Without a Doubt

Chain of Fools

If Orenthal James Simpson had really hired a Dream Team, Johnnie Cochran would have stood before the judge on July 10, given one of his dramatic, world-weary sighs, and proclaimed, “The defense rests!”

Why not rest? Johnnie and company had been able to put some dings in our witnesses along the way. If it was true that these jurors were hell-bent on acquittal, the LAPD had logged in just enough screwups to lend credence to that loony conspiracy theory and provide them with a credible pretext for a verdict of “not guilty.” The smart bet would have been to take the leap and say, “We rest”-and watch this jury hand Simpson his freedom on a silver platter.

But as often as not, the defense can’t resist. They have to strut their stuff. I love it when this happens. I call it “defense to the rescue.” Usually, it’s at the client’s insistence. After being pounded by accusers, a defendant wants his buddies up there telling everybody what a great guy he is. A smart jury with lingering reservations about the defendant’s guilt will often find those doubts dispelled when they see a flimsy defense. They say, “Wait a minute. If this guy was really innocent, he would’ve had a better story than this.”

At least, that’s what happens in a normal trial. But that wasn’t the case here. After all, it wasn’t a Dream Team that would acquit O. J. Simpson. It was a Dream Jury.

Ironically, those hot dogs at the defense table could not leave well enough alone. Even though they had no coherent case of their own to present, Cochran and company were determined to put on a show. And as a result, they nearly blew it.

Because the evidence against their client was so strong, Johnnie was, in effect, unable to call honest, credible witnesses to the stand-their candor and ethics would wind up hurting the defendant. A case in point was Dr. Edward Blake, who appeared on the defense’s original witness list. He had observed all the scientific testing and was in a position to comment on whether it was aboveboard. Since there was no conspiracy, of course, by the time the trial began, Dr. Blake not so mysteriously had disappeared from their witness list. (We would have loved to call him ourselves. It was a sure bet, however, that Ito would rule Blake was shielded by the attorney-client and work-product privilege, and therefore off-limits for us.) Instead, the Dream Team put on a string of weak, unconvincing, and irrelevant witnesses. And we had one of our best streaks during the entire trial, batting them down one by one.

Following cameo appearances by Simpson’s daughter, sister, and aged mother, the defense presented a series of witnesses whose job it was to push the murders later and later toward the hour of eleven. They started with Ellen Aaronson and Danny Mandel.

This couple had been on a blind date the night of the murders. On the surface, they seemed benign enough. Mandel was a junior executive at Sony Pictures. Aaronson worked in toy licensing. (She apologized to the court for her part in the proliferation of Power Rangers.) They testified that on the way back from dinner at Mezzaluna, they’d passed Nicole’s condo around 10:26 P.M. They’d seen nothing. No bodies, no bloody pawprints, no signs of mayhem.

On the stand, I blasted the lights out of Aaronson. The reason wasn’t, as pundits later suggested, that her recollection of 10:26 played havoc with my time line. This murder could have occurred as late as 10:40, and O. J. Simpson would still have gotten home in time to be seen skulking in through his front door.

It was simply that, when Ellen and Danny had first been interviewed by the LAPD, Mandel wasn’t even sure what time they’d left the restaurant. Aaronson remembered looking at her watch on the way home and seeing that it was eleven o’clock. Not 10:26 P.M., as she later testified. During that first interview, they’d described taking an entirely different route to Aaronson’s apartment. On the stand I pointed out these inconsistencies with a vigor that was, I have to admit, excessive. Particularly when I asked Aaronson whether she’d been drinking at dinner. (Turns out she hadn’t.)

Critics have taken me to task for my aggressive cross of this pair. But try to put yourself in my position. For a year now, I’d been coping with publicity seekers and showboats willing to say just about anything to get themselves on the witness stand. Aaronson and Mandel had given inconsistent statements. If the defense team was not going to give its own witnesses a rigorous screening before throwing them up there, then it fell to Chris and me to expose their flaws.

Maybe I’ll go to hell for it. But I had no patience with Hansel and Gretel.

Denise Pilnak’s assertions were flat-out comical. She was a Bundy neighbor who professed with certainty that she’d looked at a clock at 10:18, and had heard no barking. She’d glanced out her window. It was quiet on the street.

Denise staked her claim to credibility on the fact that she was a fanatic about time. On the witness stand, she’d rolled up the sleeve of her blazer to show that she wore not one but two watches. She’d spun out this elaborate story about having been with her girlfriend that night and having looked at the clock every ten seconds. She’d even gone so far as to type out a time line of the evening, including where she and her friend had had dinner. When we checked out this document, we found that she’d actually gotten the restaurant wrong.

On cross-examination I asked her, “Do you recall how long you’ve been here today?”

Denise Pilnak, clockophile, couldn’t remember what time she’d arrived at court.

My favorite was Mark Partridge, a lawyer who sat next to Simpson on the airplane home from Chicago.

Partridge, who seemed sympathetic to the defendant, apparently decided that his seating assignment was a potential gold mine. He handwrote eight pages of memories from the flight. On cross, I made a point of putting part of this valuable intellectual property on the overhead projector-specifically the notice he affixed to each page that read “©1994 PARTRIDGE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” and had him explain, as an attorney, why he had affixed a copyright notice to each page.

“In an effort to prevent people from distributing them without my consent,” he said.

“Doesn’t it also mean you have a financial interest in the privacy of that matter you copyright?” I continued.

He professed not to understand. I found this an unusual response, considering he was an attorney specializing in trademark and copyright law. Finally, I managed to wheedle from him the admission that, yes, copyrights are sometimes used by authors to ensure they profit from the work.

With that out of the way, I asked him to describe the nature of the phone calls his seatmate had placed during the flight. Partridge provided a bit of information that somewhat contradicted the image of a distraught mourner headed home to console the children of their dead mother: Simpson was repeatedly calling his lawyer.

By this time the law clerks watching all this on TV upstairs in our offices were rolling on the floor with laughter. And it was all Chris and I could do to keep a straight face.

The next performance was perhaps the weirdest of all. Robert Heidstra, a wizened little Frenchman who lived in a converted garage and earned his living detailing luxury cars, claimed to have been walking his dog near Nicole’s condo at 10:30 P.M. when he heard a young man shout, “Hey, hey, hey,” followed by the screaming of an older man who sounded black. Heidstra’s testimony was fully consistent with our time line. We had, in fact, considered calling him as a prosecution witness. But after I’d spent about five minutes with him, I decided he was not credible. People who lived right next door to Nicole heard nothing but a dog barking, and he heard all that? No way. If I needed further corroboration for my skepticism, it came when I learned he’d been boasting to people that he was going to make some money from being a witness. We declined to put him on. Instead, the defense did.

After testifying that he could have heard the shouts as late as 10:40, Heidstra went on to say that “a white car came out of the darkness into the light.” On cross, Chris asked him if he had not told a friend of his that the vehicle looked like a Ford Bronco.

“Might have said maybe a Bronco…” the Frenchman admitted nervously.

On the other side of the room, the Dream Team had sunk low into their chairs. The guy couldn’t have done a better job for us if we had called him.

But the jewel in the crown was Robert Huizenga, who came at the end of the defense’s first week of testimony. I’m sure the Dream Team thought he would play splendidly. A former doctor for the NFL, Huizenga, at forty-two, was one of those archetypal Southern Californians who, even into middle age, retain an unnatural, almost creepy youthfulness. Shapiro had called him into the case two days after the murders. He’d examined the defendant at Kardashian’s house and was there, in fact, when Simpson and Cowlings split in the Bronco.

The defense called Huizenga to establish that Simpson didn’t have the physical strength to commit a double murder. Under Shapiro’s friendly questioning, Huizenga started out smiling and confident. His bias was unbelievable: he compared the suffering of O. J. Simpson to the biblical trials of Job.

Shapiro called the doctor’s attention to a photo of Simpson in his underwear. “This appears to me as a layperson to be a man in pretty good shape,” Shapiro lobbed. “Would that be your evaluation?”

“Although he looked like Tarzan,” Huizenga joked, “he walked like Tarzan’s grandfather.”

Brian Kelberg, who took Huizenga on cross, quickly wiped the smarmy smile off the witness’s lips.

For the benefit of the court, Brian ran the raw footage of Simpson’s exercise video. It had been shot only two weeks before Nicole’s and Ron’s deaths, and our man was leaping around like, well, Tarzan. Brian then screened a video of Simpson doing a product endorsement for some elixir that he claimed had ended his arthritis problems and had him “immediately feeling better.” It had even added ten yards to his golf drive.

One by one, Brian reduced Huizenga’s assertions to rubble. He used him to document extensive cuts on Simpson’s hands. Under Brian’s pressure, the doctor admitted he’d seen no evidence of a disability that would impede Simpson’s movements; that he’d suffered no “acute” episodes of arthritis. Then Brian leveled him with the big one.

