Without a Doubt

Prologue

April 30, 1996

This is painful. I don’t even know where to begin. When I try to find a starting place, headaches, backaches, this damned cough that won’t go away, all pull me down. My confidence collapses out from under me and I have to curl up on the couch until I feel better. I hope for sleep. But sleep won’t come.

I drink Glenlivet, but then you probably know that. And you know that I smoke Dunhills. And you know, or at least you think you do, that my “addictions” include crossword puzzles and detective novels, and that I have “unpredictable” taste in men. I am reading now from People magazine. I’ve never talked to anyone from People, but they seem to like me. Funny-when the media likes you, they can take scraps that your friends toss out, and spin them into flattering fairy tales. (But when they don’t like you, they take the scraps from ex-husbands.) God, don’t get me started. I look at myself in the Globe and see a man-crazy lush. And then I look at Ladies’ Home Journal and see a serene professional woman at the top of her game. And I look and look and look and don’t see myself at all.

All the attention I’ve gotten-it’s something I still cannot wrap my mind around. There was a time when I would have been thrilled by it. Back in high school, I wanted to be an actress. No fifteen-year-old wants to be an actress without wanting to be famous. Somewhere along the line, I outgrew wanting to be famous. I wanted to do something truly useful with my life. I wanted to make a real contribution. The irony, of course, is that the most serious job I ever undertook turned into a damned circus.

During the fourteen years I spent as a deputy D.A. for Los Angeles County, I believed in justice. To me it wasn’t an abstract idea. Before the Simpson case, I’d prosecuted twenty homicides. I’d brought cases against twenty defendants who I believed in my heart were guilty. And all but one jury agreed. I felt The Force was with me, if you know what I mean. Even in the difficult cases, it had been my experience that when people got onto juries they usually acted in better conscience than they did in their private lives. I had faith they’d rise to the occasion.

On the morning of June 13, 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found-their bodies butchered and discarded like grass clippings-all of that changed. Their murderer, O. J. Simpson, would turn justice on its head. By virtue of his celebrity, he would be coddled by worshipful cops, pumped up by star-fucking attorneys, indulged by a spineless judge, and adored by jurors every bit as addled by racial hatred as their counterparts on the Rodney King jury. O. J. Simpson slaughtered two innocent people, and he walked free-right past the most massive and compelling body of physical evidence ever assembled against a criminal defendant.

I am not bitter. I am angry. And I ask myself over and over again, How could this jury fail to see? Was there something else we could have done? Something more we could have said? How many times did I lead that jury along the blood trail? Following the bloody prints of that rare and expensive Bruno Magli loafer-size 12, the same as Simpson wears-leading away from the bodies, up the front steps to the rear gate of Nicole Brown’s condo. A blood trail leading right to the foot of O. J. Simpson’s bed, for God’s sake! On Ronald Goldman’s shirt, a head hair that matched those of the defendant. Simpson’s hair. On the navy-blue cap dropped at the crime scene, the same black hairs, as well as a carpet fiber matching those found in the defendant’s Bronco. Stop and think for a moment. How did all this stuff get there? The defendant’s blood is found where there shouldn’t be blood. The defendant’s hair where there shouldn’t be hair. There was enough physical evidence in this case to convict O. J. Simpson twenty times over.

Defendant “not guilty” on all counts.

I feel bad about a lot of things. I feel bad for the Browns and the Goldmans, for the way the system failed them. I feel bad for my fellow deputies, who so often stayed at the courthouse until two or three A.M., working themselves into a stupor of fatigue. I feel bad for all the good cops at LAPD who got a bum rap because of the transgressions of a few. I feel bad for the D.A. investigators who pulled off some truly extraordinary feats of behind-the-scenes investigation. I feel especially bad for our young law clerks, who poured their hearts into this case for fourteen months-only to have them broken by that unthinkable verdict. For many, it was their first case. How could anyone explain to them what an anomaly it was? No other criminal case in American history has generated such massive publicity. No other criminal defendant has entered the dock so perfectly insulated by personal wealth and public sympathy. What those fresh, idealistic young clerks saw, to their dismay, was a defendant who was virtually unconvictable. And that, quite understandably, shook their faith in American justice.

I’m ready now to do this. I’m upright at my laptop, ready to begin this story. Every time I feel overwhelmed by the desire to curl up on the couch and pull an afghan over my head, I’ll fight that urge down, because this is important. I just ask you to understand how hard this is. The event is so huge, it’s difficult to figure out how to shrink it into words, or even to make a start. The definitive account, I cannot give you. No one can. But I can tell you what the case meant to me. I can tell you about the strategies and the courtroom skirmishes. About moments of exultation and days of heartache. I can give you my private reflections. Particularly those. Because that’s what it all comes down to. Just as all politics is local, all good history is personal.