Without a Doubt

The Big Picture

CAR TAPE. April 18. I haven’t been talking much because my life is so painful I don’t want to talk about it. I just want to pretend it’s not there. Everything seems like it’s getting a lot crazier on my personal front… Thank God… I can sit down and let others stand up and talk to the witnesses. The problem is that I still have to be there to prompt and give ideas and kind of guide things. So I’ve never really got my hand out of it. It would sure be nice to get out of court for a week or so and just kind of chill out. But I can see now that’s probably never gonna happen. I’ve got to be there. I have the big picture… me and Chris are really the only ones who do.

By early April, we’d penetrated to the very heart of our case. The physical evidence.

Now, normally I love that stuff, and if I’d had my way-plus eight spare months to prepare-I would have handled it all myself. But here, that simply wasn’t possible. I’d had to delegate. So I kept the hair and trace evidence for myself, and gave the glove, which was a pretty straightforward assignment, to Chris. Then I’d divided the remainder of the science witnesses among Rockne Harmon, Woody Clarke, Brian Kelberg, and Hank Goldberg. Rock and Woody got DNA. Brian, the coroner. Hank caught the criminalists, including Dennis Fung.

Talk about drawing the short straw. What was it with that guy Fung?

Dennis’s scattered performance before the grand jury boded ill, but I had no idea how bad things really were until a few days after the preliminary hearings. Back in August I was holed up in my office, poring over the photos of Rockingham. I spend a lot of time looking at police photos. Every time you return to them, you see something else. Kind of an Antonioni thing.

I was studying a picture of Dennis crouched near the laundry hamper in Simpson’s master bathroom. He was holding something dark in his hand. I looked closer. Could it be? It had to be. Jesus! It was the dark sweatshirt Kato had described Simpson wearing when they drove to McDonald’s! Why hadn’t anyone told me about this? Those sweats had to be tested for blood immediately. Unless, of course, they were never seized.

Please, God.

Tom Lange was in the War Room with Patti Jo. I sent for him and handed him the photo.

“Look at this carefully and tell me what you see in the hamper.”

“Dark sweats,” he replied. He looked like he might have to sit down.

“Is it possible they were taken and Fung forgot to write it up? Maybe there was one brown bag that had been overlooked in the booking process.

“I know there was nothing seized that wasn’t booked,” he said with grim finality.

“I want to see Fung right fucking now,” I snapped. Tom got him over in just one phone call.

Dennis strolled in wearing jeans, sneakers, and a windbreaker.

“Do have a seat,” I told him.

I like to get my bad news as soon as possible.

“Do you remember going through Simpson’s hamper when you were at Rockingham on June thirteenth?”

“I think so,” Dennis replied in his usual fog of distraction.

I handed him the eight-by-ten.

“Tell me if you collected the clothing you’re holding in that picture.”

“I know I didn’t book any clothing out of the bathroom,” he replied. “Why?” But I could see awareness dawning.

“You must have known that clothing in the hamper was likely to have been worn recently by the defendant. In a knife killing there’s bound to be some trace evidence, if not the blood of the victims. So why didn’t you take the sweats?”

I was pissed off. But I was also truly curious.

“Well, I looked to see if there was blood on them. I figured if they’d been used in the murder the blood would be big and obvious. I didn’t see any, so I put them back.” He shrugged dejectedly.

“But if the killer stood behind his victims,” I pressed, “he might get only a fine spray on him, if that. You can’t see a fine spray of blood on black clothing. Not in normal light.”

You shouldn’t have to tell a criminalist this.

Dennis passed his hand over his face and stared at the ground. He’d screwed up big-time. What could I say? There was no use belaboring the point or making Dennis feel any worse. The damage was done.

The hard, ugly fact was that Fung’s oversights would hobble us at every turn.

On his first pass at Bundy on June 13, Fung hadn’t picked up the bloodstains on the rear gate. This, after Tom Lange had specifically instructed him to do so. Fung’s property reports from that date show that he’d collected a stain from the rear driveway, then gone up front to collect a stain from the front gate, then returned to the rear driveway to collect another stain. The guy was painfully disorganized. He didn’t get around to picking up the stains from the rear gate until three weeks later.

Same with the Bronco. For reasons known only to Fung, he’d taken only a “representative sample” of the blood smears from inside the vehicle on June 14, which meant he hadn’t collected all of the blood on the console. That blood would be a devastating blow to the defense: DNA results from that stain showed Ron Goldman’s blood mixed with that of the defendant. There could be no innocent explanation for this except the truth: that Simpson had tracked the blood of his victims into the Bronco.

During a re-exam of the Bronco on September 1 we ended up collecting a considerable amount of blood that Dennis left behind on the first sweep. (Ironically, that re-exam was done at the request of the defense. Had it not been for their demand to see the Bronco, Ron Goldman’s blood might never have been found.)

Both of Fung’s oversights-the rear gate and the Bronco console-left us vulnerable. They gave the defense an opening to argue that blood on both the console and the rear gate had been “planted,” presumably using blood drawn from Simpson the day he was questioned by police. Both of these charges were easily refuted. We had in our possession police photos taken of the Bronco on both the morning of June 14 and again on September 1. They showed stains on the console in exactly the same places. Ron Goldman’s blood had been there during the first sweep; but because of Fung, it had been left behind.

Same with the blood on the rear gate. Lange noticed it the morning after the murders. So did at least two other officers. Three weeks before Dennis took the stand, Hank and Woody-during one of their many late-night work sessions-came across a police photo of the inside of the gate taken from about fifteen feet away. In this “perspective shot,” as such photos are called, one of the bloodstains was clearly visible under magnification.

The real stumbling block for the defense remained those blood droplets leading up the walkway at Bundy, away from the bodies. No way could they have been planted. They’d been collected during the early-morning hours of June 13, before Simpson had been questioned, let alone had his blood drawn. Where would Mark Fuhrman, Phil Vannatter, or anyone else in this alleged conspiracy have gotten hold of any of O. J. Simpson’s blood, even if they’d had a mind to plant it?

The only path open to the defense was to claim that the Bundy blood trail was either so degraded or so contaminated by the LAPD’s sloppy collection work that the results had gone haywire.

We suspected the Dream Team was planning to make its contamination case upon the crushed bones of Dennis Fung. And so Hank spent days and days preparing him. He reported back to me that he thought Dennis would be “okay.” Dennis’s “tentative demeanor,” as Hank put it with characteristic delicacy, might actually be endearing to the jury.

On April 3, Dennis Fung took the stand.

Hank did a very smart thing. But since it was a quiet and intelligent thing, it went largely unnoticed by the press. He led Dennis step-by-step through the process of evidence collection, leading up to the subject of “substrate controls.”

Now, please. Hang tough while I explain. Substrate control is a fancy term for a very simple concept. Once you understand it, it should help you see why the contamination theories put forward by the defense were such utter nonsense.

What happens is this. A criminalist goes into a room and sees blood on, say, the carpet. He lifts a sample from the bloody spot and smears it on one little square of cotton cloth. That’s the “evidence sample.” Then he goes just a little beyond the stain to what looks like clean carpet, and he tests that. He puts this on another cotton cloth, to make what scientists call the “control.”

So, you test the control. If it shows traces of another blood type, that tells you that there may be contamination. But if the control comes up clean-formidable! You can safely infer that the DNA profile on the evidence sample is valid. It tells you that the criminalist did his job right. If Dennis’s procedures were so sloppy that the bloodstains he collected had become contaminated, then the controls-collected under identical circumstances-would have been contaminated in an identical fashion. In fact, every one of Fung’s controls came up clean as a whistle.

The controls should have rendered moot any further argument about the validity of the sample. But they did not. Barry Scheck kept Fung on the stand for seven days over the course of two weeks. The entire time Scheck slashed away at him in his nasal, nails-on-chalkboard voice for things like storing the samples in a hot truck, and accusing him of handling evidence without gloves and not using a fresh set of tweezers for each swatch.

Red herrings all. Later in the trial we would bring on Gary Sims of the California Department of Justice, who set the record straight. DNA is a much tougher material than the defense would have you believe. Gary described tests run by the FBI in which agents had done about every stupid thing you could think of to contaminate evidence. They’d used the same pair of scissors to cut different swatches without cleaning them in between. One analyst had sweated on samples before testing them. One agent coughed on samples for a solid minute. The testers even shook dandruff on their samples. In each case, the contaminants had no effect on the DNA profile. Even the defense’s own expert witness, Henry Lee, would later testify that a cop could track blood from the crime scene or the heel of his shoe, and that blood could produce a valid test result. As for degradation, DNA gives valid results on body parts found out in the jungle after days of exposure to hot sun, dampness, insect infestation, and animal scavenging. You’re going to destroy it during a few hours in a warm truck?

The bigger point, however, was this: under no circumstances could either contamination or degradation yield a set of flawed results all pointing to a single suspect. And yet, this was the very premise upon which Scheck sought to discredit Fung.

I found little to admire in Barry Scheck. Here was a man who was an expert in the science of DNA. He believed in it. He’d staked his reputation on it. He and his partner, Peter Neufeld, had founded an organization called the Innocence Project, which routinely used DNA testing to exonerate defendants falsely convicted of crimes. He knew what contamination and degradation could and could not do to a sample.

Now, you could argue, “He’s a defense attorney. A defense attorney knows what the truth is and he argues counter to it all the time.” But when a lawyer who’s an authority in science gets up and puts forward a defense based on what he knows to be scientifically incorrect, you’re talking about something far worse than professional sophistry.

