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

14. THANK YOU, CARL

I to broke for the day early on January 25 so that the prosecutors could regroup and decide what sanctions they would ask the judge to impose on the defense for its discovery violations. Hodgman trudged upstairs with his colleagues to weigh what they should do.

For Bill Hodgman, assignment to the Simpson case had paid few dividends. He did not escape all of his administrative responsibilities, yet he didn’t have full control of the trial, either. Though Clark had recently served as Hodgman’s assistant in the office, and though the two of them were nominally identified as co-lead counsel, the case remained fundamentally hers. Their temperaments were ill matched: Clark, mercurial, passionate, disorganized; Hodgman, methodical, contemplative, a little dull. He scheduled meetings at three-thirty, and Clark appeared at five. It wasn’t that Clark was slacking off-she probably worked more total hours than her colleague-but she did it in an anarchic manner that drove Hodgman to distraction. Hodgman felt betrayed, too, by the discovery violations and other ethical lapses of Cochran and his colleagues. In all, the pressure was great, the rewards few.

As Hodgman and Clark were briefing Gil Garcetti on the day’s events, Hodgman noticed a strange feeling in his chest. Not pain, exactly, but a tightening. He got up and walked around, but the sensation didn’t go away. At Garcetti’s suggestion paramedics were called, and at about 6:20 P.M., an ambulance took Hodgman to the California Medical Center. He was, at the time, forty-one years old. Doctors found an irregular pattern in his electrocardiogram and decided to keep him overnight. A senior member of Garcetti’s staff called Ito at home to give him the news, and by morning word of Hodgman’s hospitalization had leaked out to the news media. The hospital was promptly besieged by television satellite trucks, and white-jacketed doctors began conducting briefings in a manner usually associated with presidential illnesses. In the end, Hodgman was fine; his condition was temporary, seemingly the result of stress and overwork. Though he returned to the D.A.’s office after only a few days at home-and he continued to supervise the case-Hodgman had to yield his courtroom role. Henceforth, the case would be tried by Marcia Clark and Chris Darden.

Hodgman’s departure would turn out to be one of the most important events of the trial. His absence deprived the prosecution of a day-to-day center of gravity, a voice of calm and maturity. Hodgman could tell the difference between an everyday dispute and a bona fide crisis. Clark and Darden, in contrast, tried cases in an atmosphere of perpetual turmoil, much of it self-generated.

The shift in mood was immediately apparent. Addressing Judge Ito about the discovery violations, Clark and Darden nearly became unhinged. True, the defense had engaged in rather cynical misconduct, but in the context of a long trial, the withholding of a few witness statements was probably not going to amount to much. What should have mattered more to the prosecution was simply getting the case under way and its witnesses on the stand. Instead, for several hours, Clark and Darden ranted.

Clark: “Unfortunately, because of the nature of this misconduct, which is egregious and flagrant and not the minor violation that [Cochran] attempts to represent to this court, he’s attempting to sweep it under the rug, claim ignorance and use Mr. Douglas as a sacrificial lamb, and that is absolutely inappropriate. Counsel should bear the brunt of his own misconduct, which is willful and deliberate and intentional, and it is in effect a thumbing of his nose at this Court’s order…” And so on.

Darden’s behavior was even stranger. Cochran’s stature in L.A.’s black legal community was such that the relatively inexperienced Darden was, perhaps understandably, intimidated by his mere presence (and the older man would use this against the younger man time and again during the course of the trial). Cochran’s hold over Darden bordered on the mystical-or, more precisely, the parental. This often led the prosecutor to behave like an adolescent, appearing alternately to disdain and beseech his elder. When Cochran spoke in court, Darden would often hunch over in his seat, hold his head in his hands, puff his cheeks, and pout theatrically.

On this day (and several others during the trial), Darden seemed to blurt out the first thing that came into his head. “Had we known about some of these witnesses,” Darden said to Ito (and, quite obviously, the television camera), “we could have informed counsel that they are heroin addicts, thieves, felons, and that one of these witnesses, one of their so-called material witnesses, is the only person I have ever known to be a court-certified pathological liar.” This was a scandalous remark to make about a dozen people who had done no more than have their names mentioned by a lawyer in a criminal trial. To be sure some of them, like Gerchas, were questionable characters, but others were upstanding, ordinary citizens who had cooperated with both sides and simply remembered events in a manner helpful to the defendant’s case. Darden’s group libel reflected his own immaturity more than the witnesses’ true natures.

