The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (54 page)

But it was not in Marcia Clark’s nature to equivocate. It was, after all, her job to tell the good guys from bad guys, and she had no doubts about her ability to do it. Faced with a problematic witness like Fuhrman, many prosecutors would insist at a minimum that he undergo many hours of grueling mock cross-examination. Such an approach both tests the witness’s veracity and prepares him for what is to come. Clark and her team decided not to bother. Their preparation amounted to about a half an hour of Fuhrman fielding questions while he ate a sandwich. He spent much of the time complaining about the press. The prosecutors commiserated. They stood by their man.

In court, Clark took Fuhrman briefly through his background and then had him tell the jury about the time he responded to a domestic-violence call at Simpson’s home in 1985, when O.J. shattered a Mercedes-Benz window with a baseball bat. Then she moved to a new topic.

“Now, back in 1985 and 1986, sir, can you tell us whether you knew someone or met someone by the name of Kathleen Bell?”

“Yes, I can tell you,” Fuhrman said evenly. “I did not.”

Clark displayed Bell’s original letter to Cochran on the overhead projector. The jurors had the opportunity to study the precise, awful words that Bell said Fuhrman had uttered: that, among other things, Fuhrman wanted “all ‘niggers’ gathered together and killed.” It was one thing for Fuhrman to issue a general denial, but Clark pushed these ugly sentiments right in the jurors’ faces. This gesture was a measure of her confidence in her witness.

Clark then established that Fuhrman had been instructed to watch (what else?)
Larry King Live
when Bell had appeared on the program about a month earlier.

“Did you recognize her?” Clark asked.

“No, I did not.”

Clark continued, “Did the conversation Kathleen Bell describes in this letter occur?”

“No, it did not.”

This entire exchange was little short of madness on Clark’s part. Bell was a credible witness. She had no ax to grind with the defense or the prosecution; indeed, as she had told Larry King, she thought Simpson was guilty. More important, Clark knew that the defense could corroborate Bell’s story with people she had told of Fuhrman’s comments at the time he made them. The psychiatric records established that at least at one time Fuhrman had claimed to harbor similar sentiments. Clark thus had to know that Kathleen Bell was almost certainly telling the truth. Yet still Clark went with her gut—and Fuhrman.

The remainder of her direct examination was uneventful, underlining how minor a role Fuhrman had played in the overall investigation. As Clark intended, Fuhrman’s testimony mostly repeated what the jurors had already heard from Lange and the officers who discovered the bodies. Ultimately, a half dozen police officers made the same point: There was only one glove at the murder scene on Bundy Drive. With Fuhrman, the idea was to show (correctly) that there never was a second glove to move to Rockingham and, furthermore, that even if he had wanted to, Fuhrman never had the opportunity to move or plant any evidence. Clark also had the opportunity to finish the week with a flourish. Fuhrman testified that while he was examining the Bronco on the sidewalk outside Simpson’s home, he saw through a window a large heavy-duty plastic bag and a shovel. With great ceremony, Clark presented Fuhrman with a package wrapped in brown paper and police-evidence tape. She asked Fuhrman to unseal it, and he ripped the bag open and described what he saw.

“It appears to be a bag that’s approximately three foot by four or five feet,” Fuhrman said.

“And is that the plastic that you recall seeing in the rear cargo area?” Clark asked.

“Yes, it is.”

Fuhrman held it up. No one needed to point out that it looked like a human being could fit right inside—a sinister image for the jurors to savor all weekend long.

Over that weekend, thanks to the televised broadcast of the trial, Bronco owners arose. They made telephone calls to the prosecution,
the defense, even to the judge. Clark’s demonstration had suggested quite a bit more than the facts allowed. She had to begin the following week with a rather important, and sheepish, clarification.

“Now, that plastic,” Clark said. “Do you happen to know whether it belongs in a Bronco or anything about it?”

“Well, now I do,” Fuhrman replied.

“And what is that?”

“The spare-tire bag”—standard equipment that comes with all Ford Broncos. (And O.J. generally used the shovel as a pooper-scooper for his dog.)

On that anticlimactic note, Clark turned over Mark Fuhrman to F. Lee Bailey.

“Good cross-examination,” Bailey once wrote, “suffers at the hands of public misunderstanding. This achieves serious proportions because it is the public that fills our jury boxes. Too many jurors are waiting for Perry Mason; they expect the lawyer to bring the witness to the point where he cries out that the defendant is innocent, that
he’s
the one who killed the go-go dancer. Well, it happens—on television.”

There was just such a public expectation when Bailey rose to cross-examine Fuhrman, but it was largely Bailey’s own fault. He was so hungry for the spotlight—and so embarrassed by his meager role to date in the trial—that he held a series of press conferences in the courthouse lobby during Fuhrman’s direct examination to announce how much he was looking forward to cross-examination. “Any lawyer in his right mind who would not be looking forward to cross-examining Mark Fuhrman is an idiot,” Bailey said, adding that he thought Fuhrman was comparable to Hitler. Bailey built expectations so high that even Perry Mason himself couldn’t have matched them.

In a display of brooding courtroom machismo, Bailey had not objected a single time during Clark’s direct examination, preferring instead to smirk silently as Fuhrman told his story. But when his turn came, Bailey rushed to the podium in a burst of manic energy. He bounced on the balls of his feet as he asked questions.

He began by driving home Clark’s folly with the plastic sheet. “After nine months of investigation, you discovered on Saturday that this important piece of evidence was perfectly innocuous, is that right?”

Clark objected, but the point was made.