Not only did I find Scheck’s performance intellectually dishonest, I considered him by far the most obnoxious lawyer in that courtroom. And that’s saying a lot. Scheck’s treatment of Dennis Fung was deplorable. Even Lee Bailey had displayed a fundamental courtesy to Mark Fuhrman while dueling to the death with him on cross.

Not Scheck. He knew he was going up against a witness who was easy pickings, someone from whom he could have extracted every concession he wanted, with kindness. And yet he set upon Fung like a common bully, jabbing a stubby finger in his face and screaming “Liar!”

Dennis, who wanted only to please, buckled in the first ten minutes.

Scheck would pose to him absurd hypotheticals. Remember the blanket Tom Lange had found inside the condo and spread over Nicole’s dead body? It was back to haunt us. Barry contended that when Tom performed this act of decency he had “contaminated” the crime scene. O. J. Simpson had visited this residence, Scheck observed. He might have “sat or laid” on that blanket and shed his own hair on it.

“Could that, in your expert opinion,” he asked Dennis, “be a source of secondary transfer of his hairs to the crime scene?”

Hank and Chris and I cringed. We knew what was coming.

“It’s possible” was the reply.

“… Are you with me so far?” Barry queried.

“It’s kind of hard to follow,” Dennis replied. “But yes.”

“And if a dog… Kato the dog… were lying on this blanket… dog hairs can be transferred to the blanket?”

“Yes.”

“And the dog itself may have hairs and fibers from other people with whom it has been in contact?”

What Dennis could have said, and should have said, was this: “Counselor, if you’re asking me if that blanket could transport dog hairs that were carrying Mr. Simpson’s hairs that subsequently found their way to the inside of the knit cap, I’d have to say this scenario is too ludicrous to warrant serious consideration.”

Instead, Dennis replied, “Yes, there’s a chance.”

Scheck hoped to use Fung to advance the theory that the blood on the back gate at Bundy had been planted sometime later than June 13. He got Fung to say that he had not seen the blood himself that morning. Fung also testified that he’d not heard Tom Lange ask him to collect the stains on the morning of the first search.

Scheck pulled out one of the photographs of the back gate taken at such an angle that the blood spots were not apparent.

“Let’s look back at the picture of the gate on June thirteenth.”

The photo was displayed on the Elmo. No blood to be seen.

Scheck turned to Dennis and in a tone as contemptuous as it was shrill, inquired, “Where isss itttttt, Misterrrr Fung?”

That line, of course, became the sound bite du jour. But it was revealed for the empty histrionics it was when we introduced our own shot of the gate-which showed that at least one of the stains was clearly visible.

Scheck moved on to another tack, building to what he no doubt expected would be a boffo climax. He’d hoped to establish that Phil Vannatter had kept custody of Simpson’s reference vial long enough to plant the blood to frame him. Fung had testified that Phil had brought it to Rockingham in the late afternoon of June 13 and personally handed it over at about 5:20 P.M. But there was no written record of that exchange. Scheck produced a series of video clips from a local station, KABC. They showed Fung and Andrea Mazzola leaving the house, putting various items into the crime-scene truck. But a gray envelope carrying the blood vial was not among them.

Scheck tried to cast Dennis in the role of a conspirator by suggesting that he’d lied about ever receiving the blood from Vannatter. In an attempt to establish this, he produced a crime-scene checklist filled out by Fung and Mazzola and turned over to the defense during discovery. Page 4 of this document was different from the others. It was not an original; it was a photocopy. You could tell that because there were no staple holes, just black hen scratches where the holes should have been.

Scheck intended to use this to suggest that the original page would have shown Dennis’s actual log-cut time, which, he speculated, was 5:15 P.M. (This was based upon nothing, as far as I can tell, but Scheck’s fevered imagination.) Since Vannatter arrived at 5:20, that would mean the two had missed each other.

“If there were something filled in there that said five-fifteen as to the time leaving the scene,” Scheck charged, “that would be inconsistent with what you wrote [5:20 P.M.] on the gray envelope you received from Detective Vannatter?”

Hank objected. He was overruled.

“If there was that time there,” Dennis said meekly. “Yes, it would.”

Scheck acted as though he’d cornered the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby.

“And that is why you destroyed the original page four, Mr. Fung?”

At the break we noticed that Dennis happened to be holding his case notebook.

“Dennis,” Hank asked him, “could I take a look at that?”

Hank quickly flipped through the binder. And from a pocket on the inside cover, he withdrew the original of the infamous page 4. It was identical to the photocopy. No mention of 5:15 P.M. or any other time. We decided that we would not share this development with Scheck. He had, after all, ambushed us with the copy; let him find out about the original the hard way.

The timing was perfect, because after the break Hank started redirect.

“During the recess, sir,” he asked the witness, “did you have an opportunity to look in your notebook and find the original of page four?”

Yes, he did. Dennis produced the form.

Scheck predictably screamed “discovery violation,” but this time Ito tuned him out and let Hank pass the original of the disputed page 4 among the jurors.

Live by the sword, die by the sword, buddy.

Still, lodged in the jurors’ recent memory were those snippets of videotape that Scheck had introduced, showing Dennis and Andrea purportedly leaving Rockingham without the vial of Simpson’s blood. These, he’d intimated, showed that Dennis had deceived the court when he’d testified about receiving the blood vial from Vannatter.

Now, Dennis Fung might be a dope, but he was not a liar. We knew the truncated footage did not tell the whole story.

Hank and Bill Hodgman were quietly negotiating with KABC for the portion of their videotape that had not aired. Normally, broadcasters are reluctant to release unaired material. Maybe the execs over at the station felt Fung deserved a break, I don’t know. Anyway, on Easter Sunday, Hank was in the office, working with Fung on upcoming redirect, when the unedited footage arrived.

There is a wonderful account of this in Hank’s own book, The Prosecution Responds. He tells how he and Dennis sat over bagels and lox and ran the outtakes. Sure enough, at 5:17 P.M. by the time counter, there was Phil Vannatter strolling up the Rockingham walk. “He was carrying a leather attaché case,” Hank recalled, “the way a schoolboy would carry a notebook against the side of his body. A gray piece of paper sat on top of the attaché case. A gust of wind blew back the top of the paper, allowing us to see the reverse side. We could clearly observe the flap and metal clasp, showing that it was the back of an envelope.”

The envelope carrying the blood vial. Dennis could identify it by the form printed on the face of the envelope.

“We could see a long shot of the front door at Rockingham,” Hank writes. “Just inside the foyer, we could see Dennis. In one hand he had the plastic garbage bag. In the other, he had what could only have been the evidence envelope containing the vial.”

Dennis jumped up for joy, screaming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

First thing on Monday, Hank played that tape for the jury. Barry was forced to eat crow.

“Your Honor,” he said with uncharacteristic humility, “we have viewed the… tape. It is certainly enlightening.”

The defense ended up stipulating to the time on KABC’s footage. And Hank went on to do a beautiful job on redirect.

Dennis stepped down on April 18. He’d been on the witness stand over two interminable weeks. Most of this time had been pissed away on Scheck’s cross. As Dennis tried to make his escape from the courtroom, he was intercepted by a jubilant defense team, who shook his hand and greeted him like a long-lost relative. I was baffled. For starters, why were attorneys for the defense displaying public affection for a man who, they’d just claimed, helped frame their client? And why on earth was Fung allowing himself to be fawned over by these hypocrites? When Hank asked him about it later, Dennis replied that he’d been “somewhat in a daze” after leaving the witness stand. And knowing Dennis, that answer rings true.

It is that curious image of him fraternizing with his tormentors that lingers in the memory of the public. Seared with equal clarity into the American consciousness are those shrill invectives of Barry Scheck. What amazed me was that he drew such favorable reviews for his performance.

No question, Fung turned in a sorry performance. But in the end, Scheck bluffed, Hank called him on it. And Barry had to fold.

CAR TAPE. April 18. Just heard that some idiot out there’s come out with an unauthorized biography on me. The weird thing is to see the change in the judge’s attitude… It’s like, the more famous I get the more he’s willing to pay deference, to be nicer to me… Ito is really somebody who is very affected by the media stuff, by popularity, you know? When Johnnie was the most famous one… he was very deferential, to the point of idiocy. But I think having the press call him on his deference to Johnnie and then maybe hearing the jurors say that Johnnie was in control of the courtroom perhaps set him back a bit. But I think what set [Ito] back even more is seeing my getting famous. It’s all of a sudden somebody else whose favor he needs to curry. Very weird. Very, very weird.

CAR TAPE. April 27. Constantly sick. I can’t seem to recover. Finally, my teammates pushed me in to the doctor… I just need rest. With all this stress, I mean, it’s impossible. I can’t just go home and lie down. There’s just no corner. I really hope something gives somewhere. This is just too much. Fortunately, it’s not my witness who’s up right now, and I can afford the luxury of concentrating on the custody case for a little bit.

I needed more time. I always felt breathless, my chest constricted with fatigue. I woke up each morning in a state of dread, knowing that before the day was through some new crisis was sure to break. To make things worse, by the time Dennis Fung got off the stand, it looked like we might be headed for a mistrial.

We were losing jurors at the rate of about two a month. The judge, of course, was worried that we wouldn’t have enough alternates to last the trial, which now looked like it would be going well into the summer. Lawyers on both sides of the room kept an anxious eye on the shifting composition of the jury.

