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

2. PARKER CENTER

Officer Robert Riske of the Los Angeles Police Department was patrolling West Los Angeles in a black-and-white squad car when his radio summoned him at 12:09 A.M. on June 13. There had been a report of a crime from 874 South Bundy, in Brentwood. Four minutes later, Riske and his partner arrived at the address, which was the home of an elderly woman, Elsie Tistaert. She had called the police because a few moments earlier, a man and a woman-Sukru Boztepe and Bettina Rasmussen, it would turn out-had banged on her door. It wasn’t the kind of thing that usually went on in the neighborhood, and Tistaert was scared. She called 911 and reported a possible attempted burglary of her home.

When Riske rolled up to the scene, he found Boztepe and Rasmussen, who were still tending to Kato-the-Akita, and the officer quickly straightened out the confusion about why the police were needed. Boztepe took Riske across the street and showed him the pathway to number 875. The officer shined his flashlight on the corpse of Nicole Brown Simpson.

Nicole was lying at the base of four stairs that led up to a landing and the front door. The pool of blood around her was bigger than she was. Blood covered much of the imitation-tile walkway leading to the stairs, a path that was bordered on both sides by shrubbery. When Riske pointed his flashlight to the right, he saw another body. It was a muscular young man with his shirt pulled up over his head. The man, later identified as Ronald Goldman, was slumped against the metal fence that separated 875 from the property next door. Near Goldman’s feet, Riske identified three items: a black hat, a white envelope stained with blood, and a single leather glove. Turning back to Nicole, Riske made out a single fresh heel print in the blood next to her body. Perhaps the most important thing to Riske was what he didn’t find: Despite all the blood, there were no bloody shoe prints coming out the front gate onto the sidewalk by Bundy Drive.

Careful not to make tracks in the blood, Riske tiptoed through the bushes to the left of the pathway, past Nicole’s body, and up to the landing. From the landing, he shined his flashlight on a walkway that stretched the entire northern length of the property. Along this 120-foot-long corridor, Riske saw a single set of bloody shoe prints. It appeared that the killer had gone out the back way, to the alley that Nicole shared with Pablo Fenjves and other neighbors. On closer inspection, Riske noticed something else: fresh drops of blood to the left of those shoe prints. While leaving the scene, the killer might well have been bleeding from the left hand.

The front door to 875 South Bundy was open. Riske walked in to a scene of domestic calm. Nothing was out of place: no signs of ransacking or theft. Candles flickered in the living room. The officer walked up the stairs. There were lighted candles in the master bedroom and master bath, too, and the tub there was full of water. There were two other bedrooms, with a young girl asleep in one and a younger boy in the other.

Robert Riske knew his place in the chain of command. Once he had identified the dead and closed off access to the scene, his only responsibility was to summon the investigators, who would begin looking for clues. This was a major crime in an unlikely locale. (Eventually, there would be 1,811 murder victims in Los Angeles County in 1994, but these two were only the ninth and tenth of the year in the West Los Angeles division of the LAPD and the first two of the year in Brentwood.) As Riske prepared to summon assistance on his “rover,” a portable walkie-talkie, he noticed a letter on the front hall table. The return address indicated that it was from O.J. Simpson. The former football star was also depicted in a poster on the north wall of the home. On closer inspection, Riske found photographs of Simpson among the family pictures scattered on tables.

These discoveries prompted a change in Riske’s plans. He decided to call for help on the telephone because, as he testified later, “I didn’t want to broadcast over my rover that there was a possible double homicide involving a celebrity.” Reporters monitored the police bands, and if he had used his rover, he said, “the media would beat my backup there.”

Robert Riske was only a four-year veteran of the LAPD when he made his grisly discoveries. His name had never even appeared in the Los Angeles Times, but as his actions demonstrated, he had already developed an interest in, and some sophistication about, the ways of the press. In this he was typical. More than any other police force in the nation, the LAPD was locked in a strange and complex symbiosis, of several decades’ duration, with the media.

The modern Los Angeles Police Department was largely the creation of one man, William H. Parker. Born in 1902 and raised in the hard fields of South Dakota, Parker came to resemble in character the austere setting of his youth. He moved west to Los Angeles in 1923 and drove a cab to support himself while he studied at one of the many fledgling law schools that were springing up around the city. He joined the LAPD in 1927, worked a night shift on patrol, and became a member of the bar in 1930. Some years later, he made the acquaintance of another young LAPD officer, Gene Roddenberry, who eventually turned to writing science fiction and created Star Trek. The character of Spock is said to be based on Bill Parker.

