The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson

13. BLAMING FAYE

Christopher Darden paced in front of the jury box. As he walked, he kept his eyes on the floor, and his double-breasted jacket flopped open in front of him.

“Now, we’re here today obviously to resolve an issue, to settle a question, a question that has been on the minds of people throughout the country these last seven months. It certainly has been on the minds of my people up in Richmond, California, and friends in Fayetteville, Georgia, and all across the country. Everybody wants to know, and everybody I know often poses a question to me: Did O.J. Simpson really kill Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman?”

The phrase “my people up in Richmond” was not an accidental choice. Both the diction and the reference to the location came fraught with meaning. In general, white Americans do not refer to their relatives as “my people,” nor do they, for the most part, live in Richmond, California. The overwhelmingly black city near Oakland was Darden’s hometown, and his mention of it marked a small effort at solidarity with the African-American jurors who were arrayed before him.

Darden was nervous, as any person would be in his position. On arriving at the courthouse this morning, January 24, the lawyers had run a gauntlet of twenty-six video cameras and perhaps twice as many still photographers. Seven news helicopters had circled overhead. Even the core group of spectators-the reporters and family members who had seen each other almost daily for several months-took on a hushed, almost reverent attitude on this day. There was an important new face among them, too. Eunice Simpson, the defendant’s mother-tall and regal, even though wracked by arthritis-appeared in her wheelchair in the courtroom’s center aisle. As soon as Eunice Simpson arrived, Juditha Brown-likewise a grandmother to Sydney and Justin Simpson-gave her a hug. Hands fluttering nervously on her lap just before Darden rose to begin his opening statement, Juditha Brown dropped her eyeglasses, and Kim Goldman casually leaned over from her nearby seat to pick them up. Retrieving Juditha’s dropped glasses had cost Kim’s brother his life.

That it was Chris Darden who began the case demonstrated how much the prosecution effort had evolved over the months leading up to the trial. Shortly after Simpson’s arrest, Garcetti had asked Darden to conduct the grand-jury investigation into the Bronco chase. At the time, Darden was at loose ends; he had been named to run the D.A.’s Inglewood branch office, but he had not yet moved. Darden had an excellent reputation in the office as an investigator (less so as a trial lawyer), and Garcetti and Hodgman thought the grand-jury role made sense for him. But as the scale of the trial expanded, particularly in the scientific area, Clark and Hodgman realized they could not handle it all themselves. Clark, an old friend of Darden’s, urged that he be invited to join the trial team. The racial tensions in the case made the logic of adding Darden even more compelling. The case needed a black prosecutor.

Darden’s rise also reflected Don Vinson’s fall. By late January, the results of Vinson’s focus groups were a forgotten memory. The prosecutors had decided to make domestic-violence evidence a linchpin of their case. From an early date, Clark and Hodgman had divided the labor so that Clark would handle testimony about the events of June 12, 1994, and Hodgman would focus on the scientific evidence. That left the ever-expanding number of domestic-violence witnesses still to be assigned. Those went to Darden. And since the prosecution lawyers had decided they would attempt to prove that O.J. and Nicole’s relationship provided the motive for the murders, it made sense for Darden to begin the prosecution presentation to the jury.

In his opening, Darden went right to the heart of the prosecution’s theory. “The answer to the question is, Yes, O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. And I’m sure you will be wondering why as the trial proceeds on, and I’m sure you are wondering why right now… Why would he do it? Not O.J. Simpson. Not the O.J. Simpson we think we know… But that is another question… Do you know O.J. Simpson?…

“We watched him leap turnstiles and chairs and run to airplanes in the Hertz commercials, and we watched him with a fifteen-inch Afro in Naked Gun 33 1/3, and we’ve seen him time and time again, and we came to think that we know him.” Here Darden paused.