“Doctor,” he asked, “was there any finding by you… which dealt [with] any physical limitation of Mr. Simpson’s which, in your opinion, would have prevented him from murdering two human beings using a single-edge knife on June twelfth of 1994?”

“Objection, objection!” Shapiro yelped. But Ito overruled him.

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

It was Huizenga who ended up limping from the witness stand.

At this point, we were beginning to get excited. The defense was making our case for us, tossing us meatball after meatball. The jury had to be thinking that an innocent man would have a better case to present.

Next up to bat for the defense, the experts-for-hire.

It is worth noting here that never, during the entire case, did the defense perform one single test on any of the blood found at Bundy, in the Bronco, or at Rockingham. The reason was perfectly clear. They knew the results would point directly to their client. Under law, they’re allowed to keep those results confidential, but if the word somehow got back to the jury that they’d done the tests and weren’t putting their findings into evidence, it could be mighty incriminating.

They elected, instead, to have their own expert, Dr. Edward Blake, observe our testing. But they quickly realized that if he were put under oath, he would have to tell the truth: that the prosecution’s blood results were unimpeachable.

As I’ve said, Dr. Blake disappeared from their witness list. Instead, we got Dr. Fredric Rieders.

Rieders, an Austrian-born toxicologist now working in Philadelphia, was called to support the very essence of the defense’s “conspiracy” offensive. He would argue that the blood on certain evidence-like the rear gate at Nicole’s condo and the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed-contained a preservative called EDTA. He would assert that this meant it came from a test tube. Rieders was there to back up the theory that the blood taken from Simpson after his police interview had been subsequently sprinkled on crime-scene evidence. He was basing his claims on his own interpretations of data that had come back to us from the FBI lab.

The challenge sounded serious enough that I wanted to handle this witness myself. That meant getting up to speed very quickly on the science of EDTA. Several weeks before Rieders’s scheduled appearance, an FBI toxicologist, Roger Martz, flew in from the East Coast to brief me. Agent Martz gave me a chart with two sets of results. One showed the results from the blood taken from Simpson the morning he’d been brought to Parker Center. That reference blood, of course, had been treated with EDTA to preserve it. The presence of the preservative manifested itself as tall, unmistakable bars. Next to it were the readings from blood on the rear gate and Simpson’s socks. Here the EDTA showed up as tiny bars.

The question the defense would ask, of course, was “Why was there any bar at all? Why was any trace of EDTA in the blood on the gate and socks?” And that’s exactly the question I asked Roger Martz.

Roger explained to me why the low-level readings were meaningless. As a “negative check” against the readings, he’d lifted a bloodstain from Nicole’s dress. Now that had to be her blood. Right? No one had a reason to plant it; it hadn’t come from a test tube. The results on that sample came back with the same EDTA reading as the disputed blood from the gate and socks. Agent Martz had gone a step further: he’d drawn blood from his own arm and tested it. Sure enough, there it was again. The same low-level reading of EDTA.

“EDTA is used as a preservative in foods and detergents,” he explained to me. “A small amount of EDTA can stay in your system when you eat preserved foods. Or on your clothes after you wash. It’s everywhere then. It’s the matter of degree that tells the story. You see this huge bar?”

He pointed to the reading from the vial of reference blood taken from Simpson.

“If the blood on the rear gate and the socks had come from the preserved tube, the EDTA indicators would have been just as high. Instead, they’re about a hundredth the size.”

Wonderfully clear and graphic. But could I get this across to the jury?

Since the defense had done no tests of their own, we knew they would have to call Agent Martz as their own witness-after all, he had performed the case’s only EDTA testing. Only he could give the testimony that would get the results into evidence. Had they been interested in getting to the truth of the matter, they would have called him first to explain his testing, then followed up with Rieders offering his own interpretation, obviously one more favorable to the defense.

But of course they weren’t interested in the truth. Late in the day on July 17, we got notice that they wanted to call Dr. Rieders first, and only then call Agent Martz. Worse, they waited until that moment to release a dense technical report on Rieders’s interpretation of the test-which we’d have to analyze closely before responding to it. It would be very tough, but at that point the defense was listing seven or so witnesses ahead of Rieders.

At nearly eight o’clock on the evening of July 19, however, we got notice that they might be calling Rieders as early as the next day. This flew in the face of Ito’s rule requiring both sets of counsel to give a few days’ notice before they called a witness. We’d complied, but the defense virtually ignored the rule. They knew all they had to do was give some lame excuse, and Lance would shrug his shoulders and let them off the hook.

I was pissed, and made no bones about it.

“I’m really outraged at the way the defense has proceeded,” I charged in court the next morning, so angry I was stammering. “It is a trial by ambush.” I outlined the history of this issue, noting that Rieders had received the test results in February, giving him months to prepare his report. There was no excuse for springing it on us just before he testified. Furthermore, I explained why it was unacceptable for the defense to put Rieders on before Martz. They had a guy who was going to put his own twisted spin on a set of scientific tests – before the tests themselves were presented to the court.

“I think it is scandalous what has occurred here,” I said. “I think it is a very deliberate attempt to try to… prevent the people from adequately meeting this testimony… I mean, where is the fairness?

The defense, of course, acted stunned and accused me of trying to manipulate their witness order. They even tried to insinuate that Lisa Kahn had told them that we were ready for Rieders anytime. When I called that “the biggest bald-face lie we have heard yet in this case,” Ito warned me about making personal attacks. But Lance knew what was happening. “If the shoe were on the other foot,” he said to the defense, “I would be peeling you off the ceiling right now.”

Damned straight.

Nevertheless, Ito was loath to give me the prep time I needed. The jury was restless; the case had already dragged on way past its original estimated four months. Bob Blasier had the gall to mock my argument that Martz should go first: “I can’t believe that Miss Clark says she’s ready for Martz but she’s not ready for Rieders.”

“Oh come on,” I charged. “That’s so obvious it doesn’t even bear addressing. Agent Martz is going to be an honest witness who’s going to testify truthfully to the results. That’s a little easier-” (I had not intended to suggest that Rieders was lying so much as that he was distorting the evidence to such an extent that it would have the same effect.)

Lance cut me off. “Miss Clark, earlier today I cautioned you about personal attacks.” I began to apologize but he stepped on me again. “Sanction is two hundred and fifty dollars. Don’t leave court without writing a check.”

Thanks, Lance.

At the end of the day, he ruled that the defense could put Rieders on first, and they could do it on Monday, July 24. This gave me only three or four days to prepare an incredibly complicated cross. With the witness order inverted, the defense would use Rieders to distort the test results before Martz, an honest and knowledgeable witness, could explain what they meant. Instead, I’d be forced to try and extract simple explanations of scientific evidence from a hostile witness bent on confusion and distortion. At the same time, I’d need to use my now bulging dossier on Rieders’s professional history to impeach both his ethics and his expertise.

This task would have been daunting if I’d had three months to prepare, but three days? Even as Ito admitted the situation was unfair, he wouldn’t budge. His rationale: “Professional attorneys are paid to work twenty-four hours day when they’re in trial.”

Which rules out, I guess, single parents, people with sick relatives, or human beings who simply require sleep.

On July 24, Dr. Fredric Rieders took the witness stand. After putting in a very long weekend, I was ready for him.

Rieders was a portly man with wisps of long, wild hair swirling about his head. His thick Austrian accent made him difficult to understand and he had a gruff, abrasive demeanor that turned condescending when he explained technical terms to the jury. With any other jury, I would have leaned back and let him hang himself. But not this one. He was going to give them the excuse they needed to dismiss key blood evidence. I had to hang tough. During his direct testimony, which was every bit as convoluted and misleading as I’d expected, I took careful notes.

When it came time for cross, I promptly introduced a copy of a study conducted by the EPA. It showed that the levels of EDTA found in the environment at large were consistent with those measured on the rear gate and the sock. Further, I noted that these levels were also consistent with the unpreserved blood from Agent Martz’s own body. Didn’t this, I asked the witness, show that the levels in the untreated evidence were meaningless?

Rieders resisted, calling the EPA study “either a typo or a complete absurdity.”

“But isn’t it true, Doctor, that [Martz’s] unpreserved blood came out very similarly in result to bloodstains found on the gate and the sock? Isn’t that true, Doctor?”

“Surprisingly, yes,” was his answer.

“Yes,” I repeated with exaggerated emphasis.

Ito demanded a sidebar. “Miss Clark… I know you’re enjoying yourself,” he began. “But I’m warning you in no uncertain terms, if I see any more of that commentary, there’s going to be severe sanctions. And I underline the word ‘severe.’ “

I couldn’t believe it. Barry Scheck could stand up there and sneer, “Where isss itttttt, Misterrr Fung?” and Ito would shine it on. I emphasize one word for effect and get dragged to sidebar.

I returned to Rieders.

“Doctor,” I asked him, “how do you account for the readings that came up from Agent Martz’s blood?”