Rambling on, Darden turned to the subject of Cochran. “You know, as I sat there yesterday… watching Mr. Cochran, I noticed that his opening statement, most of it was typed. He had time to type it, to type out that opening statement, and it was a very fine opening statement. And I’m always proud of Mr. Cochran whenever I see him in court, Your Honor. I love him. I just don’t like to go up against him. But if he had time to type his opening statement, then he had time to turn it over. And I’m disappointed in Mr. Cochran.”

So it went-for hour after hour. Darden at one point requested that the trial be delayed for thirty days as a result of the defense misconduct-a patently absurd idea when a sequestered jury was waiting to hear testimony. Ito, characteristically, said nothing during the lengthy harangues by the lawyers, not even when Darden made his bizarre profession of love for Cochran. After only about fifteen minutes, the lawyers started repeating themselves, concentrating mainly on cranking up the invective. Ito froze. A stronger, more self-confident judge would have stopped the name-calling, limited debate, and focused on the jury, which had been sitting in a hotel room for two full weeks and had not even heard all of the opening statements.

In the end, Ito reached a reasonable resolution of the issue. He agreed to put off the conclusion of Cochran’s opening statement until Monday, January 30, to advise the jury that defense misconduct had caused the delay, and to allow Clark to make a brief reopening statement the following day.

It was 10:05 A.M. on January 31 when Lance Ito asked, “Mr. Darden, who is your first witness?” (During jury selection in the fall, Ito had told the panel that he expected the entire trial would be over by late February.)

Prosecutors know they have a jury’s full attention at the beginning of a trial, so they like to start out with a dramatic, powerful witness who cannot be effectively cross-examined. Darden and Clark chose well.

“Sharyn Gilbert, Your Honor.”

Gilbert, a rotund and good-natured black woman, was working as a 911 operator in downtown Los Angeles during the early morning hours of January 1, 1989. Her phone rang at 3:58 A.M.

This was not Nicole’s famous 911 call from 1993. This was, in its way, far more chilling. When Darden played the tape of this call, there were no words, just a rumbly silence, as if a phone had been left hanging limp from a table. Then a woman screamed… and screamed some more. Next, unmistakably, flesh collided with flesh-the sound of slapping or hitting of some kind. After about three minutes, the line went dead.

Gilbert’s computer had registered that the call came from 360 North Rockingham, so she urgently dispatched a police unit to the location. The assignment went to Officer John Edwards, who was working in a patrol car with a trainee, Patricia Milewski. Darden called Edwards as his next witness. Edwards told of finding Nicole, her face battered, staggering around the bushes in just sweatpants and a bra. He recalled her prophetic cries of “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!”

Cochran’s cross-examination was more notable for what he didn’t do than what he did. The lawyer poked a little fun at the detective, noting that he had languished as a patrol officer for nineteen long years. Continuing his effort to diminish Nicole in the eyes of the jury, Cochran also asked a whole series of questions that suggested (without any evidence) that Nicole had been drunk during the New Year’s Day altercation. But Cochran had a grenade in his pocket that he declined to use. Cochran never pointed out for the jury that in 1991, John Edwards had been named one of only forty-four officers identified by the Christopher Commission as part of a “problem group” within the LAPD. The commission, formed to investigate the police in light of the Rodney King beating, found that these officers had received highly disproportionate numbers of complaints for use of excessive force, dishonesty, discourtesy, and other misdeeds. In the Los Angeles black community, following the release of the Christopher Commission’s report the existence of “the Forty-four” became important symbols of the LAPD’s malevolence. Yet Cochran passed on the chance to tie Edwards in to his favorite theme of police racism.

The reason for this uncharacteristic diffidence became apparent as Edwards was followed to the stand by other officers involved in the 1989 incident. What was remarkable about their testimony was not how hard they had been on O.J. Simpson but how easy. Faced with a badly beaten woman who had the red imprint of a human hand on her neck, Edwards did not arrest the man who admitted to causing her injuries, not even after learning from both O.J. and Nicole that police had been called out to the house repeatedly on domestic-violence calls. Rather, even after O.J. conceded that he had hurt Nicole, and even after Nicole told him that O.J. kept guns in the house, Edwards graciously allowed Simpson to return to his house by himself and change out of his bathrobe. And then Edwards stood by as O.J. leaped into his Bentley and drove off. In the course of his examination, Darden had asked Edwards why he didn’t arrest Simpson on the spot.

“Because I knew that if I took O.J. Simpson, a person of that stature, to the station in his underwear that there would be repercussions because the media would show up and it would be blown out of proportion.”