“What we’ve been seeing, ladies and gentlemen, is the public face, the public persona, the face of the athlete, the face of the actor. It is not the actor who is on trial here today, ladies and gentlemen. It is not that public face. Like many public men… they have a private side, a private life, a private face. And that is the face we will expose to you in this trial, the other side of O.J. Simpson, the side you never met before…

“When we look upon and look behind that public face… you’ll see a different face. And the evidence will show that the face you will see and the man that you will see will be the face of a batterer, a wife beater, an abuser, a controller… the face of Ron’s and Nicole’s murderer.” Darden recited the litany of abuse in their relationship: “domestic abuse, domestic violence, stalking, intimidation, physical abuse, wife beating, public humiliation.” He said at one point, “Please keep in mind that all of these different kinds of abuse were all different methods to control her.” And yet the list of incidents, on close analysis, was rather thin. In Simpson’s trial, the prosecution could point to only a single example of “wife beating,” the 1989 incident for which Simpson was arrested and then pleaded no contest. There were no other proved examples of physical violence between them. Nicole had referred to several more incidents in the diary she prepared in connection with her divorce proceeding, but Ito had ruled (correctly) that that document was inadmissible hearsay evidence. Here, the Simpson case illustrated one of the larger tragedies of domestic violence-that it usually takes place without witnesses.

Still, with the district attorney having made the Simpson trial into a domestic-violence showcase, Darden pressed on, even lapsing into a kind of California psychobabble at times. “He stripped her of her self-esteem,” Darden said. “He was so controlling that he attempted to define her identity. He attempted to define who she was.” Darden’s theory even turned what others might call Simpson’s generosity against him. Darden said with disdain that O.J. gave Nicole money. “By the time she was nineteen, she was driving a Porsche. He got it for her.” That, too, according to Darden, was evidence of his desire for control.

Everything Darden said was probably true, but his opening could also be interpreted as a great edifice of rhetoric built on a foundation of little evidence. The prosecution’s problem was exacerbated, of course, by the makeup of the jury, which was filled with people predisposed to admire Simpson and to discount evidence of domestic violence.

Darden finished with the story of Sydney’s dance recital on the night of June 12. The prosecutor had picked up confidence as he spoke, and he now addressed the jury instead of his shoes. O.J. arrived late at the recital, bearing flowers for Sydney, Darden said, and he greeted everyone in the Brown family-“except Nicole.” Simpson moved a chair to the corner of the auditorium, and “he sat there facing Nicole, and he just stared at her. He just sat there staring at her… This was a menacing stare, a penetrating stare. It was an angry stare, and it made everyone very uncomfortable.”

The Brown family, Darden said, had decided to have dinner at the Mezzaluna restaurant, and “as they left, they made it clear to the defendant that he was not invited, and he wasn’t invited. And by not inviting him, it was a reaffirmation of what he had already been told, and that is that it was over. He was no longer being treated as a part of the family. He was no longer the central centerpiece of every family outing. Nicole was getting on with her own life.

“And as the Brown family left, they looked toward the defendant and they saw him, and he was angry and he was depressed, and they were concerned, and everyone wondered, What is he up to now?

“Ms. Clark,” Darden muttered quietly, “will tell you exactly what the defendant was up to as the day proceeded on.”

His conclusion was almost elegant in its simplicity: “She left him. She was no longer in his control. He could not stand to lose her, and so he murdered her.”

Marcia Clark’s style differed from her colleague’s. Businesslike, almost chipper, she stood behind the podium and moved only when she had somewhere to go-as opposed to Darden’s nervous pacing. She began by introducing all of the lawyers on the prosecution team, the traditional duty of the lead counsel. And that, in part, was her mission on this day. A good prosecutor commands the courtroom, orchestrates the case. She wanted to show the jury who was in charge.

Darden had spoken without exhibits; Clark employed a series of elegantly integrated photographs, slides, and charts in her presentation. This in itself was unusual. Most district attorney’s offices cannot afford to give their prosecutors much more than a blackboard. But even though Clark had dismissed DecisionQuest from jury selection, the prosecution did continue to accept the company’s pro bono assistance in making charts and other visual aids. DecisionQuest ultimately made hundreds of these state-of-the-art exhibits over the course of the trial, an effort that would have cost a paying client nearly $1 million.