In January we lost a middle-aged female juror whom we’d pegged as pro-prosecution. She’d stated right up front on her questionnaire that she’d had to get a restraining order against her abusive ex-boyfriend. How the defense had dropped its guard long enough to let her slip through, I don’t know.

But now they were looking to rectify their error. It turned out that the ex-boyfriend had called the court claiming that she shouldn’t be on the case because she’d had problems with black co-workers. The charges were investigated; they were bunk. What was happening is that the son of a bitch was harassing her even as she sat behind a veil of sequestration. The thing I found so sad about this is that, in managing to be get herself on this jury, the woman had found herself a temporary haven.

The defense filed a motion to have her booted. We objected, and lost.

Defense: 1. The People: 0.

The same day, January 18, Ito dismissed a black man who had formerly worked for Hertz. Critics of the prosecution have asked us how we ever let this guy onto the jury in the first place. That’s a fair question. When his employment history came out during voir dire, I wanted to boot him. Bill, however, argued persuasively that this guy was a follower who would do neither harm nor good. The juror himself assured us that he’d never had any personal contact with Simpson.

After he was seated, though, we began receiving a string of tips from other Hertz employees to the effect that not only had Juror Number 228 met Simpson, but they’d seen him shaking hands with Simpson at a celebrity affair that the juror himself had helped organize! When we reported this to Ito, we learned that the judge already had this information and had, for some inexplicable reason, been sitting on it. Why, I’m not sure. As far as I could tell, there was no nefarious motive for his foot-dragging. I think he was just disorganized. Yet he actually seemed pissed off at us for bringing it to his attention. Only the court, he admonished us, is allowed to do juror investigations! Still, the facts were undeniable. This juror had lied.

I’d noticed throughout the trial that Simpson would sometimes smirk when looking at the jury box. Now I realized the reason. He had Hertz-man as the ace up his sleeve. Not anymore. Bye-bye, Hertz guy.

Defense: 1. The People: 1.

For a couple of weeks, it seemed like the jury situation had stabilized. Then, in early February, rumors began to circulate that we might lose an elderly white female juror, Number 2017, who we felt was favorable to us.

Another juror, a stout black woman held generally to be a darling of the defense, claimed that this feeble little white woman had “pushed” her during an evening walk. Even Ito had to see that this was a put-up job. But to keep the peace he ended up excusing 2017 on the hollow pretext that she’d been treated for arthritis by the same doctor who’d treated O. J. Simpson.

Defense: 2. The People: 1.

During March, two more jurors bit the dust. The first was Michael Knox, the black man who’d worn the 49ers cap and jacket to the jury walk. Knox later wrote a book, The Private Diary of an O.J. Juror, in which he explained that the only reason he’d flown the 49ers’ colors was that his brother was a public relations flak for the team and the cap was a freebie. (That, of course, did not explain why he had deliberately flouted the judge’s order to ignore memorabilia on the walls of the defendant’s home.) The Dream Team was desperate to keep this guy. But the knockout punch came when the court discovered that Knox had failed to report that he’d been arrested for kidnapping a former girlfriend. Gone. History.

Defense: 2. The People: 2.

A little over two weeks later, Ito kicked Tracy Kennedy, the white guy who professed to be part American Indian. Kennedy was well-educated and a part-time high school teacher, a prosecution juror if ever there was one. Since October, Shapiro had seemed to be obsessed with this guy. He complained that Kennedy was often seen “staring out into space.” It turned out, however, that Kennedy had been paying a great deal of attention to the goings-on around him. The sheriff’s deputies seized a laptop computer on which Kennedy had been keeping notes on his fellow jurors. These musings seemed to be preparation for writing a book.

He’d been caught red-handed with the goods; nothing we could do.

Defense: 3. The People: 2.

For about a month, during the early part of our physical-evidence testimony, there were no more dismissals. But those of us on the prosecution side, at least, knew that this was only an appearance of calm. While Dennis Fung was still on the witness stand, Ito was investigating Juror Number 462, Jeanette Harris. The court had received an anonymous tip that she’d once sought a restraining order against her husband.

Harris was definitely someone we’d have been delighted to kick. She was part of a bloc we called the Clique of Four. That bunch included another middle-aged black woman named Sheila Woods, an impressionable young black woman named Tracy Hampton, and an ill-tempered black man named Willie Cravin-all of whom we believed to have a strong pro-defense bias.

Harris, at least, had been honest enough to lay out her feelings about the defendant during jury selection. She felt sympathy for him. During voir dire she’d been asked about the Bronco chase. “My family,” she answered, “is comprised mostly of males, so I know that females have this real desire, you know, to protect their young men.” Her “heart went out” to Simpson, she’d said. I wanted to kick her. Bill wasn’t crazy about her either, but she managed to win us over. During voir dire she had made it a point to be pleasant to me. She made good eye contact, gave intelligent answers, and seemed to indicate that she could render an impartial verdict. All in all, she was impressive enough to make it very difficult for us to overcome a Wheeler objection if the defense tried to claim we were targeting her because she was black.

Almost immediately after the jury was sequestered in the Inter-Continental, we began to get reports back from the deputies that Jeanette was a troublemaker. She didn’t like any of the white jurors, who, she felt, didn’t want to sit with the blacks. This ran contrary to the intelligence we were receiving-which was that Harris and her friends didn’t want to sit with the whites.

Anyway, after we got the tip concerning Harris’s domestic problems, Ito pulled her file from the civil courthouse. She had, indeed, filed for a restraining order against her husband on grounds of abuse. When Ito brought her in and confronted her with it, she tried to minimize, but she couldn’t deny it. The defense fought to keep her, but it was over. They’d gotten one of our jurors booted on a domestic violence issue. Harris had to go.

After she was booted from the jury, Harris gave a set of wide-ranging interviews to station KCAL in which she claimed, among other things, that she thought Denise Brown was “acting.” This made me sick at heart. It still does. I think the thing that bothers me most is how Harris’s grandstanding and her apparent callousness seemed to confirm the social theories of Don Vinson, among others, who had pronounced with smug certainty that black women don’t take domestic violence seriously.

You cannot make these reckless generalizations about people. Experience had shown me that black female jurors are perfectly capable of convicting a black man who brutalizes his wife or girlfriend. As I’ve said before-and I’ll say it as many times as I have to-the Simpson case was an anomaly. What was perceived here as apathy on the part of black women jurors toward Nicole’s suffering seemed to me rather a deliberate form of denial. I truly believe that our black female jurors knew in their hearts that O. J. Simpson was no better than the average asshole who gets drunk on Friday nights and throws his woman against a wall. But I think they felt they couldn’t afford to act on that knowledge. Too few black men succeed in penetrating the ranks of upper-class white society for them to allow one to be taken out in such an ignominious way. Looking back on it, I think I’d have to say that blacks of both sexes were moved to breathtaking feats of denial in order to keep the Juice from going down.

With the departure of Jeanette Harris, the Clique of Four lost its center of gravity. Little Tracy Hampton claimed to have awakened one night to find a white female deputy standing at the foot of her bed. She went running to Ito, claiming that the deputies were “spying” on her, that they were going in and out of her room when she wasn’t there.

Now, during jury selection Hampton had come across as an okay sort. She was unusually quiet, but not someone we particularly had to worry about hanging the jury. During the early days of sequestration, however, she’d been drawn into the gravitational pull of the stronger personalities in the Clique and had gotten way off into the race thing.

Now we had to figure out what to make of her allegations. Ito talked to the deputies, who denied her charges. The defense, obviously, wanted to keep this juror, so they were all for rotating the deputies to another post. Chris, for once, agreed with the defense. He was afraid of the bad press it would generate if we cut Hampton loose and she spouted off to reporters about “spying” and “racial discrimination.”

I was scandalized. These deputies were doing a difficult job and doing it admirably. They’d done everything for these jurors. When a couple of jurors had deaths in the family, the deputies had accompanied them to the funerals and quite literally given them a shoulder to cry on. Now we were going to let their reputations be sacrificed for the sake of expediency? I felt it was just flat-out wrong to punish those deputies based upon the word of a juror who, in my opinion, wasn’t wrapped too tight.

But Ito thought he could hose Hampton down by removing the deputies. So that’s what he did.

Whenever I hear the pundits wringing their hands over the racial tensions on the jury, I defy them to explain what happened next. After little Tracy got the white deputies rotated out, most of the remaining jurors were so angry and upset that they demanded to see the judge to discuss the matter. One by one they professed affection for the deputies and sorrow at the shabby treatment they’d received. Through it all, Johnnie looked confused and worried. I could just about tell what was going through his head: Oh, my God. They’re identifying with law enforcement.

Only by promising the jurors that the deputies would not have black marks on their records did Ito get them to agree to return to the jury box. Thirteen of them wore black in support of the deputies. Two of the Clique of Four-Tracy Hampton and Sheila Woods-wore bright colors to express their opposition.

The irony, of course, is that Ito’s appeasement strategy didn’t work. Within days, Tracy was back in chambers whining that she was being ostracized. “I can’t take it anymore,” she pleaded. This time, Ito showed the good sense to cut her loose.

Two of the Clique had bitten the dust.

Defense: 3. The People: 4.

In late May, the court received an anonymous letter purporting to be from a “receptionist in a literary agency.” The letter writer claimed to have knowledge that Francine Florio-Bunten-a thirty-eight-year-old white woman we considered one of ours-was circulating a proposal for a book to be entitled Standing Alone-A Vote for Nicole.

When I read that letter in Ito’s chambers, I looked straight at Johnnie. This was a setup. I had no doubt of it then, and I have no doubt now. The defense had been itching to kick Florio-Bunten.

