The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (45 page)

Prosecutors know they have a jury’s full attention at the beginning of a trial, so they like to start out with a dramatic, powerful witness who cannot be effectively cross-examined. Darden and Clark chose well.

“Sharyn Gilbert, Your Honor.”

Gilbert, a rotund and good-natured black woman, was working as a 911 operator in downtown Los Angeles during the early morning hours of January 1, 1989. Her phone rang at 3:58
A.M.

This was not Nicole’s famous 911 call from 1993. This was, in its way, far more chilling. When Darden played the tape of this call, there were no words, just a rumbly silence, as if a phone had been left hanging limp from a table. Then a woman screamed … and screamed some more. Next, unmistakably, flesh collided with flesh—the sound of slapping or hitting of some kind. After about three minutes, the line went dead.

Gilbert’s computer had registered that the call came from 360 North Rockingham, so she urgently dispatched a police unit to the location. The assignment went to Officer John Edwards, who was working in a patrol car with a trainee, Patricia Milewski. Darden called Edwards as his next witness. Edwards told of finding Nicole, her face battered, staggering around the bushes in just sweatpants
and a bra. He recalled her prophetic cries of “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!”

Cochran’s cross-examination was more notable for what he didn’t do than what he did. The lawyer poked a little fun at the detective, noting that he had languished as a patrol officer for nineteen long years. Continuing his effort to diminish Nicole in the eyes of the jury, Cochran also asked a whole series of questions that suggested (without any evidence) that Nicole had been drunk during the New Year’s Day altercation. But Cochran had a grenade in his pocket that he declined to use. Cochran never pointed out for the jury that in 1991, John Edwards had been named one of only forty-four officers identified by the Christopher Commission as part of a “problem group” within the LAPD. The commission, formed to investigate the police in light of the Rodney King beating, found that these officers had received highly disproportionate numbers of complaints for use of excessive force, dishonesty, discourtesy, and other misdeeds. In the Los Angeles black community, following the release of the Christopher Commission’s report the existence of “the Forty-four” became important symbols of the LAPD’s malevolence. Yet Cochran passed on the chance to tie Edwards in to his favorite theme of police racism.

The reason for this uncharacteristic diffidence became apparent as Edwards was followed to the stand by other officers involved in the 1989 incident. What was remarkable about their testimony was not how hard they had been on O.J. Simpson but how easy. Faced with a badly beaten woman who had the red imprint of a human hand on her neck, Edwards did not arrest the man who admitted to causing her injuries, not even after learning from both O.J. and Nicole that police had been called out to the house repeatedly on domestic-violence calls. Rather, even after O.J. conceded that he had hurt Nicole, and even after Nicole told him that O.J. kept guns in the house, Edwards graciously allowed Simpson to return to his house by himself and change out of his bathrobe. And then Edwards stood by as O.J. leaped into his Bentley and drove off. In the course of his examination, Darden had asked Edwards why he didn’t arrest Simpson on the spot.

“Because I knew that if I took O.J. Simpson, a person of that stature, to the station in his underwear that there would be repercussions
because the media would show up and it would be blown out of proportion.”

Edwards admitted he didn’t even file a complete report of the incident; he omitted, he said, Simpson’s statement that he had had sex with one of the women living in the house earlier that day. Why did Edwards leave it out? In part because he didn’t think it was relevant, but also because “it would just be a sensationalism thing.”

This deferential police attitude toward Simpson became even more obvious when the next witness, Mike Farrell, the detective in charge of the 1989 domestic-violence investigation, took the stand. Farrell’s inquiry, such as it was, consisted of calling O.J. on the telephone and then calling Nicole. Farrell’s conversation with Nicole appeared to have amounted to the detective’s telling the crime victim how she could drop the case against the man who had beaten her. In a manner typical of domestic-violence victims, Nicole preferred to get on with her life rather than take her husband to court. Farrell testified, “She said if she could avoid it, she doesn’t want to prosecute.” As Farrell admitted on the stand, the only reason he referred the case to the city attorney’s office for prosecution is that the California domestic-violence law required him to do so.

The coddling of O.J. by the police placed Clark and Darden in an uncomfortable position. In the murder case against Simpson, of course, they were joined with, and supportive of, the LAPD. But it was clear to all of the prosecutors that the police had horribly bungled the domestic-violence matter. In a remarkable footnote to their brief to Judge Ito on the domestic-violence issues, the prosecutors made clear their disdain for their ostensible allies. “Nicole’s feelings of helplessness and belief that the police would not do anything to the defendant were well founded,” they wrote. “Members of the [West Los Angeles] division of the LAPD frequented defendant’s home, often utilizing the pool and tennis courts. When the officers required the appearance of a celebrity at the yearly Christmas party, [the] defendant eagerly agreed to appear. When the officers desired his autograph on footballs, he responded. In turn, the officers responded to Rockingham in response to Nicole’s calls for help 7–8 times prior to the 1989 incident. Each time the defendant was not arrested.”

However, the true measure of Nicole’s isolation came only with the next witness.