“I don’t have to account for it,” he sniffed. “I think he would have to account for it because it’s absurd to find that much EDTA in normal blood.”

Great. You dismiss our tests as “absurd.” Not that you have any evidence to the contrary. In fact, you haven’t done one single test or your own. What a despicable sham. They claimed the blood was planted-that was their whole defense against all our evidence-and yet they don’t even perform one test? How could it be more obvious that their claims were fiction?

All that remained, at this point, was to impeach Rieders’s competence as a toxicologist-and we believed we had the goods to do it.

Brian Kelberg would present to the court certain details about Rieders’s role in a 1985 murder case-a Ventura County man who had allegedly been killed by a fellow named Sconce, one of his competitors in the funeral business. It was suspected that the victim had been poisoned with oleander. Rieders did the original postmortem tests and later appeared in court to say that while he could not be 100 percent certain, he felt that his tests showed, to “a high degree of scientific certainty,” the presence of oleander. That testimony led to Sconce’s indictment.

But Rieders, as Kelberg would argue, had done only rudimentary tests. Really definitive results would have required a pricey instrument he didn’t have. When this weakness was discovered, the district attorney joined the defense and ordered the more sophisticated testing. The results? No oleander. (Rieders argued that the differences between his results and those of the toxicologist who double-checked him is that the latter used a different set of tissue samples, which could have deteriorated with the passage of time.)

That explanation notwithstanding, charges against Sconce were dropped.

The Simpson jury had to hear this.

At the mention of Sconce, Rieders began to fidget and waved his hands at me dismissively. When a witness behaves this way, it is the judge’s role to force him to respond to the question. Not only did Ito refuse to do this, but he began to interrupt my questions, urging me to move to another topic.

“This is the Simpson case, Ms. Clark. How about getting back to it?”

I couldn’t believe it. We’d had to argue the admissibility of the Sconce case at some length before Rieders took the stand. Ito knew perfectly well that this was important impeachment testimony. What was he doing?

I pressed on, determined to show the jury that the witness’s interpretation was unreasonable and far-fetched. But after a few more questions, Ito barked, “This inquiry. It is completely irrelevant at this point. Move on to something else.”

In that instant this judge had told the jury to disregard a significant point of impeachment and rebuked me as if I were some wayward schoolgirl. I was ready to lock horns with Lance, to keep pursuing Rieders, but Ito’s inevitable response would damage my cross even further. I had no choice but to accede.

I could only hope that the jury had troubled to get clear of all the scientific mumbo jumbo to see the truth-which is what Martz himself presented when he took the stand next. The blood on the defendant’s sock, Nicole’s blood, did not come from a test tube containing EDTA. The blood on the rear gate, Simpson’s blood, did not come from a test tube containing EDTA. Which is to say, in each case the blood came straight from the source.

It should have been a clean win for us-a definitive rebuttal to the defense’s lunatic speculations. But I knew that the impact of Martz’s testimony was diluted by the circus put on by Rieders and the defense. Any other jury would have seen through it. But by now we had a pretty good idea that this jury liked a circus.

The defense’s next witness was Dr. Herbert MacDonell, an expert witness in blood-spatter interpretation. He was the man who would supposedly buttress Johnnie’s claims that if Simpson had committed these murders, he would certainly have been drenched in blood. Ironically, MacDonell himself had offered an answer to that question. In a paper entitled “Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence,” he’d demonstrated how a perpetrator could leave a bloody crime scene without very much blood on him. I couldn’t wait to have him discuss it.

We had collected a whole binder of materials to impeach MacDonell’s testimony with his own writings. But the defense must have seen this coming. To keep us from getting that paper into evidence, they narrowed MacDonell’s testimony to a single piece of evidence: the socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed.

The defense had focused upon one sock that had a stain they claimed was a “compression transfer”-meaning that the blood hadn’t been spattered onto the sock in the heat of violence, but had been pressed onto it later. The jury was to infer, of course, that the pressing had been done by one of the nameless, faceless conspirators out to frame O. J. Simpson.

MacDonell was harping on certain microscopic spheres of blood found on the inside of the sock that was stained at the ankle with Nicole’s blood. I pointed out that these “little balls,” as I referred to them pejoratively, could very well have come from the handling the socks received after the crime-but for perfectly innocuous reasons. The socks had been frozen and unfrozen. They had been stretched for microscopic analysis. And in an earlier test, they had been swabbed with water; this alone could easily have caused the blood to rehydrate and leak through to the other side of the sock.

I confronted him with the fact that he had originally referred to the blood pattern as a “swipe,” not a “compression.” This was important because of the latter term’s sinister implications.

“It’s a matter of interpretation,” he waffled. “It’s a distinction that to my mind is totally irrelevant.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

I asked the court for permission to question the witness about crime-scene photos. The defense objected frantically, but this time Ito overruled them.

“You saw photographs of the crime scene, have you not?” I asked him.

“Yes,” MacDonell answered, “I have.”

“… Let me ask you this, sir,” I continued. “If someone wearing the socks that you saw were to step near to the body of the victim, Nicole Brown Simpson, near enough for the ankle bone to come in contact with her bloody hand, could that cause a compression transfer?”

“Certainly,” he replied.

I could see Johnnie and Peter Neufeld out of the corner of my eye. Sweating.

“Could it also cause a swipe?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I shot it back again, with a cleaner spin. “If Nicole Brown Simpson reached out a bloody hand to touch the ankle of the murderer wearing those socks, could that cause a compression or a swipe transfer?”

He admitted that it could.

Bingo.

The Dream Team had two big guns left to call: Michael Baden and Henry Lee. Shapiro had called in Baden, a medical examiner for New York State, almost before the bodies were cold. It was Baden, in turn, who’d told him to secure the services of Henry Lee, the forensic scientist who ran Connecticut’s state police crime lab. The word of mouth on both men was good. They enjoyed reputations for scientific and personal integrity. Sadly, those stellar reputations would take a beating in the Simpson trial.

Baden was an affable, charming man who always went out of his way to be sweet to me. And I have to admit, he had expert-witnessing down to a science (so to speak). A big man with a winning smile, he sat on the stand as if he owned it. Though Brian is not as physically imposing as Baden, his intensity makes him a formidable courtroom figure. I enjoyed watching their exchanges; to a seasoned legal observer it was like a clash of gods on Mount Olympus. I just hoped the jurors weren’t so blown away by the pyrotechnics that they ignored the point: that Brian was able to get Baden to concede that his scenarios were not as watertight as they seemed. Here’s how:

Contention: The L.A. County Coroner destroyed evidence when he discarded the food remnants in Nicole’s stomach. They might have indicated that she died much later than our time line allowed for.

Refutation: Under pressure from Brian, Baden in effect admitted that even if the contents had been preserved, they wouldn’t necessarily have pinpointed the time of death.

Contention: Nine days after the sock was found in Simpson’s bedroom, Baden looked at it and saw no blood, the implication being that the blood was planted later.

Refutation: Brian got Baden to admit that he had not inspected the socks carefully. A special high-intensity light is required to see blood on such material, and the defense didn’t use it. Thus, Baden couldn’t say for certain that there was no blood present.

Contention: The victims’ injuries showed that they may have been killed by two people, with two knives.

Refutation: Kelberg got Baden to admit that the evidence was consistent with a single murderer wielding a single knife.

In addition, Baden testified about the cuts on Simpson’s hands-and helped us while doing so. He reported that Simpson himself had told him that he’d gotten the cuts while retrieving his cell phone from the Bronco just before he left for Chicago. This line of questioning was important: It allowed us to get in evidence that the cell phone he’d used to call Paula at 10:03 P.M. on June 12 was in the Bronco. Ergo, Simpson had been out driving at 10:03 P.M., just before the murders were committed. Now I didn’t even need that snippet from Simpson’s statement to Vannatter and Lange. I would put this information to good use in closing arguments. In fact, I would use the Baden “cut” testimony in my summation to show how Simpson’s flimsy excuse about the cell phone couldn’t possibly account for all the blood in his car and his bathroom.

For his performance, Baden was paid $100,000.

There was even more fanfare for the vaunted superstar of the defense’s lineup, Dr. Henry Lee, one of the country’s most revered-and charismatic-criminalists. Lee’s testimony would focus on evidence collection, the blood on the socks, and the shoe prints-all Hank Goldberg’s turf. The job he had ahead of him was the courtroom equivalent of guarding Michael Jordan.

Personally, I thought there was a pretty good chance that Dr. Henry Lee could be helpful to us. He was, for instance, a big proponent of DNA testing in criminal cases. He could also be helpful in answering assertions that the LAPD labs were “cesspools of contamination,” as charged by another defense witness, Dr. John Gerdes. Dr. Lee, by his own admission, had at one time done his evidence processing in a men’s room! He’d also dried crime-scene clothing in his backyard. (This practice ended when a stray dog took off with a piece of a rape victim’s underwear.)

