Without a Doubt

Take Two

I Could never bring myself to call him O.J. And it galled me when everyone else did. No one referred to Charles Manson as Chuck. Yet even the people on my own team would talk about “O.J. this,” and “O.J. that.” I had zero tolerance for it. “O.J.‘s the ballplayer,” I’d tell them. “This is ‘the defendant.’ ” At one point, we even began fining offenders twenty-five cents each time they slipped. Bill Hodgman set out a big glass jar to collect the levy. The jar slowly filled with quarters. Not one of them came from me.

I didn’t hate Orenthal James Simpson. At least I don’t like to think of it that way. Hate is not an emotion that a prosecutor can afford. Hate clouds your thinking and distorts your priorities. The public, by and large, doesn’t understand that. When they see you standing up in court leveling allegations against the man in the dock, they assume that your conviction must spring from some deep personal animosity. Usually that’s not the case. You must never be drawn into a vendetta against the defendant. You can’t let it get personal.

Having gone on record with that noble sentiment, let me say that I reserve the right to consider Orenthal Simpson unregenerate, low-life scum.

Prosecutors do not think much of defendants as a class. I’m no exception. I enjoyed a brief and unrewarding career as a criminal defense attorney. After I graduated from Southwestern University School of Law in 1979, I was taken on as an associate by a criminal defense firm, where I was assigned primarily to represent drug dealers. I was okay defending the dopers. After all, I was a child of the sixties. “Skip a little rope; smoke a little dope”-that was my motto. I’d wrap myself in the flag and declaim self-righteously about the Fourth Amendment, how it protected us all against unlawful searches and seizures. I sprang some dubious clients and had few qualms about it.

But after a few months, I started drawing the violent crimes. Now my clients, for the most part, were defendants whose greed or stupidity had wrecked not only their own lives but the lives of everyone around them. For me, the thrill of victory was no longer enough, because every time I scored an acquittal, I had to reckon with the possibility that I might have released another rabid dog onto the streets.

The moment of truth came while I was assigned to help defend a man charged with multiple murders. They were vicious crimes, but the D.A.‘s office didn’t have the evidence.

To a defense attorney, that’s very good news. My assignment was to draft a motion to dismiss. And I did one hell of a job; several days later, my boss, Jeff Brody, came in to tell me my motion had been granted. Instead of feeling jubilant, though, all I could think of was that I might have helped spring a murderer.

My face must have betrayed my conflict. “Don’t worry, Marcia,” Jeff reassured me. “The prosecution will refile.” (Indeed, they did.) And then he gave me a piece of solid advice.

I think you’d feel more comfortable as a prosecutor.”

He was right about that. Every defendant is entitled to competent counsel-but it didn’t have to be me. So I got myself over to the CCB for an interview with John Van de Kamp, who was then the D.A. of Los Angeles County. I threw myself on his mercy. “I can’t do criminal defense,” I told him. “I won’t do civil. This is the only job I want.”

Van de Kamp hired me and I took the prosecutor’s oath to represent the People. Now, that was an idea I could get behind. The People-especially those who have been victimized by brutal crimes-have just as strong a right to advocacy as defendants do. Prosecution was a fierce calling, and one I felt I could pursue with dignity.

I never worried that I’d do my job so well that an innocent man would go to jail. There were too many checks against such abuses. The grand jury wouldn’t return an indictment. A judge would throw out the case. And even if those system checks went haywire, there was a fail-safe: my own conscience. I could never throw myself into the pitched battle of a major criminal trial unless I believed in my head, heart, and soul that the defendant was guilty. When the Simpson case fell into my lap, I had been on the job for fourteen years. I had prosecuted literally thousands of defendants. I could feel a clench in my gut when I realized we had the right man.

By the time O. J. Simpson finally surrendered at his home the night of June 17, 1994, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was the one. That familiar twist in my stomach confirmed it. Even before the blood, we had a strong case. But the blood clinched it. His blood was on Nicole’s walk. Nicole’s blood and that of Ron Goldman were on the glove from Rockingham. My God, the trail of blood literally led to Simpson’s bedroom. From where I was sitting, it was dead-bang.

Somebody, probably Suzanne, had given me the tape of Robert Kardashian reading Simpson’s so-called suicide letter, a travesty I’d managed to catch for only a few seconds when it was broadcast live. I took it home and, on the Saturday after the chase, I ejected a Disney tape from the VCR in my living room, parked myself on the couch, and watched the whole sorry performance.

“Please don’t feel sorry for me… I’ve had a great life, made great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.”

He sent his “love and thanks” to all his friends. He started ticking off golfing buddies. Golfing buddies!

Are you fucking kidding? Your children are left motherless and all you can talk about is yourself, the media, and your golfing buddies?

The only pain he could feel was his own. That kind of total preoccupation with self is the mark of a sociopath. I’d seen it before. These guys commit unspeakable acts and yet somehow things get twisted around in their heads so that they are the victims. Simpson’s behavior hardly surprised me.

The question being kicked around our office by the end of the week was whether or not Shapiro would try some kind of mental defense. Would he try to claim a temporary insanity that absolved Simpson of responsibility-switching the penalty from life in prison to an indeterminate spell in a mental hospital? Gil was convinced that Simpson would do this by asserting some Menendez-type plea; at the very least he would argue it was a crime of passion. Over the weekend, on This Week with David Brinkley, Gil said, “It wouldn’t surprise me if at some point we go from ‘I didn’t do it’ to ‘I did it, but I’m not responsible.’ ” (It made me a little nervous that Gil was speaking so frankly to the media, but I trusted his judgment; I also understood that the defense, with its own outrageous pandering to the media, was forcing Gil onto the hustings.) David and I also thought there was a pretty good chance of a mental defense. I was actually hoping Simpson would try it. I had cut the legs out from under Robert Bardo, and I knew the drill-even a sociopath knows the difference between right and wrong.

Over the weekend, Simpson had been placed in the high-security wing of the Men’s Central Jail, under a suicide watch. Reporters were scratching and clawing for information about him. And Shapiro cheerfully obliged them by slinging them maudlin slops. Sunday was Father’s Day and Simpson, he said, had started to weep at the thought of not spending this day with his children. The press lapped that drivel right up. It was incredible. Here you had two people slaughtered like animals and yet the media coverage was actually creating sympathy for the suspect.

That weekend, I was working at home, sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop cradled between my knees. The phone rang. It was Shapiro.

“Hey, Bob, when’s the real lawyer coming in?” I needled him. On the surface it was good-natured, but after the chase-a debacle for which he bore no small responsibility-I really wasn’t joking. I figured that he’d be stepping aside to let a high-octane criminal attorney take over.

“I’m staying with this case, Marcia,” he said, seeming to ignore the taunt. “I’m in it to the end.”

“Stop it, you’re killing me,” I said. Now I got totally serious. “Come on, who’s the real lawyer going to be?”

“I mean it: I’m staying with the case.”

“Well, we’re filing the complaint on Monday. Are you going to ask for a continuance?”

He said they probably would. This was standard procedure. Defense attorneys usually try to postpone the plea to give them a chance to review the evidence and see whether there’s room for negotiation. And so I expected that when we all went down to Municipal Court, the hearing would last only long enough for the judge to set a new date for arraignment. From there, we would head straight back to the real show-the grand jury.