Edwards admitted he didn’t even file a complete report of the incident; he omitted, he said, Simpson’s statement that he had had sex with one of the women living in the house earlier that day. Why did Edwards leave it out? In part because he didn’t think it was relevant, but also because “it would just be a sensationalism thing.”

This deferential police attitude toward Simpson became even more obvious when the next witness, Mike Farrell, the detective in charge of the 1989 domestic-violence investigation, took the stand. Farrell’s inquiry, such as it was, consisted of calling O.J. on the telephone and then calling Nicole. Farrell’s conversation with Nicole appeared to have amounted to the detective’s telling the crime victim how she could drop the case against the man who had beaten her. In a manner typical of domestic-violence victims, Nicole preferred to get on with her life rather than take her husband to court. Farrell testified, “She said if she could avoid it, she doesn’t want to prosecute.” As Farrell admitted on the stand, the only reason he referred the case to the city attorney’s office for prosecution is that the California domestic-violence law required him to do so.

The coddling of O.J. by the police placed Clark and Darden in an uncomfortable position. In the murder case against Simpson, of course, they were joined with, and supportive of, the LAPD. But it was clear to all of the prosecutors that the police had horribly bungled the domestic-violence matter. In a remarkable footnote to their brief to Judge Ito on the domestic-violence issues, the prosecutors made clear their disdain for their ostensible allies. “Nicole’s feelings of helplessness and belief that the police would not do anything to the defendant were well founded,” they wrote. “Members of the [West Los Angeles] division of the LAPD frequented defendant’s home, often utilizing the pool and tennis courts. When the officers required the appearance of a celebrity at the yearly Christmas party, [the] defendant eagerly agreed to appear. When the officers desired his autograph on footballs, he responded. In turn, the officers responded to Rockingham in response to Nicole’s calls for help 7-8 times prior to the 1989 incident. Each time the defendant was not arrested.”

However, the true measure of Nicole’s isolation came only with the next witness.

The lawyers on both sides of the Simpson case often learned as much through the news media as from their own investigators. For example, during jury selection, the prosecutors found out about one witness in Sheila Weller’s Raging Heart, one of the “instant books” that were published in the months after the murders. The opening scene of Weller’s book described a conversation between Simpson and a man “whom we will call Leo” in Simpson’s bedroom late on the night of June 13, after Simpson had returned from his trip to Chicago and had been interviewed by the detectives at Parker Center. Simpson told “Leo” that the police had told him they had found blood in his house. “How long does it take for DNA to come back?” Simpson asked. “Leo,” who didn’t know, guessed two months. “They asked me if I would take a lie detector test,” Simpson continued, adding that he didn’t want to take one. “ ’Cause,” Simpson added with a kind of a chuckle, “I have had some dreams of killing her.”

It didn’t take long for the prosecutors to identify “Leo” as Ron Shipp, a former LAPD officer and longtime friend of O.J.’s. Shipp was a rather typical, if revealing, figure in Simpson’s circle of hangers-on. Simpson and Shipp were, on one level, peers-black men of about the same age and background. Shipp had first met Simpson in the 1960s, when his brother played high school football against Simpson. But Simpson became a major figure in Shipp’s life in the late seventies, when he was a patrol officer assigned to West Los Angeles. During that period, Shipp would stop by O.J.’s house on Rockingham as often as twice a week, to use the tennis court or just shoot the breeze. In 1982, Shipp was transferred downtown, so he visited the Rockingham house less often, about once a month. (Shipp had also served as a kind of counselor for Jason Simpson, O.J.’s troubled son from his first marriage. He spoke to the boy once when O.J. found that Jason had used cocaine and again when Jason attacked the life-size statue of O.J. by the Rockingham pool with a baseball bat.) In more recent years, Shipp had not prospered. He had developed a drinking problem, was suspended from the police force, accepted early retirement in 1989, and then, a year later, tried and failed to be reinstated as a cop. His efforts at an acting career met with little success, save one small part on a television program that O.J. helped him get.

