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

21. “SOUNDED BLACK”

The prosecutors had no monopoly on arrogance in Judge Ito’s courtroom. Forced for months to respond to whatever the prosecution threw at them, the defense lawyers hungered for the opportunity to make their own case to the jury. As always, their egos played a big part in their considerations. Each member of the defense team had researched a part of the planned defense case, and each one longed to present “his” evidence to the jury. Cochran had Simpson’s family; Bailey (with Pat McKenna) had found the witnesses who could testify about the time of the murders and about Simpson’s demeanor on June 12; Shapiro had Simpson’s doctor, Robert Huizenga, and pathologist Michael Baden; Scheck had forensic expert Henry Lee. All wanted their moments onstage.

Simpson egged his lawyers on. Not surprisingly, he saw the trial in football metaphors. For months, in conversations with friends, Simpson had asked them to wait for the defense case: that’s when his team would have the ball; that’s when they would score their points. In fact, the football analogy was not apt. It is often best for defendants in criminal cases to do nothing. With no burden of proof, defendants (and their lawyers) often serve themselves best by poking holes in the prosecution’s case and putting on no evidence at all. Taking the initiative to prove something carries risks. In a murder case, for example, a defendant who presents evidence at least implicitly suggests to the jurors that he will unveil the real killer to them.

But in responding to the entreaties of their client-and to the needs of their own vanity-the defense lawyers forgot something very important: that their client was guilty. And so to the extent that it concerned the events of June 12, 1994-as opposed to the police investigation of those events-the evidence the defense presented made Simpson look more guilty, not less. And yet, incredibly, the prosecution’s arrogance and clumsiness during the course of the defense case managed even here to trump the folly of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers.

Cochran wisely played it safe to start. He called to the stand three Simpson women: O.J.’s daughter Arnelle; his sister Carmelita Durio; and most dramatically, his mother, Eunice. All poised, all dressed in yellow, and all conspicuously loyal to O.J., the three women served more as exhibits than witnesses, with nothing of substance to say about the evidence. (Oddly, and irrelevantly, they all suggested that Ron Shipp was drunk on the night he said he had spoken with O.J. about his “dreams” of killing Nicole.) Cochran tried throughout the trial to separate O.J.-here portrayed as a loving father, brother, and son-from the “wild” world of white women like Nicole and Faye Resnick; the verbal and nonverbal testimony of these three appealing African-American women marked another way of reaching out to the eight middle-class black women on the jury.

Cochran followed Simpson’s relatives with a number of people who saw O.J. in the days before the murders: a fellow guest at a fund-raising dinner on June 11, an interior decorator who met with him on June 6, and a man who played golf with Simpson on June 8, at a Hertz event in Virginia. All of them testified that Simpson had behaved appropriately, in a friendly and cordial manner. One can scarcely imagine less provocative (or relevant) testimony. So Simpson was nice to these people-so what? But with them, again, Clark’s frustration surfaced. She went after these witnesses as if they were gangsters. Clark snarled at the golfer, Jack McKay, the mousy chief financial officer of the American Psychological Association: “After the two hours you spent with him, you don’t know what he looked like, do you?” McKay said he didn’t.

“You did not see him on June the ninth, 1994, correct?”

“Correct.”

“The tenth?”

“No.”

“The eleventh?”

“No.”

“The twelfth?”

“No,” the plainly terrified McKay conceded. Clark’s hostility had, perversely, elevated the importance of a witness she should have dispatched with just a question or two. And with the hapless McKay, Clark was just sharpening her knives for the rest of the defense witnesses.

Moving through witnesses quickly-twelve in two days-Cochran turned next to Ellen Aaronson and Danny Mandel. On the night of the murders, this young couple had gone out on their first (and only) date, dinner at Mezzaluna. Aaronson lived near Nicole’s condominium, and after their meal, she and Mandel strolled right by the murder scene. The key issue in their testimony was the time they passed Nicole’s front door.

