Without a Doubt

War Games

He has to say yes-there’s no one else.

That was my mantra as I walked down the hall from my office to the corner office occupied by Bill Hodgman. I was about to change his life. Right now he was in a relatively low-stress post as the director of Central Operations; if he accepted my offer, and Gil approved, he’d be subject to unprecedented heat. I think he knew I was coming. I almost expected to find a sign on his door that said “Leave me alone.” I wouldn’t have blamed him. But I also wouldn’t have known where to go next.

There were only seven deputies besides me in the Special Trials Unit, and all of them were either already trying a case or about to start one. I’d thought a bit about Brian Kelberg, a thin, intense man with a goatee and dark glasses. Brian was almost pure intellect. He had spent a little time in medical school before switching to law. It would be terrific, I thought, to have him as a sounding board for the complex evidentiary issues of the Simpson case. But I knew having him as co-counsel wouldn’t work. Though Brian was brilliant, he was a loner. He’d always felt that the team approach to prosecution wasn’t an effective way to try a case.

Then my thoughts had turned to Bill. We’d worked together in management, and we’d clicked. I was brassy and often abrasive; Bill was gentle, a conciliator. We laughed a lot together-and a sense of humor would be as essential as a law degree in a pressure cooker like this one. But most important, he was one hell of a lawyer.

Bill had started out in Long Beach, one of the branch courts. Shortly after he arrived Downtown, he prosecuted savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating. The resulting conviction (though ultimately reversed) was a thrilling triumph in an office starved for victories, and for a while Bill was the golden boy. He’d been with us only about a year when Gil appointed him director of Central Operations. He was the first real trial lawyer I can recall who ever held that job. His placement had been a boost in morale to all of us on the front lines.

All the same, Bill’s experience with Downtown juries was fairly limited. I’d done some of my juvenile work in Long Beach: the community was conservative, so the jury pool tended to be law-and-order types. The judges pretty much mirrored that point of view. As a result, criminal trials were relatively orderly affairs, seldom the grueling battles that were the daily experience of deputies Downtown.

The Simpson case was shaping up to be the ultimate Downtown case. I didn’t know if Bill was up to the rough-and-tumble. I didn’t even know if I was. Of one thing, however, I was certain: Bill Hodgman had a gift for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses in evidence. Bill and I had talked through a number of cases in the last year, and I had come to admire his instincts.

I needed him.

His door was open, and I leaned in. “Got a minute?”

“Sure, partner, come on in.”

Bill took a seat behind his huge desk, framed by a postcard-worthy panorama of downtown L.A. It was very luxurious by county standards. It was even carpeted.

“Bill,” I said, “remember how we’ve talked about wanting to try a case together?”

He nodded. I couldn’t read his expression.

“How would you like to do Simpson with me?”

He smiled.

“I have been kind of anxious to get back into court,” he said slowly. “I don’t know how my wife will take it, and I hate to miss my time with Alec.”

I knew what he meant. When Bill had been trying Keating, I’d been knee-deep in Bardo. We’d find ourselves in the office on weekends slaving away at our respective witness lists, and we’d commiserate about how our cases were cutting into family time. I remember him telling me that his son, Alec, then four years old, was taking his absences hard.

But Bill was too intrigued by this once-in-a-lifetime case to let it pass. “Let me talk to my wife, see how she feels about it,” he said finally. And we left it at that.

I don’t know what went on in that conversation, but when Bill showed up at my office the next day, he gave me the thumbs-up. We went down to Gil’s office to get his blessing. We received not only that but our marching orders.

“I want you two to work as equals,” said Gil. “No first- or second-chair situation.”

I didn’t like that. It wasn’t that I felt competitive, but for strategic reasons, every team needs a capo. Otherwise, you lose too much time negotiating over every little disagreement in approach. I also admit that it was disappointing to have Gil zing me like that. Again. I thought I’d hidden my feelings, but apparently not. Bill pulled me aside and said, “Marcia, it’s your case. I know what the realities are.” And during the months to come, he was as good as his word. Bill knew someone had to lead.

