The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (53 page)

In the end, the jurors did not return to the courtroom until Monday, March 6—
nine days
after they had last heard testimony.
The Lopez interlude amounted to another example of the prosecution’s bad luck and the defense’s good fortune. Cochran had been livid when Ito ruled that Lopez’s testimony would not be presented live to the jury. But if the jurors had been present, they would have seen this witness implode on cross-examination. As a result of this defense “loss,” Cochran could decide later whether he wanted to show the tape of her testimony to the jury. (In a characteristic show of defense-team harmony, Shapiro told reporters after Lopez stepped down that the defense would decide later whether the jury would see her testimony; that same night, F. Lee Bailey went on
Larry King Live
to declare that the defense would definitely be playing the Lopez tape to the jury.) Ultimately, of course, the defense would decide not to play the tape.

The real loser in the Lopez episode was Lance Ito. The handling of Lopez’s testimony represented an appalling piece of judicial mismanagement. At great expense to Los Angeles County, Ito forced the sequestered jurors to sit in their hotel for all that time—just so the defense could call a witness who didn’t help either side very much. Not once over those nine days did the judge hurry the lawyers along. As so often happened in moments of stress for the judge, he simply froze.

When her testimony concluded, Rosa Lopez did indeed return to her remote hometown of Sensuntepeque, El Salvador. There was one fitting postscript. In April 1995, a comedian from Baltimore named Mike Gabriel traveled to El Salvador hoping, on a lark, to meet Rosa. He managed to find her, and they took a few photographs together. When Gabriel—who performs as a “sensei” mystic, teaching yoga to cats—returned to the States, he announced that he and Rosa were engaged to be married. The hoax succeeded beyond Gabriel’s greatest hopes. For many months, the pending nuptials were reported deadpan in any number of newspaper reports, magazines, and television shows. Rosa Lopez, still single, has never returned to the United States.

17. “IN THE PAST TEN YEARS,
DETECTIVE FUHRMAN …”

A
fter the conclusion of Detective Lange’s long-delayed testimony just before lunch on March 9, the trial reached a critical juncture.

“The People call Detective Mark Fuhrman,” said Marcia Clark.

Neither side made even a pretense of treating Fuhrman as just another witness. His arrival was timed with military precision. Before most witnesses in the trial were summoned to Ito’s courtroom, they waited in the ninth-floor hallway, chatting nervously with passersby. Not Fuhrman. The D.A.’s office had gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate him from any unplanned encounters. Unlike any other witness in the case, Fuhrman came down from the district attorney’s headquarters on the eighteenth floor on the freight elevator—the same one used by the jurors. Even the prosecutors crammed into the passenger elevators along with all the other courthouse denizens, but the D.A.’s office didn’t want to take that chance with Fuhrman. And unlike other witnesses, Fuhrman walked into court surrounded by a quartet of beefy bodyguards, investigators assigned to the district attorney. Clark’s examination promptly bore out the metaphor implicit in Fuhrman’s arrival: She—and her office—were protecting him.

In the flesh, Mark Fuhrman was an imposing figure, a muscular six foot three inches, the first man in the courtroom who appeared a physical match for the defendant. He fit perfectly into his blue suit, and his white shirt and red-print tie made a handsome match to his freshly cut dirty-blond hair. The room perked up when
Fuhrman walked in, and even O.J. Simpson looked a touch startled by the detective’s commanding physical presence.

Marcia Clark stepped to the podium, cocked her head to one side, and asked her first question as if it had just popped into her head. (It was, in fact, carefully planned.)

“Detective Fuhrman, can you tell us how you feel about testifying today?”

“Nervous,” Fuhrman said, not at all nervously.

“Okay,” Clark prompted.

“Reluctant,” Fuhrman continued.

“Can you tell us why?” she asked.

“Throughout—since June thirteenth, it seems that I have seen a lot of the evidence ignored and a lot of personal issues come to the forefront. I think that is too bad.”

“Okay,” Clark said. “Heard a lot about yourself in the press, have you?”

“Daily,” Fuhrman said gravely.

“In light of that fact, sir, you have indicated that you feel nervous about testifying,” Clark went on. “Have you gone over your testimony in the presence of several district attorneys in order to prepare yourself for court and the allegations that you may hear from the defense?”

“Yes.”

Clark asked if this preparation session concerned the events at Bundy and Rockingham.

“No,” said Fuhrman.

“It dealt with side issues, sir?”

“Yes, it was.… It seems that the issues we were concerned with weren’t evidentiary in nature or about the crime; mostly of a personal nature.”

Clark paused, soaking up the answers from her witness, and then turned to her pad and the beginning of the conventional portion of her direct examination. “Can you tell us how you are employed right now?…”

Seen on its own terms, Clark’s unorthodox introduction of Fuhrman to the jury succeeded. Under her sympathetic questioning, Mark Fuhrman presented himself as an earnest civil servant who tried to do his job in the face of unwarranted and irrelevant
personal attacks. Clark’s message to the jury could not have been clearer: Here before you is a good man.

Seen in retrospect—indeed, even in light of what Clark knew at the time—her examination of Fuhrman stands as her biggest miscalculation of the trial.

This critical set piece in the Simpson trial—the testimony of Mark Fuhrman—represented another illustration, in microcosm, of why the trial ended the way it did. The prosecution’s arrogance led it to disaster. The defense’s obsession with race led it to victory.