Parker joined the force at a propitious time for an ambitious and incorruptible young officer. For years the LAPD, along with the rest of Los Angeles city government, had floated on a sea of graft and payoffs. The situation became so intolerable in the 1930s that the city’s business leaders decided changes had to be made. They hired from out of town a series of reform-minded police chiefs, who brought with them the gospel of “professionalization” of the force. The new leadership improved training, cracked down on corruption, and worked to insulate the police from what was then seen as the sinister influence of elected officials. This last goal became the special mission of Bill Parker. Working in tandem with the police union, Parker drafted changes in Section 202 of the city charter, which put a cast-iron shield of civil-service law around all police officers. After voters approved these measures in 1937, it became virtually impossible to fire cops; they could only be dismissed by a panel of their invariably sympathetic brethren. The law even decreed that the police chief would be selected according to civil-service guidelines, which meant that the LAPD would determine for itself who would serve as its leader. Once selected, the chief would also enjoy the protection of the civil-service law, which amounted to lifetime tenure in the top spot of the LAPD. As Joe Domanick, a historian of the LAPD, has written of the changes in Section 202, “A quasi-military organization had declared itself independent of the rest of city government and placed itself outside the control of the police commission, City Hall, or any other elected public officials, outside the democratic system of checks and balances.”

Parker became chief in 1950, when Los Angeles was in the midst of a period of spectacular postwar growth. At that point the city was no longer, in H. L. Mencken’s phrase, “a double Dubuque”-an insular, nearly all-white outpost of the Midwest on the Pacific Ocean. But if Los Angeles was changing, the LAPD was not. Parker’s model for his force was the Marine Corps, and so the police became tantamount to an army of occupation for those in the city who did not share Parker’s ethnic heritage. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, though, the LAPD under Bill Parker became known as a model of efficiency and skill. This did not happen by accident. Shortly after Parker took charge, he became acquainted with a young radio producer named Jack Webb. In 1949, Webb had started a radio series, Dragnet, based on the exploits of the LAPD. At first Parker was suspicious of the show, worried that it might place his beloved department in an unflattering light. Aware of his discomfort, Webb proposed a deal: In return for the LAPD’s cooperation, he would give the department the right to approve every script. Parker’s suspicions eased. When Dragnet moved to television, Parker understood just how advantageous an arrangement he had struck. Sergeant Joe Friday became the paradigm of what Parker wanted in an LAPD officer: an incorruptible white man who, with scientific detachment, descended on neighborhoods where he had no personal or emotional ties to clean up the messes made by the vaguely distasteful residents of the city. Soon Parker was only too happy to have Dragnet conclude each week with the announcement “You have just seen Dragnet, a series of authentic cases from official files… Technical advice for Dragnet comes from the offices of Chief of Police W. H. Parker, Los Angeles Police Department.” Jack Webb, who later wrote an admiring biography of Parker, had created one of the longest-lived genres in television programming, the L.A. police drama, which has included, at various times, The Mod Squad, Adam 12, Felony Squad, Blue Thunder, S.W.A.T., Strike Force, Chopper One, The Rookies, Hunter, and T. J. Hooker. As Joe Domanick wrote, “For twenty-five consecutive seasons at least one LAPD police show was being aired on network television.” They portrayed the LAPD in a manner that made Bill Parker proud.

Parker and his wife never had children, and the chief remained aloof from most of his colleagues on the force. He did, however, take a special shine to the young officer who was assigned to be his personal chauffeur-Daryl Gates. Together the two men refined a theory of “proactive policing,” which featured relentless confrontations between heavily armed officers and the hostile populations they patrolled. Parker and Gates came of age in an era when white cops didn’t have to rein in their feelings about African-Americans. When Watts exploded in 1965-a rebellion set off by a confrontation between a black motorist and a uniformed officer of the California Highway Patrol-Parker compared the black rioters to “monkeys in a zoo.” A year later, a black man named Leonard Deadwyler was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital when he was stopped by police for speeding. In the ensuing confrontation, the unarmed Deadwyler was shot dead. “Police are not supposed to stand by and watch a car speeding down the street at eighty miles per hour,” Parker explained. “[The officer] did something he thought would successfully conclude a police action. All he is guilty of is trying to do his job.”

