Without a Doubt (46 page)

Let’s think through this again: the defense lives and dies on the premise that Mark Fuhrman pocketed one of the murder gloves and carried it to Rockingham. But it couldn’t have happened.
There wasn’t a second glove to steal
.

I thought Riske made a superb witness. He didn’t embellish; he didn’t minimize. Johnnie, however, tried to make Riske out to be an inexperienced klutz.

The officer had found Nicole’s bathtub full of water. Had he tested the temperature?

No.

The officer and his partner had found a cup of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream sitting on a banister inside the house. Did they have it photographed?

No.

Sounds bad, huh?

Well, it isn’t. In fact, it wasn’t within the scope of their responsibilities to do
any
of those things. Riske and his partner were responsible for calling their superiors and securing the crime scene. Period. I made sure to establish this on redirect.

Johnnie then called Officer Riske’s attention to two photos. The first showed the knit hat, the envelope, and the glove in one position; the second showed them at slightly different angles to each other. Johnnie contended that this showed that evidence had been moved while Mark Fuhrman was in the “same general area.”

I leaped in with an objection.

“This is the same thing Mr. Cochran has been doing throughout this trial,” I complained to Ito. “This is another distortion; this is another deception.”

Here’s what I was talking about: between the time the first and second photos were taken, the bodies had been removed from the scene. In one photo, in fact, you could see the toe of Ron Goldman’s boot; in the second, you could not. The simple act of moving the bodies caused the area around them to be disturbed. That’s
why
we take “before and after” photos.

Johnnie was also angling to play a laser disc with isolated segments of a crime-scene video.

Chris tried to block that kick. “We have never been provided a copy of this video,” he told the court. And, indeed, we hadn’t. The tape showed the back of an unidentified cop traipsing straight through a pool of blood on the Bundy walk. An image that, of course, shot to hell our contention that the cops had taken precautions to keep the crime scene intact.

Chris and I argued that there was no way of telling when this video had been taken. It hadn’t been shot by police, so there was no time stamped anywhere on it. You could tell from the sun line that it had to be sometime in the afternoon. And that was all. But, once again, Lance waffled. He disallowed the video, but permitted the defense to show Riske the photo of the unidentified cop to see if he could ID him. Of course, he couldn’t. Riske left the crime scene at 7:15 A.M., and the photo had been taken well after that.

That photo business really galled me. In the lower left-hand corner there was a gray square where something had been blocked out. A TV show’s logo? I beckoned one of our law clerks.

“Get this photo to Suzanne, ASAP,” I whispered. “I need to know who took it and whether it was before or after the crime scene was released. Go now!”

The clerk shot out of the courtroom. By the break, Suzanne had located the source: Darryl Smith, a freelance photographer on assignment for
Inside Edition
. Smith was a very cool guy, about six and a half feet tall. Suzanne arranged for him to come to my office and look at the video.

“Yep,” he said, “that’s mine.”

We watched the original footage, which preceded the shot offered by the defense. It showed the officers taking down the yellow tape and rolling it up. The Bundy crime scene had been broken down! After that, the cops could walk anywhere they pleased. I put Darryl himself on the stand to confirm that the officers were in the clear. Man, was that satisfying.

How, I wondered, did Johnnie think he could get away with a trick like that? Giving your client a vigorous defense is one thing. Deliberate deception is another. But then—did this jury realize that the defense was selling them snake oil, deceiving them with these “before and after” photos? They should have taken that as an insult to their intelligence. Did they realize how cynically the defense was trying to manipulate them? Did they care?

It seemed to me that the boys over at the defense table had whipped each other up into such a macho frenzy that they had totally jettisoned the ethics of our profession. Each was trying to outdo the others with feats of chicanery, which some collective hallucination had allowed them to believe constituted intrepid lawyering. Even refined former law school dean Gerald Uelmen had been sucked into slapping high fives with the guys.

We could not let our guard down. Not for one minute.

My alarm went off at five A.M. It was Sunday, February 12. It was still dark. I was still on duty.

