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

3. BEING O.J.

The pace of events picked up quickly after Mark Fuhrman discovered the glove on the path behind Kato Kaelin’s room. After Phillips spoke to Simpson in Chicago, Tom Lange had the melancholy duty of notifying Nicole Brown Simpson’s parents of her death. LAPD policy called for detectives to notify a homicide victim’s next of kin in person if possible, but Lange learned from Arnelle that Lou and Juditha Brown lived in Orange County, about seventy-five miles away. Lange knew the media would soon learn about the murders and suspected that if he didn’t speak to Nicole’s parents immediately, they would learn of their daughter’s death from television news reports.

Lou Brown answered the telephone at 6:21 A.M. He took the news quietly. Lange did not know that Nicole’s sister Denise, the oldest of the four Brown daughters, lived at the family home and that she had picked up the phone on another extension.

Denise began screaming, “He killed her! He finally killed her!”

“Who?” asked Lange.

“O.J.!” said Denise.

Meanwhile, behind the house, Fuhrman quickly appreciated the significance of what he had found. The detective later recalled in testimony that “when I found the glove back here on this pathway, I will have to-I have to admit to you that the adrenaline started pumping because I didn’t really know what was going on… When I found the glove and actually realized this glove was very close in description and color to the glove at the crime scene, my heart started pounding and I realized what I had probably found.” One by one, Fuhrman took each of the other three detectives down the narrow pathway to study the glove without touching it. They all agreed that based on what they remembered, this right-hand glove looked like a match for the one at Bundy, but Vannatter sent Phillips and Fuhrman back to the murder scene to make a closer comparison. Lange would go back, too, to begin examining the evidence there, while Vannatter would await the criminalist at Rockingham.

The evidence stacked up quickly and led to a plausible theory of events: It appeared that the killer had dropped a left glove in a struggle at the murder scene and then suffered a cut on his exposed left hand. Bleeding, the killer then walked to a car in the back alley-very possibly Simpson’s Bronco. He then traveled to Rockingham where, perhaps in an effort to hide his clothes on the narrow path behind Kato’s room, he had dropped the other glove. “This is a crime scene,” Vannatter declared at Rockingham.

After the other three detectives left for Bundy, Vannatter decided to take a look around O.J. Simpson’s property. He stepped out the front door and onto the driveway, near the two parked cars. The sun was coming up at this point, and in the spreading daylight, Vannatter noticed what appeared to be a drop of blood on the ground. Then he found another… and another. The drops were all more or less in a row heading from the Rockingham gate to the front door. Vannatter opened that gate and took another look at the Bronco parked nearby. He stared in from the passenger side and noticed blood on the console between the two seats-and more blood on the inside of the driver’s door. Vannatter thought back to what he had seen at Bundy. The individual drops to the left of the bloody shoe prints leaving the two bodies resembled in size, shape, and color the drops here at Rockingham. Vannatter went back into O.J. Simpson’s home and found more blood drops in the foyer, just beyond the front door. The trail of blood now led right into Simpson’s home.

The criminalist, Dennis Fung, arrived at Rockingham at 7:10 A.M. and did a quick test of the red stain on the exterior of the Bronco. It was only a presumptive test, and so not 100 percent definitive, but it suggested the presence of human blood. Fuhrman returned from Nicole’s condominium a few moments later. He said the glove at Bundy was for a left hand, and told Vannatter that it did indeed look like a match for the right glove found behind Kaelin’s room.

That’s it, said Vannatter. We need to get a search warrant for this place. Vannatter left for the West Los Angeles station to write one up. Once there, he decided to touch base with deputy district attorney Marcia Clark. Vannatter and Clark had recently completed work together on a murder case that focused on blood and other trace evidence, and the detective wanted a second opinion on the facts he had gathered so far in this case. Checking with a prosecutor made sense for a detective; lawyers usually had better antennae than cops for determining whether a judge would grant a search warrant. For her part, Clark was only too pleased to receive Vannatter’s call at home shortly after eight on that Monday morning. A workaholic, and something of a crime junkie, she relished the details of criminal investigations as much as courtroom prosecutions.

Vannatter told Clark about the apparently matching gloves and then summarized the trail of blood-which wound from the left side of the shoe prints at Bundy, to the Bronco on Rockingham, to the driveway, and then to the foyer of Simpson’s home. Clark listened to Vannatter dispassionately and was struck only by one thing: the fancy neighborhood where the murders had taken place.

“Marcia,” Vannatter said. “It’s O.J. Simpson.”

“Who’s that?” Clark replied.

“You know, the football player, actor, Naked Gun.”

Marcia Clark had never followed sports. She went to the movies only once in a while. Just about her only connection to mass culture was when she listened to her Doors albums. For relaxation, she read novels about serial murderers.

“Sorry,” Clark said. “Never heard of him.”

On hearing the facts of the case, Clark thought there was more than enough evidence to get a search warrant-probably enough to arrest Simpson himself. But Vannatter said they should take it one step at a time, and he hung up. Then he began drafting the affidavit he would be required to submit in order to get a search warrant.

In his affidavit, Vannatter said he had been a police officer for over twenty-five years and a detective for fifteen. He wrote that after examining the crime scene, he and his partner had traveled to 360 North Rockingham to notify O.J. Simpson of the murder of his ex-wife. When they examined the Ford Bronco, Vannatter went on, they “noticed what appeared to be human blood, later confirmed by Scientific Investigation personnel to be human blood on the driver’s door handle of the vehicle.” Vannatter continued, “It was determined by interviews of Simpson’s daughter and a friend Brian Kaelin [that Simpson] had left on an unexpected flight to Chicago during the early morning hours of June 13, 1994, and was last seen at the residence at approximately 2300 hours, June 12, 1994.”

A magistrate signed the warrant in the late morning, and Vannatter returned to the Rockingham estate at just about noon on Monday, June 13, which was, as it happened, almost the same time O.J. Simpson arrived home from his abbreviated trip to Chicago.

