Without a Doubt (57 page)

I had a new lawyer, Judy Forman. She was not only a decent person she would become one of my closest friends and confidantes but also one tough cookie. Judy was trying to make sure that certain issues presented in the divorce case were kept confidential.

Chris knew the stress I was under and he offered to go with me to family court. I always declined. I didn’t want to burden him with my problems. He had his own share of sorrow. His brother, Michael, was dying of AIDs. As I listened to Chris describe Michael’s skull-like face and impossibly shrunken body, I knew this deathwatch was sheer agony for him. I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t ask for help unless I was desperate.

As the custody case progressed, though, desperate was exactly what I became. Gordon’s lawyers were demanding to take my deposition. That process could run on for days, during which time I would be subjected to intense personal questioning, about my private life… everything. Depositions in custody matters are harrowing under the most ordinary circumstances. These were not ordinary.

I was under the worst pressure I’d ever experienced. I was in the middle of this incredible trial. I was exhausted. One afternoon the thought of doing the deposition simply overwhelmed me. I sat at my desk staring dumbly at the documents in front of me, unable to focus.

I looked up to see Chris standing at the door. His expression was concerned. He knew what was going down.

“I’ll go with you,” he said quietly.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, I’m not. I’ll go with you. You know I got your back, G.”

Chris did go with me. I can’t tell you what went down at the deposition. The custody case file has been sealed at my request, in the interests of protecting my children. It severely limits what I myself can say. But I can tell you this. Being able to exchange supportive glances with my
compadre
and joke with him during the breaks made a huge difference to me. I’ll never forget it.

Come the last week in March, Chris was taking a trip to the Bay Area to visit his family. He also wanted to spend some time with his teenaged daughter, Jenee. It was sweet to hear him talk about her. He was a tender, doting father. Of course, San Francisco was my old stamping ground; I said wistfully that I missed the place.

“Wanna join me?” he asked.

It was a weekend when the boys would be with their father. So 1 thought about it. The Bay. Long walks. Irish coffees. A world that had nothing to do with this craziness.

“I sure as hell would.”

We made the five-hour drive in Chris’s Toyota Camry. I was so paranoid about being spotted that when we stopped at a gas station, I pulled the hood of my parka over my face. But the farther north we got, the more relaxed I felt. We could talk for once without running the risk of being overheard. We vented about Fuhrman, Johnnie, Ito, the goddamned media. TFC, TFC, This Fucking Case.

“When this is over,” I told him, “I’m gonna take about a year off and do nothing but read murder mysteries and play with my kids.”

“Man, I’ll tell you what,” he replied. “When this case is over, I’m gonna take about a year off and do nothing but kick it in my crib, drink beer, and watch the games.”

Is it me, or do men seem to lack imagination?

That weekend I was in a state of absolute euphoria. Chris and I checked into the Fairmont—taking separate rooms, for those of you keeping score. He introduced me to his family. One night his sisters and I went out to a place near the wharf. People recognized us—hell, all that airtime had made us the two most recognizable civil servants in the country—but they kept their distance. I felt lighter, more hopeful than I had in months. It seemed possible that someday life might return to normal.

On the trip home I remained enveloped in this euphoria, until we stopped at a fast-food joint. I ran inside to pick up a quick dinner. I hadn’t been standing in line but a few seconds when I felt it. People were staring. We must be getting close to L.A. I fumbled for my wallet, grabbed the bags, and ran back to the car.

The weekend had been an illusion. Nothing had changed. I was still a featured player in a freak show. There was nothing I could do to keep back the tears.

Chris, who was about to pull out of the lot, caught me in a sidelong glance and said, “Hey, what’s up with you?”

Last he knew, we were having a pretty good time.

“I can’t face it,” I whispered, tears now streaming freely down my cheeks. “I want it all to be over.”

“Yeah, me too,” Chris said quietly. “But look at the bright side. People all over the world are naming their baby girls Marcia.
Marcia, Marcia, Marcia
. They’ll probably come out with Marcia dolls. They’ll argue with everyone and accuse them of wearing gloves in size small.”