But Hank’s work wouldn’t end there. Back on June 25, over a year earlier, Lee had gone to Bundy to examine the bloody shoe prints. His notes revealed that he thought he’d found evidence of a second set of prints, different from those made by the Bruno Maglis. Hank pored over the photos Lee had taken, trying to find the supposed shoe prints-to no avail. Finally, by piecing together all the photos, Hank located the exact spot on the tiles where Dr. Lee claimed to have seen that other set of shoe prints. Then he looked at the crime-scene photos taken by LAPD on their first sweep of Bundy. That spot was blank. The lines Dr. Lee found on June 25, two weeks after the murders, had not been there on June 13.

That wasn’t surprising. It could easily be explained by the fact that, after the crime-scene tape was removed, cops walked up and down that pathway freely. If, after all the photos were taken and the evidence collected, someone had stepped on some remaining blood and left another imprint, it was no big deal.

But Lee was claiming to have found what he called “parallel lines” that, he said, firmly indicated a second set of shoe prints. Hank located the spot where those appeared, and discovered that the parallel lines were actually impressions in the concrete.

Hank sat back while Scheck questioned the affable Dr. Lee for hours on these shoe-print findings. Then, on cross, Hank revealed to the witness the fact that the parallel lines were artifacts in concrete, probably made by a workman years before the crime.

“And now…” he asked Lee, “does it appear that the parallel lines are in fact trowel marks or scratches in the surface of the pavement?

“Could be” was the answer.

“Does that appear to be the most reasonable explanation?”

“Yes, right,” Lee conceded.

So much for the two-killer theory.

But the most damaging part of Lee’s testimony had nothing to with science and everything to do with theater. I’m referring to a much-hyped remark he offered at the close of the direct testimony. Scheck had asked his opinion of a specific piece of blood collection by the police, and Lee responded, in his broken English, “Only opinion I can giving under the circumstance-something’s wrong.”

Do you know what Dr. Henry Lee was referring to when he intoned so dramatically that “something’s wrong”? A minor, almost insignificant piece of evidence. Eight swatches of blood from one of the Bundy spots had been collected to be stored in a little paper envelope called a bindle. But only four of them left stains on the bindle. The reason, of course, is that four of them were dry and the other four wet at the time they were stored. So what?

“Somethings wrong.” It was the most unscientific thing I’ve ever heard a forensic expert say. It was, in fact, Lee’s way of helping the defense without saying anything.

“Something’s wrong!” Barry Scheck treated it like a message from God, and repeated it like a mantra throughout his summation, suggesting disingenuously that Lee’s comment referred to the prosecution’s entire case.

In fact, Hank disarmed this insinuation on cross. Wasn’t it common, he asked Lee, for a forensic scientist to see something that he couldn’t explain? Lee admitted that it was.

“That doesn’t mean something is wrong, does it?” Hank pressed.

“No,” conceded Dr. Lee.

Later, when I learned that our jurors had cited Dr. Lee’s testimony as their prime reason for discounting the absolutely definitive physical evidence we had presented over the course of months at trial, I knew the bad vibes I’d been getting from the jury box weren’t just figments of my imagination. They were tuning out for the prosecution and tuning in for the defense. Hank might have been asking Dr. Lee about his favorite punk-rock group for all they cared or listened. Once they heard the ominous proclamation “Something’s wrong,” it became in their minds an emblem for our entire case. It became synonymous with the conditions of society in general. “Something’s wrong” in a country where racism flourishes and the law has been known to be dispensed in unequal portions.

We had struck down every single claim made to support a “conspiracy.” But our streak of luck was at an end. By the time Lee finished his testimony in August 1995, the focus of the trial no longer bore any relevance to the evidence. Instead, all eyes were fixed on what was wrong-wrong with a racist cop, wrong with the legal system, wrong with America.

And all of this-all of what was wrong-was to be symbolized by one man, Mark Fuhrman.

It was early July when I first got a hint of the disaster that would ultimately ruin us. I was feeling a little overwhelmed that day. The case was dragging on far longer than expected. Johnnie had once estimated that he would wrap up his case within the month. I’d hoped to spend more time with my children before school started. But the Glorious Fourth had come and gone, and there was no end in sight.

Bill Hodgman buzzed and asked me to come to his office immediately. He looked ashen.

“Marcia,” he told me. “We’ve heard a rumor that Mark Fuhrman may have been collaborating with some author to write a book. Our source says Mark used racial epithets.”

Maybe I was tired, but this sounded to me like just one more of the bullshit rumors we’d had to entertain, investigate, and dismiss in recent months.

“The good news,” Bill continued, “is that they were apparently composing a work of fiction where Mark played a racist character.”

If this was true, the book would be irrelevant to our case. Still, that wouldn’t stop the defense from trying to exploit it. Bill said he was already checking it out.

I returned to my office, where EDTA reports, MacDonell binders, notes for the Rieders cross, and texts illuminating the mysteries of bloodstain patterns blanketed the surface of my desk.

“Maybe,” I whispered to myself, “it will just go away.”

It didn’t. Reports kept filtering in. The project was a movie script and Fuhrman had made tapes in the process. His collaborator was a would-be screenwriter named Laura Hart McKinny, who had retained lawyers in Los Angeles. Lawyers to do what? Shop the screenplay? Sell the tapes?

We had to find out what was in those tapes. Chris wrote a subpoena at warp speed-we were under the impression that the goods were instate-and Ito approved it. But before we could serve, we learned that the defense had already located McKinny; she had taken some obscure academic post in North Carolina. They were going after her with their own subpoena. The problem was this: a California judge can’t demand a witness or a tape from another state unless that state’s courts agree to honor the subpoena. So Johnnie himself, with Lee Bailey riding shotgun, headed to the Tar Heel State to make their arguments.

Word got back to us that Johnnie didn’t play real well in North Carolina. The judge there barely hid his contempt for the defense’s race strategy. I had to smile. Johnnie had gotten a taste of what this trial would have been like if he hadn’t been blessed with Lance Ito. The subpoena was denied on the grounds that McKinny’s tapes didn’t constitute material evidence.

I knew that was not the end of it. The defense was sure to appeal, and they did. In short order, the subpoena was granted and the tapes, along with Ms. McKinny, were on their way to California. Well, we’d expected that.

It would be two weeks before we could get those tapes to make our own transcriptions. In the meantime, I’d gotten some idea of what they contained by reading transcripts of the North Carolina hearing. Fuhrman and McKinny had met periodically over a period of about ten years. During that time he spun out tales for her like Scheherazade. We didn’t know all he’d said, but it was clear that the tapes contained at least one thing that was going to be trouble for us. Big, big trouble.

Fuhrman had uttered the N-word on those tapes. And Johnnie had made sure to get that on the record.

Oh, God.

The only glimmer of hope here was that Mark had simply been helping McKinny develop a character for a work of fiction. The racial epithets, she insisted, were used “in the context of developing a story… It wasn’t a biography of Mr. Fuhrman’s life.” She went on to say that these sessions gave her “information about ideas and feelings that some people might have about African Americans. I don’t know that it reflects his feelings about African Americans.”

But I sure knew how it would sound.

On August 11, McKinny’s attorneys appeared before Lance to turn over the tapes. They looked as if they’d never set foot in a courtroom. Actually, they looked barely old enough to shave: young, inexperienced guys who thought they’d caught a rocket to fame and fortune. They didn’t get it-once the defense got those tapes, it would be only a matter of hours before they were leaked to the press. By then, they would have a commercial value of zero. Inside Edition doesn’t fork out the big bucks for stuff that’s playing free on national television.

I was the one who raised the possibility of leaks, and I saw the lawyers’ eyes go wide with panic. They immediately asked Ito for a protective order, which he granted. But I knew it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. Everyone was shocked-shocked, mind you-when, not long after the tapes reached attorneys for both sides, they were leaked to the press.

Our steno pool worked overtime transcribing those fifteen hours of tape. When, at last, a copy reached my desk, I curled up in my chair like a wary cat, lit a Dunhill, took a deep breath, and started to read.

Every racial slur imaginable. “Those niggers, they run like rabbits.” Every demeaning stereotype. “Nigger driving a Porsche that doesn’t look like he’s got a $300 suit on, you always stop him.” Every fear that a black man could have about a racist cop, fulfilled. “How do you intellectualize when you punch a nigger? He either deserves it or he doesn’t.”

Did Mark actually mean these things? Even if he was, as McKinny claimed, spinning out a fictional persona, did he envision this character as a villain or a hero?

If African Americans got rough treatment, women got just as bad. I consider myself fairly well versed in the language of profanity, but Fuhrman had come up with some slurs I’d never even heard.

“Split tail?” I asked Chris, who was slumped dejectedly against my door. He’d just emerged from his own hellish immersion in those transcripts. He shook his head in disgust. “Man,” he said, “that motherfucker just lost the whole case for us.”

