The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (21 page)

Genego put up his hand. “I told you I don’t want you asking him any questions.”

Clark was incensed. “I’ll ask him questions if I want, and if you try to interfere I’ll have you arrested for obstruction of justice.”

An experienced criminal lawyer, Genego had never before been threatened this way by a prosecutor. Left no alternative, Genego scribbled out a page of instructions and handed them to Kaelin before Clark escorted him into the grand-jury room. Clinging to his lawyer’s script, Kaelin picked his way through the jurors, who were seated classroom-style in front of the witness stand, and flopped into the chair.

After he gave his name and took the oath, Clark asked him, “Mr. Kaelin, were you acquainted with a woman by the name of Nicole Simpson?”

“On the advice of my attorney,” Kaelin stated, “I must respectfully decline to answer and assert my constitutional right to remain silent.”

“You seem to be reading from a piece of yellow paper, and there is some writing on that paper,” the prosecutor said. As Clark would soon know only too well, Kaelin could never have uttered such a cogent sentence if left to his own devices. Kaelin admitted that he had been reading his answer.

Clark tried again, asking, “On the night of June 12, 1994, were you in the company of Mr. Orenthal James Simpson?” (Among prosecutors, it would become sort of a trope, even a badge of honor, to use Simpson’s ungainly full name, no matter how stilted it made them sound.)

Kaelin kept reading the same response to her questions, and Clark soon excused him to speak with Genego, who was waiting outside. After a moment, Kaelin returned to the grand-jury room and repeated his refusal to answer questions.

Then, at Clark’s direction, the foreperson of the grand jury read a stern message to Kaelin: “Mr. Kaelin, I advise you that this grand jury is a lawfully constituted legal body and that your refusal, without legal cause, to answer questions before this grand jury does constitute contempt and will subject you to imprisonment pursuant to the laws of this state.” (Recalling the scene for the man who later wrote his “instant” biography, Kaelin described his reaction in his own terms: “It sounded like something out of an old
Dragnet
rerun on Nickelodeon.”) When Kaelin still wouldn’t answer, the foreperson officially found him in contempt of the grand jury and ordered the bewildered houseguest to the courtroom of Judge Stephen Czuleger.

Before Judge Czuleger, the prosecutors erupted in fury and indignation. Kaelin, they said, was not a suspect in the case but only a witness; therefore, he had no right to invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Genego replied that Kaelin certainly had been treated like a suspect that morning, and it was undeniable that Kaelin had received unusually rough treatment for a mere grand-jury witness. Under those circumstances, Genego argued, Kaelin had every right to refuse to answer. A thoughtful judge, Czuleger seemed put off by the prosecutors’ strong-arm tactics. What was more, even though Czuleger (like the rest of the world) had never heard of Kato Kaelin at that point, his reaction to Kaelin’s puppy-dog persona offered a preview of the response of the public at large. What was the harm, Czuleger asked Conn, in giving Kaelin a weekend to talk to his lawyer, “putting aside he may flee the country and be in Brazil by morning.” Everyone in the courtroom laughed at the ridiculous prospect of Kato Kaelin on the run.

Conn had to admit that the weekend probably wouldn’t make much difference, and Czuleger put off the confrontation until Monday, June 20. “Trust me,” the judge, momentarily stern, told Kaelin. “Don’t go anywhere. You wouldn’t like the alternative. Be here Monday at 8:30 in the morning.” Czuleger then moved to recess the hearing—but not before he learned from his bailiff, and told the astonished audience, that O.J. Simpson had been located and was at that moment part of a televised car chase across the Los Angeles freeways.

The wisdom of Judge Czuleger’s decision was proven on Monday morning, when Kaelin agreed to testify without invoking his Fifth Amendment right. The weekend-long delay had defused the legal confrontation, but the rocky introduction set the tone for Kaelin’s relationship with the district attorney’s office. When he took the oath and answered Clark’s questions, she found that the core of his story remained largely unchanged from the moment he had first told it to the detectives at Rockingham just hours after the murders. Kaelin told the grand jury, as he had told the detectives, that on the night of the murders he and O.J. had gone to McDonald’s for hamburgers shortly after 9:00 and returned at about 9:40
P.M.
(The grand jury also marked the on-the-record debut of
Kaelin’s singular diction. He said, for example, that at McDonald’s he had ordered a “McGrilled chicken sandwich deal.”) At about 10:45
P.M.
, while he was talking on the telephone in his room, Kaelin said, he heard the three loud thumps on his wall. Shortly before 11:00, Kaelin said, he had helped Simpson put his bags in the limousine for the trip to the airport.

It was, for the most part, an incriminating story. Most important, it established that Simpson’s whereabouts were unaccounted for at the time the murders took place. Kaelin gave O.J. no alibi. His testimony also established that someone, possibly Simpson, had been rummaging around in the precise location where the bloody glove was found just a few hours later. Some details in Kaelin’s recounting did favor Simpson. For one thing, as Kato described it, Simpson’s demeanor during their trip to McDonald’s hardly seemed that of a man who was moments away from slaughtering his ex-wife. Still, that kind of nuance might have evolved in the prosecution’s favor if Kaelin had come to trust the prosecutors and confront the truth about his benefactor.

One way of drawing a fuller story out of Kaelin might have been to stroke him, accommodate him, and try to persuade him that the prosecutors would stand by him and, just as important, that he had nothing to fear from O.J. and his friends. But that kind of approach wasn’t Clark’s style; she relied far more on the stick than the carrot. Clark and Conn had decided to put the fear of God into Kaelin by rushing him before the grand jury. They succeeded only in alienating him.