Picking up the story on the evening of June 12, Clark introduced the jury to “Kato,” whose last name would scarcely ever be uttered during the trial, and she told of his trip to McDonald’s with Simpson, which ended with their parting around 9:40 P.M.

Her pace quickening, Clark turned to Nicole’s movements in the hours before the murders. After the dance recital, Nicole and her family had dined at Mezzaluna. They returned home and then, also at 9:40 P.M., Juditha Brown called her daughter to say she had dropped her glasses on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. “That was the last time Juditha ever spoke to her daughter Nicole,” Clark said. Nicole then called Mezzaluna and asked that her friend Ron Goldman, a waiter there, bring them to her house. He left for his home, and then Nicole’s, at about 9:50 P.M.

It was a very specific opening statement, with a multitude of times and places identified for the jury. This is risky business for a prosecutor, for an opening is nothing more (and nothing less) than a promise to the jury of what the evidence will show. Broken promises, even on relatively innocuous subjects, can embarrass a prosecutor-or worse. There was, in fact, no real reason to lay the story out with such precision; no jury could be expected to remember such details over the many months to come. But it was a measure of Clark’s confidence that she thought she had the story so thoroughly nailed down.

Clark’s precision extended even to the animal world-that is, to the subject of barking dogs. “At approximately 10:15 P.M.,” she said, “Pablo Fenjves, who lived diagonally across the alley behind Nicole’s condominium, heard a dog begin to bark.” A moment later, Clark even repeated the time, this time without the qualifying “approximately.” The dog barked at “10:15.” Clark thus committed the prosecution to a theory of the case that had the murders taking place shortly before 10:15 P.M. As Clark knew even before her opening statement, other credible evidence put the time of the murders about fifteen minutes later. Placing the murders at 10:30 or even shortly after-or, better yet, leaving the time somewhat vague at that early stage in the case-could still have served the prosecution’s purposes. But again Clark’s arrogance led her to an unwise commitment.

Speaking with few notes, Clark gracefully integrated the disparate strands of the story. O.J.’s whereabouts were unaccounted for after 9:40 P.M., when he and Kato parted, until Allan Park, the limousine driver, saw him at 10:55 P.M. hustling into the house. During that period, Kato heard loud thumps outside, near the air conditioner, which was precisely where the bloody glove was later found. (Never in her opening did Clark mention the name of the detective who had found the glove, Mark Fuhrman.) Even though it was a cool night, Clark noted that O.J. asked Park to turn up the limo’s air conditioner as they raced to make Simpson’s 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago. She turned, at last, to the discovery of the bodies.

“Now I’m going to show you what Sukru Boztepe saw when Nicole’s dog took him to 875 South Bundy,” Clark said, and then she nodded toward Jonathan Fairtlough, a junior prosecutor whose role it would be throughout the trial to control the video and slide projections on the large screen that was bolted above the witness stand.

“P-7,” said Fairtlough, calling out the exhibit number.

The photograph had been taken from the sidewalk, looking toward the stairway that led up to Nicole’s front door. The young woman lay in a fetal position in a pool of blood. Clark had shown these photographs to the family members before so that they wouldn’t have to see them for the first time in the courtroom. But Juditha and Lou Brown still shuddered, steeling themselves as they saw again the scene of their daughter’s death. Clark then described how Officer Riske crept up the walkway, trying not to disturb the trail of blood, “to a point where he was able to see… that it was not just Nicole, but also Ron.”

“P-11,” said Fairtlough.