True to the intent of the civil-service law, Parker served until he died, and Gates took over as chief in 1978. The selection process that led to Gates’s appointment seemed designed as a direct affront to the city’s black community: To head the internal review of candidates for the job, the LAPD brought in Curtis LeMay, the far-right-wing former air force general who had served as George Wallace’s running mate in 1968 and earlier had promised to bomb North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age.”

After Gates took over, the list of black victims of the LAPD grew ever longer. In 1979 Eulia Love, a thirty-nine-year-old black widow who was late in paying her gas bill, hit a meter reader on the arm with a garden shovel. The utility man summoned police officers, who, rather than defuse the situation, shot Love dead at pointblank range. In 1982, after a number of African-American men died from police choke holds, Gates observed that the deaths might have been caused by the distinctive physiology of the black victims: “We may be finding that in some blacks when [the choke hold] is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do on normal people.” It mattered little that Los Angeles had had a black mayor, Tom Bradley, since 1973. The LAPD answered to no one.

A raid on a suspected narcotics operation in August 1988 may have been the paradigmatic LAPD operation. About eighty police officers (and one helicopter) swooped in on four apartments in two small buildings at Thirty-ninth Street and Dalton Avenue, on the periphery of the South Central district. The officers, armed with shotguns and sledgehammers, barreled through the rooms. They tore plumbing out of the walls, ripped a stairway from its moorings, pulled carpet from the floor, destroyed furniture and appliances, and kicked and punched the stunned residents. For all the terror it unleashed, the raid netted only two minor drug arrests. Nevertheless, the officers on the scene did find reasons to take thirty-two residents of the complex back to the local precinct, where the captives were forced to whistle the theme song from the 1960s situation comedy The Andy Griffith Show. Before they left the Dalton homes, some officers had spray-painted the words LAPD RULES on the walls.

Less than three years later, a passerby videotaped LAPD officers beating unarmed motorist Rodney King. On April 30, 1992, the four officers who administered the beating were acquitted in a trial that had been moved from downtown Los Angeles to the rustic (and largely white) Simi Valley. As it had in 1965, the city once again erupted in a riot of protest, rage, and frustration. A blue-ribbon commission, headed by future secretary of state Warren Christopher, after studying the King beating and its aftermath, delivered a deadpan verdict that was many years in coming. “The problem of excessive force is aggravated by racism and bias within the LAPD,” the Christopher commission concluded. “These attitudes of prejudice and intolerance are translated into unacceptable behavior in the field.”

At 12:30 A.M. on June 13, Officer Robert Riske telephoned news of the two homicides to his supervisor, David Rossi, the sergeant in charge of the West Los Angeles station at the time. Rossi promptly made a half dozen phone calls around the LAPD chain of command, setting in motion the police response to the crimes. In an ordinary case, even a homicide, Rossi would probably have made only two calls-to the detective on duty, who would investigate the scene, and to his own commander. But Rossi’s supervisor immediately told him to reach higher in the command structure because of, as Rossi later put it, “the possible notoriety of this particular incident.”

A steady stream of officers began converging on the murder scene at 875 South Bundy. Sergeant Marty Coon was the first supervisor to arrive. Riske and his partner put up yellow crime-scene tape to block access to this block on Bundy and to the back alley. Additional officers came to make sure no one passed through the tape. A squad car arrived to take the two children to the West L.A. station, and two more officers began walking through the alley, searching garbage pails for possible evidence and knocking on doors in an effort to find witnesses. By the time David Rossi arrived at the scene at 1:30 A.M., the tape was up and the scene quiet. Moments later, Rossi’s boss, Captain Constance Dial, arrived as well. Riske took Coon and Rossi for a quick tour. Standing on the landing by the front door, Rossi saw what Riske had seen: the two bodies, the trail of blood heading toward the alley, the envelope, the knit hat, and the single leather glove.

Before leaving the station for the crime scene, Rossi had reached the chief of the West L.A. detective-homicide unit that would be in charge of the investigation, Ron Phillips, at home. A twenty-eight-year veteran of the LAPD, Phillips no longer investigated crimes himself; rather, it was his responsibility to visit the crime scene, talk with the uniformed officers who had discovered the bodies, and assign the case to one of the four homicide detectives who worked under him.