Simpson’s friends often used the same expression to describe him: “He loved being O.J.” That was, in many respects, his occupation-being O.J. By 1994, he was long retired from his days of football glory. He had modest visibility as a sports broadcaster and some minor success as an actor in occasional self-mocking roles in the Naked Gun movies. He judged beauty contests. He shilled for Hertz. He pitched in an infomercial for an arthritis cure. At the time of his arrest for murder, Simpson had only a vaporous, peculiarly American kind of renown: He was famous for being O.J. (When Nicole Brown Simpson called 911 on October 25, 1993, and complained that her ex-husband was “going nuts” outside her home, she assumed that his name would be immediately recognizable; but having heard it, the dispatcher asked, “Is he the sportscaster or whatever?”)

The event Simpson planned to attend in Chicago on Monday, June 13, demonstrated how he made his living as a “sportscaster or whatever.” He was due that day at the Mission Hills Country Club, in suburban Northbrook, to play in the Hertz Invitational, the rental car company’s annual tournament for its top corporate customers in the neighboring thirteen-state area. In 1994, playing golf was pretty much all O.J. Simpson did for Hertz, though he did a lot of it. (The previous week, he had played for Hertz in Virginia.) It had been a different story when he first signed with Hertz in the 1970s, when he was still playing football. At that time Simpson starred in some of the best-known television advertisements of the era, which featured the handsome athlete leaping over furniture in airports to make a swift connection to his rental car. “Go, O.J., go!,” a grandmotherly matron shouted after him. At the time Hertz even tied its corporate slogan to its celebrity spokesman, touting itself as “the superstar in rent-a-car.” But a decade and a half later, the company paid him about half a million dollars a year to be, as his friends put it, “the house golfer for Hertz.”

The creation of a public image-that is, defining what “being O.J.” meant-had been Simpson’s life work. In the years before he was arrested for murder, O.J. Simpson was interviewed countless times about his life story, and he would invariably invoke the same themes, even the same anecdotes. Though it is now difficult to remember in light of the notoriety of the murder case, Simpson for many years enjoyed a clean-cut and lovable image. This was a man who, after all, had been sanctified with a nationally televised “roast” by Bob Hope before he was twenty-five years old. So Simpson often went out of his way to boast in interviews about his hardscrabble origins and rascally past-a history that would take on a more sinister cast after his arrest.

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 7, 1947, the third of four children of James and Eunice Simpson, in San Francisco. (His unusual first name, which O.J. loathed, was an aunt’s suggestion of obscure origin.) His father was an intermittent presence in his life; in later life, he came out as a homosexual, and he died of AIDS in 1985. His mother, who worked nights as an orderly and then a technician in the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital, supported the family as best she could.

In an authorized, highly laudatory biography published in 1974, when O.J. was twenty-seven, Larry Fox wrote of Simpson’s childhood: “There was the throwing rocks at buses, the shoplifting (after all, they were too young to buy beer and wine), the breaking up of parties, and, above all, the fights, the constant fights.” And Simpson himself admitted in an extensive Playboy interview in 1976, “If there wasn’t no fight, there wasn’t no weekend… Sports was lucky for me. If I hadn’t been on the high school football team, there’s no question but that I would’ve been sent to jail for three years.”

When asked about his formative influences, Simpson repeated one story from his adolescence over and over again. The year was 1962, and Simpson, a sophomore in high school, was in trouble. In some versions of the story, he had been caught stealing from a liquor store; in others, he had been arrested for a fight involving his gang, the Persian Warriors, in his Potrero Hill neighborhood. Simpson was asleep in his apartment when there was a knock at the door. Knowing of O.J.’s troubles, as well as of his athletic promise, a concerned adult had arranged for Willie Mays, the legendary center fielder for the San Francisco Giants, to pay a call.

“Willie didn’t give me no discipline rap; we drove over to his place and spent the afternoon talking sports,” Simpson told Playboy. “He lived in a great big house over in Forest Hill and he was exactly the easygoing friendly guy I’d always pictured him to be.” (In a revealing segue in the interview, Simpson went on to defend Mays because “a short time after that, Jackie Robinson took a shot at Mays by saying he didn’t do enough for his people.” But, Simpson protested, “Mays always put out good vibes.”) Of the Mays visit Larry Fox wrote, “Willie’s message was not so much in his words. It was in his achievements and what these achievements had brought him in the way of material goods.” Telling the Mays story in the book I Want to Tell You, which he nominally wrote later from his prison cell, Simpson said, “It was the first time I saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Getting a big house and putting out good vibes became the leitmotif of Simpson’s professional life. After high school, he spent two years playing football and running track at the City College of San Francisco, a local junior college. He averaged more than ten yards per carry at CCSF, so the recruiters from the big four-year schools came calling in droves. But Simpson only had eyes for the University of Southern California. As a boy, O.J. had admired the pageantry of USC football-the Trojan wearing a suit of armor seated atop a great white stallion. But as a prospective Trojan himself, Simpson saw that USC delivered media exposure-and thus potentially lucrative contacts-beyond that of any other college football program in the land.

Almost half a century earlier, the USC football machine had been willed into existence by one man, an obscure, Illinois-born academic named Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid. After bouncing around several different universities after the turn of the century, Dr. K, as he was known, became president of USC in 1921. There he faced a dilemma familiar to college presidents. “Supported by tuition, possessed of virtually no endowment (hardly more than $1 million by 1926) with which to finance its expansion, U.S.C. needed money,” the historian Kevin Starr has observed. “Football offered a solution.” Dr. K invested in recruiting, bands, and a magnificent new stadium, the Coliseum, which would serve as the centerpiece of the 1932 Olympic games in Los Angeles. Von KleinSmid’s gamble paid off beyond even his own imaginings. Trojan football became one of the few activities to unite the fractured metropolis of Los Angeles. When USC defeated Notre Dame on a last-second field goal in 1931, a crowd of 300,000, one third the population of the city, greeted the returning team at the train station. The passage of time did not dim the school’s (or the city’s) enthusiasm for the sport. By the 1950s, the Trojans’ greatest star was Frank Gifford, about whom a fellow student, the novelist Frederick Exley, would observe, “Frank Gifford was an All-America at USC, and I know of no way of describing this phenomenon short of equating it with being the Pope in the Vatican.”

