The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (18 page)

Another question again illustrated the way Simpson’s status as a celebrity affected the way his case was conducted. Shapiro mentioned that three letters had been found at Kardashian’s house—one to the public (which Kardashian had read out loud), one to his children, and one to his mother. A reporter asked if Shapiro had read all three. No, the lawyer said. “They are under seal and will be turned over to the persons to whom they are addressed.” All three letters constituted crucial evidence in locating a fugitive accused of murder. First and foremost, it was the police who were entitled to seize and read those letters. Yet Shapiro and Kardashian blithely walked out of the house with them and then announced that the fugitive, not the police, would determine who read them. This was so much the natural order of things in Los Angeles that the removal
of the letters from the house scarcely drew a word of comment in the local media.

Nor was that Shapiro’s most remarkable answer at the press conference. “What were the last words you heard from O.J. Simpson?” a reporter asked.

This question called for him to reveal a communication that may have been subject to Simpson’s attorney-client privilege, yet Shapiro did not hesitate to answer. “My personal words with him were of a complimentary nature to the way I had been with him and for him to thank me for everything I had done up-to-date,” he replied. The response raised another question (which went unasked): If Simpson was offering you valedictory thanks about your efforts on the case, why didn’t you think he was about to flee?

Many lawyers with a client on the run would have gone straight to their desks and worked the phones to sniff out any clue of the missing man’s whereabouts. But Shapiro had never liked to spend any more time than necessary at the office. After the press conference, he simply went home. His wife, Linell, greeted him at the door.

“Where have you been?” she asked. “He’s on television, Bob.”

The LAPD had put out an all-points bulletin for Al Cowlings right around the time of Gascon’s press conference, at 2:00
P.M.
Around that time, Vannatter, Lange, and their colleagues put in their first calls to the many police departments whose jurisdictions abut that of the LAPD. But because the police had never seized Simpson’s passport, the cops had to cast an even wider net. They alerted the U.S. Border Patrol, as well as the airlines, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Mexican Judicial Police.

It wasn’t until just after Shapiro’s press conference ended, however, at around 6:00
P.M.
, that the Los Angeles media confirmed the description of the car the police were seeking: a 1993 white Ford Bronco with California license plate 3DHY503. Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the vast public interest in the case, it was the broadcast announcement, not the law enforcement effort, that produced almost immediate results.

Chris Thomas had been watching television at home in Mission Viejo when he learned Simpson was on the run. At 6:25
P.M.
, he
and his girlfriend, Kathy Ferrigno, were heading north on Interstate 5, the Santa Ana Freeway, on their way to a weekend of camping. They had been joking about O.J.’s disappearance, studying in a halfhearted way the cars coming toward them, seeing if Simpson might be among them, on his way to Mexico. After a few minutes of this, Ferrigno looked into the passenger-side rearview mirror and started saying, “Oh my God!—Chris, Chris, Chris!” Thomas slowed down and in a moment Ferrigno was face-to-face with Al Cowlings. When he noticed that she was staring at him, Cowlings glowered at her. Their location at that moment was about eighty miles south of Kardashian’s house in Encino, near the El Toro interchange on Interstate 5. They were about a five-minute drive from the gravesite of Nicole Brown Simpson. The Bronco—and this later proved important—was heading north, that is, back toward Los Angeles and away from the Mexican border.

Ferrigno jotted down the Bronco’s license plate, and Thomas pulled to the side of the freeway by a call box. Thomas called the California Highway Patrol and gave the dispatcher his impression of Cowlings’s demeanor: “We looked at him, you know, and he like stared us down, like he was death.”

As Simpson described it in his deposition in the civil case, he and Cowlings left Interstate 5 intending to go to Nicole’s grave, but they retreated when they saw that the cemetery was staked out by police. Just a few minutes after Thomas’s telephone call, Orange County sheriff’s deputy Larry Pool saw the Bronco heading on an on-ramp returning to the northbound Santa Ana. Pool sped alongside the Bronco and looked inside. Cowlings smiled nervously at him. The officer then radioed in to check the plate on the Bronco and learned that it was a match for Cowlings’s.

“Ten-four, I’m behind it,” Pool said into his radio, and with that, all air traffic on the police radio band receded into a stunned silence.

As the Bronco began to move on the freeway through the city of Santa Ana, the traffic grew heavier and then came to a complete standstill. Pool and a colleague in another car, Jim Sewell, used the opportunity to leave their cars and, with guns drawn, advance by foot on the Bronco.

“Turn off your engine,” the officers shouted to Cowlings.

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.