It would be difficult to imagine two more upstanding witnesses. Aaronson produced videos for children, and Mandel had a job in finance at Sony Pictures. They were educated and articulate; neither had an axe to grind or a lust for publicity; they had behaved responsibly since the night of the murders, calling the police immediately to report what they remembered. The computer receipt of their restaurant bill showed that it had been printed at 9:55 P.M. They had chatted for a while after Mandel paid the bill, and estimated that they left the restaurant at about 10:15. This would mean that, in Aaronson’s words, they passed by Nicole’s residence at “a little after 10:25.” In their testimony, both Mandel and Aaronson remembered nothing out of the ordinary on Bundy Drive-no barking dogs and certainly no dead bodies.

For Marcia Clark, this was a problem. In her opening statement and through the testimony of Pablo Fenjves, Clark had committed herself to the murders having taken place at 10:15, the time that Fenjves asserted he heard the “plaintive wail” of the dog. But if the couple on the date saw or heard nothing at 10:25, what of Clark’s theory? That was why the defense wanted Mandel and Aaronson on the stand.

In fact, Clark had several options for dealing with their testimony. Fenjves lived behind Nicole’s house, while the couple had walked in front of it. Perhaps, Clark could have suggested, they simply didn’t hear the same sounds. Likewise, perhaps they were simply a little off in their time estimates. Or-most likely of all-Fenjves may have been slightly mistaken and the murders did not take place-and Kato-the-Akita did not start barking-until around 10:30. That still would have given Simpson plenty of time to make the five-minute drive to his own house and appear in front of Allan Park, the limousine driver, at 10:55. All in all, then, Aaronson and Mandel’s testimony was in no sense exculpatory for Simpson. Clark should have had no trouble integrating their version of events into the general prosecution outline of how the murders took place.

But Clark took a different approach to the couple’s testimony. The prosecutor’s explanation for Aaronson and Mandel’s account? They were liars-and drunken liars to boot.

“I just have to ask you one question,” Clark began her frosty cross-examination of Aaronson. “That credit card receipt in the amount of $47.50… You guys didn’t have anything to drink?”

“No,” said Aaronson.

“You just had dinner?”

“No alcohol,” the witness replied firmly-just as Mandel had said.

“Did that seem like a large amount to pay for just two dinners and a cappuccino?”

Cochran objected to this digression, but Clark kept pursuing Aaronson, forcing her to account precisely for what they ate and how it could possibly have added up to forty-seven dollars. In fact, if Clark had called Mezzaluna-or any of the other overpriced boîtes that dot Brentwood-she would have learned that it was easy to spend fifty dollars on practically no food at all. But Clark didn’t. Instead, she just accused Aaronson of conducting a boozy debauch in preparation for her walk home. Practically spitting her words at Aaronson, Clark demanded to know how many people were in the restaurant, exactly the route she had walked, everyone she had talked to about the incident, when she had first called the police, even what Aaronson had been wearing.

“And you are not sitting here trying to tell us there was no body lying at the foot of the steps at 875 South Bundy?” Clark growled.

Ito asked her to rephrase the question.

“Ms. Aaronson,” Clark said with no less hostility, “are you telling the jury that there was no one lying at the foot of the steps at 875 South Bundy when you passed by?”

“I have no idea,” said Aaronson, who at this point was looking at Clark as if the prosecutor were insane.

Three more women from the neighborhood testified that the scene near Bundy was silent at 10:15, and one of them said that the dog didn’t start barking until about 10:35. Again, it was all consistent with Simpson’s guilt-but not with the prosecution’s theory of the case.

The fact that Robert Heidstra lived up the block from Nicole demonstrated just how different Nicole’s new neighborhood was from her old one, where she lived when married to O.J. Heidstra earned his living in a distinctively Southern California occupation-he was a “car detailer.” Heidstra traveled to the homes of wealthy people and cleaned their automobiles in a particularly meticulous way. He used toothbrushes and Q-tips as the tools of his trade. He supplied, in other words, a kind of meta-car wash for this car-obsessed culture. (Among his clients were the Salingers, Simpson’s next door neighbors and the employers of Rosa Lopez.) It was not especially lucrative work, and Heidstra, a middle-aged immigrant from France, lived in a single room in a small apartment house off Bundy Drive.

