The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (7 page)

“I think I saw something on the Bronco,” Fuhrman called to Vannatter.

The senior detective came by to study the vehicle more closely, and the two men agreed that the stains looked like blood. Vannatter directed Fuhrman to run the license plates and see who owned the car. The plates came back to the Hertz Corporation, whose products Simpson had long endorsed.

Vannatter and Lange conferred. They decided that Vannatter would radio a request for a police criminalist to come and test the stain and see if it really was blood on the Bronco door. More generally, as they testified later, Vannatter and Lange were growing concerned about what might have happened inside Simpson’s property. They had just come from the scene of a brutal murder. Someone was supposed to be living at the Simpson home—at least a housekeeper—and there was no answer, even though lights were on. There appeared to be blood on the car outside. As Lange said later in court, “I felt that someone inside that house may be the victim of a crime, maybe bleeding or worse.” Vannatter testified, “After leaving a very violent bloody murder scene, I believed something was wrong there. I made a determination that we needed to go over—to go into the property.” Fuhrman—by far the youngest and fittest of the four detectives on the scene—volunteered. “I can go over the wall,” he said. “Okay, go,” said Lange. Fuhrman hoisted himself over the six-foot-high brick wall, then stepped to his right
and manually opened the hydraulic gate. The four detectives entered O.J. Simpson’s property.

Simpson’s dog—a black chow—did not stir as the detectives passed it on their way to the front door. Vannatter knocked. No answer. They waited two or three minutes, knocked again, and still heard no stirring inside. The four detectives decided to take a look around, and so, still using flashlights in the moments before dawn, they walked together toward the rear of the house. There they saw a row of three guest houses, though they were really more like connected rooms, each with its own entrance. Phillips peered into one.

“There’s—I see someone inside,” he said.

Phillips knocked, and almost immediately a disheveled man who obviously had just awoken answered the door. Shaking his mane of blond hair out of his eyes, Kato Kaelin stared at Phillips, who identified himself and asked, “Is O.J. Simpson home?”

The groggy Kaelin said he didn’t know, but suggested the officers knock at the adjacent guest house, where Simpson’s daughter Arnelle lived. Phillips, accompanied by Vannatter and Lange, then knocked on Arnelle’s door. Fuhrman stayed behind and asked Kaelin if he could come in. Fuhrman noticed that Kaelin seemed disoriented, even for someone who had just awakened. Fuhrman gave Kaelin a standard police test for intoxication: Holding a pen about fifteen inches in front of Kaelin’s face, he watched to see if Kaelin could follow it with his eyes. Kaelin passed—he just
looked
zonked. Fuhrman asked to look around the small suite. As Fuhrman poked around—among other things, checking the shoes in the closet for blood—the detective asked if anything unusual had happened the previous night.

As a matter of fact, something unusual
had
happened. At about 10:45
P.M.
, while he was talking on the telephone, Kaelin said, there were some loud thumps on his bedroom wall, near the air conditioner. The jolts were so dramatic that a picture on the wall was jostled. He had thought there was going to be an earthquake.

The two men chatted a while longer, then Fuhrman walked with Kaelin into the main house, where the other three detectives were
speaking with Arnelle Simpson. Fuhrman then decided to follow up on what Kaelin had told him. He left Kaelin in the house with the other detectives, walked back outside, and tried to orient himself to see what faced the south wall of Kaelin’s bedroom—the wall where Kaelin had heard the loud noises. Fuhrman saw that the south wall faced the edge of Simpson’s property, which was marked by a Cyclone fence, and that there was a narrow passageway between the back of the guest houses and the fence.

“I took out my flashlight and I started walking down the path trying to figure out the residence architecture to figure out where Kaelin’s wall might have been,” Fuhrman testified later. “I saw a long, dark path covered with leaves.” When Fuhrman had walked about twenty feet along the path, he saw a dark object on the ground, but it wasn’t until he was practically upon it that he realized what it was. “At some point,” Fuhrman remembered, “I could tell that it was a glove.”

It looked out of place. There were no leaves or twigs on it, and the glove looked moist or sticky, with some parts adhering to one another. Fuhrman stepped around the glove and kept walking along the path, but he started hitting cobwebs, which he had not previously encountered. He followed the path all the way to the end, which was an untended patch of dirt, then headed back out, passing the glove once more. He didn’t touch it, but he noticed something about it: “It looked similar to the glove on the Bundy scene.”