A few seconds into this riff I was doubled over with laughter and coming back with my own ideas for a Chris doll. It would say “Mmm, ummm, hummm” after everything and get held in contempt.

We laughed the rest of the way home. Once again, Chris had snatched me back from the brink of despair.

There’s been a lot of speculation about whether Chris and I were lovers. And if there’s any one of you out there with lingering curiosity on this point, I’m truly sorry. The question is irrelevant. Fact of the matter is, Chris Darden and I were closer than lovers. And unless you’ve been through what we went through, you can’t possibly know what that means.

T
he Big Picture

CAR TAPE.
April 18. I haven’t been talking much because my life is so painful I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to pretend it’s not there. Everything seems like it’s getting a lot crazier on my personal front
. . . .
Thank God… I can sit down and let others stand up and talk to the witnesses. The problem is that I still have to be there to prompt and give ideas and kind of guide things. So I’ve never really got my hand out of it. It would sure be nice to get out of court for a week or so and just kind of chill out. But I can see now that’s probably never gonna happen. I’ve got to be there. I have the big picture… me and Chris are really the only ones who do
.

By early April, we’d penetrated to the very heart of our case. The physical evidence.

Now, normally I love that stuff, and if I’d had my way—plus eight spare months to prepare—I would have handled it all myself. But here, that simply wasn’t possible. I’d had to delegate. So I kept the hair and trace evidence for myself, and gave the glove, which was a pretty straightforward assignment, to Chris. Then I’d divided the remainder of the science witnesses among Rockne Harmon, Woody Clarke, Brian Kelberg, and Hank Goldberg. Rock and Woody got DNA. Brian, the coroner. Hank caught the criminalists, including Dennis Fung.

Talk about drawing the short straw. What
was
it with that guy Fung?

Dennis’s scattered performance before the grand jury boded ill, but I had no idea how bad things really were until a few days after the preliminary hearings. Back in August I was holed up in my office, poring over the photos of Rockingham. I spend a lot of time looking at police photos. Every time you return to them, you see something else. Kind of an Antonioni thing.

I was studying a picture of Dennis crouched near the laundry hamper in Simpson’s master bathroom. He was holding something dark in his hand. I looked closer. Could it be? It had to be. Jesus! It was the dark sweatshirt Kato had described Simpson wearing when they drove to McDonald’s! Why hadn’t anyone told me about this? Those sweats had to be tested for blood immediately. Unless, of course, they were never seized.

Please, God
.

Tom Lange was in the War Room with Patti Jo. I sent for him and handed him the photo.

“Look at this carefully and tell me what you see in the hamper.”

“Dark sweats,” he replied. He looked like he might have to sit down.

“Is it possible they were taken and Fung forgot to write it up? Maybe there was one brown bag that had been overlooked in the booking process.

“I know there was nothing seized that wasn’t booked,” he said with grim finality.

“I want to see Fung right fucking now,” I snapped. Tom got him over in just one phone call.

Dennis strolled in wearing jeans, sneakers, and a windbreaker.

“Do have a seat,” I told him.

I like to get my bad news as soon as possible.

“Do you remember going through Simpson’s hamper when you were at Rockingham on June thirteenth?”

“I think so,” Dennis replied in his usual fog of distraction.

I handed him the eight-by-ten.

“Tell me if you collected the clothing you’re holding in that picture.”

“I know I didn’t book any clothing out of the bathroom,” he replied. “Why?” But I could see awareness dawning.

“You must have known that clothing in the hamper was likely to have been worn recently by the defendant. In a knife killing there’s bound to be some trace evidence, if not the blood of the victims. So why didn’t you take the sweats?”

I was pissed off. But I was also truly curious.

“Well, I looked to see if there was blood on them. I figured if they’d been used in the murder the blood would be big and obvious. I didn’t see any, so I put them back.” He shrugged dejectedly.

“But if the killer stood behind his victims,” I pressed, “he might get only a fine spray on him, if that. You can’t see a fine spray of blood on black clothing. Not in normal light.”

You shouldn’t have to tell a criminalist this.

