The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (62 page)

The detectives set out to learn where and when—and, if possible, by whom—the gloves had been purchased, and they started with only one clue: the gloves themselves. Each glove bore a tag with the trade name Aris, the size (extra-large), and the style number (70263). A phone call to the Aris Isotoner company revealed that the prosecution had caught a break. Even though Aris was the biggest glove company in the world—selling about 4 million pairs a year—this particular style number constituted only a tiny part of its inventory. Even better, as far as the prosecutors were concerned, this style was sold only at one chain of stores in the United States: Bloomingdale’s. When Phil Vannatter tracked down Richard Rubin, who had been the general manager of the Aris Isotoner glove business in the early 1990s, Rubin told him, “You have no idea how rare those gloves are.”

So the investigators took it a step further. They asked Nicole Brown Simpson’s parents if they could locate her old credit card bills. The Browns turned them over, and Vannatter and Lange carefully looked through them to see if there might be a charge for a glove purchase at Bloomingdale’s. To their astonishment and delight, there was—right around Christmas 1990.

The detectives then enlisted the assistance of the FBI, which sent agents to Bloomingdale’s in New York to locate the actual sales receipt. They were lucky again. According to a receipt, on December 18, 1990, Nicole Brown Simpson bought two pairs of “Aris Lights” leather gloves at the Bloomingdale’s flagship store in New York. Researching further, the detectives found that while Bloomingdale’s had received about twelve thousand pairs of Aris Lights in 1990, only three hundred were brown and size extra-large—and just two hundred of those had been sold.

Besides the DNA evidence, this sales receipt may have been the most incriminating evidence in the entire case. Who else in Los Angeles except O.J. Simpson would have had access to these extremely rare gloves? Who else except O.J. Simpson would have used them to murder his ex-wife? Even if one accepted the defense theory that Fuhrman had planted one glove at Rockingham, the record of Nicole’s purchase of the gloves amounted to devastating evidence of her ex-husband’s guilt in her murder. It is therefore all the more astonishing that the day prosecutors presented this evidence to the jury turned out to be the single best day of the trial—for their adversaries.

The conclusion of Lakshmanan’s horrific (and interminable) testimony left the participants in the case with an almost giddy sense of exhaustion. Even the defense team welcomed the glove evidence as a respite from Lakshmanan’s catalogue of severed arteries and transected jugulars. When the doctor finished his testimony just before lunch on Thursday, June 15, the defense lawyers spent much of the break examining—and goofing around with—the gloves. Just about every lawyer tried them on. When Richard Rubin, the prosecution’s glove expert, came to court and subjected the gloves to an almost comically meticulous examination, defense investigator Pat McKenna quipped, “Who is this guy—the Dr. Lee of Bloomingdale’s?”

The lunchtime hijinks did have one important ramification. Shapiro and Cochran noticed that the gloves, even though size extra-large, were not very big—and Simpson’s hands were. In the L.A. county jail, the defense lawyers had spent months greeting
Simpson with the customary jailhouse handshake, palm-to-palm contact against bullet-proof glass. They had seen his hands every day. The gloves, they suddenly realized, might not fit.

The subject of the gloves’ fit was also on the prosecutors’ minds that afternoon. Bill Hodgman was in his office preparing material for the cross-examination of Simpson, if he decided to take the stand. Sometime earlier, the prosecutors had examined the gloves and found just how tight they were. Phil Vannatter, who has a big, meaty fist, had put the gloves on and had noticed the snugness. This was intentional on the part of the maker, for the Aris Light was a very unusual model. Made from extremely thin leather, more like a woman’s style, it was meant to feel very light for a cashmere-lined man’s glove. It was designed to fit closely, almost like a racing glove.

At lunch, Clark and Hodgman discussed whether they should put the evidence gloves on Simpson’s hands. They decided it wasn’t worth the risk. These gloves were several years old, had been through extensive DNA testing, and had several small samples of the leather cut out. The two lawyers figured that all the wear and tear might have made them shrink. Worse, Simpson would have to wear latex gloves underneath the evidence gloves, which would almost certainly alter the fit. Especially when the latex gloves were taken into account, there were simply too many variables to risk a demonstration. Mostly, though, they feared that Simpson himself would control the experiment. Clark passed the word to Darden just after lunch.

“Don’t do it.”

Darden nodded agreement. Even though he’d had the eight-day duration of Lakshmanan’s testimony to prepare his next witness, Darden had never spoken to Richard Rubin before the former glove-company executive arrived in Los Angeles the day before his testimony. When they did speak, Darden never asked Rubin a single question about the size of the gloves, their fit, or their condition. In other words, Darden called Rubin to the stand virtually cold.

Earlier that day, Darden had called Brenda Vemich, who had been the Bloomingdale’s glove buyer, to testify about the receipt from Nicole’s purchase of the gloves in 1990. Cochran couldn’t do much with Vemich on cross-examination, so Darden was feeling pretty confident when Rubin followed her to the stand.

Rubin’s direct testimony was actually very brief—no more than ten minutes—and had nothing to do with the size of the gloves. He testified solely to explain that Aris had delivered only about three hundred pairs of brown extra-large Aris Lights to Bloomingdale’s in 1990. After a rather aimless cross-examination by Cochran, Rubin was about to be excused.

Just then, though, a paralegal arrived in the courtroom with a pair of gloves—a new pair—from the prosecution headquarters on the eighteenth floor. When Darden looked like he was going to use them for a demonstration as part of Rubin’s redirect testimony, Cochran asked to approach the bench. There Darden whispered to Ito, “I would like to lay the foundation to show they are the exact same size, similar make and model so that perhaps we can have Mr. Simpson try them on at some point to determine whether or not the gloves found at the scene and at his home will fit him.”