While Fuhrman had stopped in Kaelin’s room to talk to him, the other three detectives had knocked on Arnelle Simpson’s door, which she promptly answered. Phillips told her there was an emergency, and he needed to speak to her father—did she know how to reach him? Arnelle gestured to the main house and asked, “Isn’t he there?” The officers told Arnelle that her father was apparently not there. Leaving her guest house, Arnelle began walking toward the Ashford gate to see if her father’s car was there—that was where he usually parked it. The detective informed her that the Bronco was in fact parked on Rockingham. Using her key, Arnelle let them into the main house.

On the way they passed the third guest house—it belonged to the housekeeper, Gigi Guarin—and noticed that it was empty, the
bed still made. Once they were inside the main house, Arnelle called Cathy Randa, her father’s longtime secretary, who always knew O.J.’s whereabouts. Arnelle handed the phone to Phillips, who told Randa there was an emergency that required their speaking with Simpson. Randa said he had taken the red-eye flight to Chicago the previous night and was staying at an airport hotel, the Chicago O’Hare Plaza.

Phillips called the hotel at 6:05
A.M.
and asked to be put through to O.J. Simpson’s room. Though he recognized the voice, the detective still asked, “Is this O.J. Simpson?”

“Yes, who is this?”

Phillips chose his words carefully when he delivered news of Nicole’s death to O.J. “This is Detective Phillips from the Los Angeles Police Department. I have some bad news for you. Your ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, has been killed.”

Simpson was distraught. “Oh my God, Nicole is killed? Oh my God, she is dead?”

Phillips tried to calm him. “Mr. Simpson, please try to get ahold of yourself. I have your children at the West Los Angeles police station. I need to talk to you about that.”

“What do you mean you have my children at the police station? Why are my kids at the police station?”

“Because we had no place else to take them,” Phillips answered. “They are there for safekeeping. I need to know what to do with your children.”

“Well, I’m going to be leaving out of Chicago on the first available flight,” Simpson said. “I will come back to Los Angeles.” Phillips then handed the phone to Arnelle, who agreed with her father that she would ask his friend Al Cowlings to pick up the children.

Phillips never spoke to Simpson again. Later, the detective found it worth noting what Simpson did
not
say in their brief conversation. Simpson never asked how or when Nicole had been “killed.” Phillips had not said (and Simpson did not ask) whether she had been killed in an accident or a murder.

The drowsy children waited at the police station for someone to explain what had happened to them. At one point, eight-year-old
Sydney Simpson asked to make a phone call, and she dialed her home number. The answering machine picked up, and Sydney left a message: “Mommy, please call me back. I want to know what happened last night. Why did we have to go to the police station? Please answer, Mommy. Please answer, Mommy. Please answer, Mommy. Please answer. ’Bye.”

3. BEING O.J.

T
he pace of events picked up quickly after Mark Fuhrman discovered the glove on the path behind Kato Kaelin’s room. After Phillips spoke to Simpson in Chicago, Tom Lange had the melancholy duty of notifying Nicole Brown Simpson’s parents of her death. LAPD policy called for detectives to notify a homicide victim’s next of kin in person if possible, but Lange learned from Arnelle that Lou and Juditha Brown lived in Orange County, about seventy-five miles away. Lange knew the media would soon learn about the murders and suspected that if he didn’t speak to Nicole’s parents immediately, they would learn of their daughter’s death from television news reports.

Lou Brown answered the telephone at 6:21
A.M.
He took the news quietly. Lange did not know that Nicole’s sister Denise, the oldest of the four Brown daughters, lived at the family home and that she had picked up the phone on another extension.

Denise began screaming, “He killed her! He finally killed her!”

“Who?” asked Lange.

“
O.J.!
” said Denise.

Meanwhile, behind the house, Fuhrman quickly appreciated the significance of what he had found. The detective later recalled in testimony that “when I found the glove back here on this pathway, I will have to—I have to admit to you that the adrenaline started pumping because I didn’t really know what was going on.… When I found the glove and actually realized this glove was very close in description and color to the glove at the crime scene, my heart
started pounding and I realized what I had probably found.” One by one, Fuhrman took each of the other three detectives down the narrow pathway to study the glove without touching it. They all agreed that based on what they remembered, this right-hand glove looked like a match for the one at Bundy, but Vannatter sent Phillips and Fuhrman back to the murder scene to make a closer comparison. Lange would go back, too, to begin examining the evidence there, while Vannatter would await the criminalist at Rockingham.

The evidence stacked up quickly and led to a plausible theory of events: It appeared that the killer had dropped a left glove in a struggle at the murder scene and then suffered a cut on his exposed left hand. Bleeding, the killer then walked to a car in the back alley—very possibly Simpson’s Bronco. He then traveled to Rockingham where, perhaps in an effort to hide his clothes on the narrow path behind Kato’s room, he had dropped the other glove. “This is a crime scene,” Vannatter declared at Rockingham.