Back in his own neighborhood Chris was going to catch a lot or heat for this. I was glad, for his sake, that I was the one who’d ended up taking Fuhrman on direct.

But at that moment the anger and sadness I felt was not only for the prosecution but for the country, torn by racial hatred. People v. Orenthal James Simpson had done nothing but widen the divide. We’d hoped that by carefully presenting the facts, we could convince all the people that our charges were justified. Now these horrible epithets were about to infiltrate our courtroom, and they would further strain the uneasy truce between blacks and whites. The release of these tapes, and the prominence they would assume, would mean a step backward for all of us. And a step forward for hate.

Chris left without a word. I returned to the transcripts. The worst racial slur of all, repeated forty-one times. And when I reached the end, I threw the transcript down and cried.

That night I drove home from work in a trance. Got into bed. Stared at the ceiling. On this miserable night, the loneliness of that bedroom was killing me. I wanted to talk to someone who would listen with unconditional sympathy.

I reached for the phone and called my brother, Jon. It was always comforting to talk to him; he could make me laugh, and he shared my sense of outrage about what was happening in Lance’s courtroom. When this trial began, he was living nearby, but recently he’d moved north. I missed him.

It took him a moment to recognize my voice. “Marsh. You don’t sound too good,” he said. I told him about the transcripts.

“I still can’t believe it,” I said. By now I’d begun to weep. “It’s going to be so ugly.”

“You’ve got to pull it together,” he told me in his gentle, firm way. “This case is still happening-you’ve got to get through it.”

The next morning when I got up, the self-pity was gone. I was just plain angry. Fuhrman! Why hadn’t he told us about those fucking tapes? It’s not like they could have slipped his mind. One illuminating fact to have emerged from the transcripts was that Fuhrman had met with McKinny as recently as July 1994-just a few weeks after the murders-to discuss the “hot property” he’d become. The two of them agreed to lie low until the case was over; then they’d make the sale, and Mark would get a percentage. But apparently McKinny had seen her chance sooner: it was no accident those tapes were surfacing now.

Fuhrman had boasted in that July tape, “I’m the biggest witness in the case of the century-if I go down, they lose the case.” No, as a matter of fact, he was not our biggest witness. Just the most vulnerable. And when Johnnie got done with him, this would no longer be the Simpson trial; it would be the Fuhrman trial.

Did I feel betrayed? You bet. We all did. After the tapes came out, I got a lot of criticism for having “embraced” Fuhrman. Bullshit! I never had any choice about calling him as a witness. And it was Mark Fuhrman’s job to inform us of anything that might be used against him by the defense. Instead, he took the stand at the preliminary hearing without telling us about his personnel package. Then he testified-as I held my breath and silently screamed, No, don’t do it!-that he hadn’t uttered the N-word in the last ten years. All the while he knew about those tapes.

And now, after all our hard work-DNA, PCR, EDTA-the case came down to this: MF.

Read it any way you like.

Laura Hart McKinny showed up at our eighteenth-floor conference room with her attorneys and her husband. I wasn’t surprised when she agreed to talk to us. It was good PR for her to appear not to be taking sides. At first glance she struck me as a flower child gone slightly to seed. She was in her forties, but her hair hung long and free. Her freckled face bore no makeup and she wore the kind of funky, flowing clothing that you’d have seen at a Jefferson Airplane concert.

I wasn’t fooled by the packaging. Beneath that hang-loose exterior lay a stratum of steel.

I told her that we routinely taped our interviews, and she balked. Pretty ironic, under the circumstances. She and her team withdrew from the room to confer. I raised an eyebrow at Bill. By the time she returned, several minutes later, she was more compliant. Bill did the questioning while Chris and I sat by.

McKinny told us how one day in 1985 she was sitting at a café table in Westwood, tapping away at her laptop computer, when up sidled Mark Fuhrman. He asked her a question about the computer. (It sounded to me like a come-on line. No way Mark Fuhrman cared about RAM and ROM.) McKinny had something else in mind. Fuhrman, she learned, was a police officer. And, whaddya know, she happened to be writing a screenplay about cops.

They struck a deal: he would give her inside cop skinny, and she would give him credit as her technical adviser and a percentage of whatever. Fuhrman, it turned out, was useful to McKinny not merely because he was an officer with the LAPD. He was also a member of a group called Men Against Women, MAW, which had resisted the advancement of female cops. Talk about an appealing protagonist.

After their decade of interviews on the subject, McKinny turned out a screenplay with the catchy title “Men Against Women.” And guess what. It didn’t sell.

She recounted this tale with no discernible sense of irony, and I grew increasingly impatient with her. This woman had laughed and giggled with Mark, listened to his chest-thumping accounts of cop life, and accepted without criticism his descriptions of police misconduct against blacks and women, all spiced with the vilest racial and sexual slurs that a human can utter. What was the deal here? Did she believe he was being himself? Or was he playing a role?

I asked her just that.

At the hearing in North Carolina, she’d claimed that what Mark had said was simply theater; now she backed off. Sometimes she knew that he was acting a part, she said. But at times, he seemed to be talking about himself. When he blathered on about police brutality, she didn’t bother to distinguish between what might have been true and what imagined. She was working on a piece of fiction. It didn’t matter. She was “a writer.”

But Laura, I asked her. When you heard him use those epithets, what did you do?

Nothing.

Laura, what did you feel?

Nothing, she replied. I was just listening.

Chris could take no more. “Nothing?” he repeated, incredulous. “You felt nothing when you heard him talk that way?”

At this McKinny got her back up. She was a writer, she insisted. Interjecting her opinion would have made her subject freeze up.

The upshot of Chris’s sally, unfortunately, was that McKinny herself froze up, and we got nothing more of substance out of her. As time went on, she would put serious distance between herself and her politically incorrect collaborator.

The leopard had changed her spots. By the time of her court appearance, she would have become mortally offended by this creature who had spewed filth into her tape recorder.

We had to face it-it really didn’t matter at this point whether Laura McKinny was going to say that Fuhrman was acting on those tapes. The issue was the tapes themselves. We absolutely had to try to keep them out of evidence. We could argue, with God and Truth firmly on our side, that Fuhrman’s boasts had nothing to do with the deaths of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown. But Lance, through his insupportable error of allowing in the N-word in the first place, had opened the floodgates to travesty.

We worked hard to stop the inevitable. It was a horrible time. I was fighting a low-grade flu that had plagued me for weeks. But hearing those tapes just did me in. After that, I was flat-out sick. During the worst, most feverish part of it, I had to drag myself into the office at 6:30 A.M. one Saturday to work with Bill on our motion. Scott Gordon worked right alongside us, pulling up more cases in which racial epithets had been deemed inadmissible because of their inflammatory impact. I didn’t get home until three in the morning.

And if all that weren’t enough, by the end of the weekend a new problem had emerged. Cheri Lewis had been going over the transcripts with a fine-tooth comb, filing Fuhrman’s utterances under different categories: by racial epithet; by description of misconduct; etc. We realized that there was another issue raised by the tapes.

One that Lance Ito could never rule on.

At one point in the tapes, Fuhrman complained vociferously and pejoratively about a female captain who had supervised him several years earlier in the West L.A. Station. He described her like this:

Dyed, real white blond hair… with one-inch roots… This woman is forty years old. She’s got braces on, slumped shoulder. Only marsupial lieutenant on the job. She has a pouch big enough to hide two cats. Under the lower belt it looks like she’s hiding a soccer ball. She’s not pregnant. And she’s never worked the field. Ever. She sued… to get the job.

He was talking about Peggy York-Lance Ito’s wife.

Mark had described two run-ins with her, including one during which she upbraided the squad for writing “KKK” on the calendar entry for Martin Luther King Day. Mark had snickered, and when she called him on it in private, he claimed, he belittled her to her face. In another dustup, he refused an assignment from her, supposedly saying, “I don’t talk to anybody that [sic] isn’t a policeman, and you’re as far from a policeman as I’ve seen-and as far as that goes, you’re about as far from a woman as I’ve seen.”

This was going to be a source of major grief for Ito, in more ways than one. Earlier the preceding fall, it had come out that York had known Fuhrman as someone under her command. Those of us on the prosecution side felt that Lance had surely looked into this matter privately-at the very least, had asked, “Honey, what do you know about this?”-and had concluded that there was no personal animus between his wife and Detective Fuhrman. Had there been any, Ito should have recused himself right then and there. He didn’t. So we all assumed the matter was under control.

In October, I had even met Peggy York. Her lawyer, my old sparring partner-cum-buddy Barry Levin, had introduced us. Captain York struck me as a smart, classy lady. York had given a deposition in which she stated she had no memory of ever having reprimanded Fuhrman. In short, she had no information to offer.