In the early morning hours of June 13, Phillips’s on-call detective for the next case was Mark Fuhrman, who would be assisted by his more junior partner, Brad Roberts. Phillips called Fuhrman and Roberts at their respective homes and told them to meet him at the West L.A. station. Roberts couldn’t get to the station as quickly as the other two, so when Phillips and Fuhrman met there at shortly before 2:00, they took an unmarked police car and proceeded together to the murder scene. They arrived at about 2:10 A.M. As Fuhrman approached the scene, he wore a shirt and tie but no jacket. According to the crime-scene log, Detective Mark Fuhrman was the seventeenth police officer to arrive at 875 South Bundy Drive.

Riske met Phillips and Fuhrman at the front of the house on Bundy and took them on a tour of the scene. They walked together toward the front door and hunched together in the shrubbery to the left of the pathway while Riske shined his high-powered flashlight on the female victim’s body. But because the front pathway was so covered with blood, the three men decided not to try to tiptoe around it and up the stairs, as Riske had done when he first discovered the scene, but instead walked around the block, via Dorothy Street, to the back alley. Rossi was waiting for them in the alley, and he pointed out some blood on the rear gate to Phillips. Riske, Phillips, and Fuhrman then entered the house through the garage, passing a black Jeep Cherokee and a white Ferrari, and then walked up a short flight of stairs. On the bannister next to the stairs there was a partially eaten cup of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream-Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough in flavor.

Riske led the two detectives through the house, including the second floor, and then back to the landing. There Phillips and Fuhrman could see the two bodies in front and the bloody shoe prints on the walkway leading to the back alley. Riske shined his flashlight around the scene once more, pointing out for the detectives the envelope as well as the hat and the glove, which were partially obscured by the foliage. They went back into the house and left through a door that opened onto the walkway that ran along the northern edge of the property. Riske showed them at close range the bloody shoe prints with the blood drops to the left. The three men then went out the back gate, which was, Riske pointed out, also stained with blood, especially on the handle.

After they completed their tour, Phillips and Fuhrman split up. Phillips stayed outside to use his cellular phone. Fuhrman wanted to make some notes of what he had seen. He wasn’t writing a formal report at this stage, just his preliminary observations to refer to as his investigation proceeded. Fuhrman reentered the house through the garage and sat down on a couch in the living room to scribble down some of what he had seen and been told. Numbering his entries, Fuhrman noted that Riske had discovered the bodies and made the initial report. The causes of death were still unknown, and Fuhrman hadn’t gotten close enough to the bodies to make any definitive finding. The third item in his notes said the victims had “Possible GSW”-gunshot wounds. Fuhrman made reference to the two children who had been taken to the police station, the lit candles, the melting ice cream. Fuhrman noted the blood drops to the left of the shoe prints on the walkway. “Suspect ran through this area,” he wrote. “Suspect possibly bitten by dog.” He made several mentions of blood on the rear gate, including a note that said, referring to the handle that opened the gate from inside the property, “Possible blood smudge and visible fingerprint.” In all, Fuhrman listed seventeen items for follow-up. He was writing his last entry-“Ski mask, one glove by feet of male victim”-when he was interrupted.

Brad Roberts had arrived and was asking for an update. Fuhrman quickly walked his partner to the landing and showed him the bodies, the hat, and the glove, and then they went back along the walkway that was marked with the bloody shoe prints. Afterward, Roberts headed around the block toward the Bundy entrance, and Fuhrman returned to the couch to work on his notes. He was interrupted again. This time it was his boss, Ron Phillips. Phillips told Fuhrman that the West L.A. team was off the case. It was being turned over to Robbery-Homicide Division, the headquarters unit that handles especially complex or high-profile cases. Moments later, Fuhrman followed Phillips out of the house through the garage. It was about 2:40 A.M., and Mark Fuhrman’s tenure as lead detective on this double homicide was over. It had lasted about thirty minutes.

Shortly after arriving at Bundy, Phillips had received a cellular phone call from one of the highest-ranking officers in the entire LAPD. Keith Bushey was the commander of operations for the western quarter of Los Angeles, a region that included not only West L.A. but the Hollywood, Pacific, and Wilshire divisions as well. Bushey had an order for Phillips. Since one of the victims was the ex-wife of O.J. Simpson-and because children presumed to be his had been removed from the house-he wanted Simpson personally informed of the murder. Bushey said he wanted to avoid a “Belushi situation.” (When the actor and comedian John Belushi had died at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in 1982, the news media had learned of it almost instantaneously and broadcast the information before the LAPD had the chance to notify any family members in person. It had been painful for Belushi’s family and embarrassing for the LAPD.)