The Browns-the parents and the three surviving sisters-heaved their shoulders as one when the photograph of Ronald Goldman came up on the screen. It was a far more gruesome image: his body wedged into the corner of the fence, his shirt pulled over his head, and his exposed torso-so muscular and young-marred by obvious knife wounds filled with congealed blood. Clark’s words added to the horror: “He was literally backed into a cage where he had nowhere to run and that is how his murder was accomplished in a very short amount of time.” A cage-the phrase was so awfully right for the place that Goldman had died. Clark next moved to a photograph of Nicole taken from the top of the stairs. Her body was curled, and no wounds were visible, but the quantity of blood was shocking.

Clark turned now to the last and most powerful portion of her opening statement: the story of the blood. She offered a brief, homey introduction to the subject of DNA testing-“Some of you talked about Jurassic Park and they used DNA to make dinosaurs”-and then she offered a preview of the results. Fairtlough put up the slides of the various blood spots:

By the left door handle in O.J.’s Bronco: “Matches the defendant,” said Clark.

On the center console of the Bronco: “Consistent with a mixture of the defendant and Ron Goldman.”

The socks in Simpson’s bedroom: “The blood on one spot matched the defendant. The blood on another spot matched Nicole.”

Each one of the blood drops to the left of the bloody size-twelve shoe prints leaving the murder scene:

“Matches the defendant.”

“Matches the defendant.”

“Matches the defendant.”

“Matches the defendant.”

“And the results of the analysis of that blood confirms what the rest of the evidence will show,” Clark said, “that on June the 12th, 1994, after a violent relationship in which the defendant beat her, humiliated her, and controlled her, after he took her youth, her freedom, and her self-respect, just as she tried to break free, Orenthal James Simpson took her very life in what amounted to his final and his ultimate act of control.” She then paused a beat.

“And in that final and terrible act, Ronald Goldman, an innocent bystander, was viciously and senselessly murdered.”

Shortly after Clark finished her opening statement, a producer for Court TV, which ran the camera in Ito’s courtroom, advised the judge that the camera had accidentally shown the face of an alternate juror for about a second. A furious Ito said categorically, “I’m going to terminate the television coverage as a result of that.” But in what would become characteristic of his style throughout the trial, Ito cooled off and changed his mind the following morning. No one enjoyed the attention more than the judge; the cameras could stay. He even praised Court TV for its candid acknowledgment of the mistake. Then he called for Johnnie Cochran to begin his presentation for the defense.

Cochran wore a periwinkle suit. Vertical white stripes ran the entire length of his tie, and there were blue and white vertical stripes on his shirt, too, to go with a contrasting white collar. Somehow it looked right, all that exuberance in Cochran’s dress. He stood before the same podium the prosecutors had used, but he radiated a confidence that they could not hope to equal. Cochran’s chest looked like it was ready to burst out of his formfitting double-breasted suit.

Anyone wondering what place race would play in the defense of O.J. Simpson had only to wait about one minute into Cochran’s opening statement. The jurors, Cochran said, would hear a lot of talk about justice. Searching the jurors’ faces, he went on, “I guess Dr. Martin Luther King said it best when he said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, and so we are now embarked upon this search for justice, this search for truth, this search for the facts.” Cochran then paused to pay tribute to the jurors. “We are very, very pleased with the fact that you have agreed to serve as jurors, to give us your time, to leave your lives, to be sequestered as it were. That is a remarkable sacrifice,” he continued. “Abraham Lincoln said it best when he said that the highest act of citizenship is jury service.”

Having enlisted King and Lincoln in the cause, Cochran went on to discuss parts of the case that Clark and Darden “didn’t talk about yesterday.” He started with the tale of the maid who lived next door to Simpson on Rockingham: Rosa Lopez. On the night of the murders, according to Cochran, Lopez “heard something very strange. She heard a prowler.” When Lopez came out to walk her dog at 10:15 P.M.-ostensibly the time of the murders-she saw the Bronco parked in the same place it had been earlier in the evening. From Lopez, Cochran moved on to Mary Anne Gerchas-“a very interesting lady”-who was apartment hunting on Bundy Drive on the night of the murders. Shortly after 10:30 that night, Cochran said, Gerchas was walking on Bundy, and “she sees four men who come within ten feet of her, two of which gentlemen appeared to be Hispanic, I think the others are Caucasians, several of which I believe have knit caps on their heads. The two who are behind apparently have something in their hands they are carrying.”