The lawyers on both sides of the Simpson case often learned as much through the news media as from their own investigators. For example, during jury selection, the prosecutors found out about one witness in Sheila Weller’s
Raging Heart
, one of the “instant books” that were published in the months after the murders. The opening scene of Weller’s book described a conversation between Simpson and a man “whom we will call Leo” in Simpson’s bedroom late on the night of June 13, after Simpson had returned from his trip to Chicago and had been interviewed by the detectives at Parker Center. Simpson told “Leo” that the police had told him they had found blood in his house. “How long does it take for DNA to come back?” Simpson asked. “Leo,” who didn’t know, guessed two months. “They asked me if I would take a lie detector test,” Simpson continued, adding that he didn’t want to take one. “ ’Cause,” Simpson added with a kind of a chuckle, “I have had some dreams of killing her.”

It didn’t take long for the prosecutors to identify “Leo” as Ron Shipp, a former LAPD officer and longtime friend of O.J.’s. Shipp was a rather typical, if revealing, figure in Simpson’s circle of hangers-on. Simpson and Shipp were, on one level, peers—black men of about the same age and background. Shipp had first met Simpson in the 1960s, when his brother played high school football against Simpson. But Simpson became a major figure in Shipp’s life in the late seventies, when he was a patrol officer assigned to West Los Angeles. During that period, Shipp would stop by O.J.’s house on Rockingham as often as twice a week, to use the tennis court or just shoot the breeze. In 1982, Shipp was transferred downtown, so he visited the Rockingham house less often, about once a month. (Shipp had also served as a kind of counselor for Jason Simpson, O.J.’s troubled son from his first marriage. He spoke to the boy once when O.J. found that Jason had used cocaine and again when Jason attacked the life-size statue of O.J. by the Rockingham pool with a baseball bat.) In more recent years, Shipp had not prospered. He had developed a
drinking problem, was suspended from the police force, accepted early retirement in 1989, and then, a year later, tried and failed to be reinstated as a cop. His efforts at an acting career met with little success, save one small part on a television program that O.J. helped him get.

Even though California law prohibited the prosecution from mentioning the polygraph issue in front of the jury, the prosecutors wanted to call on Shipp to testify about his conversation with O.J. about his “dreams” of killing Nicole. According to prosecutor Hank Goldberg, the statement would illustrate “the defendant’s mental state and show his intention at or around the time of the murder.” (In a later argument on the same issue, Marcia Clark cited Hollywood authority in support of admitting the dream testimony, telling the judge, “Walt Disney said it best, I think, in
Sleeping Beauty
: ‘A dream is a wish your heart makes.’ ”) Because Cochran was distantly related to Shipp, Carl Douglas handled the witness for the defense. He urged Ito to exclude Shipp’s testimony because, as Douglas put it, dreams “are not predictive of events that may have occurred in the past or predictive of things in the future.” Evidence about the dream would prove very little, especially divorced from its context in the conversation about the polygraph. Ito weighed the decision whether to allow the dream testimony—and blew it. For all his failings as a judge, Ito handled the hundreds of legal rulings in the case with considerable skill; but he missed on this one. The judge said the dream was admissible. (Ito essentially acknowledged this mistake at the end of the trial by instructing the jury to discount the testimony about the dream.)

Simpson had absorbed the first few days of the trial impassively, occupying himself with doodling or whispering comments to Shapiro on his left or Cochran on his right. When Shipp walked to the witness stand, though, Simpson came alive. He shook his head, muttered beneath his breath, and generally made his contempt unmistakable.

After he took the oath, Shipp tried to avoid Simpson’s gaze. The former cop appeared a genuinely tortured figure—beholden to Simpson, still admiring of him in some ways, and yet conscience-stricken about what he knew. One could tell how much he had enjoyed
the days when he could come and go freely through the electric gates at Rockingham, when he had entered a world of privilege and savored his proximity to celebrity.

“Did you take officers to the defendant’s home …?” Darden asked him.

“Yes, I did. If I was on patrol, sometimes I would take people over there. I used to get a kick out of not telling them where I was going and ringing the doorbell and have O.J. come out and greet them.”

“How many other officers would you say you took to Rockingham?”

“Wow. I would have to say approximately maybe—maybe forty guys maybe.”

Darden asked if he and Simpson remained friends.

“I still love the guy, but, um, I don’t know. I mean, this is a weird situation I’m sitting here in.”

Shipp had made his love for Simpson evident following the January 1, 1989, incident with Nicole. Two days after the beating, Nicole called Shipp, who had some training in domestic-violence situations, to talk about what had happened with Simpson. Nicole asked Shipp to talk with O.J. and impress upon him how seriously she regarded the incident. Shipp did talk to Simpson, who “was very upset because he thought that he was going to lose Hertz and his image was going to be tarnished.” Instead of helping Nicole, Shipp went to his supervisors at the West L.A. station and asked that the case against Simpson be dropped.

It is possible, then, to summarize Nicole Brown Simpson’s experience with the LAPD after her beating in 1989. The officers on the scene let O.J. run off into the night. The detective on the case told her how to drop the charges. Nicole sought help from one police officer she knew, Ron Shipp, and he ran right to O.J. Shipp then went to a supervisor to try to get the charges dropped and in the end returned to Nicole to implore her to leave O.J.’s precious “image” intact. In a trial that resounded with talk of conspiracies within the LAPD, this was, in reality, the
only
conspiracy: the one to help O.J. Simpson escape prosecution for beating his wife in 1989. Small wonder, then, that in the week before her death, Nicole called a battered women’s shelter, not the police, to report that her ex-husband was stalking her.