You Can't Make This Up: Miracles, Memories, and the Perfect Marriage of Sports and Television (29 page)

The next day, like everyone else in America, I heard the stunning news: Nicole Brown Simpson had been murdered, along with a friend, Ron Goldman. I had eventually gotten a golf game together and after finishing the round was getting information from the Grill Room television set at the club at the same time as most of the country. The initial word was that O.J. was in Chicago on a golf trip. I knew, of course, that O.J. and Nicole were separated and that she had moved into her own place. But I was thinking about O.J., wondering how he had found out Nicole had been killed, and how he was handling it.

THE STORY EXPLODED IMMEDIATELY
and there was a nonstop whirlpool of information and misinformation. In fact, it was becoming a cesspool of misinformation. ABC News asked me to help. Not only did I know the area, and not only did I know O.J. and Nicole, but I knew most everyone in their circle of friends. I played tennis with Al Cowlings. I knew O.J.’s good friend Bob Kardashian, and his wife at the time, Kris. (Yes, I had met the Kardashian girls when they were, like, five, seven, and ten.) I knew Bob Shapiro, who would represent O.J. I’d even met Kato Kaelin at one point. He was living in a guest suite behind Simpson’s tennis court for a few weeks. (For the record, I did not know Ron Goldman.)

So I was brought in to try to help separate fact and fiction for ABC. I told my old boss, Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News, that I would help but I was in a dicey position. I would clearly become privy to certain information but that I’d have to protect my sources. He understood. And behind the scenes, I was working with Ted Koppel, then the host of
Nightline
. I was able to give Ted specific background information without attribution. And when he would ask, “How do you know this?” I could only respond, “I’m not going to give you a bum steer. You have to trust me here.” The fact that we had worked closely on the night of the 1989 World Series earthquake had given him a certain level of confidence in me.

The day after the murder, O.J. flew back to Los Angeles from Chicago and television vans had invaded Brentwood. Rockingham Avenue was now as famous as Fifth Avenue. O.J. was in residence. By Wednesday, there had to be a thousand reporters and another thousand lookie-loos hanging out on Rockingham and the neighboring streets. Every outlet was reporting that Simpson was still in seclusion. “
Would
he be coming out?
When
would he be coming out? What will he say?” Blah, blah, blah. I called Koppel. “Ted, I have to tell you something. O. J. Simpson is
not
in his house. I know where he is. I can’t tell you where he is. You have to find another source if you want to use the information with attribution. But don’t report that O. J. Simpson is in the house. He’s not there.”

“How could he get out of his house without anybody knowing?” Koppel wondered. “That seems impossible.”

“Here’s how he got out of the house,” I said. “I’ve played tennis in that backyard more than a hundred times. There is a gate back there that connects to his neighbor’s property, and he can slide out through it and go between two other houses on North Bristol Avenue, which is the street that runs parallel to Rockingham. It’s secluded back there. Nobody would have seen him. That’s how he got out of the house.”

Now, I knew all this because Bob Kardashian was in contact with me, and Bob had told me O.J. was at
his
house. I couldn’t give that away. At this point, I knew too much and I had friends involved and I couldn’t betray them by going public with information I’d learned in confidence. At the same time, I didn’t want my network repeating the same bogus information that everyone else was putting out.

Meanwhile, as it became evident he was being investigated as a suspect, I spoke with O.J. by phone three or four times. He kept saying the same thing to me. “How can anybody think I did this?” Not, “I didn’t do it.” He just kept saying, “How can anybody think I did this?” “I can’t believe what they’re saying on the news.” In retrospect, that should have been a clear signal to me that something wasn’t right.

At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt. And I did this for a number of reasons. For one thing, he was my friend. And who can believe that a friend would ever be capable of doing something so vicious? Second, the early timeline was confusing.

O.J. may have been the guy in those Hertz commercials, racing through the airport concourse to make his flight. But in reality, I knew that like me, he hated being late for flights. We’d talked about it a number of times. Even in the pre-9/11, pre-TSA days, we both obsessed about getting to the airport with plenty of time to spare.