In 1967, at the University of Southern California, O.J. Simpson became pope-and then some. He quickly established himself as the best running back in the school’s history on what was perhaps the best team in USC history. He gained 158 yards rushing in his third game and 190 in his fourth. Southern Cal had not beaten Notre Dame in South Bend since 1939, but in 1967 Simpson and his teammates routed the Irish there, 24-7. In the final week of O.J.’s first season, USC played crosstown rival UCLA in a game freighted with even more significance than usual. Both schools, with just one loss each, remained in the hunt for a national championship, and likewise both teams needed only to beat the other to win a bid to go to the Rose Bowl. Finally, the game matched the leading contenders for the Heisman trophy, awarded annually to the best player in the nation-Gary Beban, the senior UCLA quarterback, and O.J. Simpson, the USC junior. Late in the fourth quarter, the game came down to a single play. UCLA led 20-14, and the Trojans had the ball on their own thirty-six-yard line. The drive looked like it would be Southern Cal’s last chance to score. It was third down and eight yards to go.

In the huddle, Toby Page, the USC quarterback, called a play that did not involve Simpson, but he changed his mind at the line of scrimmage and called out, “Twenty-three blast!”-signaling to his teammates that he was calling an audible. In the reconfigured play, Page handed the ball to Simpson, who took off-first right and then back against the grain to the left, all the while trailing UCLA defenders. Simpson outran his own blockers as well as the defense, and his touchdown gave the Trojans the game. Decades later the play remains known to USC faithful as, simply, “the run.” USC went on to beat Indiana in the Rose Bowl, where Simpson was named player of the game, and to win the national championship. (Beban, however, still won the Heisman in a close vote.)

As a senior, Simpson picked up where he had left off. He gained 236 yards in the season opener against Minnesota, 220 against Stanford, and a career high of 238 yards against Oregon State. Southern Cal was tied by Notre Dame in its last regular season game and lost the Rose Bowl to Ohio State, but as a senior Simpson won the Heisman in a landslide. The number of O.J.’s jersey-32-was retired at the end of his career. To be sure, his success at USC was limited to the athletic arena. In those days, before the NCAA began to regulate seriously the recruiting and schooling of college athletes, Simpson received virtually no education at USC. Even today, he can barely write a grammatical sentence. As he confided to Playboy, “My only interest in school was in gettin’ out, so I took courses like home economics, and didn’t exactly kill myself.”

Simpson was the first player selected in the 1969 professional draft and, in a characteristic gesture, parlayed that first year into a book deal as well as a lucrative contract with the Buffalo Bills. OJ: The Education of a Rich Rookie, which was cowritten by Pete Axthelm, is for the most part a stupefyingly dull game-by-game account of the season (“We spent the week working on the I-formation…”), but there are casually revealing moments as well. On the very first page, Simpson wrote, “I have been praised, kidded, and criticized about being image-conscious. And I plead guilty to the charge. I have always wanted to be liked and respected.” In fact, his good looks and cheerful demeanor with reporters and fans paid dividends as soon as he left college.

Before he had played a single professional game, Simpson won endorsement contracts with Chevrolet and Royal Crown Cola, and a broadcasting deal with ABC. “I’m enjoying the money, the big house, the cars; what ghetto kid wouldn’t?” Simpson went on in that first book. “But I don’t feel that I’m being selfish about it. In the long run, I feel that my advances in the business world will shatter a lot of white myths about black athletes-and give some pride and hope to a lot of young blacks. And when I’m finished with the challenges of football, I’m going to take on the challenge of helping black kids in every way I can. I believe I can do as much for my people in my own way as a Tommie Smith, a Jim Brown, or a Jackie Robinson may choose to do in another way. That’s part of the image I want, too.” Simpson had put his views on race more starkly in a 1968 interview with Robert Lipsyte of The New York Times. As the country smoldered with racial tensions-and some black athletes, like Robinson and Muhammad Ali, jeopardized their careers to participate in the civil rights movement-Simpson told Lipsyte, “I’m not black, I’m O.J.”

Simpson’s professional football career started slowly. His first Bills coach, John Rauch, favored a pass-oriented attack, and O.J. did not come close to winning the Rookie of the Year award. He missed most of his second year with an injury. In his third year, the Bills won only one game. But after that season, the owner of the team, Ralph Wilson, made a decision to reorient the entire Bills operation around O.J. Simpson. He fired Rauch and brought in Lou Saban, who favored a running attack. The team began using its draft choices on blockers, building the group that would become famous as the Electric Company-because they “turn on the Juice.” In 1972, the first season under Saban, Simpson ran for 1,251 yards, the best in the league, and his professional career was launched.

Shortly before the next season, Simpson spoke on the phone with Reggie McKenzie, his lead blocker on the Bills. As O.J. recalled it for Larry Fox, he said, “You know, with the guys we’ve got to block, I think I should gain 1,700 yards this year. Maybe I’ll even have a shot at Jim Brown’s [single-season] record.”

McKenzie disagreed. “Why don’t we go for the two grand?”

A 2,000-yard season-something never before done in professional football-became Simpson’s obsession. O.J. gained 250 yards in the Bills’ season opener against the New England Patriots, a new single-game record for the league. As he built his totals with similar performances throughout the 1973 season, football fans followed his race against Brown’s record 1,863 yards and beyond. The hoped-for number had a magical quality. It was one of those round figures that have defined many of sports history’s greatest dramas: the 4-minute mile; the.400 batting average; the 2,000-yard season.

As the year wore on, nearly every story about Simpson noted the contrast between him and Jim Brown. The great Cleveland player, who had been a dour, brooding presence in the game, had churned out his record by crushing everyone in his way, and he was something of a black activist to boot. Simpson relied on speed and agility more than on brute strength. These differences in style, it was said, were reflected in the two men’s temperaments-the militant Brown versus the cheerful Simpson. To the public, Simpson was the anti-Brown, the smiling celebrity, the chipper pitchman, the one who ran around, rather than over, defenders and who never said a discouraging word before the cameras. In fact, these portraits amounted to little more than sportswriters’ tinny conceits, but they affixed Simpson with a glowing image that would last through his arrest for murder in 1994. Simpson did, of course, break the magical barrier in 1973, finishing with 2,003 yards as the nation’s sports fans cheered.

