ordeal for Chavarria. Her skin had become blotchy and irritated, apparently because of the stress, and she had complained to Ito that Willie Cravin had stared at her and intimidated her several times. She read one self-help book after another—The Dance of Intimacy, then The Dance of Anger, and any number of others. Chavarria told Ito that she wrote the note to Florio-Bunten to remind her about an incident where another juror’s girlfriend had made a remark about writing a book. Ito then called Florio-Bunten into his chambers.

  “Did another juror before you came in here write you a note about our discussions in here?”

  “No,” said Florio-Bunten.

  The judge then showed her the note. “Was that note shown to you, scribbled out by another juror?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m positive.”

  “Any reason why two other jurors would say that note was shown to you?” Ito asked.

  “I have no idea,” Florio-Bunten replied.

  Everyone in the judge’s chambers—Ito, the defense lawyers, even Marcia Clark—thought Florio-Bunten was lying about seeing the note. Ito brought Florio-Bunten back another time and confronted her with the anonymous letter about the book. Florio-Bunten was indignant. “This is ridiculous,” she said. “I am here for one purpose, to be a juror.” Plainly disgusted at the entire line of questioning, Florio-Bunten finally said, “I mean, you know, Jesus. I want out. Just let me go. This is absolutely ridiculous.” With Marcia Clark’s consent, Ito did just that, dismissing Florio-Bunten for lying about the note from Chavarria, not specifically for the underlying accusations in the anonymous letter. Only four alternates remained.

  The origin of the anonymous letter to Ito about Florio-Bunten remained (and remains) a considerable mystery. The author had a good deal of accurate inside knowledge, including Florio-Bunten’s approximate age, her husband’s medical condition, and the name of the jurors’ hotel. Yet Florio-Bunten and her husband continued to deny that they had ever discussed a book project with anyone, and she ultimately did not write a book. A survey of all Los Angeles—based book agents by 60 Minutes in March 1996 found no one who matched the self-description offered in the letter—which further corroborates Florio-Bunten’s claim that no such conversations took place. Members of the defense team, who had a motive to want Florio-Bunten removed, have categorically denied any role in the letter, and no evidence has surfaced tying them to it. In the end it was probably either a freelance effort by an insider to help Simpson’s cause, or part of a personal vendetta against Florio-Bunten.

  In keeping with the obsessive media interest in the case, Florio-Bunten became a paid consultant to NBC’s Today show in the late stages of the trial, analyzing developments in the trial from her unique status as a former juror. As it turned out, the judge’s anonymous correspondent did O.J. Simpson a great favor, for Florio-Bunten said later that she definitely would have voted to convict him.

  Both in the courtroom and in what passed for their private lives, several jurors showed signs of depression. One juror, Tracy Kennedy, tried to kill himself after he was dismissed, and another, Tracy Hampton, was rushed to the hospital with an apparent anxiety attack on the day after she left the jury. The jurors were further shaken when they learned that on July 19, one of the deputies who guarded them in the courtroom, Antranik Geuvjehizian, was murdered while trying to stop a burglary at a neighbor’s house. The isolation from friends and family, the endless waits as Ito listened to the lawyers haggle, and the mind-numbing testimony about arcane scientific matters all gave the jurors more than adequate reason to be miserable. Watching one after another of their colleagues summoned to Ito’s chambers and then dismissed—without being allowed so much as a goodbye to their fellow jurors or an explanation for the dismissal from the judge—added to the strain. Denied access to alcohol by the sheriffs, several jurors took solace in food. Family members, struggling to find some common ground with their increasingly estranged loved ones, began bringing gargantuan feasts to the hotel during visits—mostly cookies, cakes, and desserts of every description. The remaining jurors gained weight at a fantastic pace, which only compounded their despair.

  Though Ito did not dismiss Farron Chavarria immediately after he caught her passing the note to Florio-Bunten, her days on the jury were numbered. On June 5, Ito decided to let her go because she had violated his order in tipping off her friend about the judge’s inquiry. Ito’s other action on that day came as more of a surprise. He dismissed Willie Cravin because “the Court has received numerous reports of personal conflict between [him] and other jurors,” including Cravin’s “deliberate and offensive physical contact and the threat of physical contact.” Yet Ito provided a less than overwhelming list of Cravin’s misdeeds—principally, a couple of purported shoves in the elevator and a pair of complaints from jurors that Cravin had stared at them.

  In short, it appears that the judge, too, was monitoring the racial makeup of the jury. Upon reflection, Ito may have recognized that he had dismissed Florio-Bunten too precipitously, but having done so, he realized he had to dismiss Chavarria for essentially the same offense. That meant he was dropping consecutively two non-African-Americans. It is difficult not to conclude that Ito then pulled Cravin—a black man—as a sop to the prosecution. (Lawyers on both sides saw it this way.) The trial had become so swept up in race that, regrettably, the judge seemed also to be party to the bean-counting. The unexpected dismissal of Cravin sent Marcia Clark literally skipping with joy out of the courtroom.