There was no mystery in the nature of the defense’s line of attack on Fuhrman. More than seven months before he took the stand, my story in
The New Yorker
had shown that the defense would attempt to portray the detective as first and foremost a racist but also, more speculatively, as the man who had planted the right-hand glove on Simpson’s property. But that story was only the beginning. As often happened in the Simpson case, a disclosure in the media flushed out additional people with similar stories to tell. In the case of Mark Fuhrman, my story provoked several people to come forward with tales of his racist behavior—a reaction that should have served as a warning to the prosecution.

After “An Incendiary Defense” hit the newsstands on Monday, July 18, 1994, one person who saw a television report about it was Kathleen Bell. The report so startled her that she was moved to write a letter to Simpson’s attorneys.

“I’m writing to you in regards to a story I saw on the news last night,” Bell wrote to Johnnie Cochran on July 19, 1994. “I thought it was ridiculous that the Simpson defense team would even suggest that their [
sic
] might be racial motivation in the trial against Mr. Simpson. I then glanced up at the television and was quite shocked to see that Officer Ferman [
sic
] was a man that I had the misfortune of meeting. You may have received a message from your answering service last night that I called to say that Mr. Ferman may be more of a racist than you can even imagine.”

Bell went on to write that she had worked as a real estate agent in Redondo Beach in 1985 and 1986. Her office was above a marine recruiting station where Fuhrman sometimes visited friends. “I remember
him distinctly because of his height and build,” Bell wrote. Talking about his police work one day, “Officer Ferman said that when he sees a ‘nigger’ (as he called it) driving with a white woman, he would pull them over. I asked would if [
sic
] he didn’t have a reason, and he said that he would find one. I looked at the two Marines to see if they knew he was joking, but it became obvious to me that he was very serious. Officer Ferman went on to say that he would like nothing more than to see all ‘niggers’ gathered together and killed. He said something about burning them or bombing them. I was too shaken to remember the exact words he used.…” Bell gave Cochran her name and number, and her story surfaced in the news media as well, several months before the trial began.

On that same day—July 19, 1994—a deputy district attorney named Lucienne Coleman was going about her business in the Criminal Courts Building when she happened to run into LAPD detective Andy Purdy. Having seen the same reports Bell had seen, Coleman mentioned in passing that she thought it was absurd that the defense was alleging Fuhrman had planted evidence. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all,” Purdy answered. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Purdy went on to say that shortly after he married a Jewish woman a few years before, Fuhrman had painted swastikas on Purdy’s locker. A few weeks after receiving this news, Coleman ran into some other officers who said they had heard Fuhrman making remarks about Nicole Brown Simpson’s “boob job.” Coleman did the responsible thing. In early August 1994, she brought these remarks to the attention of Marcia Clark and Bill Hodgman.

Coleman had once been among Clark’s closest friends in the office. The two women and their husbands had socialized together for several years. But as often happens in divorces, the Clarks’ friends had taken sides in their divorce, and Lucienne had taken Gordon’s. That, inevitably, cooled her relationship with Marcia, so Lucienne Coleman was a messenger Clark was only too pleased to shoot.

“This is bullshit!” Clark cried when Coleman mentioned the reports about Fuhrman. “This is bullshit being put out by the defense!” Hodgman reacted less passionately, but he also appeared to pay Coleman’s report little mind. Clark told Coleman to take her complaints to the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division.

In fact, Fuhrman’s reputation was such that it almost reached into my own family. On the Friday after my story about Fuhrman came out, my wife called me from her office at the large corporation in Manhattan where she worked. One of her colleagues, a young African-American business-school graduate named Jarvis Bowers, had noticed the publicity about my story and sought advice about reporters who were now calling him about his link to Fuhrman. Jarvis had grown up in Los Angeles, and one day in 1984, when he was eighteen, he and his father had gone to a movie in Westwood. Officer Mark Fuhrman stopped Jarvis for jaywalking, put him in a choke hold, and threatened to kill him. Bowers was so outraged that he filed an official complaint against Fuhrman, which was sustained; the officer was docked one day’s pay.

Clearly, then, there was not just smoke but fire in Fuhrman’s past. Clark, though, had her own method of determining whether Fuhrman was telling the truth: She simply asked him about the charges. He confessed that the psychiatric reports revealed in
The New Yorker
were genuine, but he said those problems were long in the past. Kathleen Bell? A liar. Swastikas? Never happened. Fuhrman even had an impressive character witness within the district attorney’s office. In recent years, the detective had worked closely with a prosecutor based in Santa Monica named Danette Meyers, a black woman. (Fuhrman had actually called Meyers to warn her that the
New Yorker
story was coming out and to make the case that he was a changed man.) Meyers told the Simpson prosecutors that Mark Fuhrman had never showed her the slightest hint of racism, and she gave him high marks as a detective and as a person.

There were several ways the prosecution could have taken the middle ground with respect to Mark Fuhrman. Clark could simply have avoided calling him. She could have introduced the glove found at Rockingham through Lange or Vannatter, who had both seen it in its untouched state on the path behind Kaelin’s room. That strategy would have prompted some mockery from the defense—“They’re hiding him!”—but such criticism wouldn’t have amounted to much, because Simpson’s attorneys could always have called Fuhrman themselves. Similarly, Clark could have
called Fuhrman but shown the jury—through both verbal and nonverbal signals—that the prosecution was not embracing the detective. A brief, chilly direct examination would have sufficed.