The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (11 page)

“We’re in an interview room in Parker Center,” Vannatter began. “The date is June 13th, 1994, and the time is 13:35 hours. And we’re here with O.J. Simpson. Is that Orenthal James Simpson?”

“Orenthal James Simpson,” O.J. confirmed.

Vannatter began by reading Simpson his constitutional rights, in the form of a Miranda warning. “Okay, do you wish to give up your right to remain silent and talk to us?” Vannatter then asked.

“Ah, yes.”

“Okay,” Vannatter continued. “And you give up your right to have an attorney present while you talk?”

“Mmm-hmmm, yes,” Simpson replied.

Vannatter began, “We’re investigating, obviously, the death of your ex-wife and another man … and we’re going to need to talk to you about that. Are you divorced from her now?”

Simpson said they had been divorced for about two years.

“What was your relationship with her?” Vannatter asked.

“Well, we tried to get back together, and it just didn’t work. It wasn’t working, and so we were going our separate ways.”

Vannatter quickly changed the subject. “I understand that she made a couple of crime … crime reports or something?”

“Ah, we have a big fight about six years ago on New Year’s, you know, she made a report. I didn’t make a report. And then we had an altercation about a year ago maybe. It wasn’t a physical argument. I kicked her door or something.”

“Were you arrested at one time for something?” Lange asked.

“No, I mean, five years ago we had a big fight, six years ago, I don’t know. I know I ended up doing community service.” (Later in the interview, Simpson explained the 1989 incident this way: “We had a fight, and she hit me. And they never took my statement, they never wanted to hear my side, and they never wanted to hear the housekeeper’s side. Nicole was drunk. She did her thing, she started tearing up my house, you know? And I didn’t punch her or anything, but I … wrestled her, is what I did. I didn’t slap her at all. I mean, Nicole’s a strong girl, one of the most conditioned women. Since that period of time, she’s hit me a few times, but I’ve never touched her after that.…”)

“So you weren’t arrested?” Vannatter asked.

“No, I was never really arrested.”

After Vannatter asked how much sleep Simpson had had the previous night—the answer was very little—Lange said to his partner, “Phil, what do you think? We can maybe just recount last night.” Vannatter agreed. “Yeah, when was the last time you saw Nicole?”

“We were leaving a dance recital. She took off and I was talking to her parents.” O.J. and Nicole’s daughter, Sydney, had performed on Sunday night at Paul Revere Middle School in Brentwood. “It ended at about six-thirty, quarter to seven, something like that, you know, in the ballpark, right in that area.… Her mother said something about me joining them for dinner, and I said no thanks.” Simpson added that he left the scene in his Bentley, and Vannatter asked him where he went from there.

“Ah, home, home for a while, got my car for a while, tried to find my girlfriend for a while, came back to the house.”

“So what time do you think you got back home, actually physically got home?” Vannatter asked.

“Seven-something.… Yeah, I’m trying to think, did I leave. You know, I always … I had to run and get my daughter some flowers. I was actually doing the recital, so I rushed and got her some flowers, and I came home, and then I called Paula [Barbieri, his girlfriend] as I was going to her house, and Paula wasn’t home.… I mean, any time I was … whatever time it took me to get to the recital and back, to get to the flower shop and back, I mean, that’s the time I was out of the house.”

This was an incomprehensible answer. Did Simpson buy flowers for Sydney before or after the recital? (She was holding flowers in a photograph taken at the recital.) Or were the flowers for his other daughter, Arnelle? Did he actually go to Paula’s house? If not, where did he go? Intentionally or not, Simpson gave the officers absolutely no way to check his story and determine if he was telling the truth. The officers could, of course, have pursued the issue and tried to pin Simpson down, yet Vannatter’s follow-up question was “Were you scheduled to play golf this morning someplace?” Yes, Simpson said, in Chicago, with Hertz clients.