Ito, however, felt this source was reliable, largely because the writer had confidential” knowledge that the jurors were staying at the Inter-Continental Hotel. (The issue of confidentiality was nonsense, of course, since the fact had already been published in a British newspaper and had long since made its way Stateside.)

Once again, Ito questioned jurors individually. The last of these, a young black woman who, I believe, was an alternate at the time, told us she’d seen Farron Chavarria, a young Hispanic woman who was friendly with Florio-Bunten, write something on a newspaper and pass it to Florio-Bunten. Francine reportedly read it and then threw it in the trash. Ito immediately dispatched a deputy to get the newspaper. Sure enough, there was a note saying, in effect, “They want to know if someone’s writing a book.” The words had been scribbled over, as though someone had tried to obscure what was written.

Farron was called first. She admitted writing the note-although, she said, she hadn’t meant to disobey the judge’s order. Then he called in Francine, who denied seeing the note, even after Ito showed it to her.

Lance had no choice. Florio-Bunten might have been lying about reading the note, and that alone was grounds for dismissal. What galled me was my certainty that Florio-Bunten had been set up. Our investigators scoured the city of Los Angeles trying to locate this supposed “literary agency.” They found nothing matching the one in the letter. To this day, Florio-Bunten maintains that the letter was a fraud. And I believe her.

But what really floored me was that after her dismissal, Florio-Bunten took to the airwaves proclaiming that the prosecution’s case was “too circumstantial,” that the blood drops at Bundy could have been left by Simpson at an earlier time. And this was supposed to be one of our jurors!

Defense: 4. The People: 4.

The departure of Florio-Bunten made it inevitable that the other shoe would drop. Days later, Lance booted Chavarria for passing the note, then not leveling with him about it. And that left us down in the standings.

When the defense made its move to kick Chavarria, I leaped up and moved immediately to kick Number 1489.

Number 1489 was Willie Cravin, an African American and one of the two remaining members of the Clique of Four. Willie was a big dude with a mug so fierce that one of the reporters dubbed him the Easter Island Statue. He was a hanger for sure. He was also an irascible bully. From the outset he’d gone out of his way to be nasty to Florio-Bunten and Chavarria. He’d pushed Chavarria in the elevator as they were coming to court. And once, while they were all watching a movie, Florio-Bunten was swinging her leg and happened to tap the back of his seat. He turned and said, “Don’t you ever do that to me. How dare you.”

During previous in camera discussions with the jurors, we discovered that Cravin was viewed as a bully by many on the jury. He was definitely a problem.

I’d been watching and waiting, wondering when I should make my pitch. The passing of Chavarria was my cue. I suspected that I’d find Lance in a receptive frame of mind. He could keep a scorecard as well as any of us. He’d just booted two pro-prosecution jurors in succession. Now, he’d feel he’d have to give us one. I also knew that after the Tracy Hampton incident and the revolt that followed in its wake, he was keen upon promoting harmony at all costs.

“Here’s a man,” I told Ito, “who has systematically harassed and intimidated other jurors. Is this the kind of person [who] can actually deliberate with other jurors in a meaningful and adult fashion?”

Lance caught my drift and gave Willie the boot.

The defense was so stunned by this development that they didn’t realize what had happened to them. Half an hour later, when the reality of losing Cravin finally dawned on them, they ran back into court, saying, “We want to take a writ. Have him reinstated.” There was no provision in the law for that. But they tried anyway and were summarily shot down.

Defense: 5. The People: 5.

That was a fine day. I was so happy I actually skipped out of court. A lapse in decorum to be sure, but understandable given the circumstances. We’d broken the back of the Clique of Four. The composition of the jury had changed radically. Depending on who filled the spot left by Willie Cravin, we might actually hope for a level playing field. I was hoping like hell we wouldn’t draw Alternate Number 165, an elderly black man who’d regaled fellow jurors with tales of racism from his Southern youth.

Of course, a hard look at the jury that day would have revealed only two votes we really felt we could count on. That of Anise Aschenbach, a sixty-one-year-old white woman who’d gone to college for a year. And Annie Backman, a twenty-three-year-old white insurance claims adjuster, who I felt might-just might-have the mathematical acumen to grasp the scientific testimony. The rest were ciphers or hard sells, including forty-four-year-old Lon Cryer, a black man whom we’d begun to suspect was a militant, and who had confided to Ito during the latest round of juror interviews that he didn’t trust cops. There was also a young Hispanic deliveryman who’d been on the case since the beginning. We still had no idea where he stood. And then there were those (seven) black women. Two of them seemed fairly bright. They’d also happened to have some college education. Perhaps they could be reached. Perhaps they could persuade the rest.

That’s what I was thinking on the day Willie Cravin got his walking papers. I was so high on hope, not even common sense could bring me down.

After Fung, we really picked up speed. Andrea Mazzola, Dennis’s assistant, might have been a rookie in the field but on the stand she came on like a real pro. She didn’t take guff from Peter Neufeld, and her clear, confident answers went a long way toward bolstering Dennis Fung’s credibility.

Then on May 1, Greg Matheson, the foursquare forensic chemist I’d brought in from SID to sub for Fung at the preliminary hearings, took the stand.

In Hank’s skillful hands, Greg helped us to do some serious debunking.

Defense contention: Nicole’s blood had been planted on the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed.

Debunked: Greg explained that his notation concerning the blood, “none obvious,” meant just that-no blood observable under ordinary light on June 29. It didn’t, as Johnnie had tried to suggest in his opening statement, mean that Nicole’s blood wasn’t on the socks as of that date, leaving open the possibility that it had been planted later. The blood just wasn’t detected until Collin did his presumptive test a few weeks later.

(There’s an interesting aside to this story: The cops just assumed the blood belonged to O. J. Simpson. I was the one who pushed the crime lab to take it one test further and do conventional testing, which, to everyone’s utter amazement, showed that the blood on O. J. Simpson’s sock belonged to Nicole.)

Defense contention: “Missing blood.” Thano Peratis, the LAPD nurse who’d drawn Simpson’s reference sample of blood, had testified at the preliminary hearings that he’d drawn 8 milliliters. In poring over records, Barry Scheck noticed the actual amount was 6.5 milliliters. A discrepancy of about 1.5 milliliters. Do you have any idea how little that is? About a quarter of a tablespoon. As near as I could figure it, the defense was contending that this minuscule volume of “missing” reference blood had multiplied miraculously-to be slathered generously by “conspirators” over gateposts, socks, and other incriminating pieces of evidence.

Debunked: When Thano heard that the defense was making hay with his measurements, he called us to correct the record. He really didn’t know how much he’d drawn. He was just estimating. It could have been as much as 7 milliliters or as little as 6. Since the vials themselves have no hatch marks, it’s impossible to know exactly how much blood was in them to begin with. Even if you assumed the scenario most favorable to the defense-that he’d drawn 7 milliliters-that left only 0.5 milliliter unaccounted for.

In his sensible, careful testimony, Greg went on to account for it. Small amounts of blood, he explained, are routinely lost in testing as a natural consequence of the opening and closing of the vial.

So much for missing blood.

Defense Contention: Contamination.

Debunked: Greg’s most powerful testimony went to a single blood spot, Sample Number 49, found on the walkway at Bundy. Forget DNA testing for a moment. The very basic conventional serology tests Greg did on that single stain showed that it matched Simpson’s blood. And that only 0.5 percent of the population had that blood type. This was a bigger deal than we knew at the time: the basic tests, it turns out, aren’t sensitive enough to be affected by contamination even if there was any. We extracted that concession from one of the defense’s own witnesses, Dr. John Gerdes. Throughout the trial, the results on that drop linking O. J. Simpson to the crime scene remained unrefuted.

The star of our DNA case was Dr. Robin Cotton, a petite woman with short blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses. She was the director of Cellmark Diagnostics, the largest private DNA lab in the country. I’d presented her as a witness in the first DNA case I ever tried, and I’d been mightily impressed. She was indubitably honest, and her explanations of the very complicated procedures of DNA testing were as simple as one could humanly make them.

Woody Clarke, a slender, sweet-faced man who was one of California’s leading attorney-experts in DNA evidence, had the difficult job of leading Cotton through this potential quagmire. He elevated the discussion above the technicalities to drive home three essential points.

Would the method of collection and packaging cause the evidence to change from one person’s type to another? he asked her.

It would not.

What if it degraded totally?

Then it would produce no result, she explained; not a change in type. What will happen is that a dirty surface will eat up DNA faster than a clean nonporous surface, which was why the blood on the rear gate was in better shape than the droplets on the cement walkway.

“So this process of degradation,” Woody continued, “can it change my DNA into looking like your DNA?”

“No.”

“Or [the DNA of] any members of the jury or the audience?”

“No.”

Bottom line: Neither sloppy collection nor degradation can change one person’s blood into another’s! It was a point we would hammer home again, and again, and again.

Dr. Cotton gave us something else. An incredible set of statistics. One blood drop on the driveway behind Nicole’s condo was good enough for RFLP, the most sensitive DNA test that can be performed. Only one in 170 million people had blood that would match that drop-and it matched Simpson’s. Even more compelling, the blood on the rear gate also matched the defendant’s. And it was in better shape, so we’d been able to do more extensive tests that narrowed the field even further. Only one in 57 billion people had that DNA type. There are only 5 billion people on the planet. Odds like this are called “identification.” It’s probably the closest thing you can get to a perfect match.