Another grand-jury witness was Jill Shively. If the glamour of O.J. and Nicole’s lives represented one archetype of Los Angeles culture, the reality of Shively’s represented another—a more common, if less celebrated, saga of the city.

Though the great migration of white midwesterners that created modern Los Angeles had slowed by the 1970s, it never entirely stopped. Jill Shively’s newly divorced mother, Nancy, arrived from Indiana in 1979 and settled in Santa Monica. Nancy Shively worked as a medical transcriber, and the family struggled to maintain a middle-class existence. At the age of thirty-two, in 1994, Jill
found herself working intermittent hours in a film-supply business and living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. On most nights, Jill cared for a young niece, the daughter of Jill’s sister, whose personal problems left her unable to act as a parent. Diminutive, athletic, long on schemes for success but short on good luck and results, Shively lived one mile and a world away from Nicole Brown Simpson’s condominium on Bundy Drive.

On June 12, Shively had been battling the flu all day and had eaten nothing. At around 10:45 that night, she decided to drive to San Vicente Boulevard to a favorite salad bar. Gunning her Volkswagen to beat the store’s 11:00 closing time, she raced along San Vicente, going east. As she approached the intersection where Bundy crosses San Vicente, Shively accelerated to make the light. A large white vehicle heading north on Bundy raced in front of her against the light. Shively slammed on her brakes, as did the white car, which then ran up partially on San Vicente’s raised center median. A third car, a gray Nissan heading west on San Vicente, also stopped suddenly, trying like Shively to avoid the white car that had raced in front of them.

Briefly, the three cars were frozen next to one another. Then Shively noticed that the driver of the white car began honking his horn and screaming—“Move your damn car! Move it! Move it!”—for the driver heading west on San Vicente to let him pass. Shively noticed that the driver of the white car was black, and on second glance, she thought she recognized him. Her mind raced.

That’s … that’s … Marcus Allen!

Then she heard him scream again, and she realized that she recognized the voice. It’s wasn’t Marcus Allen; it was O.J. Simpson. The stunned driver of the gray Nissan was finally gathering his wits to move on. At last he did, and Simpson peeled off on Bundy, but not before Shively had a chance to look at and remember the license plate of the white car: 3CZW788.

Shively wrote off the incident and continued her search for salad. Her car lacked a radio, so when she went to work the next morning, she had no idea about the murders until her mother called her at her job. “Did you hear that Nicole Simpson was murdered last night?” Nancy Shively asked.

Jill said she hadn’t. “That’s weird,” she went on. “O.J. nearly ran me down last night.”

Later that day Shively called the police, and a pair of detectives came to interview her the following day. On Saturday, June 18, a detective came to her home with a grand-jury subpoena ordering her to testify on Tuesday, June 21. By Sunday, June 19, her name had leaked out as a witness and reporters were banging on her apartment door. The next morning, she called Patty Jo Fairbanks, whose name she had been given as a witness coordinator for the district attorney’s office. Shively later recalled Fairbanks saying that she could give no interviews until after she had testified in front of the grand jury; Fairbanks remembered telling her to speak to no one at all. In any event, on Monday, June 20, Shively decided to give an interview. She went to the Paramount lot in Hollywood, found her way to the set of
Hard Copy
, and sat down to make a little money.

Long-established policies at virtually all outlets of the mainstream press, from newspapers to television networks, categorically prohibit journalists from paying interview subjects. For many years, only the operators on the disreputable fringe of the print world, the supermarket tabloids, paid for news. But thanks to two seemingly unrelated phenomena, the “cash-for-trash” business exploded in the early 1990s.

The first was the birth of a new and successful genre of television program, the tabloid, or infotainment, program, which parlayed celebrity news and scandal into tremendous ratings.
A Current Affair
(Fox),
Inside Edition
(King World), and
Hard Copy
(Paramount) boomed in popularity. Produced by entertainment companies with no history of journalistic enterprise or ethics, the television tabloids had the money to buy stories and did so with abandon. The supermarket tabloids, led by the
National Enquirer
, which has a weekly readership of nearly 20 million, had no trouble keeping pace.

The second factor was a decision of the United States Supreme Court. The so-called Son of Sam law was passed by the New York state legislature in 1977 to prevent David Berkowitz (who sent notes to the police signed “Son of Sam”) from capitalizing on his notoriety as a serial killer. The measure made it illegal for criminals to earn income from selling stories about their misdeeds. In 1991,
however, the Supreme Court ruled that the law violated the First Amendment. The tabloid industry saw the Supreme Court’s decision as a vindication of its ways.

Because witnesses who take money from tabloids automatically raise questions about their credibility—and because defense attorneys can successfully vilify those witnesses on cross-examination—the practice of buying and selling interviews seriously threatens prosecutors’ abilities to win high-profile cases. In the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, for example, defense attorney Roy Black skewered a critical government witness who had sold an interview to
A Current Affair
. Ironically, the print and television tabloids that fuel this industry have been widely denounced for their supposed rush to convict celebrity defendants before their trials; in his early press conferences, Robert Shapiro often complained about their unfairness to O.J. Simpson. As it happens, though, the tabloids can so taint government witnesses that tabloid infotainment may actually be the greatest friend a famous defendant can have.