The next morning, David and I had taken our places at the counsel table when the bailiffs brought Simpson out of the holding cell. I didn’t have to look up to know he’d entered the courtroom. Spectators rustled in their seats. The reporters snapped to, straining forward to see the sheriff’s deputies and, finally, the prisoner enter the court. I raised my head and got my first glimpse of O. J. Simpson.

He looked like he’d been sleeping on the street. He wore a dark suit that seemed to sag on his body. In accordance with rules of the suicide watch, he wore no belt or shoelaces. His features were slack, his manner distracted. I suspected he was tranked. He looked half-angry, half-scared, utterly deflated. In the coming months I would watch an alert, carefully coached O. J. Simpson put on an affable, confident face for the jury and the world to see. And I would remember the way he looked this first morning. A common thug, collared.

Shapiro stood close to him, patting his shoulder, whispering in his ear, fawning. Seemed to me he wanted to be close enough to his client to make sure he was in the photos. The municipal judge, Patti Jo McKay, took the bench and we all sat down. When she asked Simpson if he was ready to enter his plea, I opened my calendar, ready to pick a new arraignment date. And to my shock, I heard Shapiro answer, “Yes, Your Honor, Mr. Simpson is ready to enter his plea.”

No continuance. The son of a bitch.

Had Shapiro deliberately misled me? Fortunately, an arraignment is a routine procedure that most prosecutors can do in their sleep. I looked down at the complaint:

Count 1: Orenthal James Simpson willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought murdered Nicole Brown Simpson on or about June 12, 1994, in Los Angeles County…

Count 2: Orenthal James Simpson willfully, unlawfully and with malice aforethought murdered Ronald Goldman on or about June 12, 1994, in Los Angeles County…

Everything was standard, except for one thing. David and I had carefully worded a clause invoking “special circumstances.” As I’ve explained, this means that the crime was particularly heinous-in this case a double murder. Invoking the clause allowed us to consider the death penalty.

“Orenthal James Simpson, is that your true name, sir?” I asked him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. He mumbled “Yes.”

“To the charges stated in Counts One and Two of the complaint, how do you plead, guilty or not guilty?”

Simpson’s reply of “Not guilty” was jumbled. In fact, it was barely coherent.

Then Bob Shapiro did something that shocked me-something that prefigured the Grand Guignol that this case was destined to become.

Shapiro beseeched the court to allow Mr. Simpson to redo his plea.

You could have scraped me off the floor. Did he think this was a goddamned soundstage? “Simpson plea: take two!”

I watched helplessly as the judge allowed Shapiro’s outrageous request. This time Simpson, drawing on the thespian skills doubtless honed by his work in The Towering Inferno, reached down inside himself and hit the mark. He restated his plea of “Not guilty” in a clear, strong James Earl Jones cadence. Enraged, I watched as Shapiro, his comically heavy eyebrows knitted in a show of concern, patted his client on the shoulder, congratulating him on his improved performance.

And then suddenly, without warning, it was my turn to perform. Suzanne Childs grabbed me outside the courtroom. “Marcia, you’ve got to go downstairs with David and Gil,” she said. “The press is waiting.”

It wasn’t that I was a novice in front of the cameras. Bardo, you’ll recall, was one of the first cases broadcast live on Court TV, and the Hawkins case had received its share of headlines as well. I had never gotten comfortable with press conferences and interviews; the media had become such an intrusive presence in judicial proceedings that you could deplore them, but hardly ignore them.

This appearance would be particularly difficult since my own role in the case remained ambiguous.

For the past week, the media had been referring to me as “lead prosecutor.” Yet as Gil had emphasized so pointedly at Thursday night’s meeting, I was nothing of the sort. I was more of a co-prosecutor, with a partner to be named later. And so I was feeling overwhelmed and unsure of my mandate. I also felt that my energies should be focused not on this little tap dance but on the chamber upstairs where twenty-three jurors were twiddling their thumbs, waiting for me. Didn’t matter. I found myself being herded toward the cameras.

Press conferences were usually held in an antechamber off the D.A.‘s office, but this one had been slated for the much larger western lobby on the ground floor. David and I took the slower-than-weight-loss freight elevator for a few final seconds of strategizing. Suzanne Childs fussed with my hair and straightened my suit. “There’s going to be a lot of press,” she warned me. That was the under-fucking-statement of the year.

The elevator door opened onto a mob scene. The lobby was jammed wall-to-wall with bodies-broadcast androids trying to muscle out the print scruffs. Photographers were dangling from the mezzanine. I don’t think there had been a crush like this at a D.A.‘s press conference since the death of Bobby Kennedy.

For a moment I thought fright would get the best of me. That my voice might quaver. But then something remarkable happened. As I drifted toward that sea of reporters and cameras, I was enveloped by a sense of calm. All my life I’d felt sure that something would happen to me that would make my life bigger, more profound. As I walked toward the lectern, I felt I wasn’t even moving under my own power. To say that I felt a sense of destiny might be overstating it. But I do remember thinking, This is it. You were meant to do this.

“It was premeditated murder,” I heard myself saying. When one reporter asked me if the killings might be considered an act of passion, a “spontaneous meltdown,” I shook my head. “It was done with deliberation and premeditation. That is precisely what he is charged with, because that is what we will prove.”

“Are there plans to charge anyone else?” someone called.

“Mr. Simpson is charged alone,” I answered, “because he is the sole murderer.”

I’d blown it. Man, had I blown it. What I had meant to say, of course, was that Simpson was not the sole murderer, but the sole suspect. I realized my slip almost immediately, but by then I was fielding other questions and correcting my error would only call more attention to it. I was sure I’d take heat for not using the word “suspect.”

As it turned out, I did get heat-but not for that. The word that Robert Shapiro almost instantly seized upon when reporters spoke to him later that day was not “murderer,” but “sole.” The D.A.‘s office was not investigating other suspects, he charged. In fact, this was completely untrue; the investigation was still wide open.

That was no excuse for my blunder, however. I should have said that O. J. Simpson was the “prime suspect.” That first news conference alerted me to the unique perils of this case. I knew that from this point on, every word I spoke would be analyzed, scrutinized, and dissected in detail. Lesson learned. I had to move on. The grand jury was waiting.

Normally, I have weeks or even months to prepare for a grand jury. By the time a session formally convenes, I will have interviewed every witness at least once, often more. But now, the clock was ticking. We had to get the grand jury indictment within the ten days before the preliminary hearing was set to begin. If we didn’t, we’d have the same set of witnesses running between two courts to testify. You can imagine what a mess that would be. On the other hand, if we could just get that grand jury indictment, the entire matter would be settled. We could dispense with the preliminary hearing altogether. And so the need for haste.

David and I would have to grab our witnesses as we could get them. We went into court virtually cold, with only a few mounted photographic displays. These, as I look back upon them, were pretty damned impressive, considering we’d had to pull them together over the period of a couple of days.

Almost all of our first meetings with witnesses, even our expert witnesses, had to be done on the day of their appearance. David and I would usher them into the small conference room off the grand jury room, or, if there wasn’t even enough time for a fifteen-minute session, we’d huddle in the hallway. I’d do a quick rundown of the witness’s story, and try to make an instant assessment. Much of the time, really, was spent instructing them not to give any indirect evidence that might taint the record: “Only answer the question-don’t volunteer anything, don’t tell me what anybody told you,” I’d advise them. “That’s hearsay, and it’s inadmissible.”