In Simpson’s years as a professional athlete and then afterward, his life amounted to a lesson on the manufacture and maintenance of an image-albeit one that bore little resemblance to the realities of his life. He gave the black community little more than his own example; his charitable activities were minimal. In the seventies, he did a memorable television commercial for sunglasses that ended in a cuddly embrace among Simpson, his wife, Marguerite, and their two little children, Arnelle and Jason. But the marriage-which took place shortly before Arnelle’s birth, in 1968-was a sham. Simpson philandered compulsively, both before and after he met Nicole Brown in 1977, when she was eighteen years old. Nicole had already moved into the Rockingham house when the divorce from Marguerite became final two years later, the year that also marked the end of his football career. O.J. didn’t marry Nicole until she was pregnant with Sydney, in 1985. When he was inducted into the football Hall of Fame that same year, he said Nicole “came into my life at what is probably the most difficult time for an athlete, at the end of my career, and she turned those years into some of the best years of my life.”

After his football career, Simpson enjoyed a perpetual boyhood, and he drifted between golf games and long lunches, always surrounded by the sycophants who cluster around star athletes. From broadcasting, acting roles, and business investments, he could count on about a million dollars a year in income in the late 1980s. He was charming and courteous to strangers, and would sign autographs interminably without complaint. He was no prima donna. Several production workers at NBC Sports, which he joined in 1989 after several unsuccessful years at ABC, recalled that Simpson was the only on-air talent who gave them Christmas presents. Ironically, in light of how his trial would unfold, Simpson always had a special fondness for police officers, and over the years many of them came by the house on Rockingham to use the pool or shoot the breeze. The cops turned out to be valuable friends, especially when it came to the events of January 1, 1989.

At 3:58 A.M. on that New Year’s Day in Los Angeles, the phone rang in front of 911 operator Sharyn Gilbert. At first she heard no one at the other end, but her console indicated that the call was coming from 360 North Rockingham, in Brentwood. Then there were sounds-a woman screaming, then slaps. “I heard someone being hit,” Gilbert later recalled. There was more screaming, and then the call was cut off. Though no one ever said any words to her, Gilbert rated the call a “code-two high,” which meant that it required immediate police response.

Officer John Edwards and his partner, a trainee named Patricia Milewski, went to the scene. Edwards pressed the buzzer at the Ashford gate to the property, and a woman who identified herself as the housekeeper came out. She said, “There’s no problem here,” and told the officers to leave. Edwards said they couldn’t go anywhere until they spoke with the woman who had called 911. After a few minutes of this back-and-forth, a blond woman-Nicole Brown Simpson-staggered out from the heavy bushes behind the gate. She was wearing just a bra and a pair of dirty sweatpants.

Nicole collapsed against the inside of the gate and started yelling to the officers, “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!” She pounded on the button that opened the gate and then flung herself into Edwards’s arms.

“Who’s going to kill you?” Edwards asked.

“O.J.”

“O.J. who?” Edwards asked. “Do you mean O.J. the football player?”

“Yes,” Nicole said. “O.J. Simpson the football player.”

“Does he have any weapons?”

“Yeah,” she replied, still breathless. “Lots of guns. He has lots of guns.”

Edwards shined his flashlight on Nicole’s face. Her lip was cut and bleeding. Her left eye was black-and-blue. Her forehead was bruised, and on her neck-unmistakably-was the imprint of a human hand. As Nicole calmed down, Edwards learned that O.J. Simpson had slapped her, hit her with his fist, and pulled her by the hair. Just before Edwards placed her in the squad car to warm up, Nicole turned to him and said with disgust, “You guys never do anything. You never do anything. You come out. You’ve been here eight times. And you never do anything about him.” She then agreed to sign a crime report against her husband.

As Edwards turned to the house, he noticed O.J. Simpson, wearing a bathrobe, walking toward him. Simpson was screaming, “I don’t want that woman in my bed anymore! I got two other women. I don’t want that woman in my bed!”

Edwards explained that he was going to place Simpson under arrest for beating his wife.

“I didn’t beat her,” Simpson said, still furious. “I just pushed her out of bed.” Edwards repeated that he was going to have to take him in.

Simpson was incredulous. “You’ve been out here eight times before and now you’re going to arrest me for this? This is a family matter. This is a family matter.”

Edwards requested that Simpson go back into to his house, get dressed, and return to be taken in to the station. As Simpson walked off, the housekeeper, Michelle Abudrahm, went over to Nicole, who was in the squad car, and implored, “Don’t do this, Nicole. Come inside.” The housekeeper was actually tugging on Nicole from outside the car, and Edwards came over and shooed her away. Moments later Simpson, now dressed, returned to the gate and began lecturing Edwards. “What makes you so special? Why are you doing this? You guys have been out here eight times before, and no one has ever done anything like this before.”

Edwards explained that the law required him to take Simpson in to the station. When Edwards turned to brief a second set of officers who had arrived on the scene, the officers saw a blue Bentley roar out of another gate at the property, this one on Rockingham.

Edwards got into his car and took off after Simpson-and four other police cars soon joined in the chase-but they couldn’t catch up with him. Returning to Nicole, Edwards asked what had prompted her husband’s attack. She said she had complained because there were two other women staying in their home, and O.J. had had sex with one of them earlier in the day. Edwards never saw Simpson again.

With Nicole having signed a police report, the police were obliged to bring the case against O.J. at least to the next step. The case was assigned to Officer Mike Farrell, who reached O.J. by telephone on January 3. Simpson explained that after he and Nicole had returned home from a New Year’s Eve party, where they had been drinking, they had had a verbal dispute “that got out of hand.” O.J. said it then turned into “a mutual-type wrestling match. That was basically it. Nothing more than that.” Accompanied by her two children, Nicole came into the West Los Angeles police station the next day, and she, too, minimized the dispute. She said she didn’t really want to go through with a full-fledged prosecution. Farrell mentioned the possibility of resolving the case through an informal mediation with the city attorney’s office. “I would like to have that,” the twenty-nine-year-old Nicole said. “I think that would be neat.”

Still, under the law, Farrell had to present the case to the city attorney’s office, which would have the final say over whether Simpson would be prosecuted for misdemeanor spousal abuse. The prosecutors were torn, as they so often are in domestic-violence cases. If this really was just a single drunken brawl after a New Year’s Eve party, a prosecutor told Farrell, then maybe they should just let it drop. After all, they had a reluctant victim as their only witness. Farrell was told to ask around the West L.A. station and determine whether there had been other incidents at the Simpson home. If there was a pattern, they would prosecute.