But if you believed what Mark Fuhrman had said about her in the McKinny tapes, it became more difficult to take her assurances at face value. The encounters Mark described were sufficiently hostile that, had they occurred, Captain York would most likely have remembered them. And, if she remembered them, it was hard to believe she wouldn’t have told her husband about them-if not at the time, then when his name came up on the short list of judges for the Simpson case.

To state the obvious, if Mark’s problems with York were true and Ito knew of them, he should never have taken the case.

But I decided that, although there was certainly a kernel of truth in his stories, Fuhrman was likely distorting whatever had happened between himself and York, just as he had exaggerated other incidents. During the McKinny interviews, Mark described several incidents of racism and brutality, the most graphic being a scene in which he and other officers chased some suspected cop-killers into an apartment.

“We basically tortured them…” he reported swaggeringly to his adoring Boswell. “We broke ‘em… Their faces were just mush…”

Afterward, he said, he and his colleagues had been so bloody that they had to hose down their uniforms. As he returned to this incident later in the tapes, the brutality became even more intense, and in his final version of the tale the cops actually killed one of the suspects.

This smelled like Fantasyland. Sure enough, when the FBI and other agencies set out to verify Mark’s stories, they found no basis in truth. Later on, a former partner of Fuhrman’s, Tom Vettraino, would opine that Mark’s stories came from old TV cop shows. Fuhrman had been bullshitting, right down to his boast that he was a big bad marine who’d seen all sorts of bloody action in ‘Nam-in fact, he never got off some old tub of a ship.

But if the McKinny tapes were admitted, we might have to prove that Fuhrman’s stories of police misconduct were unfounded. Our best witness might have been York, who was named on the tapes and might be able to refute Mark Fuhrman’s tales. As awkward as it was, we would have to call her to the stand. Quite obviously, Ito could not preside while his wife testified. And there was a broader issue: how could he even make a determination on the admissibility of tapes in which his wife was trashed by a witness?

Ito held a hearing on August 15. He still hadn’t heard the tapes, which, he opined, “is a good state of affairs at this point.” He framed the issue simply. If his wife was called, he’d disqualify himself from the case. Sounded fair, but it left me trapped: how could I know whether to call York until I knew which parts of the tapes would be admitted as evidence? If Lance allowed in the incidents of police brutality, York’s observations of Fuhrman’s work would be crucial.

On the other side of the courtroom, they were also in a tactical bind. The defense was pushing like crazy to get the police-brutality stuff into the record, but they didn’t want to lose Lance. Who could blame them? A replacement judge might not be so tolerant of their underhanded tricks.

We recessed for a while to research the issue. And when we returned, it was clear that Johnnie had figured out that I had hung a sword over Lance’s head: if Ito admitted Mark’s nasty statements about police brutality, we’d call York, and Ito would be off the case. Johnnie should have gracefully conceded that someone else should rule on the limited matter of the tapes. I, too, was leaning toward partial recusal, and would have gone with it. But Johnnie was so fixated upon keeping Lance on the bench that he argued against it.

Keep in mind that all of this was going on in open court. The jurors weren’t present, but the proceedings were being broadcast, so their families could hear and see it all. I shuddered to think what information they were imparting to their sequestered loved ones during visiting hours at the Inter-Continental. Johnnie took the opportunity to do all he could to convey to the media and the public what was in those tapes. He knew he could get away with it, too-because Lance was almost comatose from the stress of having to deal with his wife’s sudden visibility in the case.

I was steaming. Johnnie had found a surefire distraction from all the evidence confirming the guilt of O. J. Simpson. “This is a bombshell!” he crowed. “This is perhaps the biggest thing that has happened in any case in this country and they know it.” But, Johnnie, there’s a more immediate horror at the center of this case, lying all but forgotten: two young people with their throats cut.

Finally Lance stopped him. “I’ve heard enough,” he said.

He looked shaken. He said that, much as he hated to bring another judge in, for a ruling on these tapes, he would have to.

“I love my wife dearly,” he said, “and I am wounded at any criticism of her, as any spouse would be, and I think it is reasonable to assume that could have some impact.”

That was touching. But then he began speaking of the difficult road that women had to walk in a man’s profession, how women take a lot of hits for having to be tough. The irony of it left me breathless. For a year now, I had been browbeaten by this man, suffering the very difficulties that moistened his eyes when he spoke of his wife. Oh, when it suited his Kodak moment, he was Mr. Sensitivity.

Upstairs in the D.A.‘s office, anger was building like steam in a pressure cooker. By the time I reached the eighteenth floor, brass and deputies alike were gathered in Bill’s office. They had reached a consensus. We should demand Lance Ito’s full recusal.

The argument went like this: Even if Lance stepped aside for a ruling on the tapes, he would still be the one to enforce that ruling. But the essential conflict of interest would remain. You’d need two judges on the bench for the rest of the trial. Introducing this unusual set of circumstances would lead the jury to conclude that the Fuhrman tapes were the most important thing in this case.

The pro-recusal faction was insistent. The two-judge scenario would be a disaster. We had to have one judge-not Lance-for the rest of the the trial.

My colleagues handed me the draft of a letter, hastily composed, demanding that Lance remove himself from the case for good. I stood for a moment, silent, trying to sort out my thoughts. If Ito recused himself, this case would be over. No trial judge could walk in at this point, pick up, and carry on. Especially considering where things stood-that is, in shambles. We’d probably have to desequester the jury; you couldn’t keep them locked up for the weeks it would take a new judge to learn the case. Then the jurors would get an earful of any defense propaganda they hadn’t already managed to hear. Probably, during the extension, we’d lose enough jurors to cause a mistrial. Even though I knew in my heart that this case was lost, I believed that at another trial, with another Downtown jury preloaded with tales of Fuhrman, we’d still get the same results. And no one wanted to go through all this again.

But I had another response to this missile we were preparing to hurl. It was a response I could never have predicted. I found myself feeling sorry for Lance Ito. Obviously, I had no reason to love the guy. I had no reason even to like him. But total recusal was going too far. It would destroy him.

“We’re not doing this,” I said to Gil and the brass. “This letter is not going out over my name. If you don’t want to listen to me, then you fucking do it.”

I stormed to my office and did my best to slam the door, forgetting that those damned county office doors were too heavy to generate a good, old-fashioned, Bette Davis-style slam. I was surprised how the whole incident had shaken me. I was trembling so hard I could barely light a cigarette.

Finally, a knock. It was Chris. He’d been elected to talk me down. But I held firm.

All the way to court, Brian was still ticking off the reasons why Ito should be forced to recuse himself. I knew the rationale, but to me the issue still boiled down to two things: the necessity to finish this trial, and my feeling that Lance’s career could be ruined. I had not signed the letter demanding recusal, but as lead prosecutor I was the one who would have to present it. My head was bursting, trying to figure out a way to finesse this.

By now, word of the letter had spread through the courthouse. Johnnie, terrified at the prospect of losing Ito, raced to the podium and began to babble, “The prosecution claims now you’re totally recused on this… It’s bye-bye forever. We resist that. It’s not our understanding.”

I explained that the prosecution’s decision was only tentative, but that “it would appear, based on consultation with everyone, that the only road to take is”-I faltered-“to proceed with complete recusal from this point forward.”

I had become used to my words being greeted at the bench by condescension. Not today. Lance appeared to be holding back tears.

“You sure you want to do this?” he asked with uncharacteristic humility.

The moment was uncomfortably intimate. Lance and I looked at each other for what seemed like a long time. Finally, I spoke.

“I want an opportunity to talk further with [my colleagues] before we adopt this course and it gets set in stone. If we have the time tonight to do it, I would appreciate it and present the court with the final position in writing.”

I could tell by his expression that he understood what I was saying. That I was going to fight this. That I would fix it for him.

“All right,” he said.

I headed straight to Gil’s office, ready for battle. I was amazed by what awaited me. Like a sudden cloudburst, their mood had passed. Now it was as if the skies had been sunny all along. I suspect that was due to the tempering influence of Gil’s lieutenant, Frank Sundstedt. But I’ll never know.

“Recusal makes no sense,” I heard Frank saying. “I think we can leave it with Lance-he’ll be at least as fair as any other judge, and he knows the case.”

Everyone was nodding. I felt once again like I’d stepped through the looking glass. I was too shocked to feel relief. All I knew was that this trial would continue. For better or worse.

The following morning in court, I withdrew our request for Lance Ito’s recusal. And, I added, we wanted him to rule on the admissibility of the tapes in their entirety. Meaning, “Lance, you do it all. We have faith in you.” I crossed my fingers and prayed that this gamble would work. A flash of gratitude passed across Lance’s face. He looked like a man who’d just been granted a stay of execution.

I was drained. But I had to pull myself together. We still had to finish the motion on the Fuhrman tapes. I tried, but by the end of the day I was shivering with another bout of fever. It was all I could do to make it home. We had Thursday off. I collapsed into bed, shaking with chills. I spent part of that day and the next in bed with a 102-degree fever while Cheri and Bill finished the brief.