Vannatter then established that Simpson had taken the 11:45
P.M.
flight to Chicago the previous night. He followed that with a
question about Simpson’s Bronco. When did Simpson park it on Rockingham?

“Eight-something, seven … eight, nine-o’clock, I don’t know, right in that area.” This was another meaningless answer, yet the detectives did not ask Simpson to estimate his arrival any more specifically than this two- or three-hour window. Rather, they established that Simpson had come home from the recital in his Bentley and then got into the Bronco.

“In the Bronco,” Simpson explained, “ ’cause my phone was in the Bronco. And because it’s a Bronco. It’s a Bronco. It’s what I drive, you know. I’d rather drive it than any other car. And, you know, as I was going over there, I called [Paula] a couple of times, and she wasn’t there, and I left a message, and then I checked my messages, and there were no messages. She wasn’t there, and she may have to leave town. Then I came back and ended up sitting with Kato.”

“Okay,” Lange now said. “What time was this again that you parked the Bronco?”

“Eight-something, maybe. He hadn’t done a Jacuzzi, we had … went and got a burger, and I’d come home and kind of leisurely got ready to go. I mean, we’d done a few things.”

Neither detective asked anything about this trip for a burger. Where exactly did they go? What time did they go? Who saw them? Did he use the cellular phone again that night?

Instead the detectives pursued a new subject: “How did you get the injury on your hand?”

“I don’t know,” Simpson replied. “The first time, when I was in Chicago and all, but at the house I was just running around.”

“How did you do it in Chicago?” Vannatter asked.

“I broke a glass. One of you guys had just called me, and I was in the bathroom, and I just kind of went bonkers for a little bit.”

“Is that how you cut it?”

“Mmm, it was cut before, but I think I just opened it again. I’m not sure.”

Lange asked, “Do you recall bleeding at all in your truck, in the Bronco?”

“I recall bleeding at my house, and then I went to the Bronco. The last thing I did before I left, when I was rushing, was went and
got my phone out of the Bronco.” Lange asked where the phone was now. Simpson told him, but there is no evidence that the detectives ever examined it.

“So do you recall bleeding at all?”

“Yeah, I mean, I knew I was bleeding, but it was no big deal. I bleed all the time. I play golf and stuff, so there’s always something, nicks and stuff here and there.” Lange asked where Simpson had gotten the Band-Aid he was wearing on his left middle finger. “Actually, I asked the girl this morning for it.”

“And she got it?”

“Yeah,” Simpson continued. “ ’Cause last night with Kato, when I was leaving, he was saying something to me, and I was rushing to get my phone, and I put a little thing on it, and it stopped.”

The detectives never returned to the subject of the cut on his left hand, even though Simpson had not answered the most basic question about it: How had he first injured his hand? Again, the detectives changed the topic. They established that O.J.’s maid, Gigi, had access to the Bronco; that he had not argued with Nicole at the recital; and that he had worn black pants and Reebok tennis shoes the previous night. (Simpson said he left these clothes back at the house; the detectives did not even ask where, precisely—in the laundry? on a coat hanger?—Simpson had put them. They were never found, and Simpson’s lawyers never produced them, either.)

Finally, Vannatter said, “O.J., we’ve got sort of a problem.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“We’ve got some blood on and in your car, we’ve got some blood at your house, and sort of a problem.”

“Well, take my blood test,” Simpson volunteered.

“Well, we’d like to do that,” Lange responded. “We’ve got, of course, the cut on your finger that you aren’t real clear on. Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at Nicole’s house?”

No, Simpson said. “It was last night.… Somewhere when I was rushing to get out of my house.”

Vannatter, in effect, just threw up his hands and asked, “What do you think happened? Do you have any idea?”

“I have no idea, man. You guys haven’t told me anything. I have no idea. When you said to my daughter, who said something to me
today, that somebody else might have been involved, I have absolutely no idea what happened. I don’t know how, why, or what. But you guys haven’t told me anything. Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit.”