  The fourteen survivors—twelve jurors and now just two alternates—did not get much of a reward. After Chavarria and Cravin were ousted, they heard from Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, the Los Angeles county coroner. He had not actually examined the two victims, but the pathologist who did, Irwin Golden, had made so many errors and testified so poorl
y at the preliminary hearing that the prosecution decided to call his boss instead. Dr. Lakshmanan, as he was addressed, couldn’t do much more than guess how the murders had occurred, but he did so in dramatic fashion.

  Lakshmanan said that he believed a single killer with a single knife could have inflicted all the wounds on both victims. In his scenario, Nicole was first knocked out by a blow to the back of the head. The killer then leaned over her unconscious body, pulled her hair back, and slit her throat. Prosecutor Brian Kelberg had Lakshmanan demonstrate the movement by standing behind Kelberg and using a ruler to simulate a knife. Jurors and spectators alike recoiled at the grisly spectacle.

  This method of execution had drawn prosecutors’ attention at an early stage in their investigation. Those with military experience recognized that the killing bore great similarity to the way U.S. Navy SEALs are trained to dispatch their adversaries. In the weeks before the murders, Simpson had been filming an NBC pilot, Frogman, where several ex-SEALs had served as technical advisers. Had O.J. been trained to kill this way? The prosecutors made a halfhearted effort to make the connection, but the technical advisers weren’t very cooperative and the issue faded amid the press of other business.

  There were, in fact, relatively few coroner-related issues in dispute in the trial, yet Kelberg kept Lakshmanan on the witness stand through eight excruciating days of direct testimony. A former medical student who switched to law, Kelberg had a sophisticated underderstanding of pathology, but he hadn’t tried many cases in recent years. The examination amounted to a display of selfindulgence, with the jurors forced to stare at horrible autopsy photographs for days on end: Nicole’s neck wound propped open, as big as a baseball, her eyes open in hazy comprehension; Goldman’s savaged torso, pockmarked by knife wounds. Kelberg’s extravaganza also cost the prosecution the high ground on the issue of the length of the trial. Previously, most of the delays had come from long and meandering cross-examinations. Now, defense lawyers could (and did) blame this prosecution excess.

  The truth was, Kelberg’s fellow prosecutors did not know when he was going to finish this marathon, so when he did, they were caught by surprise. Late on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 13, Richard Rubin received a frantic call in New York saying he had to be on a plane to Los Angeles the following morning. Rubin didn’t even know precisely why he was being called to testify. He was, after all, only an expert on gloves.

  20. TOO TIGHT

  In a trial that showcased a good deal of shoddy detective work, the investigators also scored some brilliant successes. One of them involved the famous pair of brown leather gloves—the left hand recovered from the murder scene, the right from the narrow pathway behind Kato Kaelin’s room at Simpson’s Rockingham estate.

  The detectives set out to learn where and when—and, if possible, by whom—the gloves had been purchased, and they started with only one clue: the gloves themselves. Each glove bore a tag with the trade name Aris, the size (extra-large), and the style number (70263). A phone call to the Aris Isotoner company revealed that the prosecution had caught a break. Even though Aris was the biggest glove company in the world—selling about 4 million pairs a year—this particular style number constituted only a tiny part of its inventory. Even better, as far as the prosecutors were concerned, this style was sold only at one chain of stores in the United States: Bloomingdale’s. When Phil Vannatter tracked down Richard Rubin, who had been the general manager of the Aris Isotoner glove business in the early 1990s, Rubin told him, “You have no idea how rare those gloves are.”

  So the investigators took it a step further. They asked Nicole Brown Simpson’s parents if they could locate her old credit card bills. The Browns turned them over, and Vannatter and Lange carefully looked through them to see if there might be a charge for a glove purchase at Bloomingdale’s. To their astonishment and delight, there was—right around Christmas 1990.

  The detectives then enlisted the assistance of the FBI, which sent agents to Bloomingdale’s in New York to locate the actual sales receipt. They were lucky again. According to a receipt, on December 18, 1990, Nicole Brown Simpson bought two pairs of “Aris Lights” leather gloves at the Bloomingdale’s flagship store in New York. Researching further, the detectives found that while Bloomingdale’s had received about twelve thousand pairs of Aris Lights in 1990, only three hundred were brown and size extra-large—and just two hundred of those had been sold.

  Besides the DNA evidence, this sales receipt may have been the most incriminating evidence in the entire case. Who else in Los Angeles except O.J. Simpson would have had access to these extremely rare gloves? Who else except O.J. Simpson would have used them to murder his ex-wife? Even if one accepted the defense theory that Fuhrman had planted one glove at Rockingham, the record of Nicole’s purchase of the gloves amounted to devastating evidence of her ex-husband’s guilt in her murder. It is therefore all the more astonishing that the day prosecutors presented this evidence to the jury turned out to be the single best day of the trial—for their adversaries.