So Farrell asked around-and heard nothing. Both O.J. and Nicole had acknowledged that the police had come to the house eight times to stop O.J. from hurting Nicole, but at first Farrell couldn’t find a single cop who admitted to going to Rockingham. (O.J. had entertained about forty officers at his home at various times, and with their silence, the officers may have been repaying his hospitality.) Eventually, out of all the cops who had handled calls at the Simpson home, one spoke up. Yes, this officer said, he had been out to the house on a domestic-violence incident. Farrell asked him to write up the incident in a memo, and the officer wrote on January 18, 1989, “To whom it may concern”:

During the fall or winter of 1985 I responded to a 415 family dispute at 360 North Rockingham. Upon arrival I observed two persons in front of the estate, a black male pacing on the driveway and a female wht sitting on a veh crying. I inquired if the persons I observed were the residents, at which time the male black stated, “Yeah, I own this, I’m O.J. Simpson!” My attention turned to the female who was sobbing and asked her if she was alright but before she could speak the male black (Simpson) interrupted saying, “she’s my wife, she’s okay!” During my conversation with the female I noted that she was sitting in front of a shattered windshield (Mercedes-Benz I believe) and I asked, “who broke the windshield?” with the female responding, “he did (pointing to Simpson)… He hit the windshield with a baseball bat!” Upon hearing the female’s statement, Simpson exclaimed, “I broke the windshield… it’s mine… there’s no trouble here.” I turned to the female and asked if she would like to make a report and she stated, “no.”

It seems odd to remember such an event but it is not everyday that you respond to a celebrity’s home for a family dispute. For this reason this incident was indelibly pressed in my memory.

The author of the letter was Mark Fuhrman. Farrell passed it to the prosecutors, and on January 30 they decided to bring a case against O.J. Simpson.

As his lawyer, Simpson hired Howard Weitzman, a predictable choice given the latter’s reputation. Since winning an acquittal for John Z. DeLorean in a drug-possession case, Weitzman had run a well-publicized criminal and civil practice in Century City. Weitzman was also an active USC alumnus and big sports fan. In Simpson’s case, the lawyer quietly worked out a deal. First there would be several adjournments, which would diminish the already minimal media attention the incident had received. (The Los Angeles Times covered Simpson’s arrest with a 142-word story on page four of the sports section.) Weitzman arranged for Simpson to plead “no contest” to the charge-which is legally identical to “guilty” but sounds better in the press-in return for a sentence of probation and community service.

Weitzman pushed hard for Simpson. The day after Simpson made his plea, Weitzman filed a brief asking that Simpson’s case be “diverted.” Diversion is a legal process that allows a defendant, if he is not subsequently arrested, to lose the stigma of a criminal record. In his brief Weitzman observed, “Mrs. Simpson has indicated she did not want criminal charges filed against her husband nor will she voluntarily appear as a witness against her husband on behalf of the State.” This case, Weitzman wrote, involved a “minor physical injury (nonetheless significant to Mrs. Simpson) inflicted by a first-time offender who could be helped to refrain from repeating the offense with the proper counseling.” The city attorney objected to a diversion, however, and Simpson did in fact have to plea to the misdemeanor. On May 24, 1989, he received a suspended sentence, twenty-four months of probation, and fines totaling $470. He was ordered to “perform 120 hours of community service through the Voluntary Action Bureau” and to receive counseling twice a week. (Weitzman persuaded the prosecutor, Rob Pingel, to excuse Simpson from the customary group counseling sessions for batterers and instead allow him to receive his counseling from a private psychologist, Burton Kittay.) Finally, Simpson was directed to pay $500 as “restitution,” to the Sojourn Counseling Center, a battered women’s shelter in Santa Monica. (This was the same center that Nicole would call on June 7, 1994, five days before her death, to complain that O.J. was stalking her.)

Weitzman-and Simpson-did not cease playing the angles after the imposition of sentence. Simpson never reported to the Voluntary Action Bureau, which can assign convicts to such tasks as picking up trash by the highway or cleaning bedpans at hospitals. Instead, Simpson took it upon himself to select his own form of community service: organizing a fund-raiser for Camp Ronald McDonald, a children’s cancer charity, at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Beach, where O.J. and Nicole had a vacation home.

When Simpson went back to court on September 1, 1989, to report on the progress of his probation, his form of community service was questioned by the judge. Simpson’s response-indeed, his behavior at the hearing, where no journalists were present-was a mixture of indignation and self-pity.

“I want to know specifically what you did,” the judge, Ronald Schoenberg, asked the defendant.

“Everything,” said Simpson. “I closed up my office at the beginning of June and moved my office to Laguna. I created this affair. I didn’t just work for them. I created this affair. When my lawyer informed me before the sentence that I would have to do community service… in the spirit of all of this, I went out on my own and created this event. I talked everyone into it from Coca-Cola to-I flew to Atlanta. I flew to New York and met with Hertz. I flew to Boston to meet with sponsors like Reebok. I went to Ritz-Carlton, spent time with them to get them to pick up some of the cost of the event… I wrote personal letters and contacted corporate America to see if they would participate in this event… We put on what I felt was the finest event they ever had in that area. At least that’s what the press said.”

Judge Schoenberg finally cut off the monologue. “When you’re talking to other people, they’re interested in the results and what you did for them,” he began deferentially. “I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in the work that you did, the hours that you put in, and what you were doing. I know you’re used to talking to people that are interested in what results you achieved, and I’m not.”

Simpson replied, “Well, I was told, Your Honor, that I had to put in time. I think I put in not only the time that was required of me but far beyond those hours… I guess what I’m trying to say is I wasn’t trying to get a hundred hours into community service. I tried to do a good job, and it just so happened that I put in more than the hundred hours that I was sentenced to by the court.”

The prosecutor, Rob Pingel, was frustrated-and obviously feeling snookered by how Simpson’s entire case had unfolded. He complained that by organizing the fund-raiser, Simpson had merely engaged in business as usual, rather than submitting to the customary kind of community service.

After Weitzman stepped in to defend the worthiness of Simpson’s work, Judge Schoenberg asked a clever question, albeit with considerable solicitude. “There’s a question I’m afraid to ask, and that is this: If this whole case hadn’t come about, would Mr. Simpson have done the same thing for the charity?” Simpson replied, “Certainly not the hours that I put in… I went into this full-time… hoping to influence the court.” Simpson added sarcastically, “I know that’s not a worthy charity, it seems, in this room.”

