The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (14 page)

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.…

“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”

A
t 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 as 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.”