The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (46 page)

An effective defense cross-examination of Ron Shipp might have consisted of a question or two: “Mr. Shipp, do you want to do in your real life everything that you dream about?” “Do you know—does anyone know—what any specific dream really means?” Such an exchange would have communicated quickly to the jury just how much this “dream” testimony appeared to be worth.

Carl Douglas chose another tack: war. In this, he was reflecting the wishes of his client. Simpson was appalled that this hanger-on had turned on him. It upset the natural order of relationships he had lived with, and ruled over, for decades. The Ron Shipps simply do not do this sort of thing. And if they do, they are punished. Unfortunately for him, Simpson had to deputize the punishment of this lackey to Carl Douglas, who was almost certainly the weakest of the lawyers who appeared regularly in front of this jury. The cross-examination of Ron Shipp turned out to be very different from what the defense had planned. It became a study of celebrity and of power—indeed, an explanation in microcosm of why O.J. Simpson had murdered his wife and why he thought he could get away with it.

Instead of dismissing the dream comment, Douglas built it up. He began his cross-examination of Shipp by asking a long series of questions to establish that the witness had not disclosed the dream conversation in a number of interviews—with the police, with defense investigators, with Douglas himself. Shipp had essentially admitted all of this on direct examination, but then Douglas made a cardinal error. He asked a “why” question, which allows a witness, in effect, to say anything he wants. Why didn’t you tell these people about the “dream”?

Because, Shipp said, “I really did not want to be really involved in all of this, and I didn’t want to be going down as a person to nail O.J.”

Suddenly, the dream remark wasn’t innocuous; it nailed O.J. Unhappy with this answer, Douglas shot back, “Well, you’re not. So don’t worry about that.” Clark objected, and Ito scolded Douglas. “Counsel, you know better,” the judge said. “The jury is to disregard counsel’s remark.”

Clark smiled at Douglas’s blunder and scribbled a note to Darden:
Thank you, Carl
.

Douglas then set off on another series of questions aimed at proving that Shipp had made up the story about the dream. Why didn’t he tell the police earlier? Wasn’t he just trying to enhance his acting career? Was he acting now? Trying to make himself famous?

Shipp replied with quiet dignity as the attacks grew harsher. “Mr. Douglas,” he said at one point, “I put all my faith in God and my conscience. Since Nicole’s been dead, I’ve felt nothing but guilt, my own personal guilt, that I didn’t do as much as I probably should have.”

Clark wrote it again.
Thank you, Carl
.

There was some irony in this line of attack, because Douglas—and all the other lawyers—knew that Shipp was almost certainly telling the truth about what he had heard Simpson say. Shipp asserted that his conversation with Simpson took place late on Monday night, June 13. Just a few hours earlier that day, Simpson had been interviewed by Vannatter and Lange. In the course of that conversation, Lange had asked Simpson whether Weitzman had talked about his taking a polygraph examination. “What are your thoughts on that?” Lange asked.

“Should I talk about my thoughts on that?” Simpson mused to the detectives. “I’m sure eventually I’ll do it, but it’s like I’ve got some weird thoughts now. I’ve had weird thoughts … You know when you’ve been with a person for seventeen years, you think everything. I’ve got to understand what this thing is. If it’s true blue, I don’t mind.”

When Shipp spoke to Weller, he had no way of knowing what Simpson had said to the police on June 13. Yet Simpson’s comments in the two conversations—to the detectives in the afternoon and to Shipp at night—bore a striking resemblance to one another. The police interview represented strong independent corroboration of Shipp’s account.

Still, Douglas continued to flog Shipp. He suggested that Simpson in fact went to bed at 8:00 or 8:15 on the night of June 13. Shipp denied it. Douglas said other family members would confirm the early bedtime.

Shipp did something extraordinary at that point. Instead of answering Douglas, he started directing his testimony directly to the defendant. “Is that what they are going testify to?” he implored his former patron. As Douglas continued to press the issue, Shipp started shaking his head. After a long pause, he stared again at Simpson and said simply, “This is sad, O.J.”

Simpson wasn’t used to this kind of confrontation from the likes of Ron Shipp. O.J. looked shaken, rubbing his hands nervously. Shapiro noticed this and put his arm around him, as if in protection.

Douglas moved to his big finish for the day. “Were you and he close friends?”

“I would say we were pretty good friends,” Shipp said. “We didn’t—never went out to dinner like on a regular basis and stuff like that.”

Douglas seized on the phrase “regular basis.” He pointed out that Shipp and O.J. almost
never
ate meals together. Shipp readily agreed. In contrast to Douglas’s insinuations, Shipp was not trying to project any false intimacy with O.J. The power of his testimony came from the fact that Shipp knew what a toady he was. He knew he adored and looked up to O.J., and he knew—ultimately—that O.J. couldn’t have cared less about him.

“O.J. Simpson is a football fan, isn’t he?” Douglas asked.

“Yeah, he loves football, yes, he does.”

“He goes to games a lot.”

“Yes, he does,” Shipp replied.

“You and O.J. Simpson have never attended a football game together—”

“Never.”

“—in the twenty-six years that he’s been your supposed friend, have you?”

“Not one.”

“You and your wife have never gone on a double date with Nicole and O.J. Simpson in the entire time that you’ve known them, have you?” Douglas sneered.

“You’re absolutely correct.…” said Shipp.

“All the times that you claim that you were over his house playing tennis, you have never in your entire life played tennis on the same court with O.J. Simpson, have you?”