It was a sobered, marginally more cooperative Kato Kaelin who returned to testify the morning of June 20. I led him back through the story of how he had met Nicole and convinced her to rent him the guest house. And I had him explain why, when Nicole later moved to Bundy, Simpson balked at Kato’s taking a room there. “He said it would probably not be right to be in the same house,” said Kato, who then accepted Simpson’s offer of quarters-rent-free-in the Rockingham compound.

Kato had mentioned to police that he’d witnessed a scuffle between Simpson and Nicole in the fall of 1993. Only later would I get the police report documenting that fight. A unit from West L.A. responded to a 911 call from 365 Gretna Green and found a terrified Nicole. “He’s in the back,” she told them, “He’s my ex-husband, he’s O.J.-I want him out of there!” She showed them to the back door, which, she said, Simpson had smashed. “French doors-wood frame splintered, door broken, still on hinges,” the cops wrote. Simpson was railing angrily out back in the guest house. “She’s been seeing other guys!” he yelled to the cops. The cops had recorded that Kato had apparently been trying to calm him down.

But today, Kato downplayed the episode. “I saw maybe an argument,” he admitted, twitching insistently.

“Do you recall the nature of the argument, or just that it was one. I asked.

“That it was one,” he said. He insisted that he didn’t know about any other fights.

Still, Kato’s testimony advanced us a few notches. He had admitted that Simpson was a jealous guy. Certainly jealous enough to manipulate his wife by buying her friends’ loyalty. And during my questioning about the night of the murder, Kato had substantially widened the time period during which Simpson was unaccounted for. Now the window was open between 9:45, when they’d returned from McDonald’s-which was fifteen minutes earlier than the estimate Kato had given the cops-and about 10:53, when Simpson responded to the limo driver.

Kato also gave a fuller account of the now-famous thump on the wall of his guest house, which he now recalled as a “three-thump noise.” I asked him to demonstrate what it sounded like, and he made a fist and pounded three times on the table in front of him. “Like that,” he said. It had been strong enough, he added, to tilt a picture on his wall, and scary enough to make him search the grounds for an intruder.

He would never actually say “intruder.” Back in the office when I’d tried to get him to tell me what he thought had caused the thump, he’d danced all around the question.

“Uh, uh… I don’t know what I was looking for.”

“A prowler,” I probed.

“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe.”

(Later, he would volunteer for the benefit of the plaintiffs in the civil trial that the thumps sounded like a body falling against his wall.)

On the stand, however, he did reveal, for the first time, having seen a “knapsack” lying on the grass. What happened was this. Kato had rounded the corner of the main house, flashlight in hand. He checked out the area behind the garage and, finding nothing, started back toward the front yard and then opened the gate to let the limo driver in. He noticed a golf bag on a bench by the front door. He went back to check the area behind his own room, and by the time he ventured out front again, Simpson himself was talking to the limo driver. But now Kaelin noticed something else on the grass near the driveway. It was “like, a bag,” he said, in Kato-speak. He didn’t recall the color, except to say it was dark.

“To the best of my recollection, it was like a knapsack-type bag,” he said.

That knapsack had not been found among the pieces of luggage Simpson brought back from Chicago. Could it have held evidence from the crime scene?

Not bad for a recalcitrant witness. But I was convinced even then that Kato knew a lot more than he was telling.

Outside, in the waiting room beyond the grand jury chamber, were a half-dozen prospective witnesses, crowded on benches like applicants for passports. These were Nicole’s neighbors, the limo driver, Ron Goldman’s co-workers, and our own technicians and criminalists.

Since I’d had the experience with DNA evidence in other cases, I told David I’d take the criminalists. Meanwhile, David debriefed the coroner, Dr. Irwin Golden.

Had this been a preliminary hearing, we wouldn’t even have bothered calling the coroner. Cause of death is almost never in dispute, so the defense usually agrees to stipulate to the medical examiner’s testimony. The prosecutor usually reads the coroner’s conclusion into the record. Since there are no defense attorneys present at a grand jury proceeding, however, a prosecutor has to protect the record, and the rights of the defendant, by giving all the witnesses a critical questioning.

Neither David nor I had worked with Dr. Golden before. The truth is, most coroners are not Quincy. After all, what happens if they screw up? The patient lives?

The morning we put Golden on we had not given his file a thorough going-over. David, in fact, received the report only minutes before putting him on the stand. One thing immediately struck us as strange. The coroner’s investigator had reported that Nicole Brown Simpson was alive at eleven P.M., when she had spoken to her mother. If this were true, of course, Simpson would be in the clear, since he had been spotted at Rockingham at that hour. The coroner’s estimate seemed too late. (In fact, phone records would show that Nicole and her mother had spoken at around 9:45 P.M.) Now, a coroner’s report is not like a police investigative file, and these kinds of mistakes are common. Still, they give the defense something to seize upon. And we would learn, in the days and weeks ahead, that the coroner’s report was, in fact, riddled with errors.

I sat at counsel’s table while David questioned Golden, a serious, horse-faced man whose speech was marked by long pauses. What I remember most about the testimony that afternoon was not the witness, but the exhibits-the pictures of the victims. David had organized and mounted the autopsy photos on a strip of cardboard. It was a stroke of superb lawyering. Up until then, I’d been busy with the criminalists and hadn’t even seen those unforgettable, gruesome photos.

“Good God,” I whispered to myself. For the first time, I saw the wreckage of Ron Goldman’s body. The gashes to the head, the gaping slices cut into his neck from ear to ear. Stab wounds to the left thigh and abdomen had soaked his shirt and pants in blood. In death, his eyes remained open. The killer had waged a merciless assault against an unarmed, unsuspecting victim, a victim who was rapidly trapped in a cagelike corner of metal fencing and slaughtered. Whether the motive was sexual jealousy or the need to eliminate a witness, this killer had made a ruthless determination: Ron Goldman would die.

While Goldman’s wounds suggested that the killer had been in a frenzy to kill him, Nicole’s did not. The attack had been swift, smooth, and efficient. There were no hesitation marks, no half cuts or superficial throat wounds that might have shown uncertainty. Her killer did not romance the deed. Nicole had apparently been swept up, thrown down, slashed at the throat, and dropped at the foot of the steps.

I had looked on literally thousands of coroner’s photographs over the years. None were worse than the last pictures taken of Nicole Brown. Her face was a grotesque white-no wonder, since she’d bled out nearly 90 percent. The slash across her neck had nearly decapitated her. She lay there, disjointed, like a marionette discarded by the puppeteer. I had a mental flash of the photo of her that hung by the stairs at Rockingham. I recalled her bright, glossy features. That was a rich man’s wife, someone to whom I couldn’t relate. Now, as I saw her frail and broken in death, I felt a surge of helpless anger.

I fought back the feeling. Times like this call for cool reason. The last thing you can afford is too much feeling.