O.J., remember, had an American Airlines red-eye flight from LAX to O’Hare on the night of the murder. (He was supposed to play golf at a corporate outing the next day, and would later say he was told about the murder in Chicago.) The flight left at 11:45
P
.
M
. and the murders occurred around 10:15. Then Simpson was supposed to have gone home, cleaned up, and gotten into a limo sometime after 11 for the twenty-five-minute ride to the airport and in time to check his golf bag. My initial thought:
The timeline doesn’t seem plausible. He never would have cut it that close to missing a flight.

Also, I’d heard that Howard Bingham, Muhammad Ali’s personal photographer, was sitting across the aisle from O.J. on that flight to Chicago. To my mind, Howard Bingham, renowned in his profession and with all he’s experienced at close range in his life and his craft, is a man who would understand the human condition about as well as anybody. But when a mutual friend asked Howard if he had noticed anything out of the ordinary—if O.J. had been agitated or nervous, whether he had any inkling something had happened—Bingham said, not in the least. Which made me think,
wait a minute. If Howard Bingham didn’t see anything he felt was out of sorts even minimally, then how did O.J. murder two people in cold blood, and then, ninety or so minutes later, get on a plane and be completely normal?
In addition, the scene of the murders was in front of Nicole’s condo, only twenty or thirty feet from Bundy Drive, a surface street that always generates a fair amount of traffic. Someone
had
to see or hear something. It was such a chaotic story that initially, I didn’t know what to think. There was information coming out—and nobody knew what was true and what was total crap—that suggested he did it. And then there was mitigating information that suggested he couldn’t have.

By the end of that week, the story was generating headlines worldwide. The plot was twisting and turning every hour. It was a national obsession. And then along came a White Bronco on the freeway early on the Friday evening of June 17, 1994.

IT WAS FIVE DAYS
after the murder, and it had been arranged that O.J. would surrender to police late that Friday morning for questioning. He’d be picked up at Bob Kardashian’s house. Even though a double-murder charge carried no bail in California, and, potentially, the death penalty, because of the circumstances O.J. was given the opportunity to turn himself in. The cops arrived sometime around eleven. But when they got there, O.J. was gone. He had sneaked out with Al Cowlings. Kardashian didn’t even know that O.J. had left the house. Where was O.J.? The dark joke going around that day was that Al Cowlings was driving O.J. to visit Nicole’s grave in Costa Mesa, in Orange County. And that when he found out where they were going, O.J. turned to Cowlings and said, “I said Costa Rica, motherfucker, not Costa Mesa.”

By 2
P
.
M
., the Los Angeles Police Department sent out an all-points bulletin. And so the search for O.J. began. I got a call at home from ABC News. While most of my work for the network that week had been behind the scenes, I had also agreed to do a couple of short on-camera interviews. So I’d appeared on
Nightline
to lend focus to certain information, talk about some of the principal figures, and discuss what it was like to work with O.J. on the air. But that night, a horse by the name of Barraq would be running at Hollywood Park. Three years earlier, my good friend Dave Leveton, a lawyer, had gotten me to go in fifty-fifty with him and buy my first racehorse. Dave had owned a number of horses and I went along for the ride. We were having a blast. Barraq had been earning his keep.

The producer said to me, “Can you go on
Nightline
at eight forty-five Pacific Time with Ted?”

I explained that I had to be at Hollywood Park—I didn’t say why—but I’d be happy to do it if they would send a satellite truck to the track. I told the producer, “I’ll do the interview from there.” Post time was scheduled around 9
P
.
M
.

Ultimately, the network couldn’t work that out, so instead I agreed to tape an interview at the ABC studio in Hollywood at five o’clock and leave from there to go to the track. By the time I got to the studio, O.J. was still on the loose, whereabouts unknown. I did a brief taped interview with Ted Koppel that would run on
Nightline
that night, got up to leave—and then, I hear all hell breaking loose from the newsroom.
O.J. is on the freeway
.
In a white Bronco.
And a few minutes later—
Al Cowlings is in the driver’s seat.