Cochran charged that these witnesses had been ignored by the police and prosecution. Cochran noted with disdain that Lopez had been interviewed by one Mark Fuhrman. “Detective Mark Fuhrman will play an integral part in this case for a number of reasons. Now, it is very interesting that the prosecution never once mentioned his name yesterday. It is like they just want to hide him, but they can’t hide him. He is very much a part of this case. We can only ask ourselves, Why didn’t they mention him? I think that answer will become very clear to you as the case progresses.” And as for Gerchas, Cochran said she had called the police hot line about the case and was told, “ ‘Excuse me, I’m talking to a psychic right now, and I will get back to you.’ ” Cochran shook his head at the lack of respect for the “very interesting” Mary Anne Gerchas.

But the treatment of these witnesses all fit into a larger pattern. “This case is about a rush to judgment,” Cochran asserted, “an obsession to win at any cost and by any means necessary.” Invoking Malcolm X’s most famous phrase, “by any means necessary,” Cochran declared war on the LAPD. The case against O.J. Simpson, in other words, was really about the conspiracy to convict him.

It was about something else, too. Like the prosecution’s juror research, the defense focus groups had also found hostility among black women toward Nicole Brown Simpson. In his opening, Cochran gave the jurors every reason to reinforce their presumed predisposition to view O.J. as an icon and Nicole as a tramp. Cochran took issue with Darden’s assertion that O.J. had “exercised all this control over her and picked her friends… The evidence will show that Miss Nicole Brown Simpson is a very strong, independent woman,” Cochran went on. “She picked and chose her own friends, [neither] O.J. Simpson or no one else could tell her who her friends were to be. She had whatever friends she wanted, she did whatever she wanted.”

Cochran then regaled the jury with tales of Nicole’s fast life. Though nominally aimed at refuting the charge of stalking, Cochran ran though a catalogue of her sexual exploits. Sex on a couch with Keith Zlomsowitch while the children slept upstairs… Sex with one of Simpson’s best friends (Marcus Allen, though Cochran did not name him)… One man “sitting astride Miss Nicole Brown Simpson, giving her a massage or something in her shoulders”… “Miss Nicole Brown Simpson came over to the Rockingham house and said she had found a boyfriend, somebody different than Keith.” But with these examples, Cochran was just warming up for his main point about Nicole’s sordid personal life-that the sinister figure of Faye Resnick was at the center of it.

“Let me say this about Faye Resnick,” Cochran said gravely. On June 3, 1994, her boyfriend, Christian Reichardt, had thrown her out of their house because she was freebasing cocaine. “They ran in this circle out there in Brentwood. And when she was put out on June third,… she then moved over and lived with Nicole Brown Simpson.”

Cochran implied that Nicole and Faye were doing drugs together: “Because they were friends, they would go out at night. The evidence will be these ladies would go out two, three, four nights a week and stay out until five o’clock in the morning. Nobody was controlling these women… They go out dancing, they would do whatever they would do, and we know Faye Resnick was using drugs during this period of time.” Cochran went on to say that Faye’s drug problem got so bad that on June 8, her ex-boyfriend and ex-husband forced her to enter a drug treatment facility. Cochran then said Faye Resnick was “one of the people that called Miss Nicole Brown Simpson on the night of June 12, perhaps after nine o’clock, that particular night, from this drug treatment facility.” After a pause, Cochran said darkly, “We will be talking about that and her role in this whole drama.”