I drove home that night feeling dejected. Next to me was a stack of files and documents high enough to qualify me for the car-pool lane. The cell phone rang, but I didn’t pick it up. I’d answer calls when I got home, after the kids were asleep. That was when the night shift began. First priority was the grand jury. But I also had to start drafting replies to a blizzard of motions coming our way from Shapiro’s office. Most of them were absolute garbage. I didn’t get to sleep until the early-morning edition of the L.A. Times was hitting the streets. On the front page, a story that read:

The task facing Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti in the O. J. Simpson case is daunting and unparalleled: he must try to win murder convictions against an American sports legend well-known to the public for his grace and charm.

You’re tellin’ me.

If the grand jury was to indict, we needed to demonstrate that O. J. Simpson had the opportunity to commit these two murders; then we’d have to place him at the scene of the crime. That’s why I led Tuesday morning’s session with Jill Shively. Jill, a clerk for a film-supply company, had called the police the preceding week and told them she’d spotted O. J. Simpson in a white Bronco speeding northbound on Bundy right around the time of the murders. Talk about an alibi killer!

Jill Shively, I must say, seemed like a real gem. She was dressed neatly and conservatively for her testimony. She was articulate. She was confident. In fact, Scott Gordon, one of my fellow D.A.s, knew her because their children went to the same school.

Just before she took the stand, David asked Shively if she had told anyone that she had been called to testify. “No,” she told him. “Just my mother.”

“Are you sure?” he pressed her.

“Absolutely,” she said without hesitation.

If she could pin Simpson to that location, in that car, at that hour, it would be almost as good as having an eyewitness. So it was essential to nail down the time she saw him. On the witness stand, she did this beautifully. “I left my house at ten-forty-five P.M.,” she said.

“Why are you so certain?” I asked.

“Because I was trying to get to the store that closed at eleven and I wanted to get something to eat,” she said. Bingo. Vannatter and Lange had even checked with the store to confirm their closing time-another assurance that Shively was on the level.

Then she told her story. “A white Bronco runs the red light and goes through the intersection and almost hits me,” she said.

“Were you able to see the person seated in the Bronco?” I asked.

“Yes, I was,” Shively said. “It looked like he was mad, or angry.” She explained that the Bronco driver was unhappy because a third car-a Nissan-blocked his path. The Bronco driver screamed at the Nissan, “Get out of the way! Move the car!” Finally there was room to pull around the Nissan, and the Bronco sped away.

“Now, that whole intersection where you witnessed all these events, is it dark or is it well lit?” I asked.

“It’s well lit by streetlights and a gas station there,” she said.

“So were you able to see the driver very clearly?”

“I recognized him right away.”

I paused for a beat, because I wanted this next answer to have some dramatic effect.

And who is he?” I continued.

“I saw O. J. Simpson,” she said.

You get a jolt of adrenaline from a nice courtroom moment.

There was no reason to believe that I had just presented the grand jury with a flat-out lie.

But I had.

The next morning, I’d barely stepped out of the elevator on the eighteenth floor when reporters began asking me whether I’d seen the tabloid TV show Hard Copy the night before. It turns out that Ms. Shively-our alibi killer-had made an appearance. Despite having insisted to us that she had told only her mother about the Bronco incident, our star witness had found time to address several million television viewers, proudly displaying her grand jury subpoena for the cameras.

The news sent me reeling. But things got worse. On my desk was a fax from a television actor named Brian Patrick Clarke. He was claiming to have lost money to Shively and considered her a consummate liar.

Normally, you take the imprecations of a disgruntled business partner with a grain of salt. But Clarke’s story had a paper trail to back it up. According to Clarke, Jill had presented herself to him as a screenwriter and asked him to read a script she had purportedly written. She’d said a production company was about to buy it for $250,000, and she wanted Clarke to star in it. Before this bonanza arrived, though, Jill allegedly managed to borrow $6,000 from Clarke. And guess what Clarke later discovered? The script wasn’t Shively’s. In fact, it was the screenplay for a film in pre-production titled My Life, which starred Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman. Clarke filed a suit against Shively in small-claims court and won a judgment of $2,000.

“Get that woman back in here!” I hissed to Phil.

We hauled Shively back into David’s office and started grilling her about Hard Copy. It turned out that she’d done the television interview the day before her grand jury appearance-for $5,000. At the time she appeared before the grand jury, she explained nervously, the show hadn’t aired. It wasn’t going to air until afterward. She thought it was okay. She just “forgot.” She hadn’t slept well, and she was nervous, and she “really wasn’t thinking.”

We’d been duped. This was a serious screwup. We had no choice but to cut Shively loose.

I was more loath to do this than anyone. I did not, as one commentator would later suggest, ditch her in a “fit of pique.” There was a far more serious principle at work here. If I allowed Shively’s testimony to stand without amendment, suspecting as I did that it was fraudulent, the grand jury proceeding would be tainted. If an indictment against Simpson resulted, the defense would be entirely justified in asking that it be thrown out. It was my responsibility to preserve the integrity of the record.

And so I made Ms. Shively return to the witness chair the next day and made her repeat her squirming explanations to the grand jury. It was an uncomfortable experience, cross-examining my own witness and watching her credibility crumble.

Then I took a deep breath.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” I said, “because it is our duty as prosecutors to present only that evidence of which we are 110 percent confident as to its truthfulness and reliability, I must now ask you to completely disregard the statements given and the testimony given by Jill Shively in this case.”

It was a tough lesson for us, but a necessary one. In the Simpson case-as with no other case in history-there was an incentive for people to come up with phony stories in order to cash in on sudden fame.

In the end, the loss of Shively, thank God, was not ruinous. We had other time-line witnesses, and they turned out to be first-rate. The very best of the lot was the limo driver, Allan Park.

As usual, I got to talk with Park for only a few minutes before putting him on the stand. He struck me as a real straight shooter, well-groomed, well-spoken. He wasn’t eager to be there, but he wasn’t resisting. And unlike Kato Kaelin, he wasn’t beholden to Simpson and he had no ax to grind.

I had prepared a diagram of the Rockingham estate, and once Park was on the stand, I walked him through his story, marking where the limo was, and his line of sight, at every moment. He told the grand jury how he’d arrived at Rockingham twenty minutes before the 10:45 P.M. pickup time, and waited until 10:40 to ring the buzzer on the front gate.

“Did you notice any car parked in front?” I asked him.

“No, I did not,” he replied.

This was important, because Simpson had told police that the Bronco had been parked there since early evening.

Park recounted his repeated, futile buzzing, calling his boss, seeing Kato wave. He recalled seeing the black male crossing the lawn. In the police report, he’d pegged the time at 10:53. Since then, we’d had the opportunity to consult cell phone records, which placed the sighting of the black man at around 10:55 or 10:56 P.M. A minute later, Simpson answered the buzzer.

Park then described a bag that he had seen sitting by the Rolls. Kato, he recalled, had reached for it, but Simpson said, “No. No. That’s okay. I can get it.” This had to be the missing “knapsack” that Kato had mentioned earlier.

On the way to the airport, Park testified, Simpson kept complaining of being “hot.” He’d rolled his window down and turned on the air-conditioning. In fact, the night was unseasonably cool. Simpson then asked Park where the light was. In the rearview mirror, Park could see that Simpson was “checking his bags.” What was in those bags, I wondered. Perhaps… a murder weapon? Bloody clothes? I could see the grand jurors focusing closely on Park’s words; were they wondering the same thing?

All in all, Park’s testimony dovetailed snugly with Kato’s. And it had the effect of strengthening both.