Cochran called Heidstra to testify about what he had heard while walking his dogs on the night of the murders. On direct examination, he said that he was walking on an alleyway parallel to Bundy at about 10:40 P.M. on June 12, 1994. At that time, he said, he heard a commotion in the area of Nicole Brown Simpson’s condominium-two voices, one clear, saying, “Hey, hey, hey!” and the other indistinct. In this respect, Heidstra bolstered the defense theory that the murders took place around 10:30. (In a sobering reminder that this case involved actual human beings, Patti Goldman, Ron Goldman’s stepmother, told me at a break in Heidstra’s testimony that she could tell this witness was indeed describing Ron’s voice. “That’s just what Ron would say if he came on a scene like this,” Patti said. “ ‘Hey, hey, HEY!’ ”)

The defense’s “time line” witnesses had been identified and cultivated by Bailey, McKenna, and Peter Neufeld. Cochran, who rarely did much preparation of witnesses, had only a general idea of what Heidstra was going to say. The prosecution, in contrast, knew a good deal about Heidstra. He had been interviewed several times, and the prosecutors nearly decided to call him as a witness in their own case (dropping him only because he conflicted with Clark’s desire to place the murders at 10:15). But as Darden began his cross-examination, it became clear that Heidstra had a good deal to say that helped the government’s case. For starters, Heidstra admitted that he usually walked his dogs at 10:00, which, if he had done so on the night of the murders, would have put the killings at precisely the time the prosecution claimed. Heidstra also said that he saw a white vehicle that could have been a Bronco leaving the scene-another fact that was consistent with the government’s case. Twitching at the defense table, Cochran was losing his customary sang-froid as Darden converted Heidstra into a powerful prosecution witness. Continuing, Darden asked Heidstra, “The second voice that you heard sounded like the voice of a black man, is that correct?”

Cochran nearly jumped out of his chair. “Objected to, Your Honor,” he sputtered. “I object.” The defense caused such a commotion that Judge Ito excused the jury and told Heidstra to step outside for a moment. Darden patiently recounted to the judge that an acquaintance of Heidstra’s, Patricia Baret, had told Detective Tom Lange that Heidstra told her that “he heard the very angry screaming of an older man who sounded black.” Thus, Darden explained to Ito, he had every right to ask the question.

But Cochran was not to be mollified. “I resent that statement,” he thundered. “You can’t tell by someone’s voice when they’re black. I don’t know who’s made that statement, Baret or Lange. That’s racist.” Cochran continued his tirade: “This statement about whether somebody sounds black or white is racist, and I resent it, and that’s why I stood and objected to it. I think it’s totally improper in America, at this time in 1995, just to hear this and endure this.”

Darden looked stricken. The physical contrast between the two men had never looked greater-Cochran, eyes ablaze, full of blustering vitality; Darden, eyes down, looking skinny in his flopping double-breasted jacket, pacing splay-footed behind the podium. When Cochran finished, Darden replied evenly that he was simply questioning Heidstra about a statement the witness himself had allegedly made earlier. Then he came as close as he ever would to lashing back, and he addressed Cochran with quiet dignity: “That’s created a lot of problems for my family and myself, statements that you make about me and race, Mr. Cochran.” Ito called a recess, and tempers cooled.

Cochran’s outrageous behavior revealed much about him and the way he approached his role as a defense attorney. In the first place, he was simply wrong. Many African-Americans do have distinctive accents and speech patterns. But Cochran’s cynicism ran deep. His outburst came just as one of his witnesses was blowing up in his face. How better to stop an effective cross-examination than by throwing a stink bomb of racial grievance into the middle of the courtroom? When the facts went against them, Simpson’s lawyers turned, as they always did, to race.

Shapiro had not entirely disappeared from the case, and though he had little to do, he maintained his sullen vigil at the defense table to the end. When the time came for Michael Baden to testify, Barry Scheck made like a ventriloquist and fed Shapiro the substantive questions he should ask. With Baden’s testimony, Shapiro could not resist playing the race card in his own clumsy, if genial, way.