Even though California law prohibited the prosecution from mentioning the polygraph issue in front of the jury, the prosecutors wanted to call on Shipp to testify about his conversation with O.J. about his “dreams” of killing Nicole. According to prosecutor Hank Goldberg, the statement would illustrate “the defendant’s mental state and show his intention at or around the time of the murder.” (In a later argument on the same issue, Marcia Clark cited Hollywood authority in support of admitting the dream testimony, telling the judge, “Walt Disney said it best, I think, in Sleeping Beauty: ‘A dream is a wish your heart makes.’ ”) Because Cochran was distantly related to Shipp, Carl Douglas handled the witness for the defense. He urged Ito to exclude Shipp’s testimony because, as Douglas put it, dreams “are not predictive of events that may have occurred in the past or predictive of things in the future.” Evidence about the dream would prove very little, especially divorced from its context in the conversation about the polygraph. Ito weighed the decision whether to allow the dream testimony-and blew it. For all his failings as a judge, Ito handled the hundreds of legal rulings in the case with considerable skill; but he missed on this one. The judge said the dream was admissible. (Ito essentially acknowledged this mistake at the end of the trial by instructing the jury to discount the testimony about the dream.)

Simpson had absorbed the first few days of the trial impassively, occupying himself with doodling or whispering comments to Shapiro on his left or Cochran on his right. When Shipp walked to the witness stand, though, Simpson came alive. He shook his head, muttered beneath his breath, and generally made his contempt unmistakable.

After he took the oath, Shipp tried to avoid Simpson’s gaze. The former cop appeared a genuinely tortured figure-beholden to Simpson, still admiring of him in some ways, and yet conscience-stricken about what he knew. One could tell how much he had enjoyed the days when he could come and go freely through the electric gates at Rockingham, when he had entered a world of privilege and savored his proximity to celebrity.

“Did you take officers to the defendant’s home…?” Darden asked him.

“Yes, I did. If I was on patrol, sometimes I would take people over there. I used to get a kick out of not telling them where I was going and ringing the doorbell and have O.J. come out and greet them.”

“How many other officers would you say you took to Rockingham?”

“Wow. I would have to say approximately maybe-maybe forty guys maybe.”

Darden asked if he and Simpson remained friends.

“I still love the guy, but, um, I don’t know. I mean, this is a weird situation I’m sitting here in.”

Shipp had made his love for Simpson evident following the January 1, 1989, incident with Nicole. Two days after the beating, Nicole called Shipp, who had some training in domestic-violence situations, to talk about what had happened with Simpson. Nicole asked Shipp to talk with O.J. and impress upon him how seriously she regarded the incident. Shipp did talk to Simpson, who “was very upset because he thought that he was going to lose Hertz and his image was going to be tarnished.” Instead of helping Nicole, Shipp went to his supervisors at the West L.A. station and asked that the case against Simpson be dropped.

It is possible, then, to summarize Nicole Brown Simpson’s experience with the LAPD after her beating in 1989. The officers on the scene let O.J. run off into the night. The detective on the case told her how to drop the charges. Nicole sought help from one police officer she knew, Ron Shipp, and he ran right to O.J. Shipp then went to a supervisor to try to get the charges dropped and in the end returned to Nicole to implore her to leave O.J.’s precious “image” intact. In a trial that resounded with talk of conspiracies within the LAPD, this was, in reality, the only conspiracy: the one to help O.J. Simpson escape prosecution for beating his wife in 1989. Small wonder, then, that in the week before her death, Nicole called a battered women’s shelter, not the police, to report that her ex-husband was stalking her.

An effective defense cross-examination of Ron Shipp might have consisted of a question or two: “Mr. Shipp, do you want to do in your real life everything that you dream about?” “Do you know-does anyone know-what any specific dream really means?” Such an exchange would have communicated quickly to the jury just how much this “dream” testimony appeared to be worth.

Carl Douglas chose another tack: war. In this, he was reflecting the wishes of his client. Simpson was appalled that this hanger-on had turned on him. It upset the natural order of relationships he had lived with, and ruled over, for decades. The Ron Shipps simply do not do this sort of thing. And if they do, they are punished. Unfortunately for him, Simpson had to deputize the punishment of this lackey to Carl Douglas, who was almost certainly the weakest of the lawyers who appeared regularly in front of this jury. The cross-examination of Ron Shipp turned out to be very different from what the defense had planned. It became a study of celebrity and of power-indeed, an explanation in microcosm of why O.J. Simpson had murdered his wife and why he thought he could get away with it.

Instead of dismissing the dream comment, Douglas built it up. He began his cross-examination of Shipp by asking a long series of questions to establish that the witness had not disclosed the dream conversation in a number of interviews-with the police, with defense investigators, with Douglas himself. Shipp had essentially admitted all of this on direct examination, but then Douglas made a cardinal error. He asked a “why” question, which allows a witness, in effect, to say anything he wants. Why didn’t you tell these people about the “dream”?