  The conclusion of Lakshmanan’s horrific (and interminable) testimony left the participants in the case with an almost giddy sense of exhaustion. Even the defense team welcomed the glove evidence as a respite from Lakshmanan’s catalogue of severed arteries and transected jugulars. When the doctor finished his testimony just before lunch on Thursday, June 15, the defense lawyers spent much of the break examining—and goofing around with—the gloves. Just about every lawyer tried them on. When Richard Rubin, the prosecution’s glove expert, came to court and subjected the gloves to an almost comically meticulous examination, defense investigator Pat McKenna quipped, “Who is this guy—the Dr. Lee of Bloomingdale’s?”

  The lunchtime hijinks did have one important ramification. Shapiro and Cochran noticed that the gloves, even though size extra-large, were not very big—and Simpson’s hands were. In the L.A. county jail, the defense lawyers had spent months greeting Simpson with the customary jailhouse handshake, palm-to-palm contact against bullet-proof glass. They had seen his hands every day. The gloves, they suddenly realized, might not fit.

  The subject of the gloves’ fit was also on the prosecutors’ minds that afternoon. Bill Hodgman was in his office preparing material for the cross-examination of Simpson, if he decided to take the stand. Sometime earlier, the prosecutors had examined the gloves and found just how tight they were. Phil Vannatter, who has a big, meaty fist, had put the gloves on and had noticed the snugness. This was intentional on the part of the maker, for the Aris Light was a very unusual model. Made from extremely thin leather, more like a woman’s style, it was meant to feel very light for a cashmere-lined man’s glove. It was designed to fit closely, almost like a racing glove.

  At lunch, Clark and Hodgman discussed whether they should put the evidence gloves on Simpson’s hands. They decided it wasn’t worth the risk. These gloves were several years old, had been through extensive DNA testing, and had several small samples of the leather cut out. The two lawyers figured that all the wear and tear might have made them shrink. Worse, Simpson would have to wear latex gloves underneath the evidence gloves, which would almost certainly alter the fit. Especially when the latex gloves were taken into account, there were simply too many variables to risk a demonstration. Mostly, though, they feared that Simpson himself would control the experiment. Clark passed the word to Darden just after lunch.

  “Don’t do it.”

  Darden nodded agreement. Even though he’d had the eight-day duration of Lakshmanan’s testimony to prepare his next witness, Darden had never spoken to Richard Rubin before the former glove-company executive arrived in Los Angeles the day before his testimony. When they did speak, Darden never asked Rubin a single question about the size of the gloves, their fit, or their condition. In other words, Darden called Rubin to the stand virtually cold.

  Earlier that day, Darden had called Brenda Vemich, who had been the Bloomingdale’s glove buyer, to testify about the receipt from Nicole’s purchase
of the gloves in 1990. Cochran couldn’t do much with Vemich on cross-examination, so Darden was feeling pretty confident when Rubin followed her to the stand.

  Rubin’s direct testimony was actually very brief—no more than ten minutes—and had nothing to do with the size of the gloves. He testified solely to explain that Aris had delivered only about three hundred pairs of brown extra-large Aris Lights to Bloomingdale’s in 1990. After a rather aimless cross-examination by Cochran, Rubin was about to be excused.

  Just then, though, a paralegal arrived in the courtroom with a pair of gloves—a new pair—from the prosecution headquarters on the eighteenth floor. When Darden looked like he was going to use them for a demonstration as part of Rubin’s redirect testimony, Cochran asked to approach the bench. There Darden whispered to Ito, “I would like to lay the foundation to show they are the exact same size, similar make and model so that perhaps we can have Mr. Simpson try them on at some point to determine whether or not the gloves found at the scene and at his home will fit him.”

  Cochran objected, and Ito had an understandable reaction: “I think it would be more appropriate for him to try the other gloves on … I mean, the real gloves that were found.”

  Clark had a ready (and appropriate) response, the same one she had discussed with Hodgman and Darden earlier: “The only problem is,” she told Ito, “he has to wear latex gloves underneath, because they’re a biohazard, and they’re going to alter the fit.”

  Ito decided to excuse the jury for a moment to let Rubin examine the new gloves and determine if they were the same model as those in evidence. As the jury was filing out, F. Lee Bailey sidled over to Darden. Almost as much as Cochran, Bailey knew how to push Darden’s buttons. “You have the balls of a stud field mouse,” Bailey whispered to Darden. “If you don’t have O.J. try them on, I will.” With that, Bailey had baited the hook. When the jury was out, Rubin said that the new pair was not the same model as the evidence gloves, so Ito disallowed their use. (Darden, of course, had discussed none of this with Rubin in advance.) Flustered, Darden told Ito, “Before the jury returns”—that is, outside the presence of the jury—“we would like to have Mr. Simpson try on the original evidence items.”