Phillips hadn’t had a chance to act on this order in his first half hour on the scene because he had, for the most part, been inspecting the evidence with Fuhrman. Then, at about 2:30 A.M., Lieutenant Frank Spangler, in charge of all detectives in West Los Angeles and thus Phillips’s boss, arrived bearing the news that Phillips and his team were to withdraw from the case in deference to the Robbery-Homicide Division. In light of this change, Phillips decided that he would hold off on notifying Simpson as well.

Fuhrman pointed out some of the evidence, including the single glove and the envelope, for a police photographer who had arrived on the scene, but for the most part Fuhrman and Phillips stood around and waited for the detectives who were going to replace them. They stood together on Bundy chatting for almost an hour and a half, although at one point Fuhrman and Spangler did approach the male victim from the adjacent property to the north and together stared at the body through a fence.

At 4:05 A.M., Philip Vannatter, a Robbery-Homicide detective, arrived. Phillips mentioned to Vannatter that Bushey had ordered him to tell O.J. Simpson in person about the deaths. What should he do? Vannatter brushed off the issue, saying he would worry about it after he had seen the crime scene. At that point, Phillips walked Vannatter through the crime scene as he had been introduced to it by Officer Riske. At 4:30, Vannatter’s partner, Tom Lange, arrived, and Phillips gave him the tour, too. The LAPD had about fourteen hundred detectives, and neither Phillips nor Fuhrman had ever previously met Vannatter or Lange.

When the two senior detectives had completed their walkthroughs, Phillips again raised the issue of Bushey’s order for an in-person notification of Simpson. He was concerned about not having followed a very specific order from a high-ranking official. When was O.J. going to be notified? Vannatter said that since it was Simpson’s ex-wife who had been murdered, he and Lange would need to interview him anyway. As Lange testified later, “I think it is very important to establish a rapport, especially with persons who are close to the victim, to get information.” And besides, Simpson might be able to help them identify the male victim, whose name the police did not yet know. There was also the matter of the children. Simpson, who was bound to be upset at the news of the murder, might well need some assistance in collecting the boy and girl from the police station. So Vannatter decided that all four detectives would make the trip to Simpson’s home. Vannatter and Lange would introduce themselves to Simpson, assist in the notification, and then return promptly to begin their investigation of the crime scene, while the two junior detectives would help Simpson retrieve his children. Before they left, they had to settle one obvious question: Where did Simpson live?

Fuhrman said he knew. He told Phillips that when he was a uniformed patrol officer in West L.A., he had gone on a radio call to the Simpson home. “I went up there a long time ago on a family dispute,” Fuhrman said. “I think I can find it.” He didn’t remember the exact address, but Riske, who had run the plates on the Jeep parked in Nicole’s garage, told Fuhrman that the plates had come back to 360 North Rockingham. In his report of the evening’s activities, Lange summarized Fuhrman’s information this way: “Mr. Simpson and victim had been embroiled in previous domestic-violence situations, one of these resulting in the arrest of Mr. Simpson.” (Phillips later testified he did not remember any such discussion that evening, although it is possible he simply did not hear what Fuhrman said to Lange.) So, at just about 5:00 A.M., Phillips and Fuhrman led Vannatter and Lange in a two-car caravan from Bundy to Rockingham. The two-mile trip took about five minutes.

As the two cars made a right turn off Sunset Boulevard onto Rockingham Avenue, the terrain changed and the houses grew larger, grander. Traveling uphill along the silent street, the detectives strained to see the house numbers painted on the curbs. Earlier in his career, Vannatter had spent four years as a detective in West L.A., yet he had never driven on or even heard of Rockingham. It was not the kind of street that generated much police activity. Still, on that night he noticed one of the customs of the neighborhood. Rockingham was not a major artery, but it did serve as the conduit to Sunset for many smaller streets, and residents tended to avoid parking on it so that traffic could move freely. On this night, Rockingham was empty-except for a single vehicle. Just before the detectives reached the intersection of Rockingham Avenue and Ashford Street, Vannatter noticed a white Ford Bronco by the curb. On closer inspection, it appeared that the vehicle was slightly askew, as if it had been hurriedly parked. As it turned out, this car was stopped directly in front of number 360, which occupied the corner lot. The detectives turned right onto Ashford and parked their two cars near an iron gate set in the brick wall that surrounded O.J. Simpson’s property.