“Understand,” Lange said a few moments later, “the reason we’re talking to you is because you’re the ex-husband.…”

“I know I’m the number one target, and now you tell me I’ve got blood all over the place.”

“Well,” Lange said, “there’s blood at your house in the driveway, and we’ve got a search warrant, and we’re going to go get your blood. We found some in your house. Is that your blood that’s there?”

“If it’s dripped, it’s what I dripped running around trying to leave.… You know, I was trying to get out of the house, I didn’t even pay attention to it. I saw it when I grabbed a napkin or something, and that was it. I didn’t think about it after that.… That was last night when I was … I don’t know what I was … I was getting my junk out of the car. I was in the house throwing hangers and stuff in my suitcase. I was doing my little crazy what I do.… I mean, I do it everywhere. Anybody who has ever picked me up say that O.J.’s a whirlwind, he’s running, he’s grabbing things, and that’s what I’m doing.”

And after a few more desultory exchanges, the interview drew to a close. At 2:07
P.M.
, Lange said, “We’re ready to terminate this.” LAPD investigators never had the opportunity to speak with O.J. Simpson again. The interview on June 13 had lasted thirty-two minutes.

It became known almost immediately that Simpson had given a statement to the detectives, and the news media’s legal “experts”—a group that became a ubiquitous presence in the case (and that often included me)—promptly excoriated Howard Weitzman for allowing his client to answer questions. This was understandable, for it rarely works to a prospective defendant’s advantage to commit himself to a single version of the facts at an early stage of the investigation. In the months afterward, Weitzman often said in his own defense that he had tried and failed to stop Simpson from
talking. It is true that such a decision is always the client’s to make. And given Simpson’s vast ego, he undoubtedly thought he could talk his way out of trouble—and similarly, he probably dreaded the humiliating prospect of the police leaking word to the public that O.J. had been afraid to talk.

But the debate over Weitzman’s role missed the larger significance of the detectives’ interview of Simpson. The real lesson there concerned Vannatter and Lange—and the LAPD as a whole. In both the 1989 abuse incident and the murder case five years later, the police behavior suggested a fear of offending a celebrity. In the domestic-violence case on New Year’s Day, the officers could have—and probably should have—put handcuffs on O.J. as soon as they arrived on his doorstep. But they let him go upstairs to change out of his bathrobe—and then, inexplicably, allowed him to get into his car and drive off. (And Simpson, of course, was never punished for what might be seen as a rehearsal for his more celebrated flight from arrest in 1994.) Simpson was then prosecuted only because a single police officer out of the many who had seen the results of his past mistreatment of Nicole had the integrity to step forward. This crime then earned Simpson an almost comically inadequate punishment—an opportunity to network with the advertisers he longed to cultivate.

Then, on the afternoon of June 13, 1994, though Vannatter and Lange already had considerable evidence that O.J. Simpson was likely a murderer, they too treated him with astonishing deference. Time after time, as Simpson gave vague and even nonsensical answers, the detectives failed to follow up. The entire purpose of a police interrogation is to pin a suspect down, so that the prosecution can, if necessary later on, demonstrate in minute particulars that his story is false. An effective interrogation forces a suspect to repeat, in ever greater detail, his version of the facts. Incredibly, Vannatter and Lange never forced Simpson to account specifically for his whereabouts between the end of Sydney’s dance recital and his departure for the airport. (This failure allowed Simpson’s attorneys to claim later, as they did at various times, that their client spent this period sleeping, showering, and chipping golf balls in the dark.) The detectives never pressed him to describe completely what clothes he was wearing and what had happened to them.
Even if Simpson had said he could not remember these basic facts, such a failure of recollection might have been highly incriminating. In a murder case, it is common for the police to question a suspect for many hours, but Vannatter and Lange surrendered after barely half an hour—even before Simpson himself could ask for a break.