Mezzaluna’s weekend bar manager, Karen Crawford, was up next. She testified that Nicole and her party left the restaurant between 8:30 and nine. Shortly afterward, she’d gotten a call from “the older woman in the party”-obviously Juditha Brown-saying she’d lost her glasses. Karen found them lying by the curb outside the restaurant and sealed them in an envelope.

“About five minutes later, there was another phone call,” she said. This one from Nicole.

“What time was that, approximately?” I asked.

“I would say it was between nine-thirty and nine-forty-five,” she answered. Crawford called Ron Goldman over to the phone to make arrangements to deliver the glasses. Then he left the restaurant carrying the envelope.

So where did that leave us in terms of time? Nicole and her mother spoke at around 9:45 P.M. Police had talked to the neighbor, Pablo Fenjves, who had reported being bothered by the wailing of a dog on the night of the murders. The barking, he thought, had begun between 10:15 and 10:30 P.M. By midnight the victims were dead. That’s when Sukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen, came upon the body of Nicole Simpson.

Sukru and his wife were one of those Mutt-and-Jeff couples. He was large, burly, and dark, with a long ponytail. She was slender and fair, her blond hair cropped short just below her ears. The few minutes I had with Sukru before testimony were tense. He still hadn’t gotten over his discovery of a murder scene. He stammered and groped for words until finally, when he got to the point of telling how he’d first seen the body, his voice broke and he covered his eyes with one hand.

Taking the witness stand somehow seemed to calm him. He told how he’d come home to his apartment on Montana Avenue-only about six hundred feet from the crime scene-at around 11:40 P.M. He found his upstairs neighbor sitting with a big white Akita. This, though Sukru didn’t know it, was Nicole Brown’s dog, Kato. Sukru and Bettina offered to keep the dog until they could get it over to an animal shelter the following morning.

“How did it behave in your apartment?” I asked.

“He was pretty nervous, and he was going to the doors and windows, running around in the house.”

“Did you see anything unusual about his legs or his body?” I asked.

Sukru swallowed hard. “On the legs, there was blood.”

About midnight, the couple decided to take the animal out to see if they could find its owner. The animal headed toward 875 Bundy. Home.

“When we got closer to the place, he started to pull me a lot harder than normal,” Sukru said. “We were walking on the right side of Bundy and the dog stopped and turned right and looked at-”

There was silence in the courtroom as Sukru tried to go on.

“-and I turned right and looked, too. And I seen her body.”

The Akita’s role in all this was eerie, to say the least. You had to wonder what that poor animal had witnessed. Had he tried to defend his mistress? Probably not. Police canine experts later examined Kato, summarizing their conclusions in a “witness statement.” Kato, they concluded, was such a low achiever that he probably could not have defended himself, let alone a human. The chief trainer for the LAPD’s K-9 unit reported that Kato had a “very nice disposition… [but] inadequate instincts or courage to protect his territory, owner or himself.”

Thanks to his primitive loyalty, however, we were able to postulate that the murders had occurred between the time he began to howl and the time he was discovered wandering on Bundy with bloody paws-a window of perhaps an hour. That dog, it seemed, had a better handle on time of death than the coroner did.

I only wish he could have spoken for the criminalists.

A case like this-with no eyewitnesses save, possibly, a white Akita-clearly would hinge on physical evidence, especially blood evidence. That’s why I had been so concerned from the start about which criminalists we could get assigned to the case. It was critical that we establish two things: first, that the blood samples had been collected and preserved properly; and second, that the samples had undergone reliable analysis. The criminalists had to do their job competently, and it was essential that they be able to present themselves credibly to a jury. Phil’s tepid assurance that criminalist Dennis Fung was “okay” had set off alarm bells in my head.

My first meeting with Dennis Kirk Fung had been on Monday, June 20, in the waiting room outside the grand jury chamber. He’d come with Collin Yamauchi; Fung was the criminalist on the scene, and Yamauchi the criminalist/analyst in the lab. They’d handed over their reports to me, and I’d scanned them quickly, trying to envision them as testimony that would be coherent enough for a juror to follow. Fung’s task was relatively straightforward: to tell where he collected the blood and how he packaged it. I’d told him to review his reports so he’d be prepared when I took his testimony later in the week. He bobbed his head up and down as I spoke.

Then I’d turned to Collin Yamauchi. In theory at least, he had the more difficult task.

The LAPD crime lab had just recently begun to do DNA testing. None of its technicians was all that experienced in the process. They were perfectly capable of performing the simplest test, called PCR DQ alpha. But it had to be done correctly. When contamination occurs, you get wildly erratic results. That was why I breathed a sigh of relief when I read Collin’s report: in this case, the results were perfectly consistent. Every blood drop on the trail at Bundy displayed O. J. Simpson’s genetic markers, and only his genetic markers. Bull’s-eye.

It was even possible that his blood was on the Rockingham glove. Preliminary tests indicated that this was the case. We had already found markers on that glove from Ron’s and Nicole’s blood. If we could establish that the glove bore a mixture of blood from both victims and from the defendant, that would be very powerful evidence. For that, however, we would need to send the samples away to Cellmark for more sophisticated testing.

On the witness stand, Collin turned out to be pretty effective. He handled the glove business well, leaving open the possibility that it had been stained with a mixture of the blood of both killer and victims. He did stumble at explaining the fundamentals of DNA testing, but it is very complicated stuff and he hadn’t much experience on the stand. I assumed he would get better with practice.

Dennis Fung was another story.

When Dennis took the witness stand on Wednesday, June 22, I led him through a pro forma description of how he collected the blood samples by wetting swatches of cloth with distilled water, then applying them to each bloodstain. We established that he’d handed them over, as the protocol required, to Yamauchi, back in the lab.

“Are you familiar with what is known as a stride analysis?” I asked him.

“Yes, I am,” he replied.

Whenever shoe prints or footprints are found at a crime scene, the criminalist may decide to do a stride analysis to determine whether the suspect was walking or running. Fung claimed he had done such an analysis. Naturally, I asked him if he could tell us whether the person making the footprints was moving quickly or at a normal pace.

“Not really,” Fung said.

The stride analysis may also say something about the size of the person, based on the size of the print and the distance between the steps. The prints at Bundy were from size 12 men’s shoes. And so, when I asked Dennis if the bloody footprint on the walk at Bundy seemed to come from a man or a woman, all I expected was a very qualified answer that tended to favor a man. Either it was a really big woman, or a little woman or man in a pair of big man’s shoes, or a big man. There weren’t that many realistic options.

“I haven’t been in the shoe analysis assist unit for about three years,” he replied. “So I’m kind of rusty on that aspect.”

I was stunned. If he was too “rusty” to make such no-brainer observations, what the hell was he doing at a murder scene as our criminalist? This was not good at all.

“So you are disqualifying yourself?” I asked him incredulously. “Telling us you are not qualified to render an opinion as to that because of a lack of experience or training?”

“Yes, at this point,” he replied.

At that moment, I realized that I had no idea what might come out of Dennis Fung’s mouth next. I was flying blind. All I could do was continue questioning him, and hope that there were no more ugly surprises.