This was the day we were scheduled to take the jury out to see Bundy and Rockingham. Oh, shit. As I stumbled to the shower, I wondered if there was any way to call this thing off.

Believe it or not, the “walk-through” was originally my idea. Taking the jury to the crime scene usually works to a prosecutor’s advantage. Taking murder out of the courtroom and onto the killing grounds makes it less of an abstraction. It gives us an opportunity to turn the jury’s attention back to the victims.

What had started out as a potential blessing for our side went sour once we got down to thrashing out the terms for this field trip. Once again, Lance Ito let us down.

The logical time for our viewing was at night, when, of course, the murders occurred. But Ito made us do it in broad daylight, when Bundy would seem like Main Street USA. Thus the jurors would get no sense of the danger Nicole was in as she descended that small flight of steps into darkness.

The only way Ito would allow us the Bundy visit was if we allowed the defense their “fair share”—which meant taking the jurors to Rockingham. I emphatically did not want the jury to visit O. J. Simpson’s estate. What was the point? The only areas of possible significance at Rockingham were Kato’s room and the south pathway where the glove had been found. I allowed that it might also be marginally useful for the jury to see the layout of the exterior from Allan Park’s point of view. But there was absolutely
no
reason for them go inside the house. The jury—especially
this
jury—would be so dazzled by Simpson’s wealth that it was certain to erect yet another barrier to their ever imagining him a killer.

But the defense argued that an on-scene viewing of the master bedroom was necessary because the bloody socks had been found at the foot of Simpson’s bed. And so, Ito decreed that the itinerary would include Rockingham as well.

Lance Ito’s magical mystery tour began that morning under the Criminal Courts Building, in the lot where the sheriffs bring in the prisoners. It’s a dreary, cavernous place that has always reminded me of Hieronymus Bosch’s vision of hell. A fitting starting point for this junket. Chris, Hank, Scott, Cheri, and our investigators were waiting for me. We all took one van. The defense followed in another. The defendant himself was loaded into one of the sheriff’s cars. The jurors brought up the rear in a bus.

Lance appeared to be having the time of his life. He was ordering deputies around and conferring imperiously with the troops. He’d taken great pains to arrange the security precautions for this outing. But I had no idea what lengths he’d gone to until our little caravan neared the freeway. I’d curled up across a couple of empty seats, trying to catch a few more winks, when I heard Scott Gordon murmur, “Geez!”

I raised my head to an amazing scene. The Ten West was totally empty! In fact, it appeared to have been cleared for miles ahead. Once again, O. J. Simpson had managed to sweep the traffic from the Los Angeles freeways. I swore under my breath. Ito’s sense of pomp and overweening self-importance had turned this into a Spielberg production.

We cruised past Mezzaluna. I was disappointed we didn’t have a chance to stop there. The deputies hadn’t thought to pack us anything to drink, and I’d hoped for a little break to duck into the nearby Starbucks for a cup of coffee. Now I saw that was out of the question anyway. The sidewalks were packed ten deep with spectators straining to get a glimpse of us.

Finally, we arrived at Bundy, where the jurors were issued their instructions. They were to view the site in perfect silence—no questions. Fine. But Ito hadn’t allowed us to make the walk-through clear enough to eliminate the need for questions. We’d asked the court for permission to attach photos of the bodies and evidence on the spots where they had been found; Ito had refused. So we just had to hope that those images were searing enough that even
these
jurors couldn’t fail to remember them now.

What, I wondered, would they see when they looked at this narrow lot, its cement walkway long since scrubbed clean of carnage? For one thing, they had to be struck by how small the place was. Everyone seeing Bundy for the first time remarks upon that. The enclosure where the bodies were found was incredibly tiny. It was difficult to imagine one killer and two victims scuffling in that space. Forget the possibility of
two
killers. It couldn’t happen.

As usual, the jurors’ faces were devoid of expression. Certainly no signs of mental lightbulbs popping. Only one juror, a white man named Tracy Kennedy, was madly scribbling notes. One young black man, Michael Knox, wore a cap and a jacket that read “San Francisco 49ers.” Simpson, of course, hails from that city and once played for the Niners.