The judge raised the prospect of Simpson doing a more conventional form of community service before being formally released from supervision. Weitzman informed the judge that this would not be possible: Simpson was moving to New York. “He’s moving Sunday,” Weitzman said. “Football season starts.” (Simpson was moving to NBC to cohost its pregame shows on Sundays.)

Remembering that Simpson had also agreed to undergo counseling as part of his sentence, the judge asked, “What’s going to happen with the other condition about counseling?”

“I mean, I’m sure there are counselors in New York,” Simpson answered. “I’ve gone to that religiously. I don’t know how often I can discuss one incident in my entire life, but I’ll continue to do that.”

“For whatever it’s worth, Your Honor,” Weitzman then said, “I think the counselor did indicate that he believes whatever problem existed doesn’t exist any longer. The counselor said, if necessary, he’d be willing to do it via telephone…”

Simpson apparently couldn’t help himself from adding, “Maybe I’m wrong in saying this, but I just don’t understand. At that point when we’re talking about counseling, I’m more than willing to do it, and I’ve been doing it religiously. It’s just, how long can I-I mean, I really have reached a point where I can write a book about all of this. I don’t even know what else to talk about. I come in. I sit down with him. We start talking about other things that are happening in my life at this point. I can’t talk about one incident. I mean, I just don’t know how long, sir, I can talk about one incident in my entire life.

“I think I’ve been a great citizen. My wife has indicated we have a great marriage. We had one bad night in our life.”

The judge allowed Simpson to be counseled by telephone. He never had to appear in court again. He wrote Nicole a series of apologetic letters reflecting his hope that they could continue their marriage. In an interview, later in 1989, with Roy Firestone on Up Close, a sports talk show on ESPN, Simpson described the incident by saying, “We had a fight. We were both guilty. No one was hurt. It was no big deal and we got on with our lives. It wasn’t that big of a deal.”

Simpson’s probation expired uneventfully, and he had no more formal contact with the criminal justice system for almost five years-until, that is, June 13, 1994, the day after his ex-wife’s death, when he returned to his home in Brentwood and found that the police urgently wanted to speak with him.

After the judge granted the search warrant, Vannatter returned to the Rockingham house shortly before noon on June 13. At that point, the detective gave an order to Donald Thompson, one of the uniformed patrol officers guarding the perimeter of Simpson’s property. Since the entire area was now considered a crime scene-and since Vannatter now had a warrant to search the house and the Bronco-he did not want Simpson or anyone else allowed inside. If Simpson arrives, Vannatter instructed Thompson, detain him and let me know he’s here. The precise words Vannatter used with regard to Simpson later became a point of some controversy. Thompson remembered that Vannatter said, “Hook him up”-that is, handcuff him. Vannatter recalled that he simply said Simpson should be detained until detectives could speak with him.

Simpson had indeed caught the first available flight from Chicago to Los Angeles, and he made his way home at about 12:10 P.M. Curiously for a man who had been told only that his ex-wife had been killed, not necessarily murdered, Simpson had telephoned from his hotel room in Chicago to arrange for a criminal defense attorney to meet him upon his return home. That was Howard Weitzman, who had represented him so successfully in his abuse case. So Weitzman-as well as Simpson’s longtime secretary, Cathy Randa; his business lawyer, Skip Taft; and an old friend, Robert Kardashian-were waiting for Simpson on the sidewalk when he arrived at his house. Under the watchful eye of several news cameras, Simpson left his bags with Kardashian and hurried up to the front door. At that point, Weitzman, Randa, and Kardashian were not allowed on the property. Simpson was escorted to the front door by Detective Brad Roberts, Mark Fuhrman’s partner, who was assisting in the search of the house.

According to Roberts’s written report, Simpson pointed to the cops milling around his property and asked him, “What’s all this?”

“It relates to the phone call you got earlier about the death of your ex-wife.”

“Yeah, so?” Simpson replied.

“Well, I’m not the detective on the case,” Roberts explained, “but we came here because a blood trail led us here from the scene.”

Simpson started hyperventilating. “Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man,” he muttered to himself.

Acting according to his understanding of Vannatter’s instructions, Officer Thompson placed a hand on Simpson to slow him down as he approached the front door. He could have handcuffed him right there. But like Robert Riske, the first officer to see the bodies on Bundy, Donald Thompson was a media-savvy cop. (Of the dozens of Los Angeles law enforcement officials with roles in this case, Thompson was also the only African-American.) As a nine-year veteran, Thompson knew that informal LAPD protocol for dealing with celebrities dictated that he refrain from making a show for the cameras. Instead, he guided Simpson over to another part of the yard, where there was an elaborate play set that had been set up for Nicole and O.J.’s two children. There, in an area he thought was out of the cameras’ range, Thompson shackled Simpson’s hands behind his back. The officer later recalled that he applied the cuffs in this sheltered location “for the dignity of the defendant.”

It almost worked. The swarm of photographers and camera operators who had shot Simpson as he walked up the driveway strained against the iron gate on Rockingham to get a better view. Ron Edwards’s sixth sense, honed over twenty-five years as a local news cameraman, told him to break away from the pack. By himself, Edwards quietly walked around the corner toward Ashford. There, the six-foot-four-inch Edwards stood on tiptoes so that he could point his KCOP camera over the six-foot-high brick wall surrounding the property. Thus, Edwards alone got a shot of Thompson handcuffing Simpson. After a moment, O.J. noticed the lone camera, and he sought to hide his manacled hands in the doorway of his children’s plastic playhouse.

Vannatter-a beefy, slow-moving cop with a helmet of caramel-colored hair-ambled over to Simpson and Thompson. He allowed Weitzman to join them, and the lawyer immediately asked that the cuffs be removed. Vannatter agreed, and unlocked them himself. As he was working the key, the detective noticed something: a bandage on the middle finger of Simpson’s left hand. Vannatter thought this was important, because he knew there were drops of blood to the left side of the shoe prints leaving the murder scene.

Vannatter told Simpson that they had some questions for him about the death of his ex-wife. Would he come down to police headquarters and talk?

