Without a Doubt (65 page)

This task would have been daunting if I’d had three months to prepare, but three days? Even as Ito admitted the situation was unfair, he wouldn’t budge. His rationale: “Professional attorneys are paid to work twenty-four hours day when they’re in trial.”

Which rules out, I guess, single parents, people with sick relatives, or human beings who simply require sleep.

On July 24, Dr. Fredric Rieders took the witness stand. After putting in a very long weekend, I was ready for him.

Rieders was a portly man with wisps of long, wild hair swirling about his head. His thick Austrian accent made him difficult to understand and he had a gruff, abrasive demeanor that turned condescending when he explained technical terms to the jury. With any other jury, I would have leaned back and let him hang himself. But not this one. He was going to give them the excuse they needed to dismiss key blood evidence. I had to hang tough. During his direct testimony, which was every bit as convoluted and misleading as I’d expected, I took careful notes.

When it came time for cross, I promptly introduced a copy of a study conducted by the EPA. It showed that the levels of EDTA found in the environment at large were consistent with those measured on the rear gate and the sock. Further, I noted that these levels were also consistent with the unpreserved blood from Agent Martz’s own body. Didn’t this, I asked the witness, show that the levels in the untreated evidence were meaningless?

Rieders resisted, calling the EPA study “either a typo or a complete absurdity.”

“But isn’t it true, Doctor, that [Martz’s] unpreserved blood came out very similarly in result to bloodstains found on the gate and the sock? Isn’t that true, Doctor?”

“Surprisingly, yes,” was his answer.

“Yes
,” I repeated with exaggerated emphasis.

Ito demanded a sidebar. “Miss Clark… I know you’re enjoying yourself,” he began. “But I’m warning you in no uncertain terms, if I see any more of that commentary, there’s going to be severe sanctions. And I underline the word ‘severe.’ “

I couldn’t believe it. Barry Scheck could stand up there and sneer, “Where isss itttttt, Misterrr Fung?” and Ito would shine it on. I emphasize one word for effect and get dragged to sidebar.

I returned to Rieders.

“Doctor,” I asked him, “how do you account for the readings that came up from Agent Martz’s blood?”

“I don’t have to account for it,” he sniffed. “I think he would have to account for it because it’s absurd to find that much EDTA in normal blood.”

Great. You dismiss our tests as “absurd.” Not that you have any evidence to the contrary. In fact, you haven’t done one single test or your own. What a despicable sham. They claimed the blood was planted—that was their whole defense against all our evidence—and yet they don’t even perform
one
test? How could it be more obvious that their claims were fiction?

All that remained, at this point, was to impeach Rieders’s competence as a toxicologist—and we believed we had the goods to do it.

Brian Kelberg would present to the court certain details about Rieders’s role in a 1985 murder case—a Ventura County man who had allegedly been killed by a fellow named Sconce, one of his competitors in the funeral business. It was suspected that the victim had been poisoned with oleander. Rieders did the original postmortem tests and later appeared in court to say that while he could not be 100 percent certain, he felt that his tests showed, to “a high degree of scientific certainty,” the presence of oleander. That testimony led to Sconce’s indictment.

But Rieders, as Kelberg would argue, had done only rudimentary tests. Really definitive results would have required a pricey instrument he didn’t have. When this weakness was discovered, the district attorney joined the defense and ordered the more sophisticated testing. The results? No oleander. (Rieders argued that the differences between his results and those of the toxicologist who double-checked him is that the latter used a different set of tissue samples, which could have deteriorated with the passage of time.)

That explanation notwithstanding, charges against Sconce were dropped.

The Simpson jury had to hear this.

At the mention of Sconce, Rieders began to fidget and waved his hands at me dismissively. When a witness behaves this way, it is the judge’s role to force him to respond to the question. Not only did Ito refuse to do this, but he began to interrupt
my
questions, urging me to move to another topic.

“This is the Simpson case, Ms. Clark. How about getting back to it?”

I couldn’t believe it. We’d had to argue the admissibility of the Sconce case at some length before Rieders took the stand. Ito knew perfectly well that this was important impeachment testimony. What was he doing?