No such luck. Throughout the testimony, I watched helplessly as Fung fumbled through his notes, constantly losing his place. We went through all the presumptive blood tests he had taken. A presumptive blood test is simply a quick, though not infallible, procedure to determine whether a stain is indeed blood. Several stains at Rockingham had given a positive result, including stains in the foyer, on the door handle of the Bronco, and on the glove found on the south pathway. Fung had also done the tests on the drains in the master bathroom sink and shower-and they, too, had indicated blood! This could mean that Simpson had washed himself off before heading to the airport.

But Fung blew it. As we got deeper into the questioning, I learned to my dismay that he had not tested all the drains at Rockingham, only those that had appeared to be in “recent use.” When you do presumptive tests for blood, you should always be aware that the results can be impeached in court, because they can sometimes also give a positive result for things like rust and vegetable matter. Fung’s failure to test all the drains would play right into the defense’s hands. I could already hear opposing counsel crossing him: “Oh, you mean you didn’t test the other drains? So you don’t know whether they, too, might have given a positive result, do you, Mr. Fung? And if they had, you might have concluded that the positive result you got in my client’s bathroom was nothing more than rust, isn’t that so? Or would you try to tell this jury, Mr. Fung, that blood had been washed down every sink in that house?”

Fung had failed to obey the criminalist’s first commandment: be thorough. His tendency to test selectively would later cripple our efforts to get important blood evidence into the record. And his demeanor on the stand wouldn’t give a jury the confidence that he could change a lightbulb, let alone supervise a forensic investigation.

After he left the stand, I called my people and said, “This guy’s a fucking disaster.”

Here’s the bottom line: Fung and his colleague, Andrea Mazzola, a trainee with only four months’ experience, should have been supervised as they went over both crime scenes. Tom and Phil should have returned to oversee that search. When I’d spoken to them mid-afternoon after they’d interviewed Simpson, they’d assured me they were on their way back out to Rockingham. They didn’t make it back there until after five. Too late. By that time Fung and Mazzola were packing up and heading home.

We’d be doing damage control on that sloppy search for a long time to come. We still are.

At the outset, I had assumed we would be offering the cops’ taped interview with Simpson into evidence. But there was more foot-dragging by the LAPD. Not until the week the grand jury hearing began in earnest did I finally get the cops to fork over the cassette tape of that interrogation.

In the privacy of my office, I slipped the tape into my player, grabbed a legal pad, and pulled my knees up into my oversized leatherette chair to listen to what I assumed was at least a two-hour interview. It was a shock, therefore, when after thirty-two minutes, I heard Lange say, “We’re ready to terminate this at 14:07,” and then heard nothing but the white fuzz of unrecorded tape. I didn’t get it-Simpson had spent three full hours at the station. What could they have been doing all that time?

I was even more disturbed by what was on the tape. Phil and Tom both sounded exhausted-that was understandable. They’d been up since three the morning of June 13. But that was no reason to allow a potential suspect in a double murder to set the program for the interview.

Any Monday-morning quarterback can now see that Simpson lied to Tom and Phil all through that interview. Of course, some of the lies weren’t apparent to them at the time. For instance, Simpson claimed that he’d been invited to dinner with the Brown family after the recital, which Nicole’s mother would later deny. Tom and Phil couldn’t have known that yet. But on other, more elemental points, like where and when he’d parked the Bronco, there was plenty they could have done.

Lange: “What time did you last park the Bronco?”

“Eight something,” replied the suspect. “Maybe seven, eight o’clock. Eight, nine o’clock. I don’t know, right in that-right in that area.”

The follow-up should have come hard and fast: “Well, what the hell was it? Seven, seven-thirty, eight, or nine? You knew you had a flight to catch, so shouldn’t you have been aware of the time? What time did you park? What did you do then?”

And what about Simpson’s apparent lack of concern after Kato told him that he’d heard thumps on the wall? Kato was so worried that he’d taken a dim flashlight and searched the grounds for an intruder. And yet Simpson seemed strangely unconcerned-he was more intent upon finding a Band-Aid for the cut on his finger. On that one Vannatter and Lange should have dug deep: “Did you check it out? Did you call your security people to check it out? Why not? Wasn’t your daughter Arnelle staying at Rockingham? Weren’t you concerned for her safety?”

Such pointed questions would have highlighted Simpson’s evasiveness. Instead, the detectives responded to Simpson’s tentative statements by saying “I understand,” or simply “Yeah,” or “Okay,” or a mumbled “Mmnh-hm.” On some fundamental level, I think, Tom and Phil wanted to hear a plausible explanation that would eliminate Simpson from suspicion.

Just when they got a big opening, they’d move on to something else. For instance, when they ask Simpson if he would take a lie-detector test, he vacillates:

“I’m sure I’ll eventually do it,” he says, “but it’s like, hey, I’ve got some weird thoughts now. And I’ve had weird thoughts-you know, when you’ve been with a person for seventeen years, you think everything. And I don’t-” He stopped himself.

And what do Lange and Vannatter say? “I understand.” Not once but twice. And then they drop the subject!

Why didn’t they swoop down on that? “What sort of weird thoughts? Thoughts of hurting Nicole? Did you ever share those thoughts with anyone?”

I’d seen plenty of people whose family members had been murdered. An innocent man who’s just learned about the death of his children’s mother-when the children were asleep in the house-would most likely be stunned, distraught, even hysterical. And he wouldn’t hesitate to take a polygraph. He’d be demanding, “How can I help you catch this monster?”

But the O. J. Simpson who emerged from that police interview struck me as cold and detached-fundamentally unaffected by the news of his ex-wife’s murder.

Simpson chuckles as he shoots the shit about his relationship with his girlfriend, Paula Barbieri. He volunteers a story from after his last breakup with Nicole. She had returned an expensive diamond bracelet he’d given her as a birthday present. Simpson then presented it to Paula and pretended he’d bought it for her. Scamming one woman immediately after his breakup with another, who, at that moment, was lying on a cold metal coroner’s table! I couldn’t believe the way he told Vannatter and Lange about that. “I get into a funny place here on all this, all right?” he says. Wink-wink nudge-nudge. “Yeah,” they chime back. You could practically hear the towels snapping in the men’s locker room.

That jocular, almost flippant tone pervaded the entire interview. Simpson tells them about how an endorsement deal gets him Bugle Boy Jeans for free-“I got a hundred pair,” he brags. He also tells them his preference in sneakers-“Reebok, that’s all I wear.” He even gives a little rap, referring to himself in the third person, about how he rushes for a plane, just like in the Hertz commercial-“I was doing my little crazy what-I-do. I mean, I do it everywhere. Everybody who has ever picked me up says that O.J’s a whirlwind at the end, he’s running, he’s grabbing things.”

In defense of Phil and Tom, I do know there’s something to be said for developing rapport with your suspect to get him talking. It’s just that at some point, push has to come to shove. And during this interview the shove came way too late and way too gently.

“O.J.,” Phil says uneasily. “We’ve got sort of a problem.”

“Mmnh-mmh,” the suspect replies.

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

Tom puts in, “Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at Nicole’s house?”

“No,” Simpson replies. “It was last night.”

“Okay, so last night you cut it?”

“Somewhere after the recital…”

“What do you think happened?” Phil asks him. “Do you have any idea?”

O.J. subtly puts the detectives on the defensive.

“I have no idea, man. You guys haven’t told me anything. I have no idea… Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit…”

“Did you ever hit her, O.J.?”