Robin’s results were verified by Gary Sims, of the California Department of Justice, who testified after her. Gary had done the RFLP testing on some of the same stains, but using different probes. The results of both labs combined to produce the most powerful matches and most reliable conclusions that anyone had been able to introduce into a court of law.

As Gary was testifying, I glanced over at the jury. They appeared despondent. I had a painful, dawning insight. The stronger, the more compelling our evidence became, the more they hated us.

We were all a little nervous on the morning of May 24, when Collin Yamauchi took the witness stand. Collin had done the first PCR testing at the LAPD lab-the lab the defense had taken to calling the “cesspool of contamination.” The defense would try to claim that he’d contaminated the samples before they got to Cellmark and the Department of Justice, so it wouldn’t matter what Robin or Gary had found. Garbage in; garbage out.

During his first appearance before the grand jury, Collin had been solid, but unpolished. This time he’d really gotten his act together. Under Rock’s direct, Collin calmly explained how he’d begun his testing by opening the vial of Simpson’s blood and placing a small drop of the blood on what is called a Fitzco card. This is a small package containing filter paper. In the process of opening it, he’d gotten a bit of blood on his gloves, but he’d promptly stripped them, discarded them, and put on new ones before moving over to the evidence swatches. Collin went carefully over the procedure he’d followed in dealing with those samples. He’d even used a fresh knife after cutting each swatch. Pretty damned careful.

Barry Scheck, of course, seized upon the “spilled” blood, arguing that it had somehow contaminated the evidence samples. But as usual, he was blowing smoke. Collin had been standing over fifteen feet away from the evidence swatches, which were sealed inside little paper envelopes, which had been placed inside coin envelopes, which were taped shut. How could the blood have reached them?

Gary Sims of the California Department of Justice had already testified that DNA does not “jump,” nor does it “fly.” It does not waft across the room as an aerosol and penetrate two layers of packaging. And even if you assumed for one mad moment that this was possible, how did this itinerant DNA manage to come to rest only on the evidence swatches, and not on the control swatches?

(Later on, one defense expert theorized gamely that the control swatches were contaminated, but in amounts so small you couldn’t measure them. Now think about this for a minute. A scientist knows, if anyone does, that if you can’t measure something, you can’t really say it’s there, now, can you? We’re not talking about quarks here. This is blood, a substance which is quantifiable even in trace amounts. But by then, we’d tripped so far through the looking glass that an inane observation like this one could actually pass for rebuttal.)

Collin’s testimony was going great. He was firm and lucid, no mean feat considering the technical detail he had to recount. The apprehension I’d felt when he took the stand was giving way to pride. Then, suddenly, things went radically wrong.

Rock asked Collin the following: “Based on what you heard in the media at the time or… before you did the tests in this case, did you have an expectation of what the outcome of these tests would be?”

This might seem like an odd question. But in fact, during our private conversations with Collin, he’d confided in us that he was a big fan of O. J. Simpson. We wanted to let the jury in on the fact that this man was not conspirator material. Naturally, we thought Collin would say something along the lines of how he’d admired Simpson as an athlete and how improbable he thought it was that Simpson could do something like this. The point was to demonstrate that if there was any “examiner bias,” it was in the defendant’s favor.

Instead, Collin blurted out, “I heard on the news that, well, yeah. He’s got an airtight alibi. He’s-he’s in Chicago… And I go, ‘Oh, well, he’s probably not related to the scene.’ “

Ito promptly cut off the witness and ordered counsel to sidebar.

“We have a huge problem.” He glowered. “We just brought in a statement by the defendant…”

What the hell could he be referring to? The statement Simpson gave to Lange and Vannatter in their interview on June 13? Section 356 of the California evidence code says that if one side introduces part of a writing or statement, the other side has the right to bring in the rest. But it was absurd to apply that rule here. Collin’s “alibi” remark had nothing at all to do with Simpson’s statement. It was simply Collin’s own conjecture, based on news reports-and false ones at that.

Johnnie whispered urgently to Scheck, and Scheck nodded. I knew exactly what he was saying: “Go for it. Get that statement in!”

And Ito was going to allow it!

Here’s the situation. Simpson’s attorneys had been dying to get that statement into evidence so that the jury would get to hear Simpson’s tape-recorded expressions of innocence without his ever being exposed to cross-examination. Problem was, they couldn’t introduce it on their own. They had to wait for us to bring it up. Collin, supposedly, had given them an opening.

We had to close it fast.

I knew that unless I played along like this was a serious legal question, Ito’s ego would be bruised and we’d pay dearly. We’d have to submit a motion to stop this thing.

I went looking for Hank and found him in the War Room.

“I’m going to need some paper quick, so I can get him to turn around without his losing face,” I told him.

That fucking statement!

How many hours had Hank and Chris and I-in fact, the entire team-spent agonizing over what to do about it? We’d looked at it from every side. There were a couple of good arguments for allowing it in. Phil had gotten Simpson to admit that the last time he’d visited Bundy was five days earlier and he told detectives he had not been bleeding at that time. That made it patently absurd for the defense to argue that the blood drops had been left by Simpson on a social visit to Bundy before June 12. But on the other hand, the defense wasn’t even thinking about arguing that Simpson had bled there on some other occasion, so we’d gain nothing.

At one point, Simpson had said that the last thing he did before leaving for the airport was to get his cell phone out of the Bronco. That part I liked. When you combined it with the cell phone records showing the call to Paula Barbieri at 10:03, it placed him in the Bronco just before the murders.

But the rest of the statement was a disaster for us. Not only were the cops’ questions real softballs, but when Phil asked whether Nicole ever got any threatening phone calls, Simpson responded, “You-you guys haven’t told me anything. I-I have no idea what happened… Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit.”

Nice bit of sympathy grabbing. The defense was sure to play it for maximum schmaltz: “Poor Juice. Mean old cops won’t tell him anything. Is that any way to treat a grieving man who’s had no sleep in the past two days? He’s doing everything he can to cooperate. He’s giving a statement without an attorney present-surely not the action of a guilty man. And a blood sample? Why, he’d rolled his sleeve right up. Now, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury: why would he be so cooperative if he were guilty?

The only strategy worth considering was whether we should try and get into evidence that one snippet of tape where Simpson talked about getting his car phone out of the Bronco just before he left. That short excerpt would be limited enough to prevent the defense from getting the rest of the statement in. Nothing else was needed to explain or qualify it, according to the evidence code. Of course, the downside to playing one brief segment was that the jury would naturally wonder why we didn’t want them to hear the rest of the tape.

On the other hand, if we didn’t play the statement, we could still put on the phone records showing that a call had been made from Simpson’s cell phone to Paula at 10:03 P.M. A reasonable juror would infer that he’d been in the Bronco. The defense would have no way to counter that but to call Simpson and get him to try to explain it.

That was an idea we all liked. If we could force Simpson into the blue chair, we just might be in fat city.

It’s not that I thought Simpson would be an easy mark. I never thought that. I had him pegged as a pretty cagey guy. True, he’d botched the murders, leaving a trail of evidence rimmed in neon lights all the way to Rockingham. But then, he wasn’t an experienced killer. He’d managed, at least, not to get caught in the act. And by the time he’d talked to the cops, he’d clearly regained enough composure to hide the ball from two experienced homicide detectives.

But if he were to find himself being questioned by a hostile female… well, that might be a different story. Simpson would never be able to hold it together if he thought a woman had control over him. And when you can compel a guy to sit on the witness stand and answer questions, that’s control.

Beyond that, he seemed to have a special bug up his ass about me. Every so often I’d catch him trying to make eye contact. When he’d managed to sneak in his little speech to the court during jury selection, he couldn’t resist turning his head to address me, personally. Did he imagine he could charm me? What Simpson didn’t realize was that I had no special feelings for him. Not even a particularly intense hatred. This may have been the Trial of the Century, but to me O. J. Simpson was a common criminal. I felt no more repulsed by him than by any of the other scumbags I’d prosecuted over the past thirteen years.

Don’t get me wrong. I would have loved-believe me, loved-to take my shot at him. Had I gotten him on that stand, I would have kept him there for as long as it took. Because eventually he’d do something to hang himself. The upshot of the “alibi” episode with Collin was anticlimactic. By the time I returned to court, it had already fizzled like a damp charge. Ito had apparently come to his senses. He’d had a chance to review Simpson’s statement and he ruled that Collin had not “opened the door.” He denied the defense’s request to introduce the statement. We kept it out for the rest of the trial.

CAR TAPE. Let’s see. It’s Thursday, June 8. Yeah. June 8. And Brian Kelberg is up there doing the coroner’s stuff. He’s doing a fabulous job. Just a brilliant job. I find myself very jealous though, because… he had four months to prepare for two witnesses and I have weeks to prepare for about thirty. But… hey, what can you do.

We’d decided, during our marathon mapping session back in January, that there was no way we could put the assistant coroner, Dr. Irwin Golden, on the witness stand. At least not alone. He’d been so thoroughly trashed during the preliminary hearing that we’d need to put him on in tandem with a stronger witness. Our best gambit, we felt, was to import a well-respected medical examiner from another jurisdiction-but none of them wanted to risk being torn limb from limb in the lion’s den. All the while, Dr. Golden’s report was being reexamined and corrected under the supervision of the L.A. County coroner, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran. He concluded that the fundamental work was sound.

Dr. Lucky was a meticulous man. The only reason we hadn’t drafted him right off the bat as a stand-in was the fact that he was Golden’s superior and the jury might see him as having an interest in protecting one of his own people. In the end, however, we figured that Dr. Lucky’s benign manner and obvious integrity would overcome any initial skepticism.