“Never.”

Then, finally, with disgust: “You’re not really this man’s friend, are you, sir?”

Shipp sighed. “Well, okay. All right. If you want me to explain it, I guess you can say I was like everybody else, one of his servants. I did police stuff for him all the time. I ran license plates. That’s what I was. I mean, like I said, I loved the guy.”

Thank you, Carl
.

15. A DIRTY, FILTHY WORD

T
he voice of a victim from beyond the grave, lawyers always say, never loses its emotional power. Nicole calling 911 on October 25, 1993: “He’s back. Please.… He’s O.J. Simpson. I think you know his record. Could you just send somebody over here?” Weeping: “Could you please send somebody over?”

When Darden played the tape for the jury, the courtroom went absolutely still. Most people who listened to it on that day, including several jurors, had heard portions of the tape at one time or another, so many of Nicole’s words had a familiar sound to them. Yet the playing of the tape in its entirety gave it a fresh meaning—and horror. Nicole could not have feigned the terror in her voice, the trembling, the weeping, as she alternated between beseeching the dispatcher and pacifying her ex-husband.

“Okay, just stay on the line,” the dispatcher said.

“I don’t want to stay on the line. He’s going to beat the shit out of me,” Nicole said, then she drew a long breath to try to calm herself.

There was a simple barometer of Simpson’s reaction to testimony during his trial: The more it hurt, the more he talked. During innocuous testimony, O.J. would sit quietly, doodling or listening in a casual way. But incriminating testimony set him to responding, although he only had Shapiro to his left and Cochran to his right to lobby. Though ultimately unpersuasive to the jury, the domestic-violence evidence particularly set Simpson off. It hit him in the ego, and he played his favorite themes in response: But she wanted to get back together with me. The backdoor to Nicole’s house on
Gretna Green, which Simpson damaged during his October 1993 tirade, was already broken. Simpson yammered through almost the entire playing of the tape. Cochran nodded vacantly at his client; Shapiro winced and tried to ignore him. O.J., oblivious to either reaction, talked on.

It was almost impossible to make out most of what O.J. was saying on the tape, but his voice conveyed astonishing rage, in both the intensity of his tirade and its duration. For the full thirteen and a half minutes of the telephone call, Simpson’s screaming just went on and on, with no diminishment of fury.

Nicole pleaded, “O.J., O.J. The kids. O.J., O.J., the kids are sleeping.” O.J.’s response was one of the few times his words could be made out clearly: “You didn’t give a shit about the kids when you was sucking his dick in the living room. They were here. Didn’t care about the kids then.”

The dispatcher jumped in: “Is he upset with something that you did?”

“A long time ago,” Nicole sighed. “It always comes back.” The reference was to Nicole’s encounter with Keith Zlomsowitch in 1992, which O.J. had observed from his stalking post outside her front windows.

Nicole: “Could you just please, O.J., O.J., O.J., O.J. Could you please leave? Please leave. Please leave.”

“I’m leaving with my two fists is when I’m leaving.”

For all the power of the tape, the next two witnesses demonstrated the limits of Darden’s domestic-violence presentation. Carl Colby and Catherine Boe, husband and wife, had lived next door to Nicole on Gretna Green. They testified that they sometimes saw Simpson standing on the sidewalk looking into Nicole’s house. But it was all pretty vague, especially because O.J.’s children lived there and their father had a right to visit them. Boe was especially spacey. At a sidebar conference, after Darden said, chuckling, “You just never really know what you are going to get from Mrs. Colby,” Cochran chimed in, “She is an alien from another planet.” At one point, when Boe began an exegesis on which varieties of trees around her house shed berries and why O.J. might not have wanted to park his white car beneath them, Darden had to turn his face away from the jury box because he was laughing so hard.

Denise Brown was supposed to be different. She had extensive firsthand exposure to O.J. and Nicole’s relationship, including its darker sides. Since the moment Detective Tom Lange called her parents’ home on the morning after the murders, Denise was convinced that O.J. had murdered her sister. If anyone could explain how this had happened, it would be Nicole’s older sister. When Denise walked to the witness stand on Friday afternoon, February 3, she did not so much as glance at her former brother-in-law.

The four Brown sisters all looked and sounded alike, and they reflected the values of their moneyed Orange County upbringing. All four had breast implants, but not one had a college degree. The two oldest sisters, Denise and Nicole, the brunette and the blonde, came closest to embodying a certain California ideal: lithe, athletic, out for a good time, each a homecoming princess at Dana Point High School. Denise graduated in 1975 and became, briefly, a New York model. Nicole graduated on May 20, 1977, and met O.J. Simpson three weeks later.

Denise circulated on the periphery of Nicole’s life for many years, alternately competitive and supportive, combative and loving. She dated many of Simpson’s friends, including Al Cowlings, boutique owner Alan Austin, and advertising executive Ed McCabe. Married briefly in 1984, Denise had a child with another man several years later. In 1994, she and her son were living in her parents’ home. The month before Nicole’s murder, Denise spent eight days—from May 9 to May 17, 1994—as an inmate in the Huntington Beach jail, after pleading guilty for the second time to drunk-driving charges. (She had pleaded guilty to the same crime in 1992 but was not sentenced to jail.)

Though still beautiful, Denise Brown had an unmistakable hard edge. Taking the stand in a black pantsuit and a large gold cross, she obviously wanted this jury to convict.

“Miss Brown,” Darden began. “You are Nicole Brown’s oldest—older sister?”