I’m told I’m not to go anywhere and minutes later, I’m on a set downstairs alongside Bill Redeker, the West Coast correspondent for the network. Judy Muller, another ABC News correspondent, was at a separate location and tied in with us. Now the network was in full “special report” mode, with Koppel in Washington and Peter Jennings in New York. And I’m tethered to our set because O.J. was on a freeway in Los Angeles. I wasn’t going anywhere and resigned myself to the fact that Barraq would probably have to go to the starting gate in a couple of hours with his co-owner ten miles up the road.

Almost 100 million Americans were going to watch this play out on one of the networks, captivated by a spectacle that was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Would O.J. get caught? Surrender? Somehow escape? Or even kill himself right there on live television?

Now it was after six o’clock. Knowing exactly where they were when the California Highway Patrol started its pursuit, I began doing “geography narration”—similar to my role on the night the earthquake interrupted the 1989 World Series. But instead of “there’s the Bay Bridge,” it was “there’s Sunset Boulevard.” The slow-speed chase was continuing. The cops were following. People on the freeway were cheering. O.J.’s friends and former teammates were calling into the networks, telling him to turn himself in. Al (A. C.) Cowlings—my tennis partner—was driving. It was all beyond surreal.

Soon we’re into the seven o’clock hour. It’s ten o’clock in the east on a Friday night, which means it’s time for
ABC’s 20/20
. So this chase has become not just an ABC News special—preempting prime time programming—but it’s now part of
20/20,
hosted, as always, by Barbara Walters. And once that happens, who has to get on the air, somehow, someway? Barbara, of course. It was her show. So now she’s in our New York studio. We had Koppel, we had Jennings, we had Redeker, we had Muller, we had yours truly, and a couple of other correspondents out in the field. We had it pretty well covered. But this was developing into a potential crime of the century—so Barbara, of course, had to weigh in.

And how did she? As we continued to go back and forth, covering every aspect of this not-to-be-believed drama with tension building by the second, Barbara jumped in.

“Does anybody know how old O.J. is?”

There was silence. In our studio, I looked at Redeker. He looked incredulous. We rolled our eyes at each other. I couldn’t see Jennings or Koppel at that point but I could only imagine the looks on their faces.

Does anybody know how old O.J. is?
Seriously?

Somebody answered forty-six. But more important, the question spoke volumes about television—and about how gigantic this story was. Everybody had to get a piece of the action, no matter how marginally relevant. Or irrelevant. Everyone had to be involved.

A little before eight o’clock, Cowlings and Simpson pulled into O.J.’s driveway in Brentwood but stayed in the car. There were a dozen helicopters overhead. There were photographers and cameramen positioned outside the gates, even if they couldn’t really shoot over the hedges. So the television viewer was basically seeing the Bronco only from an aerial view. And there was no visible movement in the car.

At this point, there was little but speculation when Peter Jennings said, “Well, we have on the phone a Robert Higgins who lives in the neighborhood and is on the ground and can see inside the van. Mr. Higgins—”

I heard a voice that said, “Ah yay-ess, how ah you?”

I immediately smelled a rat. I knew most of the neighbors. I knew a lot of people in Brentwood and on O.J.’s street. I’d never heard of a Robert Higgins. And I knew that it would be next to impossible for anyone to see into O.J.’s driveway from ground level outside the property. I looked over at Redeker. He knew what I was thinking and nodded.

Jennings hesitated a second and said, “Uh, just about as tense as you are, I assume.”

The voice again, “Oh my Lawd, this is quite the tensest.”

Now I was certain it was a prank call. “Mr. Higgins” sounded like he was auditioning for the old
Amos ’n’ Andy
show. But Jennings kept going.

“What can you see?” he asked in a somber voice.

“Well what I’m a-lookin’ at right now, I’m lookin’ at the van and what I see is O.J. kind of slouching down and looking very, very upset. No—looky here, he look very upset. I don’t know what he gonna be doin’.”

There was an awkward pause but Jennings kept on with the questions. I was in Los Angeles and Jennings was in New York but I was trying to signal to people in our studio to let them know this was a prank.

I could hear through my earpiece someone in New York tell Jennings to “wrap this thing up because we don’t know about this call.”