O.J. agreed without hesitation.

Simpson got in the backseat of Vannatter and Lange’s car, and they made their way to Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles, about twenty miles from Brentwood. (The LAPD command center is named for former chief Bill Parker.) Weitzman and Taft followed in another car.

Once everyone was reunited in the Robbery-Homicide Division reception area, Weitzman had a request. Could he speak to his client alone for a moment? The detectives gave Weitzman a conference room and told him to take as long as he wanted. Weitzman, Taft, and Simpson then conferred for about half an hour. When they emerged, Weitzman said that Simpson still wanted to talk to the officers but that he and Skip Taft did not want to be present. Weitzman’s only request was that the detectives tape-record whatever went on among them. So Vannatter and Lange and their tape recorder replaced Weitzman and Taft in the small room with Simpson.

“We’re in an interview room in Parker Center,” Vannatter began. “The date is June 13th, 1994, and the time is 13:35 hours. And we’re here with O.J. Simpson. Is that Orenthal James Simpson?”

“Orenthal James Simpson,” O.J. confirmed.

Vannatter began by reading Simpson his constitutional rights, in the form of a Miranda warning. “Okay, do you wish to give up your right to remain silent and talk to us?” Vannatter then asked.

“Ah, yes.”

“Okay,” Vannatter continued. “And you give up your right to have an attorney present while you talk?”

“Mmm-hmmm, yes,” Simpson replied.

Vannatter began, “We’re investigating, obviously, the death of your ex-wife and another man… and we’re going to need to talk to you about that. Are you divorced from her now?”

Simpson said they had been divorced for about two years.

“What was your relationship with her?” Vannatter asked.

“Well, we tried to get back together, and it just didn’t work. It wasn’t working, and so we were going our separate ways.”

Vannatter quickly changed the subject. “I understand that she made a couple of crime… crime reports or something?”

“Ah, we have a big fight about six years ago on New Year’s, you know, she made a report. I didn’t make a report. And then we had an altercation about a year ago maybe. It wasn’t a physical argument. I kicked her door or something.”

“Were you arrested at one time for something?” Lange asked.

“No, I mean, five years ago we had a big fight, six years ago, I don’t know. I know I ended up doing community service.” (Later in the interview, Simpson explained the 1989 incident this way: “We had a fight, and she hit me. And they never took my statement, they never wanted to hear my side, and they never wanted to hear the housekeeper’s side. Nicole was drunk. She did her thing, she started tearing up my house, you know? And I didn’t punch her or anything, but I… wrestled her, is what I did. I didn’t slap her at all. I mean, Nicole’s a strong girl, one of the most conditioned women. Since that period of time, she’s hit me a few times, but I’ve never touched her after that…”)

“So you weren’t arrested?” Vannatter asked.

“No, I was never really arrested.”

After Vannatter asked how much sleep Simpson had had the previous night-the answer was very little-Lange said to his partner, “Phil, what do you think? We can maybe just recount last night.” Vannatter agreed. “Yeah, when was the last time you saw Nicole?”

“We were leaving a dance recital. She took off and I was talking to her parents.” O.J. and Nicole’s daughter, Sydney, had performed on Sunday night at Paul Revere Middle School in Brentwood. “It ended at about six-thirty, quarter to seven, something like that, you know, in the ballpark, right in that area… Her mother said something about me joining them for dinner, and I said no thanks.” Simpson added that he left the scene in his Bentley, and Vannatter asked him where he went from there.

“Ah, home, home for a while, got my car for a while, tried to find my girlfriend for a while, came back to the house.”

“So what time do you think you got back home, actually physically got home?” Vannatter asked.

“Seven-something… Yeah, I’m trying to think, did I leave. You know, I always… I had to run and get my daughter some flowers. I was actually doing the recital, so I rushed and got her some flowers, and I came home, and then I called Paula [Barbieri, his girlfriend] as I was going to her house, and Paula wasn’t home… I mean, any time I was… whatever time it took me to get to the recital and back, to get to the flower shop and back, I mean, that’s the time I was out of the house.”

This was an incomprehensible answer. Did Simpson buy flowers for Sydney before or after the recital? (She was holding flowers in a photograph taken at the recital.) Or were the flowers for his other daughter, Arnelle? Did he actually go to Paula’s house? If not, where did he go? Intentionally or not, Simpson gave the officers absolutely no way to check his story and determine if he was telling the truth. The officers could, of course, have pursued the issue and tried to pin Simpson down, yet Vannatter’s follow-up question was “Were you scheduled to play golf this morning someplace?” Yes, Simpson said, in Chicago, with Hertz clients.

Vannatter then established that Simpson had taken the 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago the previous night. He followed that with a question about Simpson’s Bronco. When did Simpson park it on Rockingham?

“Eight-something, seven… eight, nine-o’clock, I don’t know, right in that area.” This was another meaningless answer, yet the detectives did not ask Simpson to estimate his arrival any more specifically than this two- or three-hour window. Rather, they established that Simpson had come home from the recital in his Bentley and then got into the Bronco.

“In the Bronco,” Simpson explained, “ ’cause my phone was in the Bronco. And because it’s a Bronco. It’s a Bronco. It’s what I drive, you know. I’d rather drive it than any other car. And, you know, as I was going over there, I called [Paula] a couple of times, and she wasn’t there, and I left a message, and then I checked my messages, and there were no messages. She wasn’t there, and she may have to leave town. Then I came back and ended up sitting with Kato.”

“Okay,” Lange now said. “What time was this again that you parked the Bronco?”

“Eight-something, maybe. He hadn’t done a Jacuzzi, we had… went and got a burger, and I’d come home and kind of leisurely got ready to go. I mean, we’d done a few things.”

Neither detective asked anything about this trip for a burger. Where exactly did they go? What time did they go? Who saw them? Did he use the cellular phone again that night?

Instead the detectives pursued a new subject: “How did you get the injury on your hand?”

“I don’t know,” Simpson replied. “The first time, when I was in Chicago and all, but at the house I was just running around.”

“How did you do it in Chicago?” Vannatter asked.

“I broke a glass. One of you guys had just called me, and I was in the bathroom, and I just kind of went bonkers for a little bit.”

“Is that how you cut it?”

“Mmm, it was cut before, but I think I just opened it again. I’m not sure.”