Cochran’s opening statement represented a bold risk. Most defense attorneys use their opening statements to remind jurors of the presumption of innocence, to urge them to keep an open mind-and to make as few promises as possible. A defendant in a criminal case has no obligation to put forward any evidence, and few defense attorneys want to commit themselves at the beginning of a long trial to naming the witnesses they will call to the stand. So what Cochran did was all the more remarkable. He made scores of specific, factual claims about the evidence in the case, and described in detail some of the witnesses he would be calling. Cochran’s supremely confident opening statement demonstrated how central a figure he was to the defense strategy. He became the very incarnation of O.J. Simpson, his voice for the jury. Cochran sought to transfer his enormous prestige in the middle-class black community to his client. On the defense team, only Cochran had the stature-and the race-to do that.

There was another new player in the courtroom during opening statements, and he took an amused interest in Cochran’s tale of the nefarious Faye Resnick. Five and a half feet tall and nearly as wide, Lawrence Schiller would become a frequent presence in the corridors outside Department 103 and in the twelfth-floor media center. Bearded, balding, shoveling endless fistfuls of M &M’s past his yellowing teeth, the fifty-eight-year-old Schiller represented an apotheosis of sorts for the O.J. Simpson spectacle: the perfectly amoral profiteer. Schiller bore a passing resemblance to the actor Zero Mostel, and he appeared in the Simpson case as the reincarnation of Mostel’s character in the film The Producers-the man who tried to sell the public on a show called Springtime for Hitler.

A onetime photographer for Life and other magazines, Schiller operated on the fringes of show business for decades and left a trail of multiple divorces, embittered business associates, and bankruptcy. Schiller specialized in exploiting an arcane and odious corner of the literary marketplace: the purchase of book rights to murderers’ life stories. He made deals with Jack Ruby, Susan Atkins (of the Manson family), and Gary Gilmore. It was, in fact, Larry Schiller’s interviews with Gilmore and others that provided the raw material for Norman Mailer’s masterpiece The Executioner’s Song. The only real surprise about Schiller was that he took several months to surface in the Simpson affair. Schiller even had good entree: He was a longtime acquaintance of Robert Kardashian, and had lived near O.J. and his first wife many years before. Through Kardashian, Schiller inveigled an invitation to visit Simpson in jail. As he later described it to a friend, Schiller told O.J., “You are a literary resource. You need someone who can exploit it”-i.e., me.

Simpson agreed, and Schiller came up with the idea of a book of O.J.’s responses to the many thousands of letters he had received in jail. With Kardashian’s help, Schiller contrived to have his name placed on the list of “material witnesses” who were allowed to visit Simpson in jail. (There were, ultimately, fifty-two people on this list, and many of them, like Paula Barbieri, were Simpson’s friends more than potential witnesses in the trial; this arrangement is another example of Simpson’s favorable treatment by law enforcement authorities.) Schiller acknowledged privately that it was preposterous to suggest that he was really a “material witness” in the case, but the jail guards never challenged him, even when he began to lug a large, high-quality tape recorder into his meetings with the defendant.

At his home in Studio City, Schiller used his personal computer to edit the letters and O.J.’s responses, and even to lay out the pages. As Schiller put it together, the book was almost comically sympathetic to O.J. In a chapter called “Spousal Abuse,” for example, the first letter to Simpson began, “Mr. Simpson-One thing I wanted to say, everyone is focusing on the alleged abuse you inflicted on your ex-wife. No one has mentioned the abuse she inflicted on you…” Simpson responded to these letters with a series of banal pieties, most of them focusing on his supposed great faith in God. (In fact, before his arrest, Simpson neither attended church nor showed any interest in spiritual matters in conversations with friends.) Speculating about his life after prison, Simpson wrote, “I know that I will raise my children differently in relationship to God. Without a doubt. I can visualize it. I have already visualized each Sunday. I won’t play golf. Sunday we will go to church…”

Wandering around the pressroom, Schiller chuckled at the notion that Simpson’s protestations of innocence might be true. His interest in the matter was purely commercial. In concert with his publisher, Little, Brown, Schiller arranged for the book to be printed under false names at three plants around the country. Then, according to the plan, the trucks would roll up to bookstores just before Cochran was to begin his opening statement. In perhaps his greatest marketing coup, Schiller arranged for an audiotape of Simpson reading excerpts from the book to be sold at the same time. Schiller thought the tape itself might be profitable, but he knew that the news media would rush to give the public the opportunity to hear Simpson’s voice-and thus give the book enormous free advertising.