A couple of lights were on in the house, and there were two cars in the driveway. Vannatter rang the buzzer by the gate. No answer. He rang some more, and then Phillips and Lange rang for a while. Still no response. A medallion posted near the house announced that it was protected by Westec, a prominent security firm in Los Angeles. By coincidence, a marked Westec car happened to drive by, and the detectives flagged it down. They persuaded the security guard to give them Simpson’s home telephone number. (The guard also said that according to Westec records, a full-time housekeeper was usually on the premises.) At 5:36 A.M., Phillips began calling Simpson’s number on his cellular phone, but Simpson’s answering machine-“This is O.J.,” the message began-took the call each time.

Fuhrman hung back while the other three detectives tried to raise someone in the house. Though he had been a police officer for nineteen years, he was a level-two detective while the others were at level three; in the hierarchical world of the LAPD, it was therefore his place to defer. So, with nothing to do, Fuhrman wandered around the corner, back to Rockingham, and over to the Bronco. He shined his small pocket flashlight into the back and saw papers addressed to O.J. Simpson. Fuhrman then studied the driver’s door and noticed a small red stain just above the handle. Near the bottom of the door, on the exposed portion of the doorsill, he saw several more thin red stripes.

“I think I saw something on the Bronco,” Fuhrman called to Vannatter.

The senior detective came by to study the vehicle more closely, and the two men agreed that the stains looked like blood. Vannatter directed Fuhrman to run the license plates and see who owned the car. The plates came back to the Hertz Corporation, whose products Simpson had long endorsed.

Vannatter and Lange conferred. They decided that Vannatter would radio a request for a police criminalist to come and test the stain and see if it really was blood on the Bronco door. More generally, as they testified later, Vannatter and Lange were growing concerned about what might have happened inside Simpson’s property. They had just come from the scene of a brutal murder. Someone was supposed to be living at the Simpson home-at least a housekeeper-and there was no answer, even though lights were on. There appeared to be blood on the car outside. As Lange said later in court, “I felt that someone inside that house may be the victim of a crime, maybe bleeding or worse.” Vannatter testified, “After leaving a very violent bloody murder scene, I believed something was wrong there. I made a determination that we needed to go over-to go into the property.” Fuhrman-by far the youngest and fittest of the four detectives on the scene-volunteered. “I can go over the wall,” he said. “Okay, go,” said Lange. Fuhrman hoisted himself over the six-foot-high brick wall, then stepped to his right and manually opened the hydraulic gate. The four detectives entered O.J. Simpson’s property.

Simpson’s dog-a black chow-did not stir as the detectives passed it on their way to the front door. Vannatter knocked. No answer. They waited two or three minutes, knocked again, and still heard no stirring inside. The four detectives decided to take a look around, and so, still using flashlights in the moments before dawn, they walked together toward the rear of the house. There they saw a row of three guest houses, though they were really more like connected rooms, each with its own entrance. Phillips peered into one.

“There’s-I see someone inside,” he said.

Phillips knocked, and almost immediately a disheveled man who obviously had just awoken answered the door. Shaking his mane of blond hair out of his eyes, Kato Kaelin stared at Phillips, who identified himself and asked, “Is O.J. Simpson home?”

The groggy Kaelin said he didn’t know, but suggested the officers knock at the adjacent guest house, where Simpson’s daughter Arnelle lived. Phillips, accompanied by Vannatter and Lange, then knocked on Arnelle’s door. Fuhrman stayed behind and asked Kaelin if he could come in. Fuhrman noticed that Kaelin seemed disoriented, even for someone who had just awakened. Fuhrman gave Kaelin a standard police test for intoxication: Holding a pen about fifteen inches in front of Kaelin’s face, he watched to see if Kaelin could follow it with his eyes. Kaelin passed-he just looked zonked. Fuhrman asked to look around the small suite. As Fuhrman poked around-among other things, checking the shoes in the closet for blood-the detective asked if anything unusual had happened the previous night.