I told the kids, “Mommy’s sick. Let’s watch a movie together, okay?”

We retreated to the “playroom” (which had once called itself a dining room) and for the rest of the day I sat bundled in blankets in a beanbag chair, surrounded by action figures, toy helicopters, two bulldozers, and a cement truck. And we watched Pete’s Dragon. Over and over again.

What would Ito do about the Fuhrman tapes? We were arguing that not only shouldn’t the jurors hear them, but that the tapes shouldn’t be aired in court at all. It was an open secret that the jurors learned a lot about what happened outside their presence through phone calls and conjugal visits. One thing was certain. If those tapes were played publicly, the jurors would hear all about them. The reasonable thing for Lance to have done was make his own judgment on the tapes, ruling on what was relevant and keeping the rest of the tapes where they belonged: under seal.

No such luck.

“I am persuaded that this is an issue of national concern, one in which the public has a right to be informed,” he proclaimed. “In that light, I will play the tapes as a service to the public.”

A matter of national concern? This was a double homicide, not Watergate. There was neither a legal reason nor a logical reason for this. Not only was it doubtful that those tapes would provide an edifying civics lesson to the public in general, but also they sure as hell would prejudice our jury beyond redemption. Didn’t Lance understand that? Maybe, I thought surly, we should have blown him off while we had the chance.

August 29, 1995, was the worst day I ever spent in a court of law. That was the date the Fuhrman tapes were played. I sat mortified as those ugly words washed through the courtroom like a tide of sewage.

“Nigger.” God, I despise that word. Every time we heard Fuhrman utter it I felt more and more degraded. Seeing those smug, self-congratulatory expressions at the defense table made it all the worse.

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. I felt as though I’d had weights attached to my hands and feet. I looked over at Chris and realized that he was in even more misery than I. I just closed my eyes and prayed for the strength to get through this.

This trial is over, I thought. We’ll never recover.

But as Fuhrman’s clipped, arrogant cadences faded, I felt my back stiffen almost involuntarily with a surge of resolve. Get off the damned floor, Clark!

Behind me sat the families of two people murdered by the real defendant in this case. His guilt-that’s what we were here to prove.

Yes, Mark Fuhrman had spoken like a racist. But the issue at hand was whether he had planted evidence. He had not.

The defense had proved that Fuhrman was scum-but I could prove that their client was a murderer. Fuhrman could not be allowed to overwhelm Simpson. These two horrible deaths could not go unpunished.

“I am Marcia Clark, the prosecutor,” I reminded the court. “And I stand before you today not in defense of Mark Fuhrman but in defense of a case. A case of such overwhelming magnitude in terms of… the proof of the defendant’s guilt that it would be [a] travesty to allow such a case to be derailed.”

As I spoke, I felt detached from the world around me. It was like I’d entered some outside-the-body zone where the only thing I could do was to repeat a silent prayer: Don’t do it, Lance. Don’t let the jury hear this.

“The point that I make [is] that this is a murder trial,” I continued. “A murder trial where none of this is relevant. This is not the forum. This is not the forum.”

I told the court about a political cartoon I’d seen several days before. It showed a child watching television-the Simpson trial.

“What’s the forbidden N-word, Mommy?” asked the little girl.

The mother answered, “Nicole.”

The following day, Ito handed down his ruling. It was a victory, I guess. Though he would allow the defense to bring out the number of times Fuhrman said the N-word, he allowed only two brief, relatively innocuous excerpts of Mark actually saying it. Using more, he ruled, would be “overwhelmingly outweighed by the danger of undue prejudice.”

This news seemed to leave the defense team in shock. Johnnie hastily called a press conference. With his colleagues on the defense team, he marched outside to the massed media, faced the cameras, and gave his personal verdict on Lance Ito and the system in general. “This inexplicable, indefensible ruling lends credence to all those who say the criminal-justice system is corrupt,” he charged. “The cover-up continues.”

For weeks now, my own relationship with Johnnie had been icy. His disregard for fairness-his flouting of the law itself-had disgusted me. I guess he knew that, but his mind was focused elsewhere. He still approached the trial with his typical intense energy, but there was no more banter, no willingness to step back and acknowledge the humanity of all those in the courtroom. Now he was carried away with righteous fury. I could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears.

Now, after his shocking press conference, I was less angry than disappointed. Johnnie was once a respected lawyer. Now he was a wild man. Going on national television to call a judge corrupt? That should be grounds for a report to the state bar and a contempt citation. What appalled me even more was how irresponsible and self-centered his actions were. Johnnie’s comments seemed deliberately aimed at inciting a goddamned riot. You don’t need to do that, Johnnie, I told myself. You’re already winning.

Three whole days passed before Ito responded to the press conference. And even then, he might have ignored it, had Johnnie not forced the issue by resisting an innocuous request from the bench.

“I resent that tone,” Johnnie replied petulantly. “I am a man just like you are, Your Honor. I resent that tone…”

The last vestiges of decorum in this courtroom had vanished. I’d hoped that this direct challenge, along with Johnnie’s disrespectful public remarks, would force Ito into taking action. No judge worthy of his robes would allow Johnnie’s behavior to go unpunished.

Ito ordered us into chambers.

“I have chosen up to this point to ignore your press conference last Thursday and what I consider to be in direct contempt of this court…” he said. “And I want you to know that I have chosen to ignore it thus far and this is because of our long relationship and what I hope will be our continuing friendship.”

The penalty? A few of Ito’s “deep breaths.”

I stared in disbelief. What could he be thinking? Johnnie was not his friend. Never was and never would be. You’ve been his patsy through this whole case, Lance-and he’s made a fool of you.

Now that the defense had Fuhrman on the ropes, they went for the final knockout, demanding his reappearance in court. But not before calling Kathleen Bell and a string of other witnesses to attest that Fuhrman had spouted racist remarks in their presence.

Our plan? Dispatch these witnesses with the briefest of questioning. Why bother to impeach these people, with their vague stories of Fuhrman in a marine recruiting office years ago? After the tapes, it was all spilt milk. The one exception to our hurry-up-and-get-‘em-out strategy came the day Laura Hart McKinny testified. Chris could not contain himself and went after her with a misplaced vengeance.

Fuhrman’s appearance, however, could not be glossed over. Ito had ruled, as we had asked, that he would be called to testify out of the jury’s presence. The prospect of Mark’s reemergence was generating even more hype than his celebrated cross by Bailey.

By now, we were no longer speaking to him. We remained in suspense until nearly the last minute-would he invoke the Fifth Amendment? I had mixed feelings about this. Part of me wanted him to speak out to admit he’d lied about the racial slurs, and to reassert the truth that he’d never planted evidence.

The other part of me just wanted him out of my life.

Legally speaking, I didn’t think he had to invoke the right against self-incrimination. For Fuhrman to be convicted of perjury, the lie had to be material to the case-and, as I had argued until my voice ran out, all this garbage was utterly immaterial to the matter involving two people murdered in cold blood on Bundy Drive. Still, any lawyer worth his retainer would have advised Fuhrman not to talk, because anything he did say could be used against him if charges were brought. (Eventually, of course, the state attorney general would bring perjury charges, and Mark would plead “No contest.”)

For us, however, his taking the Fifth would be a disaster. When you take the Fifth, you can’t answer any questions. If you do, you’ve waived your right against self-incrimination. So if you invoke it once, you have to keep invoking it. If he didn’t answer questions about his testimony concerning racial epithets, Fuhrman could no longer affirm that the rest of what he’d said under oath was still accurate.

As much as I dreaded Fuhrman’s appearance, I knew that Chris dreaded it more. He’d despised Mark from the start, and their hatred for each other had only gotten more personal.

“I don’t want to be in the same room with the motherfucker,” he told me when I asked if he was coming to the hearing.

Chris and the black law clerks stayed on the eighteenth floor. I went down alone.

I consoled myself with two thoughts. One, the jury wasn’t present. Two, I wouldn’t have to do anything. Fuhrman was the defense’s witness now.

Fuhrman entered with his bodyguards. I sensed, rather than saw, him stride past me to the stand. For reasons still unknown to me, the defense picked Gerald Uelmen to do the questioning. Perhaps they thought assigning a dirty detail like this to an academic would sanitize it.

“Detective Fuhrman, was the testimony that you gave at the preliminary hearing in this case completely truthful?”

There was a deadly pause during which Mark leaned back and whispered something to his lawyer. Then he spoke into the microphone. “I wish to assert my Fifth Amendment privilege,” he said.

‘Have you ever falsified a police report?”

“I wish to assert my Fifth Amendment privilege.”

I forced myself to raise my head and look at him. He was no longer the composed, confident Mark Fuhrman who had parried the thrusts of Lee Bailey. Nor was he the swaggering goon of the McKinny tapes. His face was pained, his features fixed in a tight-lipped grimace that seemed to push everything to a point in the middle of his face. He looked as though he was holding back tears.