The coroner was originally Bill Hodgman’s jurisdiction. But after his health difficulties in January, Bill had been working behind the scenes as case manager, a job that was itself becoming more and more demanding. I gave the coroner to Brian Kelberg instead.

Brian was the logical man for the job. Brilliant, methodical, and knowledgeable in the field of medicine. When I first brought him into the case, he’d come kicking and screaming. Brian just didn’t like team prosecutions. I’d called him in to consult on several of my earlier cases when I’d had plenty of time to confer with him. Back then, things were great. He’d come in, plonk down, put his feet up, and we’d vivisect every minute scientific detail of the case. We both loved that. But by the time he was front and center in the Simpson case, the pace had already hit overdrive.

Before I could devote myself to preparations with Brian, I had had to put on my own twenty-five witnesses. Then I had to spend hours with Hank preparing for Fung. Hank had needed a lot of support, and I couldn’t afford to look away for a moment. That frustrated and annoyed Brian. He’d complain to Bill about my inaccessibility. He left notes warning, “You’d better find some time.” To make things worse, Brian and Chris absolutely hated each other. The team had begun polarizing into the Brian camp and the Chris camp. Throughout May, the infighting was reaching epic proportions. Luckily, by the time we’d moved on to the DNA testimony, things had settled down a bit. I started meeting regularly with Brian and that got us back on track.

Brian’s mission was twofold: one, to lay out medical hypotheticals showing how one man could have committed both murders; and two, to demonstrate how quickly those murders could have occurred. The first point, of course, was to dispel the defense’s contention that there could have been two assailants; the second point was to establish that the murders had occurred between 10:15 P.M. and 10:40 P.M.

Over the course of a week, Brian guided the coroner through a plausible death scene scenario. It went something like this: At the outset of the attack, Nicole had confronted her killer face-to-face and struggled very briefly. Then she’d turned and had been struck in the back of the head, which knocked her against a wall. That accounted for the concussion that rendered her unconscious. After her attacker delivered one vicious slash to the throat, Nicole fell or was dropped onto the second step. She remained there unconscious, moving little or not at all, bleeding profusely.

Judging by the condition of the brain at autopsy, Dr. Lucky concluded that Nicole had lain there for at least a minute before her assailant resumed his attack, this time pulling her head back by the hair and administering the coup de grâce.

“How did the fatal wound occur?” Brian asked the coroner.

“My opinion,” replied Dr. Lucky, “is that the head was extended backwards and the knife was used to cause this incised stab wound from left to right.”

The killer had apparently encountered very little resistance.

“Doctor,” Brian said, “… if you could use me and my head and hair, would you demonstrate what is your opinion as to the manner in which that last major incised stab wound was inflicted?”

Dr. Lucky left the stand, walked over to Brian, pulled his head back by the hair, and demonstrated a throat slashing by drawing a ruler across his neck.

Among the spectators, there was a rustle of discomfort.

So what was the killer doing during the minute or so between the first and second cuts? Lakshmanan left open the possibility that he had used this interval to murder Ron Goldman. Further into his testimony, he gave a second demonstration, this time going through the motions of stabbing a “victim”-once again, Brian-to show how it was entirely possible to inflict fifteen knife wounds in as many seconds. Clearly, the killings could have happened very quickly.

Later on, critics would claim I let Brian keep Lakshmanan on the stand too long. Let me set the record straight. If Brian had been less thorough, we would have been rapped for that instead. As it happened, he took an A-bomb and disarmed it, wire by wire, before the American public. He left no stone unturned, no question unaddressed. And by the time he was through, he’d converted what could have been a devastating liability into an asset.

For the first time during the trial, we’d brought out the photos taken at Bundy by the coroner’s investigators. The heads of the victims had been pulled back, exposing their neck wounds. In their own way, these photos were even more awful, more affecting than the autopsy photos. The jurors were clearly moved. Even the elderly black man from Mississippi, certainly no fan of the prosecution, wept openly. For the first time, it seemed it was getting through to the jury that this was a murder case. Two people had died.

And I thought I saw them opening their minds to the possibility that the defendant could have done this terrible thing.

It was Chris’s turn up. With the gloves.

We’d unearthed evidence that in December 1990 Nicole had bought gloves exactly like those found at Bundy and Rockingham. She’d picked them up at Bloomingdale’s in New York-one of the couple’s favorite shopping grounds, we’d learned. The receipt showed that she’d purchased two pairs of gloves and a muffler at the same time. The gloves were cashmere-lined and cost $55. The style and price alone dramatically narrowed the pool of suspects. At least in California.

Phil Vannatter had lined up Richard Rubin, a former executive of Aris Isotoner, the company that manufactured the gloves, to establish that the pair we had in evidence were exactly the same model as those purchased by Nicole in 1990. He would testify that they were sold at only one store in the country. Bloomingdale’s.

I found this whole business incredibly sad. It was clear to me that Nicole had bought those gloves as a Christmas gift for her husband. And he’d used them to murder her? Oh, man, what a world.

I fully intended that Simpson would put on the gloves: not the actual evidence gloves, but a duplicate pair. Since the AIDS crisis, anything bloodstained required protection. I figured the court would never let anyone try on the bloody gloves without wearing latex beneath them. Latex would screw up the fit. So we’d asked the glove manufacturer to send us duplicates of their Aris Leather Lights, extra large, just like the ones found at the crime scene, to try on Simpson when the time was right.

On June 15, however, the time was definitely not right.

Richard Rubin had flown in the night before his testimony was to begin. We needed some time to work out the logistics of how and when to perform the glove demonstration. Now, Simpson was not likely to cooperate with this experiment. From ongoing interviews with my FBI shoe expert, Bill Bodziak, I’d learned that a subject could contort his feet, or in this case, his hands, to make the fit appear too tight. I didn’t need Bodziak to tell me this: I’d spent enough time struggling to get shoes on reluctant little boys to know it from experience.

I knew we needed to talk about laying the legal foundation for this demonstration, to plot it as carefully as the Normandy invasion. But Chris was pumped up. The accolades Brian got for his handling of Dr. Lucky irked the hell out of Chris. He’d never liked Brian much, but now that Kelberg was being hailed as a returning hero, Chris’s competitive instincts were aroused. He wanted to score a coup of his own. He wanted to do the glove demonstration at what he thought would be the most dramatic possible moment. During Rubin’s testimony. Problem was, we hadn’t received the duplicate gloves.

I didn’t know this until the morning Rubin was scheduled to testify. This was Chris’s baby, so I asked him where the duplicate gloves were. He didn’t know. I called Bill to ask him if he knew.

“I’ll check with Phil,” he told me. “I believe he has them.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Have him bring them down.”

I didn’t want to be late to court. Chris was on a testosterone high-I didn’t know exactly where that might take him. I didn’t want to leave him alone too long.

When I got to the counsel table, I whispered to Chris that the duplicates were on their way.

“Cool,” he said as Ito came out. We’d just taken our seats when Phil showed up with the evidence box. He passed it over to us from behind the rail. Chris peered into the box. Then he asked to approach the bench.

“I would like to lay the foundation,” he told Ito, “to show that they [the reputed duplicates] are the exact same size, similar make and model, so that perhaps we can have Mr. Simpson try them on at some point.”

Whoa, Chris, I thought, a little alarmed. We needed to talk to Rubin about how to make sure Simpson couldn’t screw this up.

At that moment, Johnnie cut in, “We object to this, Your Honor… We’ve had no time to deal with this. At some point, if Mr. Simpson testifies and we want to have him try the gloves on in evidence, that is one thing… Are you going to allow them to have the defendant try [the duplicates] on?”

“I think it would be more appropriate for him to try the other gloves on,” Ito put in. He meant, of course, the bloody gloves.

I did not like the way this was going. We had to steer the discussion back to the duplicates.

When Richard Rubin took the stand, Ito allowed Chris to question him, outside the presence of the jury, about the duplicate gloves he’d brought.

Chris reached into a cardboard box and withdrew the duplicate gloves. He strolled back up to the witness stand and placed them in front of Rubin.

“Showing you the gloves that have been marked 372-C,” he said to Rubin. “Are those Aris Isotoner gloves?”

Rubin studied the flawless brown leather gloves resting on the edge of the witness stand.

“They’re Aris gloves, but these are not Aris Light gloves that were like the ones we’re talking about…”

What was going on here? Hadn’t Chris checked these out when they first came in? We should have learned of this discrepancy-and gotten replacements-months ago.

Chris looked embarrassed. And disappointed. Very disappointed. His moment of glory was slipping away.

I pulled him aside for a private conference.

“What is the fucking deal here?”

“I don’t know,” he told me. He was shifting nervously from foot to foot. “We’ve got to have him put on the gloves.”

“The crime-scene gloves?”

“Shapiro asked to see the [bloody] gloves this morning,” Chris said urgently. “They’ve been practicing with them. If we don’t do it, they will.”

“Who cares?” I said. “Let them. The latex will fuck up the fit and we can tell the jury so. We can’t do this, Chris. Let’s wait and re-call Rubin when we get the right gloves.”

“I’m telling you,” he insisted, “we’ve got to do it now!”

“Let’s let Phil try them on first,” I urged him. Phil’s hands were at least at big as Simpson’s. Maybe if Chris saw the difficulty Phil was having in pulling the gloves over latex, he’d back down. Chris agreed.