Bailey, however, was so pumped with adrenaline that he couldn’t focus on any subject for more than a few moments. He talked about Fuhrman’s educational background—a high school dropout, Fuhrman later received an equivalency degree—and then the lawyer jumped to the domestic-violence incident at the Rockingham house in 1985. Bailey returned to Fuhrman’s activities on the night of the murder, and then he was off to the marine recruiting station where Kathleen Bell used to visit. As Bailey meandered on, Fuhrman grew confident enough to venture a little joke. Asked about Bell, the detective said, “The name Bell does not ring a bell.”

Bailey grew frustrated, and by the end of the day, he was ready for a desperate lunge.

“Did you wipe a glove in the Bronco, Detective Fuhrman?”

This surprised the witness. Since Fuhrman did not know whether O.J. Simpson was even in the United States at the time of the murders, it was preposterous enough to suggest that he would take a bloody glove to plant at his house. But the idea that Fuhrman, or anyone for that matter, would use the glove as a sort of paintbrush to spread incriminating evidence—well, it was actually kind of amusing. (In the age of AIDS, the health risks alone to the glove planter would seem to render the suggestion absurd.) Yet there was an insidious cleverness to Bailey’s conjecture. If Fuhrman had wiped the glove in the Bronco, it would explain how Goldman’s blood wound up there. (In fact, after the trial, several jurors mentioned this as a possibility.)

Fuhrman gave a small smile, a faint chuckle of perverse admiration. But all he said was, “No.”

“You did not?” Bailey asked again.

“No.”

Bailey made no progress that day in budging Fuhrman from his story about his activities on the night of the murders; indeed, he never would. So the following morning, Bailey sought greener pastures: Fuhrman’s racial views. In a pretrial ruling, Judge Ito had
held that the defense could question Fuhrman about his alleged statements to Kathleen Bell but not his comments to the psychiatrists in his disability case; those remarks, Ito ruled, were too remote in time to be relevant. On the morning of March 14, however, Bailey asked Ito to allow him to cross-examine Fuhrman about additional examples of his hostility to blacks. Bailey was willing to plumb the most obscure corners of Fuhrman’s life to shift the focus away from the bloody corpses at Bundy. Using Kathleen Bell as his wedge, Bailey sought to turn the Simpson trial into an examination of the social life at a marine recruiting station ten years earlier. Bailey wanted to ask about a statement that Fuhrman allegedly made in the presence of Andrea Terry, a friend of Kathleen Bell’s, at a bar in Redondo Beach. Terry said Fuhrman had asserted that for a black man and a white woman to be together was a “crime against nature.” According to Bailey, another witness, a former marine named Maximo Cordoba, would testify that at the recruiting station, Fuhrman had called him a nigger.

Clark couldn’t refute the Terry remark, and Ito let Bailey ask about it. But the prosecutor professed amazement at the Cordoba request. “We have interviewed Max Cordoba a long time ago,” Clark said. “He never made such a statement, and he never alleged that Mark Fuhrman ever made such a statement.”

Bailey loved twitting Clark, and he spoke in a near shout when he rose to refute her. Cordoba, Bailey vowed, would indeed say that Fuhrman had called him a nigger. “Your Honor,” Bailey said gravely, “I have spoken with him on the phone personally, marine to marine. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he will march up to that witness stand and tell the world what Fuhrman called him on no provocation whatsoever.” In light of this disagreement about what Cordoba would say, Ito ruled that Bailey could ask Fuhrman about it only after the prosecution had had a chance to interview Cordoba again.

Another fruitless day of cross-examination followed. Bailey tried to impeach Fuhrman with his testimony from the preliminary hearing. At one point in that testimony, Fuhrman had appeared to refer to more than one glove at the murder scene, using the plural “them.” But Fuhrman easily turned aside this line of questioning, pointing out that he was referring to the glove and cap as “them.”
Bailey asked about Bell’s friend Andrea Terry, whom the height-obsessed Bailey referred to as “attractive but tall.” Fuhrman claimed never to have met her. But she’s “over six feet high”? Still Fuhrman claimed no memory—and still Bailey made no progress.

That night, March 14, the NBC program
Dateline
broadcast an interview with Max Cordoba in which the ex-marine asserted that Fuhrman had called him a nigger ten years ago. It was all so ludicrously distant from the issues at hand, like a situation comedy playing on another channel: Max and the wacky crew of a beachfront marine recruiting station meet the flirty real estate agent from upstairs, Kathleen, who tries to fix up the handsome cop, Mark, with her excessively tall friend, Andrea. (Bailey even wanted the man who ran “the ladies’ wear shop next door” to testify.) Curiously, Cordoba also asserted on
Dateline
that he had never spoken to Bailey—marine to marine, or otherwise. Clark played that excerpt from the broadcast the first thing the next morning in court.

Bailey was even more red-faced than usual, furious. He said that he
had
spoken to Cordoba, he just hadn’t discussed the facts of the case with him; Bailey had left that to Pat McKenna. In a phone call late the previous night, Bailey said, Cordoba had acknowledged to him that he had been mistaken on
Dateline
.

Now it was Clark who had the spring in her step when she took to the podium. She wasn’t buying Bailey’s subtle distinctions. “This is the kind of nonsense that gives lawyers a bad name, Your Honor,” she said. “He was intending to convey to the court that he had personal knowledge of what this man said because this man said it to him personally”—and here Clark puffed up her chest and parodied Bailey—“ ‘marine to marine,’ and now he is standing up and hairsplitting with us.”