I pressed on, determined to show the jury that the witness’s interpretation was unreasonable and far-fetched. But after a few more questions, Ito barked, “This inquiry. It is completely irrelevant at this point. Move on to something else.”

In that instant this judge had told the jury to disregard a significant point of impeachment and rebuked me as if I were some wayward schoolgirl. I was ready to lock horns with Lance, to keep pursuing Rieders, but Ito’s inevitable response would damage my cross even further. I had no choice but to accede.

I could only hope that the jury had troubled to get clear of all the scientific mumbo jumbo to see the truth—which is what Martz himself presented when he took the stand next. The blood on the defendant’s sock, Nicole’s blood, did
not
come from a test tube containing EDTA. The blood on the rear gate, Simpson’s blood, did
not
come from a test tube containing EDTA. Which is to say, in each case the blood came straight from the source.

It should have been a clean win for us—a definitive rebuttal to the defense’s lunatic speculations. But I knew that the impact of Martz’s testimony was diluted by the circus put on by Rieders and the defense. Any other jury would have seen through it. But by now we had a pretty good idea that this jury liked a circus.

The defense’s next witness was Dr. Herbert MacDonell, an expert witness in blood-spatter interpretation. He was the man who would supposedly buttress Johnnie’s claims that if Simpson had committed these murders, he would certainly have been drenched in blood. Ironically, MacDonell himself had offered an answer to that question. In a paper entitled “Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence,” he’d demonstrated how a perpetrator could leave a bloody crime scene without very much blood on him. I couldn’t wait to have him discuss it.

We had collected a whole binder of materials to impeach MacDonell’s testimony with his own writings. But the defense must have seen this coming. To keep us from getting that paper into evidence, they narrowed MacDonell’s testimony to a single piece of evidence: the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed.

The defense had focused upon one sock that had a stain they claimed was a “compression transfer”—meaning that the blood hadn’t been spattered onto the sock in the heat of violence, but had been pressed onto it later. The jury was to infer, of course, that the pressing had been done by one of the nameless, faceless conspirators out to frame O. J. Simpson.

MacDonell was harping on certain microscopic spheres of blood found on the inside of the sock that was stained at the ankle with Nicole’s blood. I pointed out that these “little balls,” as I referred to them pejoratively, could very well have come from the handling the socks received after the crime—but for perfectly innocuous reasons. The socks had been frozen and unfrozen. They had been stretched for microscopic analysis. And in an earlier test, they had been swabbed with water; this alone could easily have caused the blood to rehydrate and leak through to the other side of the sock.

I confronted him with the fact that he had originally referred to the blood pattern as a “swipe,” not a “compression.” This was important because of the latter term’s sinister implications.

“It’s a matter of interpretation,” he waffled. “It’s a distinction that to my mind is totally irrelevant.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

I asked the court for permission to question the witness about crime-scene photos. The defense objected frantically, but this time Ito overruled them.

“You saw photographs of the crime scene, have you not?” I asked him.

“Yes,” MacDonell answered, “I have.”

“. . . Let me ask you this, sir,” I continued. “If someone wearing the socks that you saw were to step near to the body of the victim, Nicole Brown Simpson, near enough for the ankle bone to come in contact with her bloody hand, could that cause a compression transfer?”

“Certainly,” he replied.

I could see Johnnie and Peter Neufeld out of the corner of my eye. Sweating.

“Could it also cause a swipe?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I shot it back again, with a cleaner spin. “If Nicole Brown Simpson reached out a bloody hand to touch the ankle of the
murderer
wearing those socks, could
that
cause a compression or a swipe transfer?”

He admitted that it could.

Bingo.

The Dream Team had two big guns left to call: Michael Baden and Henry Lee. Shapiro had called in Baden, a medical examiner for New York State, almost before the bodies were cold. It was Baden, in turn, who’d told him to secure the services of Henry Lee, the forensic scientist who ran Connecticut’s state police crime lab. The word of mouth on both men was good. They enjoyed reputations for scientific and personal integrity. Sadly, those stellar reputations would take a beating in the Simpson trial.