Schiller’s plan worked to perfection. The book, called I Want to Tell You, was released a few days early, on January 7, and it became an enormous success, selling more than 650,000 copies. As Don Vinson might have predicted, booksellers found that black women bought the book in especially large numbers.

It wasn’t just Simpson’s obvious guilt that Schiller found amusing. He also scoffed at the notion that Simpson actually wrote or said all that was attributed to him in the book. One of the most quoted passages in the book came on the very last page: “I know in my heart that the answer to the death of Nicole lies somewhere in the world that Faye Resnick inhabited.” According to Schiller, “I put that in at the last minute.”

It was all, thus, part of a coordinated attack on Nicole, her lifestyle, and especially her friends-Uelman’s elliptical hints about drug dealers; one of Cochran’s opening remarks about “these ladies [who] would go out two, three, four nights a week and stay out until five o’clock in the morning”; and finally, Schiller’s book. Through all these allegations-indeed, through the entire trial and beyond-not a shred of evidence ever surfaced linking any individual except O.J. Simpson to the crime. The defense never ventured an explanation of why drug dealers linked in some way to Faye Resnick would have wanted to kill Nicole Brown Simpson (much less Ron Goldman). That wasn’t the point of the defense strategy. The point was to muddy the character of the target of this homicide.

In the end, the reason for the defense’s obsession with Resnick can be found in the focus groups-that is, in the overwhelming lack of sympathy that black women felt for Nicole Brown Simpson. The “Resnick card” was just another version of the “race card”-in this case, an outlet for the resentment of black women toward the blond temptress who had snared this black hero.

The remainder of Cochran’s opening statement hewed predictably to the defense themes. He described what he called O.J.’s “circle of benevolence”-a phrase the lawyer used to describe the defendant’s financial contributions to charity (which in fact were minimal) and to Nicole’s family (which were considerable). He said that O.J. suffered from arthritis so severe that on the day of the murder, “he could not shuffle the cards when he played gin rummy at the country club.” Cochran mentioned a dog walker by the name of Tom Lang (not the detective), who said he saw Nicole embracing a man on the street in front of her home on the night of the murder, as well as “a man that he described as Hispanic or Caucasian standing… there looking as though he was angry.” Cochran disparaged the work of the LAPD employees who had collected and analyzed the evidence, and he offered a brief criticism of the DNA evidence. At the same time, Cochran asserted that DNA tests (presumably reliable ones) proved that blood found underneath Nicole’s fingernails was inconsistent with her own, Goldman’s, or Simpson’s. Finally, Cochran returned again and again to Rosa Lopez-the next-door maid who would testify that O.J.’s Bronco was parked on Rockingham at the time that the prosecution asserted the murders were taking place. (In all, Cochran mentioned Lopez’s name more than a dozen times.)

It was, on one level, a remarkable opening statement. Cochran cited any number of specific witnesses who would directly contradict the government’s theory of the case. If the defense lawyers could back up Cochran’s claims, the prosecution’s case would be shattered. But as it turned out, they couldn’t; indeed, they didn’t even try. By the end of the trial, the defense would never back up any of Cochran’s startling claims. It would never call dog walker Tom Lang to the witness stand. It would never call Faye Resnick. It would never even call Rosa Lopez (although she would indeed become a participant in the trial.) The blood under Nicole’s fingernails turned out to be her own. The reason Simpson didn’t shuffle the deck of cards was because his friend Alan Austin didn’t let him: Austin knew O.J. always cheated when he dealt. And Cochran’s star witness, Mary Anne Gerchas, turned out to be a pathological liar who spent her life dodging creditors and who, shortly after Cochran’s opening statement, would plead guilty to defrauding the Marriott Hotel of more than $24,000. Before Gerchas pleaded guilty, she claimed that an impostor using her name had actually run up the bill at the hotel. The defense would never call Gerchas, either.