Tell us, Mr. Knox. Could you telegraph your sympathies any more clearly?

The jurors were taken in groups of four and five through Nicole’s condo. One lawyer was allowed to tag along with each group. I hadn’t been there since the week of July 4. Now, as I walked in the door, I was shocked. The place was totally bare.

The Brown family, in their haste to put the past behind them, had stripped it to the walls. There was nothing to remind these jurors that a warm, vital woman had once lived here. This played into the defense’s hands very nicely. It’s so much easier to acquit someone of murder when you have no feeling for the victim as a real person. Nicole Brown had been erased from her own home.

It got worse. I’d wanted the jurors to see what a short drive it was between Bundy and Rockingham, to reinforce our contention that Simpson could have made the trip home within five minutes.

No dice. For “security” reasons, we had to take a circuitous detour. I could scarcely contain my fury. The point of this kind of field trip is to allow the jury to see the pertinent scenes under conditions as close as possible to those at the time of the murders. But here,
nothing
was the same. Not the condo, not the route, not the time of day—and certainly not Rockingham.

The defense, of course, was looking forward to showing off that mansion, hoping the jurors would ask themselves,
Why would a guy throw all this away over a woman?
Over our objections the defense had also arranged to have the jury go through Simpson’s trophy room. Ito’s justification? That Ron Shipp had testified to “the magnetism of this particular room.” So now the jurors would have a chance to be equally awed by the symbols of the defendant’s victories on the gridiron.

My only consolation was the thought that the jury would be filing past that wall of photos: Simpson with white fat-cat CEOs, Simpson with white celebrities, Simpson with his white golfing buddies, and, above all, a picture of Nicole on the ski slopes with their children. Those images, at least, would serve as a reminder of how completely the defendant had checked out on the black community.

At Nicole’s condo, O. J. Simpson had managed to keep a surprisingly low profile. By law, a defendant can’t be excluded from a jury view. The Browns had objected so strenuously to the idea of his walking through Nicole’s condo, however, that he’d agreed to stay in the cruiser, out of sight of the jury.

When we reached Rockingham, however, Simpson played the lord come home to the manor. He was supposed to be shackled at the wrists or ankles. This is standard procedure. In fact, a smart defense attorney will often advise his client not to go out on the walk-through for this very reason. You don’t want him paraded before the jury dragging his chains like Marley’s ghost. But in this case, someone had apparently prevailed upon the Sheriff’s Department to leave the cuffs off. As Simpson strolled the grounds with Robert Kardashian, the deputies walked a few respectful paces behind him.

Simpson was so full of swagger that he ventured inside the garage and lifted the tarp that covered his red Ferrari. He turned to a deputy and smirked, “Do you know what TestaRossa means?”

There was sniggering all around. And I thought to myself,
Right. Anything O. J. Simpson wants to do is fine, as long as the guys think it’s funny
.

Lance let the lawyers do the first walk-through. I’d gotten no farther than the foyer when I realized something was very wrong here. On my previous visits, the house had struck me as neglected and lifeless. Now it looked like a squadron of fairies had scrubbed it with Q-Tips. It was gleaming. In the living room, a fire was blazing. Fresh-cut flowers had been artfully arranged in a vase on the side table. But the most dramatic transformation was that collection of photographs.

The Wall of the Fat Cats had been cleansed of Caucasians. Gone were the golfing buddies and shots of Nicole in Aspen. Every single shot contained a black face. Simpson’s mother, his sister, their husbands, their kids. Upstairs, there was even a Norman Rockwell reproduction: the little black girl going to school accompanied by federal marshals. In the bathroom, there was a poster made by Simpson’s children;
that
had not been there on June 13. But the pièce de résistance was the master bedroom. On the mantel above the fireplace sat books on philosophy and religion. On the nightstand, next to a Holy Bible, stood a photo of the defendant’s mother, Eunice.

But these distortions were merely cosmetic compared to the more material misrepresentation I discovered when my little tour party took its turn down the path behind Kato’s room.