Formerly the chief medical examiner of New York City, the curly-haired and loquacious Michael Baden practically ran to the familiar blue witness chair when Shapiro summoned him. As with any expert witness, Shapiro began by eliciting Baden’s qualifications, which were considerable. The jury learned that Baden had graduated from the City College of New York in 1955 and the New York University School of Medicine in 1959. Shapiro asked Baden what awards he had received at City College. Senior-class president, Phi Beta Kappa, and valedictorian, Baden replied.

“And where,” Shapiro continued seamlessly, “was that college located?”

Baden was suddenly struck dumb, clearly puzzled by how the location of City College might edify these jurors on any issue relevant to the guilt or innocence of Shapiro’s client. Baden stumbled as he began his answer. “It’s located in upper Manhattan, New York City,” he said. Then he caught on, and hastily completed his response: “Harlem area of New York City.”

Having informed the nine African-American jurors that this white defense expert came of age in the unofficial capital of black America, Shapiro was off and running.

In example after shameless example, Shapiro sought to turn Baden into an Abraham Lincoln of the autopsy table. Did he serve on any state commissions? “Yes,” Baden replied, “the New York State commission that investigates all deaths that occur in prisons and police custody in New York State”-an entity that, Baden said, had been set up “after the Attica deaths.” Had he served on any federal commissions? Yes, he said, “on the congressional committee formed to investigate the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King.” Shapiro then elicited from Baden a lengthy exegesis on “the purpose of the examination of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King.” Asked for any “highlights” of his efforts on behalf of prosecutors over the years, Baden replied, “I was recently a witness for the… prosecutor of Jackson, Mississippi, in the reinvestigation of the death of Medgar Evers, who had been a civil-rights leader who had been killed in 1963.” Had he ever investigated cases for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office? Indeed he had. “I was involved in the investigation-and re-autopsy-of the death of a young athlete, a football player in Los Angeles County, Ron Settles, who died in a police precinct in Signal Hill.” Baden then hastened to add, “Initially, I was called by the attorney for the family, Mr. Cochran, Johnnie Cochran.” As for the substance of the Simpson case, Baden had little to add other than that he thought Dr. Lakshmanan used too much guesswork in reconstructing the crime. As for the detectives’ failure to call the coroner immediately after discovering the bodies-which was a subject the defense lawyers had dwelled on for many hours with the police witnesses-Baden had the integrity to admit under cross-examination that it would not have made any difference in determining the time of death.

The story was much the same, several witnesses later, with Henry Lee, another defense expert long on impressive qualifications but short on relevant evidence in the case. Under Scheck’s questioning, the centerpiece of Lee’s testimony was his claim that the LAPD criminalists might have missed a single non-Bruno Magli shoe print at the murder scene. Thus, according to Scheck, there was a second killer at the scene. Yet on close inspection this claim evaporated. There were more than a dozen shoe prints from the size-twelve Bruno Magli shoes-all arranged in a logical progression along the path at Nicole’s condominium. The only evidence of a second killer was this possible-not definite-single shoe print. Did the second killer hop into the murder scene, remain on one foot in one place during the entire struggle, then hop away? The idea that this evidence truly suggested the involvement of a second killer was preposterous. Lee did, however, bestow one gift on the defense. When asked whether his review of the evidence revealed the possibility of tampering, Lee muttered darkly, if vaguely, “Something is wrong.”

Robert Huizenga was more than simply another defense witness whose testimony backfired. The three days on the witness stand of this Beverly Hills internist turned out, surprisingly, to be one of the more profound moments of the trial. Not since Ron Shipp’s pathetic visit to the stand was there so vivid a reminder of the empty world of O.J. Simpson.