Phil put on latex gloves, then pulled the crime-scene gloves over them. It wasn’t easy, but he got them on. They were tight, which in and of itself was not bad. A witness named Brenda Vemich, a Bloomingdale’s buyer who’d authenticated the receipt, had testified that the gloves were supposed to fit “tight and snug.” Like racing gloves.

The problem, of course, was that Phil was a willing subject. He hadn’t splayed his hands like a two-year-old to keep the gloves from being pulled down over his fingers. No one had come up with a way to keep Simpson from pulling those shenanigans.

I turned to Chris. “Don’t do it. I’m warning you.”

“We’ve got to do it,” he insisted.

“Why won’t you fucking listen to me. This is a trap!” My voice was hoarse with tension and anger.

“This is my witness,” he snapped. “And I say we have to put those gloves on him now, before they do!”

I couldn’t dissuade him.

We approached the bench.

“… We would like to have Mr. Simpson put on the original evidence items,” Chris announced to Ito.

Johnnie, of course, had no objection to this-but he laid down his terms.

“First of all, I don’t want him to do it without having latex gloves on.”

Of course, he didn’t.

Secondly, Johnnie asked Ito not to allow the court cameras to focus on Simpson. I saw Johnnie’s strategy. He knew the jurors would buy his client’s bullshit act, but he wasn’t quite so sure the demonstration would stand up under the scrutiny of more critical observers later on.

Ito refused to allow any special camera arrangements, but he did approve the latex. The jury filed back into the courtroom.

And then it was show time.

“Your Honor,” Chris said, “at this time, the People would ask that Mr. Simpson step forward and try on the glove recovered at Bundy was well as the glove recovered at Rockingham.”

I could hear the discomfort in his voice. He knew he’d gone way out on a limb.

Deirdre Robertson took a box of latex gloves over to the defense table. From where I sat at counsel table, my line of vision was blocked. I couldn’t see Simpson pulling on the latex. I know that Chris walked over to the defense table and handed him the left glove.

Then Johnnie and one of the sheriff’s deputies escorted Simpson over to the jury box, where Simpson began pulling it on. He grimaced and mugged like Cinderella’s stepsister trying to get into that glove.

He got it only part of the way up his wrist.

Chris handed him the right glove. Same performance.

Simpson smiled broadly and displayed his mitts to the jury-and to the camera-as though he were holding up the ball at the goal line. Can you believe this? Here is Simpson wearing gloves splattered with his murdered ex-wife’s blood and he’s grinning ear to ear. Any normal person in these circumstances would cringe.

I felt like dying. But the last thing I wanted was for the jury to see my distress. There was a rule I’d learned as a baby prosecutor: when they’re sticking it to you, act like you couldn’t care less. I felt my expression harden into a mask of indifference.

Chris held up valiantly. He had Simpson pick up one of the felt-tip pens on counsel’s table and demonstrate how he could have held a knife. He then had Simpson make stabbing motions. It was a brave recovery. I gave him credit for that.

When the demonstration was finally over, Simpson casually snapped the gloves off. And I thought to myself, If they were so hard to get on, why are they so easy to get off, Sparky? At that point, he looked directly at me, as though he expected me to take them from him. I didn’t move a muscle. I met his gaze without blinking. After a few seconds, he dropped the gloves on the table in front of me and moved on.

I looked down at the bloody, weathered leather, and I said to myself, That’s it. We just lost the case.

Afterward, I went out of my way to avoid riding the elevator with Chris. I just wasn’t ready to face him. Upstairs, I found Brian sitting in Bill’s office. His chair was swiveled toward the television. When I walked in, he swung around to look at me. His face was filled with pity.

“You saw it?” I asked, despondent.

“What happened?” Brian asked. “Why’d he do it?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “I just don’t know.”

I paused for a moment, then said, “I’ll go talk to him now.”

In his own memoir Chris would write that when he arrived upstairs that afternoon, his colleagues shunned him. Perhaps that’s the way he remembered it but it wasn’t so. His office was crowded with people: Richard Rubin; Phil; one of the D.A. investigators, Mike Stevens. There was also a handful of law clerks, all offering sympathy and suggestions for how we could pull ourselves out of this nosedive. When I walked in, the conversation stopped. Chris looked down. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He was suffering too much and I found, to my dismay, that I was too drained, too devastated, to reach out to him and offer him any comfort.

CAR TAPE. Today is June… what is it? June sixteenth. To me it felt like we lost the case yesterday. It was that bad. I’m not gonna say that to Chris or anybody else, but… I don’t know if we can recover. It’s so sad because we were on such a roll. I mean, for once we were really killing them. And here we are, back at square one again, [on the] fucking defensive…

I felt desperately sorry for Chris. He was so dejected after the glove incident. But I do think it served as a wake-up call for him. You’ve got to think out carefully every move before you make it. I don’t think he fully realized the responsibility we had resting on our shoulders until June 15. He grew up a lot that day. And he came fighting back.

Chris and Richard Rubin, who turned out to be a brick throughout all of this, kept pressure on the Aris people to search their inventories until they came up with the right goddamned gloves-the ones they should have sent us in the first place. Chris recalled Rubin to the witness stand to have him authenticate the new pair. They were, at last, exact duplicates.

Richard testified that the gloves in their original condition would “easily” go over hands the size of Mr. Simpson’s. When gloves have been exposed to repeated dampness and extremes of heat and cold, however, they can shrink as much as 15 percent.

While Chris continued his questioning, I went over to the phone on the bailiff’s desk to call Brian.

“It looks like a ‘go’ to me,” I told him.

“Tell him to do it,” Brian said.

I passed a note to Chris, who stalled. I could see his confidence faltering.

“Come on, Chris. Do it,” I whispered. “It’s going to work this time.”

And it did. This time, when Simpson tried on the gloves, they fit, you should pardon the expression, like a glove.

In the days and weeks that followed, we got literally thousands of faxes, phone calls, and letters with explanations of why the gloves hadn’t fit. We also received a dozen photographs of Simpson wearing Aris Leather Lights. Not just the brown ones, like the ones we had in evidence, but a photo of Simpson wearing a pair of black Aris Lights that, I surmised, was the second pair that Nicole had purchased at Bloomingdale’s. One photo showed Simpson wearing both the brown gloves and a muffler, which I also suspected-but could not prove-was the one Nicole had bought him for Christmas 1990.

I wanted these pictures entered into the record during our rebuttal case. But that meant that we had to check out each one of them. We couldn’t risk putting on a fake. And so I interviewed each of the photographers, most of them amateurs who had just happened to snap a photo at the right moment. I wanted to showcase these photos as effectively as possible. The display shouldn’t be slick, I decided; it should be spare and homespun. So instead of the glitzy graphics we’d used throughout the trial, I set a blank board on the easel. Then I called the photographers one by one to tape his or her photo to the board. Soon the board was filled with photos of Simpson’s gloves. Photos taken by regular folks who’d caught Simpson’s glove act-and didn’t buy it. But what about those “regular folks” on the jury? Would they?

CAR TAPE. June 29. I am feeling more rested today. I got myself to bed early, which is a first… Chris and I are starting to get friendlier. Boy, things have been tense since that glove debacle… I also jettisoned any more domestic violence witnesses. He was pissed off about that too… It just doesn’t fit anymore. All that stuff is out of context now. Chris is really pissed at me, saying I’m not consulting him anymore and cutting him out of the case… [But] we need to go for the end of the case in a real strong, clean way.

This one was my call. The way to go out, I decided, was on hard, irrefutable physical evidence. I wanted the one-two punch of our footprint and hair experts, who came packing dynamite.

Investigators at the Bundy crime scene, of course, had found a set of bloody footprints leading away from the bodies toward the back alley. The pattern left by the killer’s sole was a waffle of “S”-shaped squiggles. We sent photos of the prints to the FBI lab, where they landed on the desk of Special Agent Bill Bodziak, the Bureau’s footwear and tread expert. Bodziak couldn’t locate the pattern in his computerized files of prints, so he went, quite literally, to the ends of the earth to identify them. He traveled to a little factory town in Italy, where he found the very mold that had made the so-called Silga sole. The Silgas had been used in a limited-edition Bruno Magli loafer. It was those rare Silgas that left the bloody prints at Bundy.

We found no Bruno Maglis among the shoes seized at Rockingham. We could never find a receipt for the purchase of any, either. And, of course, we had no photographs. It’s worth mentioning here that shortly after the verdict, the first of many photos would surface showing Simpson wearing the very shoes Bodziak had identified. Later, during depositions at his civil trial, Simpson would deny ever owning a pair of those “ugly-ass shoes”-a line that summoned up an assortment of shoeshine men and sports photographers offering shots of Simpson wearing these very shoes.

Permit me one question. Where were all these civic-minded photographers with their glossies of the Juice sporting Bruno Maglis when the criminal trial was going on? Watching the Weather Channel?

We may not have had photos of the defendant in his Bruno Mags, but we did have strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that he’d owned the pair that made the bloody prints. For one thing, they were a size 12, the size that Simpson wore. This was significant, Bodziak told us, because only 9 percent of the men in North America wear a size 12. Most of them are between six feet and six feet four inches tall. Simpson was six feet two. Moreover, the shoes cost $160 a pair. Your average burglar wouldn’t be wearing them to pull a caper. The price alone spoke volumes about the suspect. He’s the same type of guy who wears cashmere-lined gloves. And of those, we had pictures.