Baden was an affable, charming man who always went out of his way to be sweet to me. And I have to admit, he had expert-witnessing down to a science (so to speak). A big man with a winning smile, he sat on the stand as if he owned it. Though Brian is not as physically imposing as Baden, his intensity makes him a formidable courtroom figure. I enjoyed watching their exchanges; to a seasoned legal observer it was like a clash of gods on Mount Olympus. I just hoped the jurors weren’t so blown away by the pyrotechnics that they ignored the point: that Brian was able to get Baden to concede that his scenarios were not as watertight as they seemed. Here’s how:

Contention: The L.A. County Coroner destroyed evidence when he discarded the food remnants in Nicole’s stomach. They might have indicated that she died much later than our time line allowed for.

Refutation: Under pressure from Brian, Baden in effect admitted that even if the contents had been preserved, they wouldn’t necessarily have pinpointed the time of death.

Contention: Nine days after the sock was found in Simpson’s bedroom, Baden looked at it and saw no blood, the implication being that the blood was planted later.

Refutation: Brian got Baden to admit that he had not inspected the socks carefully. A special high-intensity light is required to see blood on such material, and the defense didn’t use it. Thus, Baden couldn’t say for certain that there was no blood present.

Contention: The victims’ injuries showed that they may have been killed by two people, with two knives.

Refutation: Kelberg got Baden to admit that the evidence was consistent with a single murderer wielding a single knife.

In addition, Baden testified about the cuts on Simpson’s hands—and helped us while doing so. He reported that Simpson himself had told him that he’d gotten the cuts while retrieving his cell phone from the Bronco just before he left for Chicago. This line of questioning was important: It allowed us to get in evidence that the cell phone he’d used to call Paula at 10:03 P.M. on June 12 was in the Bronco. Ergo, Simpson had been out driving at 10:03 P.M., just before the murders were committed. Now I didn’t even need that snippet from Simpson’s statement to Vannatter and Lange. I would put this information to good use in closing arguments. In fact, I would use the Baden “cut” testimony in my summation to show how Simpson’s flimsy excuse about the cell phone couldn’t possibly account for all the blood in his car and his bathroom.

For his performance, Baden was paid $100,000.

There was even more fanfare for the vaunted superstar of the defense’s lineup, Dr. Henry Lee, one of the country’s most revered—and charismatic—criminalists. Lee’s testimony would focus on evidence collection, the blood on the socks, and the shoe prints—all Hank Goldberg’s turf. The job he had ahead of him was the courtroom equivalent of guarding Michael Jordan.

Personally, I thought there was a pretty good chance that Dr. Henry Lee could be helpful to us. He was, for instance, a big proponent of DNA testing in criminal cases. He could also be helpful in answering assertions that the LAPD labs were “cesspools of contamination,” as charged by another defense witness, Dr. John Gerdes. Dr. Lee, by his own admission, had at one time done his evidence processing in a men’s room! He’d also dried crime-scene clothing in his backyard. (This practice ended when a stray dog took off with a piece of a rape victim’s underwear.)

But Hank’s work wouldn’t end there. Back on June 25, over a year earlier, Lee had gone to Bundy to examine the bloody shoe prints. His notes revealed that he thought he’d found evidence of a second set of prints, different from those made by the Bruno Maglis. Hank pored over the photos Lee had taken, trying to find the supposed shoe prints—to no avail. Finally, by piecing together all the photos, Hank located the exact spot on the tiles where Dr. Lee claimed to have seen that other set of shoe prints. Then he looked at the crime-scene photos taken by LAPD on their first sweep of Bundy. That spot was blank. The lines Dr. Lee found on June 25, two weeks after the murders, had not been there on June 13.

That wasn’t surprising. It could easily be explained by the fact that, after the crime-scene tape was removed, cops walked up and down that pathway freely. If, after all the photos were taken and the evidence collected, someone had stepped on some remaining blood and left another imprint, it was no big deal.

But Lee was claiming to have found what he called “parallel lines” that, he said, firmly indicated a second set of shoe prints. Hank located the spot where
those
appeared, and discovered that the parallel lines were actually impressions in the concrete.