In his opening, Cochran built a Potemkin village of assertions. There was nothing beneath the rhetoric. No matter; the evidence mattered less than what Cochran said it would be. He had planted the seeds: The LAPD was corrupt; O.J. was virtuous; Nicole deserved what she got.

Cochran’s opening statement was also an unethical piece of lawyering. California discovery law obligated each side to turn over to the other all statements by witnesses it planned to call over the course of the trial. As part of the discovery process, starting even before the preliminary hearing, the prosecution had given the defense tens of thousands of pages of material. The defense, in contrast, had given the prosecution next to nothing. This was not in itself highly unusual-the defense in a criminal case always generates far less investigatory material than does the prosecution. But as the prosecution continued to demand defense-witness statements throughout the summer and fall and into the winter, the defense lawyers responded that they understood their obligations but had nothing to share.

Then, during Cochran’s opening statement to the jury, his majordomo, Carl Douglas, announced that he had found statements of twelve witnesses whom Cochran had suggested the defense was going to call. Many of these statements, including one by Mary Anne Gerchas, had been taken by the defense several months earlier. This discovery failure, as it is known, put the prosecutors at a real disadvantage-not so much because they couldn’t prepare for Gerchas’s testimony in the defense case, which would not begin for months, but because if Clark had known about Gerchas’s claims, she could have addressed them in her opening statement. The news of the Gerchas statement blindsided Clark and her colleagues.

The next day, Carl Douglas addressed the issue of the discovery failures by the defense team. Douglas made his living by keeping track of Cochran’s schedule and making sure Cochran had the right file in his hand at the right time. When the center of operations in the defense camp shifted from Shapiro’s office to Cochran’s after the first of the year, it was Douglas’s thankless task to untangle the files.

Now, in his arch, almost archaic speaking style, he tried to explain that the withholding of the documents had just been an unfortunate mistake. “The Court is well aware that we have been working diligently in this matter,” Douglas said. “The Court is equally aware that the work in this case has been divided among a couple of offices and investigators, et cetera. It perhaps is regrettable that I stand before this Court, that we have not coordinated all of our defense efforts as well as I would have liked before this point. I say that because, Your Honor, I have some documents that I do intend to give over to the people… Your Honor, I acknowledge and I anticipate that there will be strenuous efforts to impugn both my personal integrity and the integrity of the defense team. I tell this Court, looking the Court straight in the eye with all seriousness, that it had been an oversight, and I am embarrassed by it and I take full responsibility.”

Ito, who had been studying the prosecution table as Douglas spoke, observed, “I have to say, Mr. Douglas, I’ve had long experience with Mr. Hodgman. I’ve known him as a colleague, as a trial lawyer, and I’ve never seen the expressions on his face that I’ve seen today.”

The judge turned to the bearded and usually stoic prosecutor and said, “Mr. Hodgman, why don’t you take a few deep breaths, and we’ll take a look at this.”

Among his other responsibilities, Bill Hodgman supervised the discovery process for the prosecution. The disclosure about these twelve witness statements came on top of the defense’s disclosure, one day earlier, that it had a list of thirty-four new witnesses it planned to call during the trial. These were appalling violations of the discovery laws, and Hodgman felt personally wounded by what he regarded as a dirty trick. In the Todd Bridges attempted-murder case, Hodgman had enjoyed a cordial relationship with Cochran; in a prosecution of financier Charles Keating before Judge Ito, Hodgman had likewise had the confidence of the court and his adversaries. As Ito observed, Hodgman now looked stricken.

Shapiro noticed, too. When Hodgman rose to speak, Jo-Ellan Dimitrius whispered to Shapiro at the defense table, “You know, Bill doesn’t look too good.” Shapiro agreed, then quipped, “Yeah, tomorrow they’re going to take him out on a stretcher.”