Because, Shipp said, “I really did not want to be really involved in all of this, and I didn’t want to be going down as a person to nail O.J.”

Suddenly, the dream remark wasn’t innocuous; it nailed O.J. Unhappy with this answer, Douglas shot back, “Well, you’re not. So don’t worry about that.” Clark objected, and Ito scolded Douglas. “Counsel, you know better,” the judge said. “The jury is to disregard counsel’s remark.”

Clark smiled at Douglas’s blunder and scribbled a note to Darden: Thank you, Carl.

Douglas then set off on another series of questions aimed at proving that Shipp had made up the story about the dream. Why didn’t he tell the police earlier? Wasn’t he just trying to enhance his acting career? Was he acting now? Trying to make himself famous?

Shipp replied with quiet dignity as the attacks grew harsher. “Mr. Douglas,” he said at one point, “I put all my faith in God and my conscience. Since Nicole’s been dead, I’ve felt nothing but guilt, my own personal guilt, that I didn’t do as much as I probably should have.”

Clark wrote it again. Thank you, Carl.

There was some irony in this line of attack, because Douglas-and all the other lawyers-knew that Shipp was almost certainly telling the truth about what he had heard Simpson say. Shipp asserted that his conversation with Simpson took place late on Monday night, June 13. Just a few hours earlier that day, Simpson had been interviewed by Vannatter and Lange. In the course of that conversation, Lange had asked Simpson whether Weitzman had talked about his taking a polygraph examination. “What are your thoughts on that?” Lange asked.

“Should I talk about my thoughts on that?” Simpson mused to the detectives. “I’m sure eventually I’ll do it, but it’s like I’ve got some weird thoughts now. I’ve had weird thoughts… You know when you’ve been with a person for seventeen years, you think everything. I’ve got to understand what this thing is. If it’s true blue, I don’t mind.”

When Shipp spoke to Weller, he had no way of knowing what Simpson had said to the police on June 13. Yet Simpson’s comments in the two conversations-to the detectives in the afternoon and to Shipp at night-bore a striking resemblance to one another. The police interview represented strong independent corroboration of Shipp’s account.

Still, Douglas continued to flog Shipp. He suggested that Simpson in fact went to bed at 8:00 or 8:15 on the night of June 13. Shipp denied it. Douglas said other family members would confirm the early bedtime.

Shipp did something extraordinary at that point. Instead of answering Douglas, he started directing his testimony directly to the defendant. “Is that what they are going testify to?” he implored his former patron. As Douglas continued to press the issue, Shipp started shaking his head. After a long pause, he stared again at Simpson and said simply, “This is sad, O.J.”

Simpson wasn’t used to this kind of confrontation from the likes of Ron Shipp. O.J. looked shaken, rubbing his hands nervously. Shapiro noticed this and put his arm around him, as if in protection.

Douglas moved to his big finish for the day. “Were you and he close friends?”

“I would say we were pretty good friends,” Shipp said. “We didn’t-never went out to dinner like on a regular basis and stuff like that.”

Douglas seized on the phrase “regular basis.” He pointed out that Shipp and O.J. almost never ate meals together. Shipp readily agreed. In contrast to Douglas’s insinuations, Shipp was not trying to project any false intimacy with O.J. The power of his testimony came from the fact that Shipp knew what a toady he was. He knew he adored and looked up to O.J., and he knew-ultimately-that O.J. couldn’t have cared less about him.

“O.J. Simpson is a football fan, isn’t he?” Douglas asked.

“Yeah, he loves football, yes, he does.”

“He goes to games a lot.”

“Yes, he does,” Shipp replied.

“You and O.J. Simpson have never attended a football game together-”

“Never.”

“-in the twenty-six years that he’s been your supposed friend, have you?”

“Not one.”

“You and your wife have never gone on a double date with Nicole and O.J. Simpson in the entire time that you’ve known them, have you?” Douglas sneered.

“You’re absolutely correct…” said Shipp.

“All the times that you claim that you were over his house playing tennis, you have never in your entire life played tennis on the same court with O.J. Simpson, have you?”

“Never.”

Then, finally, with disgust: “You’re not really this man’s friend, are you, sir?”

Shipp sighed. “Well, okay. All right. If you want me to explain it, I guess you can say I was like everybody else, one of his servants. I did police stuff for him all the time. I ran license plates. That’s what I was. I mean, like I said, I loved the guy.”

Thank you, Carl.