Cochran objected, and Ito had an understandable reaction: “I think it would be more appropriate for him to try the other gloves on … I mean, the real gloves that were found.”

Clark had a ready (and appropriate) response, the same one she had discussed with Hodgman and Darden earlier: “The only problem is,” she told Ito, “he has to wear latex gloves underneath, because they’re a biohazard, and they’re going to alter the fit.”

Ito decided to excuse the jury for a moment to let Rubin examine the new gloves and determine if they were the same model as those in evidence. As the jury was filing out, F. Lee Bailey sidled over to Darden. Almost as much as Cochran, Bailey knew how to push Darden’s buttons. “You have the balls of a stud field mouse,” Bailey whispered to Darden. “If you don’t have O.J. try them on, I will.” With that, Bailey had baited the hook. When the jury was out, Rubin said that the new pair was not the same model as the evidence gloves, so Ito disallowed their use. (Darden, of course, had discussed none of this with Rubin in advance.) Flustered, Darden told Ito, “Before the jury returns”—that is,
outside
the presence of the jury—“we would like to have Mr. Simpson try on the original evidence items.”

But Ito was momentarily distracted by another subject, and he invited the jury back in before Darden could conduct the demonstration with the evidence gloves. Embarrassed by his own lack of
preparation, and goaded by Bailey, Darden barreled ahead—now in front of the jury.

“Your Honor,” Darden said, “at this time the People would ask that Mr. Simpson step forward and try on the glove recovered at Bundy as well as the glove recovered at Rockingham.” Seated beside Darden, Marcia Clark widened her eyes in astonishment. They had discussed this very subject. Darden had said he was not going to do this. Barely a minute before, Darden had said he was only going to do it outside the presence of the jury. Clark thought about saying something, risking the humiliation of her colleague by saying, “No! Stop!” But she kept her seat.

Ito’s clerk passed a box of latex gloves to the defense table. For several agonizing minutes, Simpson struggled to get the thin rubber over his hands—and plainly failed to get the latex gloves on all the way. Light shined through the gloves between each of Simpson’s fingers. Thus, even before Darden handed the evidence gloves to the defendant, it was clear that they could not fit over the latex.

Darden walked over to Simpson and said, “I’m handing Mr. Simpson the left glove, Rockingham.” (This, too, was wrong—the left glove came from Bundy, the right from Rockingham.)

Darden asked Simpson to walk toward him and the jury, and both Cochran and one of the sheriff’s deputies came with the defendant, creating a traffic jam in front of the jury box. As Simpson walked, he began trying to put on the left glove.

At all times, Simpson kept his thumb bent outward at a right angle to his wrist. That, too, made it impossible for the gloves to fit properly. O.J. grimaced and said more or less to Cochran, but really to the jury, “Too tight.”

“Your Honor,” Darden said, his voice now trembling, “apparently Mr. Simpson seems to be having a problem putting the glove on his hand.”

Johnnie Cochran, stifling a smile, properly objected to Darden’s narration of the event. Simpson struggled with the right-hand glove, and then began pounding between his fingers as if he were actually trying to make the gloves fit. But the bunched latex limited how far the gloves could go, and Simpson never pushed between his thumb and forefinger, where the angle was really preventing the gloves from going all the way onto his hands.

Darden noticed Simpson’s cocked thumb and said, “Can we ask him to straighten his fingers and extend them into the glove as one normally might put a glove on?”

Ito said yes, but Cochran burst in again: “Your Honor, object to this statement by counsel.” Still, because the demonstration was completely under Simpson’s control, the defendant simply ignored the request to straighten his fingers.

Recognizing the catasphrophe he had wrought, Darden tried to salvage something. “Could we ask him to grasp an object in his hand, a marker perhaps, Your Honor?” Simpson took a marker and held it in his fist the way a baby would, with his thumb still splayed out. Panicking even more, Darden asked Simpson to simulate a stabbing motion, but Cochran scotched that idea with an indignant objection.

Ito sent Simpson back to his seat. O.J. slipped the gloves off in a flash, which would not have been possible if they were really too tight.

Floundering, Darden asked to approach the bench. As he did, Alan Dershowitz, who was making a rare appearance in the courtroom, had to cover his mouth to keep from laughing out loud at the fiasco. Darden secured permission for Rubin to place his hand against Simpson’s to determine if the gloves should have fit. Ito approved, and Rubin placed his palm against the defendant’s.

Back at the podium, Darden asked Rubin, “Should the gloves shown to you here in court today have fit Mr. Simpson’s hand in your opinion?”

“At one point in time,” Rubin replied, “those gloves would be actually, I think, large on Mr. Simpson’s hand.”

Prodded by Clark, Darden asked, “Could you tell whether or not he was intentionally holding his thumb in a certain position so that he couldn’t put the gloves on?”

It was an argumentative and speculative question, and Ito prohibited it. Then the judge called it a day.

Back on the eighteenth floor, Darden—shell-shocked by the experience—sank into his office chair. Hodgman sought him out and said, “C’mon, Chris, we’re trial lawyers. There’s a way out of this.” In the book he wrote later, Darden gave a self-pitying account of the aftermath of the demonstration—“I passed my colleagues in
the hallway and they were silent”—but others on the team remembered that several people approached him to offer support. It was certainly true that Hodgman invited Rubin into Darden’s office, and within minutes of the end of the court day, they were all planning how to undo the mess.

It was also true, however, that Clark did not speak to Darden. As she was driving home from the courthouse that day, she called her friend Lynn Reed Baragona on her car phone. “Do you think this is it?” Clark asked, not really wanting an answer. “Do you think it’s over now?”