At Shapiro’s request, Huizenga had examined Simpson on June 15, 1994, just two days after he returned home from Chicago following the murders. The defense’s (and especially the defendant’s) idea was for Huizenga to testify about Simpson’s various ailments, in an effort to persuade the jury that O.J. lacked the physical ability to commit the crimes. As even a layman could tell, such a claim was absurd. Despite his lingering football injuries, Simpson was bigger, stronger, and fitter than most people in the United States. What Huizenga’s testimony did demonstrate was the extraordinary extent of Simpson’s self-pity. The same side of his character that drove him to complain in his “suicide” note of being a battered husband drove Simpson, during his trial, to embrace Huizenga as a witness. Regardless of the facts, Simpson never saw himself as anything other than a victim. So, overcoming the skepticism of Cochran and other members of the defense team, Simpson and Shapiro (who wanted the airtime) prevailed and called Huizenga to the stand.

To call the forty-two-year-old Huizenga boyish does not do justice to the curiously unlived-in look of his face. He could have passed for a college student. Blandly handsome, blond, and fit, he seemed like a West Coast Dan Quayle. Huizenga had impeccable credentials-summa cum laude graduate of the University of Michigan; degree from Harvard Medical School; former chief resident at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles; former team physician for the Los Angeles Raiders football team-yet it was precisely because of his eminent qualifications that his testimony and demeanor seemed so shocking. For it became clear, as soon as Shapiro called him to the stand, that Huizenga was completely in O.J. Simpson’s thrall. In Los Angeles, it seemed, it wasn’t just the Ron Shipps of the world-the hangers-on, the wannabes-who worshipped the local celebrities. Even Rob Huizenga, with all his fancy credentials, was willing to sacrifice his objectivity, his probity, and even his dignity to ingratiate himself with a famous man, even one accused of murder.

Huizenga was so eager to testify that he frequently cut off Shapiro before he could even finish his question. According to Huizenga’s examinations of Simpson on June 15 and June 17 (at Kardashian’s house, just before O.J. and Cowlings disappeared), Simpson suffered, the doctor said, from a “whole array of the typical post-NFL injury syndromes.” He had a pair of bad knees, a bum right ankle, and a case of arthritis. “On the day I saw him, he had significantly limited mobility,” Huizenga said. “Fast walking, certainly in terms of slow jogging, it would be very difficult if not impossible.” Huizenga also showed the jury the photographs of Simpson taken during the examination of June 17: His torso was massive and hugely muscled, but Shapiro pointed out that he had no abrasions to suggest he had just fought a life-or-death struggle less than a week earlier.

In his breezy way, Shapiro asked whether the photographs didn’t show “a man to be in pretty good shape.”

Huizenga helpfully disagreed. “Curiously, some people have these phenomenal builds and really aren’t in all that great aerobic shape. And I think that, based on my history, he hadn’t really been doing much exercise, if any, and there are some very lucky people that looks can be deceiving and certainly in his case, although he looks like Tarzan, you know, he was walking more like Tarzan’s grandfather.”

Brian Kelberg, the former medical student who had examined Lakshmanan at such length, conducted what was possibly the best cross-examination of the entire trial. Kelberg began by exploring the question of bias. Huizenga had agreed that he had been hired by Shapiro under highly unusual circumstances, and Kelberg asked whether the doctor had viewed his role as “to start preparing a possible defense in the event Mr. Simpson was charged.”

Huizenga pouted and disagreed. “I took it to address his mental problems, insomnia, and difficulty handling this incredible stress that maybe no other human being, short of Job, has endured.”

There was a pause in the courtroom as lawyers on both sides did double takes, as if to assure themselves that Huizenga had really said what they thought he said. (Even the somnolent jurors perked up at the reference to Job.)

Kelberg knew just how to follow up. “I want to be clear in your answer,” he said. “Is it your characterization that Mr. Simpson is in a situation which, to your knowledge, only Job has suffered more?”

“I think the pressure that was on him, for whatever reason, was a tremendous weight, the change in his life status that very few, if any, people have experienced in my opinion,” Huizenga answered.

“And if he had murdered two human beings, Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, would that be the kind of thing that would cause a great weight to be on a man’s shoulders?”

Shapiro objected in vain, and Huizenga had to say, “If someone hypothetically killed someone, they certainly would have a great weight on their shoulders.”