As a matter of fact, something unusual had happened. At about 10:45 P.M., while he was talking on the telephone, Kaelin said, there were some loud thumps on his bedroom wall, near the air conditioner. The jolts were so dramatic that a picture on the wall was jostled. He had thought there was going to be an earthquake.

The two men chatted a while longer, then Fuhrman walked with Kaelin into the main house, where the other three detectives were speaking with Arnelle Simpson. Fuhrman then decided to follow up on what Kaelin had told him. He left Kaelin in the house with the other detectives, walked back outside, and tried to orient himself to see what faced the south wall of Kaelin’s bedroom-the wall where Kaelin had heard the loud noises. Fuhrman saw that the south wall faced the edge of Simpson’s property, which was marked by a Cyclone fence, and that there was a narrow passageway between the back of the guest houses and the fence.

“I took out my flashlight and I started walking down the path trying to figure out the residence architecture to figure out where Kaelin’s wall might have been,” Fuhrman testified later. “I saw a long, dark path covered with leaves.” When Fuhrman had walked about twenty feet along the path, he saw a dark object on the ground, but it wasn’t until he was practically upon it that he realized what it was. “At some point,” Fuhrman remembered, “I could tell that it was a glove.”

It looked out of place. There were no leaves or twigs on it, and the glove looked moist or sticky, with some parts adhering to one another. Fuhrman stepped around the glove and kept walking along the path, but he started hitting cobwebs, which he had not previously encountered. He followed the path all the way to the end, which was an untended patch of dirt, then headed back out, passing the glove once more. He didn’t touch it, but he noticed something about it: “It looked similar to the glove on the Bundy scene.”

While Fuhrman had stopped in Kaelin’s room to talk to him, the other three detectives had knocked on Arnelle Simpson’s door, which she promptly answered. Phillips told her there was an emergency, and he needed to speak to her father-did she know how to reach him? Arnelle gestured to the main house and asked, “Isn’t he there?” The officers told Arnelle that her father was apparently not there. Leaving her guest house, Arnelle began walking toward the Ashford gate to see if her father’s car was there-that was where he usually parked it. The detective informed her that the Bronco was in fact parked on Rockingham. Using her key, Arnelle let them into the main house.

On the way they passed the third guest house-it belonged to the housekeeper, Gigi Guarin-and noticed that it was empty, the bed still made. Once they were inside the main house, Arnelle called Cathy Randa, her father’s longtime secretary, who always knew O.J.’s whereabouts. Arnelle handed the phone to Phillips, who told Randa there was an emergency that required their speaking with Simpson. Randa said he had taken the red-eye flight to Chicago the previous night and was staying at an airport hotel, the Chicago O’Hare Plaza.

Phillips called the hotel at 6:05 A.M. and asked to be put through to O.J. Simpson’s room. Though he recognized the voice, the detective still asked, “Is this O.J. Simpson?”

“Yes, who is this?”

Phillips chose his words carefully when he delivered news of Nicole’s death to O.J. “This is Detective Phillips from the Los Angeles Police Department. I have some bad news for you. Your ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, has been killed.”

Simpson was distraught. “Oh my God, Nicole is killed? Oh my God, she is dead?”

Phillips tried to calm him. “Mr. Simpson, please try to get ahold of yourself. I have your children at the West Los Angeles police station. I need to talk to you about that.”

“What do you mean you have my children at the police station? Why are my kids at the police station?”

“Because we had no place else to take them,” Phillips answered. “They are there for safekeeping. I need to know what to do with your children.”

“Well, I’m going to be leaving out of Chicago on the first available flight,” Simpson said. “I will come back to Los Angeles.” Phillips then handed the phone to Arnelle, who agreed with her father that she would ask his friend Al Cowlings to pick up the children.

Phillips never spoke to Simpson again. Later, the detective found it worth noting what Simpson did not say in their brief conversation. Simpson never asked how or when Nicole had been “killed.” Phillips had not said (and Simpson did not ask) whether she had been killed in an accident or a murder.

The drowsy children waited at the police station for someone to explain what had happened to them. At one point, eight-year-old Sydney Simpson asked to make a phone call, and she dialed her home number. The answering machine picked up, and Sydney left a message: “Mommy, please call me back. I want to know what happened last night. Why did we have to go to the police station? Please answer, Mommy. Please answer, Mommy. Please answer, Mommy. Please answer. ’Bye.”