Uelmen finally asked him if he intended to assert the Fifth Amendment privilege to every question.

Yes, Mark said. He did.

So far, this was the lawyerly thing to do: ask a couple of questions, show the court that the witness won’t answer, and then wrap it up with the catch-all-“Do you intend to invoke as to all the questions?-to demonstrate that continuing was fruitless. For a moment, I thought Uelmen might stop here. His job done, it appeared that he might be returning to his seat. But just then, Johnnie jumped up and began whispering heatedly to him. I stiffened in my chair. Something nasty was going to happen.

Uelmen turned back toward the podium.

“I only have one more question, Your Honor.”

We’d already heard that no more answers would be forthcoming. Ito should have instructed Uelmen to sit down. Instead, Lance asked him what it was. But Uelmen, apparently pumped up by Johnnie, turned directly to Mark.

“Detective Fuhrman,” he asked, “did you plant or manufacture any evidence in this case?”

Like an automaton, Fuhrman answered.

“I assert my Fifth Amendment privilege.”

Uelmen’s gambit was legally wrong, but worse, it was morally reprehensible. He could have asked Mark, “Did you kill Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, Detective Fuhrman? Did you kill JFK, too?” Fuhrman would have had to answer, “I assert my Fifth Amendment privilege.” It was grandstanding-pure and simple. I objected angrily, charging that the question “does nothing but headline,” and demanded that the court strike it. But Ito overruled me.

More appalling still was the hero’s welcome that the Dream Team gave to Uelmen when he returned to the table. They clapped him on the back. Great job, guy. As much as I despised Mark Fuhrman that day, I thought Uelmen brought no distinction upon himself-as a lawyer or a human-by kicking a man at his lowest point.

Later that day, I heard from one of the D.A. investigators guarding Mark. When they were on their way back to the hotel, the radio was on with the story of Fuhrman’s day in court. In the backseat, Mark was crying.

All of this occurred outside the jury’s presence, but of course that didn’t matter. They’d hear about it. Whatever involuntary spasm of pity I’d felt for Fuhrman, I felt a whole lot worse for my team, for the public, and, above all, for the families of the victims. Up in the foyer of the War Room, Kim Goldman was sobbing her heart out. “Why did he do this?” she cried. “I want to tell that son of a bitch off! How could he do this to us?”

Only one more Fuhrman issue was left outstanding: what, if anything, would the jury be allowed to learn officially about his failure to reappear as a witness? Ito correctly ruled that the jury would not be informed that Fuhrman had invoked the Fifth. But the defense was asking that he instruct the jury, when evaluating Fuhrman’s integrity, to consider his unavailability for future questioning. And Ito allowed it!

For me, this was the final straw. Ito’s ruling was a direct violation of the Constitution, which states you can’t sanction anyone for taking the Fifth. If the ruling stood, the jury could reasonably assume that all of Mark’s testimony was bogus-and more easily accept the conspiracy theory the defense thrust in their faces day after day. I was prepared to fight like an alley cat for this one. I told Ito that I would be taking the matter over his head. I was going to file a writ with the Court of Appeals and try to get him overruled.

Ito was livid with anger. Whatever fragile truce had existed between us after the recusal incident was now broken. But I really didn’t care. Seven months earlier, when he issued his disastrous ruling on allowing the N-word in, I’d agonized over whether to try and get him overruled on appeal. I’d decided against it, so as not to prejudice him hopelessly against our side.

I’d been wrong. He’d shafted us anyway. And I’d forgone a shot – admittedly a long shot-at keeping the trial on track. To this day, my personal failure of nerve in not appealing the N-word from the start remains my single biggest regret. I would not compound my error by repeating it.

Ito at first tried to tell me I had only an hour to file my writ, but then backed down and gave me the night. Cheri and our appellate division lawyers worked like crazy to get it done, though I knew it had very little chance of succeeding. In fact, no one in our office could remember the Court of Appeals upholding such a protest in the middle of a trial. The pundits, print and broadcast, thought I’d lost my mind. Even my colleagues thought I was crazy. They all predicted I’d get what’s known as a postcard denial-a flat-out no, without the dignity of an opinion. But to me this ruling was so wrong that I had to appeal. Anyway, it was clear that we had nothing to lose in our relationship with Lance Ito.

The next day, I had run an errand during lunch break. About one o’clock or so a TV reporter came tearing up to me.

“Marcia,” he cried, “Ito’s order was overturned on appeal!”

I was stunned. Within minutes camera crews from NBC and ABC, all of whom had apparently been tracking me, had me surrounded, asking for my reaction.

It was the happiest day I’d had in a very long time. Not only because of the success of the appeal. A few minutes later I was grabbing a bite to eat in a restaurant when my pager went off. It was Judy, my divorce lawyer. I had asked for a gag order. It had been granted, then appealed.

“Marcia,” Judy said.

I braced myself for the worst.

“They denied the appeal.”

This piece of news gave me even more joy than winning the Ito writ.

It was like winning the lottery.

CAR TAPE. September 8. Going back to court after the writ, Lance looked like somebody had run him over with a steamroller. It was a Pyrrhic victory. But it just kind of feels good to have him taught a lesson. Man, he hates me. It’s a good thing the trial’s almost over, because I can see what’s going to happen here-he’s going to kick the shit out of us on rebuttal, prevent us from getting evidence in any chance he can. He’s already thrown the trial to them, so it probably doesn’t matter. We’ll do our best with what we’ve got.

Before prosecution and defense could rest, the defendant, O. J. Simpson, had to waive his right to testify. I do believe that right up until the McKinny tapes surfaced, Simpson had intended to take the stand. But after that windfall of racial obscenity from the mouth of Mark Fuhrman, Simpson had to know that juror sympathy was running so profoundly in his favor, testifying wasn’t worth the risk.

The waiver should have been a simple matter. All it required was for Simpson to affirm, with a simple yes, that he understood he was waiving his right. End of story. Instead Johnnie pops up with, “Mr. Simpson would like to make a brief statement regarding that waiver, if the court pleases.”

A statement? Since when does the defendant get to make speeches without exposing himself to cross-examination? There wasn’t much energy left in me by then, but I was up like a shot, objecting.

“This is a very obvious attempt by the defense to again get material admitted through conjugal visits and phone calls that has not been admitted in court…” I warned. “It is inappropriate and it is done very deliberately by the defense for a clear purpose.”

Ito seemed to be considering this possibility for the first time. I was desperate to reach him. And so I said something I’d never thought I’d be brought low enough to say in a court of law.

“Please, don’t do this, Your Honor. I beg you. I beg you.”

All I was asking of Ito was that he make the easiest call he’d ever have to make from the bench. Giving a defendant an opportunity to explain himself-without exposing himself to the rigors of cross-examination-is simply not done. Doing it over the objection of the prosecution is even more outrageous. I doubt that any judge in the history of American jurisprudence has ever made such a gaffe.

But the next thing I knew, without even ruling on my objection, Lance had turned his attention to the defendant.

“Mr. Simpson,” he said genially. “Good morning.”

Simpson stood.

“As much as I would like to address some of the misrespresentations made [about] myself and my-and Nicole concerning our life together, I am mindful of the mood and stamina of this jury. I have confidence, a lot more, it seems than Miss Clark has of their integrity.”

He cast a sideways glance in my direction.

“And that they will find,” he continued, “as the record stands now that I did not, could not, and would not have committed that crime.”

This was exactly the sort of statement that a defendant cannot be allowed to make without having to face cross-examination. At this point Ito realized how serious was the blunder he had just committed. His face fell almost to his laptop computer. I tried to catch his eye in recrimination. But like everyone else in the courtroom, and the country, he was watching Simpson with fascination. Even now, he was somehow loath to interrupt. Only when Simpson began blathering about his children did Ito muster the gumption to try and shut him up. But Simpson rushed in his last words: “I want this trial over.” And he sat down.

In the course of that performance, he had not even bothered to mention the fact that he was waiving his right to testify.

I was fairly choking with fury.

“Since he would like to make these statements in court,” I raged, I would like the opportunity to examine him about them. May he take a seat in the blue chair and we will have a discussion.”

Lance never responded to my objection. In fact, he ignored me. All he said was “Thank you.”

Johnnie held a press conference afterward, shrugging off my objections. “We’re not worried about angering Miss Clark,” he gloated. He insisted that his client’s comments were unscripted and from the heart. He was lying. According to American Tragedy, the book published more than a year and a half later by Simpson’s I Want to Tell You co-author, Larry Schiller, on September 8 Johnnie Cochran, Robert Kardashian, and Robert Shapiro helped Simpson draft the “waiver” speech. Simpson spent the next two weeks refining and rehearsing it.

The fact that they could conceive of a judge letting them get away with that was remarkable. The fact that they succeeded was not remarkable in the least.