As Kelberg continued, Huizenga strained to spin every answer in Simpson’s favor. Kelberg brought out that Huizenga had written Shapiro a series of letters in which he, a nominally independent expert, had helped Simpson’s lawyer plot legal strategy. Kelberg showcased Huizenga’s preening ego for the jury, showing how the doctor larded up his résumé with his talk-show appearances. In answer after answer, Huizenga struggled to shade his answers to help the defense. It was an astonishing, and appalling, performance.

Even on the substance of the case, Kelberg used Huizenga to his advantage. The prosecutor meticulously went over the photographs of Simpson’s hands that were taken on June 17, and revealed to the jury that Simpson actually had seven separate abrasions on his left hand and three different cuts. His right hand was unmarked. (This fit with the prosecution’s theory that Simpson lost his left glove during the struggle at Bundy, cut his left hand, and did not lose his right glove until he returned to Rockingham.)

But Kelberg was just warming up. He showed a video clip from a motivational speech Simpson had given on March 31, 1994-a little more than two months before the murders-for an arthritis-relief product called Juice Plus. (Among other things, this demonstrated just how low Simpson had sunk in the entertainment world; once he had made Hertz commercials for national television, now he was pitching for a questionable medical remedy at a shabby convention in Dallas.) Mugging for the cheering distributors, Simpson said, “I started taking regularly Juice Plus and started feeling-I don’t know if it was mind over matter, if it was a mental thing-but almost immediately I started feeling better all of a sudden. I was starting to get another ten yards on my drive!” Confronted with the tape, Huizenga had no choice but to speculate that Simpson was either lying to push the product or in fact had enjoyed some relief from his arthritis symptoms.

But the climax of Kelberg’s cross-examination came when he played seventy minutes of raw footage from an exercise video that was later released as O.J. Simpson Minimum Maintenance for Men. Simpson had taped the routine-in which he looked fit and healthy in a T-shirt and Lycra shorts-at the end of May 1994, just two weeks before the murders. Trading inane patter with the coach who was directing the exercises, Simpson looked like a model of middle-aged fitness. Simpson stretched; he marched, bent his knees, did push-ups and sit-ups. The tape alone scotched the notion that Simpson did not have the physical ability to murder his ex-wife and her friend.

The most remarkable part of the tape came so fast that it was possible to miss it the first time through. One of the routines involved the participants simulating a punching motion-right jab, left jab, right jab, left jab. As the coach on the videotape later testified, Simpson ad-libbed a narration to the punching portion of the exercise. “Get your space in if you’re working out with the wife,” Simpson said to the camera, still punching at the air with his thick, muscled arms. Then he chuckled and added, “If you know what I mean, you can always blame it on workin’ out.” Meaning, if you punch your wife, you can always blame it on working out.

A convicted wife beater jokes about beating his wife. Could there have been a more chilling glimpse into O.J. Simpson’s subconscious? (The jurors, it turned out from later conversations, never paid any attention to this. Indeed, they said little about the defense case at all, so exhausted and numb were they by the summer months. By this point, it appears, they had already made up their minds.)

The defense case, then, ranged from poignant (Simpson’s family) to pathetic (Huizenga) to irrelevant (Baden and Lee) to downright incriminating (Heidstra and the exercise video). What many of the witnesses had in common was that their testimony pained them, embarrassed them, or otherwise diminished them.

Indeed, though Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were the first and most important casualties of this case, they were not the only ones. There was Simpson’s family, those decent and loyal women in yellow who endured this long trial for a man they loved, and of course those two children, who would grow up without a mother. There were Simpson’s friends, many of whom came to realize how blind they had been to O.J.’s narcissism and brutality. There were the peripheral figures, like Shipp and Huizenga, who degraded themselves on the altar of celebrity. (Shipp, at least, came to realize what he had done.) And there was even the public at large, whose passions and biases were inflamed by the events Simpson had set in motion. None of this mattered to O.J. Simpson, because, as he had done his entire life, he cared only about himself.

Huizenga and Heidstra gave the prosecution a brief but undeniable lift. So the defense lawyers retreated to the safe harbor they sought whenever the evidence turned against them: race.