“Uh, we had-that one night we had a fight.”

“Mmnh-mmph.”

“That night-that night we had a fight. Hey, she hit me.”

“Yeah.”

“You know, and-and, as I say, they never took my statement, they never wanted to hear my side… Nicole was drunk, she did her thing, she started tearing up my house, you know. And I-I didn’t punch her or anything, but I-I-you know-”

“Slapped her a couple times?”

“No. I wrestled her is all I did-”

“Uh, okay.”

Nicole is dead, his children have no mother, he’s talking about the time he was arrested for beating her-and once again, Simpson is whining about how he feels mistreated. As I sat listening to this crap, I thought: This guy is going to deny everything all the way. He’s never going to confess. There wasn’t one shred of remorse there; not enough real soul for him to need to unburden it by telling the truth. Some killers have a need to confess, at least to themselves. But I don’t think he ever did.

That interview was one of the worst bits of police work I’d ever seen-but I kept my thoughts to myself. I couldn’t afford to alienate my chief investigators. Besides, it was spilt milk. Complaining about their ineptitude would not help me get through this case.

I had serious qualms about playing this interview tape before the grand jury. And in the months to come I would debate endlessly whether to play it at trial. It was a very risky gambit. That decision would rest largely upon the composition and sentiment of the jury. If we ended up with jurors who were star-struck by the defendant, would they be offended by his callousness toward his wife and lover, or would they be beguiled by his crude jocularity? Would they take his loss of memory and vague responses for evasion, or would they see an innocent man willing to talk to police despite his pain and exhaustion, and who got nothing but suspicion in return?

I decided to hold off.

Instead I had Phil summarize the interview. He touched briefly on Simpson’s self-pitying explanation of the beating on New Year’s, 1989, and then on what Simpson called an “altercation”-the 1993 incident that had also resulted in a 911 call. “I kicked her door or something,” Simpson had said.

That was as far as I intended to go into the issue of domestic violence for now. I’d handled DV cases before, and I knew they were very tricky. Husbands usually do not batter their wives in front of others. If a wife is killed, there is rarely an eyewitness to the murder. Or to the years of abuse that preceded it.

In this case, there was just too much we still didn’t know. Had friends ever seen them fight? Had they fought since the divorce? How recently? What were the flashpoint issues between them? I was willing to put domestic violence on the back burner for the time being-until Keith Zlomsowitch forced our hand.

Zlomsowitch, a thirtysomething restaurateur, was passed on to us by the LAPD. He claimed to have witnessed O. J. Simpson stalking and harassing his wife. Zlomsowitch lived out of state and was due to board a plane home the next day. Like it or not, David and I had to bring him in before the grand jury to preserve his testimony.

I had no idea what Keith Zlomsowitch intended to say, and didn’t get a chance to find out before he took the stand. Instead I spent our pre-interview trying to make sure he didn’t taint his testimony with hearsay evidence. Since his story involved the victim, I had to make sure that he didn’t repeat anything she might have said to him.

“Keith,” I told him, “please listen very carefully to my questions. Anything that you heard O. J. Simpson say is fair territory, but don’t tell me anything which Nicole may have said to you.”

Zlomsowitch said he understood.

So I wound up listening with innocent fascination-along with everyone else in the courtroom-as Keith told how he had met Nicole in Aspen about two years before her death. At that time, he was director of operations for the Mezzaluna restaurants’ Colorado and California operations. Nicole was legally separated from Simpson then and living at Gretna Green. In the spring of ‘92 he and Nicole became lovers, but only for about a month. During that time, Zlomsowitch said, O. J. Simpson would follow Nicole when she went out in the evening. Once Nicole and a party of friends showed up at the Mezzaluna in Beverly Hills, where Ziomsowitch was on duty. As he was sitting with her at her table, he noticed O. J. Simpson pull his car up to the parking attendant. Simpson came in and went directly to Nicole’s table. He leaned over, stared at Ziomsowitch, and said, “I’m O. J. Simpson and she’s still my wife.”

“How would you describe his tone of voice?” I asked.

“Serious, if not scary,” he said. “Just deep, threatening to the point of-yes, we were very intimidated.”

Ziomsowitch told of another incident, in April 1992, which occurred at a restaurant called Tryst. After waiting for a table, Keith, Nicole, and a few of Nicole’s friends had just sat down when Simpson appeared. This time, he walked past them and took a table about ten feet away. He pulled the chair around to face them and just stared. And stared. That freaked Ziomsowitch out.

Not long afterward, Keith went on another date with Nicole, this time to a comedy club where a friend of hers was performing. From there, they went dancing at a Hollywood club called Roxbury. They had been there less than an hour when Nicole said, “O.J. is here.”

I had to tell the jury to disregard the statement attributed to Nicole. At that point, though, they seemed to be hanging on Zlomsowitch’s every word, breathless to hear what happened next.

“We went back to Nicole’s house,” he continued. “We lit a few candles, put on a little music, poured a glass of wine, and we… began to become intimate.” After they’d had sex, Nicole told him she thought it best if he went home and she went to bed.

The following day, Ziomsowitch came back to the house and sat with Nicole by the pool as her children swam. She complained of a stiff neck; they went into a bedroom off the swimming pool where he began to give her a neck message. After about five minutes, Zlomsowitch recalled, O. J. Simpson appeared two feet in front of them and said, “I can’t believe it… Look what you are doing. The kids are right out here by the pool.”

According to Zlomsowitch, Simpson went on to say, “I watched you last night. I can’t believe you would do that in the house. I watched you… I saw everything you did.”

Then he demanded to speak with Nicole alone. Zlomsowitch, who was still sitting on Nicole’s back at that point, eased off slowly. He told us that he didn’t want to make any sudden moves that might incite Simpson to anger.

At Nicole’s urging, Keith left her alone to talk to her estranged husband. Several minutes later, O. J. Simpson emerged from the bedroom. Keith said he was frightened, but then, to his surprise, Simpson stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings, right?” he said, shaking Zlomsowitch’s hand. “I’m a very proud man.”

As Zlomsowitch spoke, I stood there with my mouth open in amazement. O. J. Simpson was spying on his wife in the bushes while she was having sex, then, the next day, shakes the hand of her lover? That was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard. (Since then, I’ve had a chance to learn a lot more about the nature of domestic violence. Batterers only rarely blame other men. It’s usually the wife or girlfriend, “the bitch,” who takes the heat. But at the time I first heard this story, Simpson’s behavior struck me as utterly incomprehensible.)

All in all, Zlomsowitch seemed an honorable guy. He’d been a pallbearer at Nicole’s funeral, and all he seemed to want out of this was to see justice done. The fact that he had been willing to recount events favorable to Simpson, like the handshake and apology, was reassuring proof of his honesty. And he had given us valuable new evidence-including the information about the stalking episodes-of Simpson’s behavior as a jealous husband.

David was as relieved as I was that Zlomsowitch had panned out. You take a risk putting any witness on blind, and here we were throwing one after another on the stand without a vetting.

“I can’t believe it,” David groused to me as we ate lunch on the afternoon break. “We have five minutes to put this case together for the grand jury, and law professors across the country are going to take months dissecting and critiquing every word.”

Man, if he only knew how true that would be.