Dennis passed his hand over his face and stared at the ground. He’d screwed up big-time. What could I say? There was no use belaboring the point or making Dennis feel any worse. The damage was done.

The hard, ugly fact was that Fung’s oversights would hobble us at every turn.

On his first pass at Bundy on June 13, Fung hadn’t picked up the bloodstains on the rear gate. This, after Tom Lange had specifically instructed him to do so. Fung’s property reports from that date show that he’d collected a stain from the rear driveway, then gone up front to collect a stain from the front gate, then returned to the rear driveway to collect another stain. The guy was painfully disorganized. He didn’t get around to picking up the stains from the rear gate until three weeks later.

Same with the Bronco. For reasons known only to Fung, he’d taken only a “representative sample” of the blood smears from inside the vehicle on June 14, which meant he hadn’t collected all of the blood on the console. That blood would be a devastating blow to the defense: DNA results from that stain showed Ron Goldman’s blood mixed with that of the defendant. There could be no innocent explanation for this except the truth: that Simpson had tracked the blood of his victims into the Bronco.

During a re-exam of the Bronco on September 1 we ended up collecting a considerable amount of blood that Dennis left behind on the first sweep. (Ironically, that re-exam was done at the request of the defense. Had it not been for their demand to see the Bronco, Ron Goldman’s blood might never have been found.)

Both of Fung’s oversights—the rear gate and the Bronco console—left us vulnerable. They gave the defense an opening to argue that blood on both the console and the rear gate had been “planted,” presumably using blood drawn from Simpson the day he was questioned by police. Both of these charges were easily refuted. We had in our possession police photos taken of the Bronco on both the morning of June 14 and again on September 1. They showed stains on the console in exactly the same places. Ron Goldman’s blood had been there during the first sweep; but because of Fung, it had been left behind.

Same with the blood on the rear gate. Lange noticed it the morning after the murders. So did at least two other officers. Three weeks before Dennis took the stand, Hank and Woody—during one of their many late-night work sessions—came across a police photo of the inside of the gate taken from about fifteen feet away. In this “perspective shot,” as such photos are called, one of the bloodstains was clearly visible under magnification.

The real stumbling block for the defense remained those blood droplets leading up the walkway at Bundy, away from the bodies. No way could they have been planted. They’d been collected during the early-morning hours of June 13, before Simpson had been questioned, let alone had his blood drawn. Where would Mark Fuhrman, Phil Vannatter, or anyone else in this alleged conspiracy have gotten hold of any of O. J. Simpson’s blood, even if they’d had a mind to plant it?

The only path open to the defense was to claim that the Bundy blood trail was either so degraded or so contaminated by the LAPD’s sloppy collection work that the results had gone haywire.

We suspected the Dream Team was planning to make its contamination case upon the crushed bones of Dennis Fung. And so Hank spent days and days preparing him. He reported back to me that he thought Dennis would be “okay.” Dennis’s “tentative demeanor,” as Hank put it with characteristic delicacy, might actually be endearing to the jury.

On April 3, Dennis Fung took the stand.

Hank did a very smart thing. But since it was a quiet and intelligent thing, it went largely unnoticed by the press. He led Dennis step-by-step through the process of evidence collection, leading up to the subject of “substrate controls.”

Now, please. Hang tough while I explain. Substrate control is a fancy term for a very simple concept. Once you understand it, it should help you see why the contamination theories put forward by the defense were such utter nonsense.

What happens is this. A criminalist goes into a room and sees blood on, say, the carpet. He lifts a sample from the bloody spot and smears it on one little square of cotton cloth. That’s the “evidence sample.” Then he goes just a little beyond the stain to what looks like clean carpet, and he tests that. He puts this on another cotton cloth, to make what scientists call the “control.”

So, you test the control. If it shows traces of another blood type, that tells you that there may be contamination. But if the control comes up clean—
formidable!
You can safely infer that the DNA profile on the evidence sample is valid. It tells you that the criminalist did his job right. If Dennis’s procedures were so sloppy that the bloodstains he collected had become contaminated, then the controls—collected under identical circumstances—would have been contaminated in an identical fashion. In fact, every one of Fung’s controls came up clean as a whistle.