Lange asked, “Do you recall bleeding at all in your truck, in the Bronco?”

“I recall bleeding at my house, and then I went to the Bronco. The last thing I did before I left, when I was rushing, was went and got my phone out of the Bronco.” Lange asked where the phone was now. Simpson told him, but there is no evidence that the detectives ever examined it.

“So do you recall bleeding at all?”

“Yeah, I mean, I knew I was bleeding, but it was no big deal. I bleed all the time. I play golf and stuff, so there’s always something, nicks and stuff here and there.” Lange asked where Simpson had gotten the Band-Aid he was wearing on his left middle finger. “Actually, I asked the girl this morning for it.”

“And she got it?”

“Yeah,” Simpson continued. “ ’Cause last night with Kato, when I was leaving, he was saying something to me, and I was rushing to get my phone, and I put a little thing on it, and it stopped.”

The detectives never returned to the subject of the cut on his left hand, even though Simpson had not answered the most basic question about it: How had he first injured his hand? Again, the detectives changed the topic. They established that O.J.’s maid, Gigi, had access to the Bronco; that he had not argued with Nicole at the recital; and that he had worn black pants and Reebok tennis shoes the previous night. (Simpson said he left these clothes back at the house; the detectives did not even ask where, precisely-in the laundry? on a coat hanger?-Simpson had put them. They were never found, and Simpson’s lawyers never produced them, either.)

Finally, Vannatter said, “O.J., we’ve got sort of a problem.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“We’ve got some blood on and in your car, we’ve got some blood at your house, and sort of a problem.”

“Well, take my blood test,” Simpson volunteered.

“Well, we’d like to do that,” Lange responded. “We’ve got, of course, the cut on your finger that you aren’t real clear on. Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at Nicole’s house?”

No, Simpson said. “It was last night… Somewhere when I was rushing to get out of my house.”

Vannatter, in effect, just threw up his hands and asked, “What do you think happened? Do you have any idea?”

“I have no idea, man. You guys haven’t told me anything. I have no idea. When you said to my daughter, who said something to me today, that somebody else might have been involved, I have absolutely no idea what happened. I don’t know how, why, or what. But you guys haven’t told me anything. Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit.”

“Understand,” Lange said a few moments later, “the reason we’re talking to you is because you’re the ex-husband…”

“I know I’m the number one target, and now you tell me I’ve got blood all over the place.”

“Well,” Lange said, “there’s blood at your house in the driveway, and we’ve got a search warrant, and we’re going to go get your blood. We found some in your house. Is that your blood that’s there?”

“If it’s dripped, it’s what I dripped running around trying to leave… You know, I was trying to get out of the house, I didn’t even pay attention to it. I saw it when I grabbed a napkin or something, and that was it. I didn’t think about it after that… That was last night when I was… I don’t know what I was… I was getting my junk out of the car. I was in the house throwing hangers and stuff in my suitcase. I was doing my little crazy what I do… I mean, I do it everywhere. Anybody who has ever picked me up say that O.J.’s a whirlwind, he’s running, he’s grabbing things, and that’s what I’m doing.”

And after a few more desultory exchanges, the interview drew to a close. At 2:07 P.M., Lange said, “We’re ready to terminate this.” LAPD investigators never had the opportunity to speak with O.J. Simpson again. The interview on June 13 had lasted thirty-two minutes.

It became known almost immediately that Simpson had given a statement to the detectives, and the news media’s legal “experts”-a group that became a ubiquitous presence in the case (and that often included me)-promptly excoriated Howard Weitzman for allowing his client to answer questions. This was understandable, for it rarely works to a prospective defendant’s advantage to commit himself to a single version of the facts at an early stage of the investigation. In the months afterward, Weitzman often said in his own defense that he had tried and failed to stop Simpson from talking. It is true that such a decision is always the client’s to make. And given Simpson’s vast ego, he undoubtedly thought he could talk his way out of trouble-and similarly, he probably dreaded the humiliating prospect of the police leaking word to the public that O.J. had been afraid to talk.

But the debate over Weitzman’s role missed the larger significance of the detectives’ interview of Simpson. The real lesson there concerned Vannatter and Lange-and the LAPD as a whole. In both the 1989 abuse incident and the murder case five years later, the police behavior suggested a fear of offending a celebrity. In the domestic-violence case on New Year’s Day, the officers could have-and probably should have-put handcuffs on O.J. as soon as they arrived on his doorstep. But they let him go upstairs to change out of his bathrobe-and then, inexplicably, allowed him to get into his car and drive off. (And Simpson, of course, was never punished for what might be seen as a rehearsal for his more celebrated flight from arrest in 1994.) Simpson was then prosecuted only because a single police officer out of the many who had seen the results of his past mistreatment of Nicole had the integrity to step forward. This crime then earned Simpson an almost comically inadequate punishment-an opportunity to network with the advertisers he longed to cultivate.

Then, on the afternoon of June 13, 1994, though Vannatter and Lange already had considerable evidence that O.J. Simpson was likely a murderer, they too treated him with astonishing deference. Time after time, as Simpson gave vague and even nonsensical answers, the detectives failed to follow up. The entire purpose of a police interrogation is to pin a suspect down, so that the prosecution can, if necessary later on, demonstrate in minute particulars that his story is false. An effective interrogation forces a suspect to repeat, in ever greater detail, his version of the facts. Incredibly, Vannatter and Lange never forced Simpson to account specifically for his whereabouts between the end of Sydney’s dance recital and his departure for the airport. (This failure allowed Simpson’s attorneys to claim later, as they did at various times, that their client spent this period sleeping, showering, and chipping golf balls in the dark.) The detectives never pressed him to describe completely what clothes he was wearing and what had happened to them. Even if Simpson had said he could not remember these basic facts, such a failure of recollection might have been highly incriminating. In a murder case, it is common for the police to question a suspect for many hours, but Vannatter and Lange surrendered after barely half an hour-even before Simpson himself could ask for a break.

When the prosecutors heard the tape, they knew immediately how dreadfully the detectives had botched this opportunity. They seethed with frustration-in private. To berate Vannatter and Lange would have been futile, and might also have damaged a partnership that faced a long and difficult investigation. But among themselves the prosecutors had a nickname for the police interview of the defendant on June 13: “the fiasco.”