Actually the grand jury was going pretty well. The only real screwup was Shively. I told myself we’d been lucky to find any witnesses whose testimony had not been tainted by pretrial publicity. The important thing was to proceed step by step and not be distracted by the babble of media around us. The grand jurors had been admonished to do the same thing. “Turn off your radio, don’t turn on your TV, don’t pick up a newspaper, don’t scan headlines at a newsstand.”

Grand jurors usually take their charge very seriously, but they are also human and as curious as anyone else. On Thursday, June 23, we were wrapping up the testimony and I had already started drafting my closing statement. I’d give it on Friday, and we’d be done. I think the jurors would have had more than enough evidence to give us the indictment. Then this hysterical pace would subside, at least until the trial started, which would be months from now. Maybe I could even go back to eating dinner at home again.

These were my thoughts as I walked down the hallway toward Suzanne’s office. I checked in with her at least once a day, usually around six o’clock. We’d kick back and shoot the breeze, or in more hectic times, like these, she’d fill me in on any brushfires that needed extinguishing. That night, I could smell smoke even before I reached her door. Suzanne and a visitor, a local television reporter, were sitting in front of the TV, riveted to the screen. There wasn’t much to see, as I recall. Just the staccato sound of a tape being played. The voice of an anguished young woman filled the room.

“He broke my door. He broke the whole back door in…”

A second voice, apparently that of a 911 operator, interrupted her: “And then he left and he came back?”

“Then he came and he practically knocked my upstairs door down, but he pounded it and then he screamed and hollered and I tried to get him out of the bedroom ‘cause the kids were sleeping there…”

“What the hell is this?” I asked Suzanne.

“Nicole,” she replied without taking her eyes from the screen. “A 911 tape.”

“What 911 tape?”

I knew that there had been police reports on the New Year’s Eve of 1989 and the door-kicking incident of 1993. Both had been triggered by Nicole’s calls to 911. But I was under the impression that the audiotapes of those calls had been destroyed in a routine recycling procedure.

My impression was wrong. It turns out that the city attorney’s office, which prosecuted that ‘93 case, had kept its own copies of the tapes. The press had tracked them down and petitioned under the state Public Records Act to get them. And somehow, they had gotten those tapes released-before I had even heard that they existed.

Suzanne’s reporter buddy handed me copies of the police reports on the tapes. I hadn’t seen these, either.

“Oh, great,” I fumed. “Now I’m getting discovery from the press!”

Within the space of an hour it seemed that tape was everywhere. You couldn’t step within earshot of a radio without hearing Nicole’s pitiful, quavering pleas for help. It was on all the television news shows, and they didn’t play it just once, but kept repeating it, in a sick parody of MTV’s heavy rotation.

“My ex-husband or my husband just broke into my house and he’s ranting and raving… He’s O. J. Simpson, I think you know his record… He’s fucking going nuts… He’s screaming at my roommate about me… about some guy I know and hookers… And it’s all my fault, and now what am I going to do…? I just don’t want my kids exposed to this…” When Nicole begged Simpson to calm down, for the sake of the children, his anger only increased. “I don’t give a shit anymore! Motherfucker! I’m not leaving!”

The backlash was immediate. Our lines were flooded by outraged callers. And most of them took the side not of the panicked 119-pound woman, but of the out-of-control former football player who was terrorizing her. They said, “How can you do this to that poor man?” Everyone assumed that the release of the 911 tape was part of a cynical scheme hatched by the D.A.‘s office, the LAPD, and the City Attorney’s office to spin public opinion against Simpson.

What a joke. Believe me, there wasn’t enough solidarity among these camps to coordinate a beer run, let alone an offensive like that. For days afterward, we would all point fingers at one another, Gil lit into the city attorney, James Hahn, for releasing the tape. Hahn insisted that he had acted in the belief that the LAPD had gotten approval from the D.A.‘s office for his office to release the tape. The LAPD would say it was against releasing the tape, but felt it hadn’t gotten support for that position from the D.A. In our office, it was David who took the fall. The cops had called, asking him if they should authorize release of the tape under the Public Records Act. And he had told them, “Do what you normally do.” It was the right instruction-but the result was disastrous.

The worst part of it was watching Shapiro exploit this screwup. He filed a motion to halt the grand jury hearing on grounds of excessive publicity. At a hearing hastily convened on Friday in the courtroom of a former prosecutor named Lance Ito, Shapiro was preening like a peacock in full plumage. He accused the D.A.‘s office of misconduct in making “improper expressions of personal opinion.” He cited my “sole murderer” slip as well as Gil’s speculation that Simpson might cop an insanity plea.

I couldn’t let this pass.

“Robert Shapiro has lost no opportunity to exploit coverage in this case to get sympathy for his client,” I told the court. “He has been no stranger to the spotlight.”

But the barbs exchanged by Shapiro and me were at that very moment being rendered irrelevant. That morning, our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had come back to Gil with reports that a couple of jurors were discussing the 911 tape. That cinched it. If we did get an indictment, it could be thrown out on the strength of this revelation alone. Gil himself had no choice but to file a motion to dismiss the grand jury. Superior Court Judge Cecil Mills heard the motion and began interviewing the jurors to see if they had read or heard anything that might affect their judgment. He concluded that they had, and granted Gil’s request to recuse the jury.

It was over.

In some ways I was not unhappy to see this grand jury go bust. The case had drawn such intense public interest that I was uncomfortable seeking an indictment in a closed proceeding. I felt we’d always be susceptible to the charge that funny things were happening behind locked doors. Better to bail out early and try for a better result at a preliminary hearing in open court. Besides, the grand jury had been a useful dress rehearsal for what was to come-sort of an overture to the opera. By totally immersing us in the case, it sharpened our perceptions of its weaknesses and strengths. I’d even prepared a grand jury summation that was a very early first draft for a closing statement.

Still, the suddenness with which the grand jury was disbanded came as a shock. None of us could remember such a thing ever happening before. It also put us in a very tough spot logistically. Normally, we have weeks, or even months, to pull these things together. But the deadline mandated by law was upon us. We had less than a week to prepare for a preliminary hearing.

A prelim is like a little trial where the witnesses you put up can be cross-examined by the defense. This means you have to go back, reinterview each one of them-after comparing their statements to the grand jury to those made to police. We couldn’t afford any unpleasant surprises. No more Jill Shivelys. It would mean sorting through the complex physical evidence and figuring out a comprehensible way to present it. We’d be clocking fifteen-hour days, at least.

This was a really low moment. The only way I could keep my spirits up was to hold on to my fantasy that Gil would relent and let me keep David on the team. That night, Gil called us both into his office. He looked straight at me, and something in that look told me it was hopeless.

“Marcia,” he began firmly, “you’re going to have to pick a partner. I’ll try and accommodate any reasonable request, but I want you to find someone who’s as strong as you.”

What he meant was I couldn’t bring on some baby D.A. who would just carry my books. Even though I knew what the answer would be, I turned toward David and inclined my head in his direction.

“No,” Gil said flatly. “I need David on Menendez.”

I could feel hairline cracks fanning out in crazy patterns all through my confidence. With David by my side I felt strong and sure. Having him to strategize with would be a dream come true. But there was no appealing Gil’s decision. I’d have to find another partner. Someone who had real strength. Someone who could brace me against the coming storm.

Although I admitted this to no one, I was scared to death.