Bodziak explained to the court how he’d examined Nicole’s black dress and found an “impression” on the “center front.” Then Hank directed his attention to an autopsy photo showing what appeared to be a heel print on Nicole’s back. Although Bodziak couldn’t positively identify the prints, he said neither was inconsistent with the Silga soles. His testimony conjured up a chilling image: Simpson planting his foot on Nicole’s chest to make the first cut, then stepping on her back and pulling her head back by the hair to deliver the cut that nearly decapitated her.

Equally damning, Bodziak had determined that the bloody shoe print on the driver’s side of the Bronco showed what looked like “S”-shaped squiggles-a particular characteristic of the Bruno Maglis.

We had suspicions that the defense team was scouring crime-scene photos to come up with something-anything-that could be construed as the footprint of a second killer.

“Mr. Bodziak,” Hank asked, “based upon your analysis of all of the items that we’ve discussed today, was there any indication that more than one pair of shoes were involved in this crime?”

“No,” the witness answered, “there was not.”

It fell to Lee Bailey to try and rattle Bodziak on cross. But Bailey, whose abilities served him so well in cross-examining cops and law enforcement personnel, was woefully out of his depth when it came to the scientific evidence.

First, he tried to suggest that if Simpson had really dropped the glove on the south pathway at Rockingham, there should have been shoe prints in the leaves. Bill explained patiently that in all his years, at hundreds of crime scenes, he’d never been able to detect shoe prints in leaves.

Undeterred, Bailey went on to probe the outer limits of absurdity, suggesting that someone had either stolen Simpson’s shoes or two killers had worn identical pairs of shoes to the crime scene.

The premise was preposterous. First of all, Bodziak pointed out, criminals simply don’t think of their shoes as a possible source of incriminating evidence. That’s what makes shoe-print identification so useful. Beyond that, it was unlikely that two criminals would be wearing identical pairs even of common shoes like Reeboks, let alone Bruno Maglis.

“To conjecture… that two people independently bought size-twelve Bruno Magli shoes… and just happened to come to this crime scene together is impossible for me to believe,” Bodziak said firmly.

“Would it be possible,” Bailey persisted, “for two people to arrange… to arrive at a crime scene in the same footwear…?”

“… I don’t believe it happens, intentionally or otherwise.”

Bailey wouldn’t let it go.

“But it’s possible?”

“In my opinion,” Bodziak replied, “it’s not even possible because it’s so ridiculous.”

Bailey had wanted to end with a flourish. Instead, he’d succeeded only in casting the two-killer theory in the silliest possible light.

I was madly putting the finishing touches on hair and trace. “Trace” refers to clothing fibers, carpet fibers, dandruff-in short, anything microscopic that a criminal might track onto or take away from a crime scene.

Prosecutors love trace evidence. It’s almost as compelling as DNA in its ability to link a defendant to a crime scene. In some respects, it’s even better than DNA because it’s jury-friendly. You can blow up photomicrographs to eight-by-tens so that jurors can actually see the similarities between the defendant’s head hair, for example, and what the killer left behind.

For about three months now, I’d remained in close telephone contact with Doug Deedrick, director of the FBI’s hair and trace unit. Doug had a fantastic sense of humor and a gift for making the complex seem simple. He flew in four days before he was scheduled to begin testimony, bringing with him his blowups of the evidence.

One large poster-board display showed photos of the hairs removed from Simpson’s head by the LAPD. The row above it showed several eight-by-tens of hairs removed from the blue knit cap found at Ron Goldman’s feet. Doug had also prepared a board of Negroid hair samples, chosen at random from FBI files. The samples all looked very different from each other. It was obvious at first glance how Simpson’s hair matched the hair from the cap.

One thing troubled me slightly. One of the file samples appeared, at least to my untutored eye, to look a lot like Simpson’s. Maybe Doug could see the difference, but I sure couldn’t.

“This is truly beautiful stuff,” I told him. “But-this one down here…” I pointed to the hair. “It looks just like Simpson’s. I’m just a lay person, what do I know. But don’t you think the jury will think so, too?”

“Yes, I do.” Doug grinned. “And there’s a very good reason for that. Because that is his hair.”

Gotcha! I burst out laughing. We could go through the same shtick in front of the jury.

Just as there had been blood where blood shouldn’t be, there was hair where hair shouldn’t be.

•Simpson’s hair on the knit cap, Ron’s shirt, the Rockingham glove.

•Nicole’s hair-“forcibly removed hairs”-on the Rockingham glove.

•Ron’s hair on the Rockingham glove.

Things got even more interesting when we moved into the area of fibers. LAPD investigators had found beige fibers at both Bundy and Rockingham. They appeared to match the carpet in O. J. Simpson’s Bronco. According to Doug, carpeting of that sort had been used only in Ford Broncos manufactured between June 1993 and June 1994. Simpson’s, of course, was a 1994 model.

That was incredible news. Bronco fibers had been found both on the knit cap at Bundy and on the glove at Rockingham-potentially linking Simpson to both scenes.

On the day Doug Deedrick was scheduled to appear, the defense got a look at his poster boards and went ballistic. They claimed they’d never seen these hair photos before.

That, of course, was complete bull. So we sent one of our minions to track down the defense expert who’d examined them. Sure enough, he’d gotten those photos months ago.

While we were wrangling over this, Johnnie caught sight of Doug, sitting inside the rail, holding a binder.

“What’s he got?” he whispered to me.

“I don’t know,” I whispered back.

So Johnnie and I went over to check it out. To my dismay, it contained the notes of a detailed investigation Doug had done on the Bronco fibers. What I thought had come from public records accessible to the defense had actually been unearthed by Doug through private sources. Doug thought it was exempt from the laws of discovery. Under California law, unfortunately, it was not.

This put me in a very bad spot. The defense was screaming about my “egregious” discovery violation. We stood to lose the extremely valuable carpet fiber evidence because of it.

I pleaded with Ito. “If the Court feels that we have been remiss, then I would urge the Court to penalize [me] personally. But please don’t-please don’t penalize the proof of the case.”

Ito was irritated. But for once, his irritation didn’t seem to be directed my way. He apparently realized-even Johnnie seemed to realize-that this report business had caught me by surprise. Besides, Ito seemed honestly fascinated by the hair and trace evidence and annoyed by having to exclude it.

Once again, we got half a loaf. He would allow us to introduce the fibers. We could tell the jury that Simpson’s Bronco fibers were “consistent” with those found on the Bundy cap and the Bundy glove, but not that they were so incredibly rare.

I could live with it.

“Sir,” I addressed Doug, “with respect to the nine or ten hairs that exhibited the same microscopic characteristics as those of the defendant inside the knit cap, do you have an opinion as to… how those hairs got there?”

There was an objection. Overruled.

“Because hats are worn on the head, it’s certainly consistent and reasonable to believe that their presence indicates that they came from the wearer of the hat, yes,” Doug replied.

“When individuals have contact through a violent struggle, have you in your past experience found the hairs of the attacker on the clothing of the victim?”

Objection. Overruled.

“Yes, I have. That’s why… I look at clothing from victims of crime…”

“If you were to assume the following events, sir. That the killer pulled back Nicole’s head with his hand, with his left hand, in order to slit her throat with his right hand and then went over to Ron Goldman for [the] final attack, touching him in the process with the hand that held Nicole’s hair by the head, could that account for the hairs that you found on Ron Goldman’s shirt?”

“Yes,” Doug replied. “That could account for the presence of those hairs.”

I put the poster with the photos of Simpson’s hair on the easel and asked Doug to step down and show which ones came from the samples taken from the defendant and which ones came from the evidence. I watched the jurors’ faces. They actually looked interested.

The fibers proved equally graphic.

“Now assume further [that the killer] while wearing the Rockingham glove, stabbed Ronald Goldman-in a manner that brought his glove into contact with Ronald Goldman’s shirt, say, stabbed him in the left abdomen… Would that… be a reasonable explanation for your finding of fibers consistent with Ronald Goldman’s shirt on the Rockingham glove?”

“Yeah,” Doug replied. “I would expect a transfer in this instance, especially on a damp bloody glove…”

“Now,” I continued. “If the attacker wore these gloves during the murder, and during the struggle with Ronald Goldman one of those gloves was pulled off, would there be fibers from the lining of that left glove on his bare hand?”

“Yes,” came the reply.

“And if the murderer continued to pursue [his] attack on Ronald Goldman after that glove came off his left hand, would those fibers on his hand be transferred to the body of Ronald Goldman, if there was contact?”

“Yes.”

There was in fact one fiber from the glove’s lining on Ron Goldman’s shirt. I had made darn sure the jury knew about it. What Doug had just told them was that the glove came off during the attack, and that the attack had continued barehanded. That was how the cashmere fiber ended up on Ron’s shirt.

But even more damning was the fact that identical blue-black cotton fibers were found on Ron Goldman’s shirt, the Rockingham glove, and the socks Simpson left on his bedroom floor. Those telltale fibers-obviously from the clothes of the killer-linked Simpson directly to the Bundy crime scene. More particularly, to the body of Ron Goldman.

If I had been in Bailey’s shoes, I would have confined my questions to a few pointed jabs about the fact that hair and fibers ain’t fingerprints, and sat down. Instead, Bailey launched into a discussion of the definitions of “random,” same,’ and “similar” that seemed to leave everyone, including himself, confused.

For the rest of the case, hair and trace would stand unrefuted. The defense could apparently find no expert who would take the stand and argue that this evidence had been contaminated or planted.

I’d gotten the ending I wanted, clean and strong.

On July 6-after five months, 58 witnesses, 488 exhibits, and 34,500 pages of transcript-the People rested.