We needed to move fast. Shapiro was demanding that the preliminary hearing be held within the time set by statute, ten days after the arraignment. That meant we would have to be ready to go within a week. We knew that the media were gearing up to cover these hearings extensively; they would be beaming testimony into the homes of our jury pool. Our office has an official policy about cameras in courtrooms: don’t object to it. So I had no choice in the matter. This left no room for the fumbles or rough spots that in normal circumstances are routinely tolerated at an early stage of a case. No more flying by the seat of our pants.

I’d told Gil earlier in the week that we should assemble a team of experts from our office to analyze the case-a sort of war council. That way, deputies with different specialties could lend us their expertise for formulating strategy. Gil thought it was a good idea, and called a meeting for Saturday, June 25. On Friday, Gil and I hashed out who should attend. He first suggested Curt Hazell, the head of the Narcotics Unit. Hazell was an expert on search and seizure, and we needed someone who would help us deal with problems arising from the search of Simpson’s house.

I also wanted to hear from Lydia Bodin, our expert on domestic violence; she, I thought, might help us use Simpson’s history to show that Nicole’s murder was premeditated, rather than an impulsive act of passion. Lydia would team with Scott Gordon, a deputy whose experience in the Sex Crimes Division had led him on to a personal crusade against spousal abuse. He’d even drafted legislation on the issue.

To shore up the blood work, I wanted Lisa Kahn, the deputy who had given me tutorials in DNA on that no-body case I’d done with Phil. We still didn’t know if Simpson would try a mental defense, but if he did, I wanted to have someone in the wings with medical training-and Brian Kelberg, whom I had briefly considered as a trial partner, would be perfect.

Bill would be there, of course. And I was happy when Gil said that David should attend as well.

On Saturday morning, June 25, about fifteen deputies and brass all met in the conference room next to Gil’s office. Most wore jeans and workshirts, though I’d rejected my usual weekend attire of leggings, Reeboks, and an oversized T-shirt in favor of slacks and a blouse. While the clothes were casual, the atmosphere was tense.

“Go ahead, Marcia,” said Gil, abruptly cutting off small talk. “Brief us on what we have so far.”

I laid it all out, beginning with the centerpiece of our case: blood. That’s what the Simpson case would be about.

Nicole’s blood.

Ron’s blood.

O. J. Simpson’s blood.

Blood would tell the truth. I was convinced it would convict.

“Here’s how it breaks down,” I began, speaking from notes I’d scribbled on a yellow legal pad. “The police lab did DNA testing on the blood drops at Bundy leading away from the victims-and they all come back to Simpson. The bloody shoe prints to the right of those drops are a size twelve-Simpson’s size. The blood on the Rockingham glove seems to be a mixture of Ron’s and Nicole’s blood, and possibly Simpson’s. We’ll send the samples to Cellmark for more sophisticated testing.”

I glanced around the room to make sure I hadn’t lost anybody. Nope.

More results were coming in, I told them. There was a bloody shoe print on the driver’s-side floorboard of the Bronco. We were preserving it for shoe-print comparison before we did the DNA testing. The knit cap found between the victims at Bundy, I told them, was set to be examined for hair and trace evidence, but nothing had been done on it yet.

On the chalkboard mounted behind Gil’s seat, I sketched a diagram of Rockingham. That’s where Simpson parked the Bentley, I showed them. Here’s where Allan Park pulled his limo up to the gate. And here’s the back wall of Kato’s guest house.

They began pelting me with questions:

When exactly did Simpson leave for the airport?

Where did Allan Park first see the black male walking toward the door?

How could Kato not have seen him, too?

I could address some of these questions, but certainly not all of them. When I didn’t have an answer there would be an uncomfortable silence, then more questions, with a slightly more aggressive tone. In fact, even though many of the people in this room were my friends, the questioning at times was not entirely friendly. It wasn’t just that everyone was feeling the pressure. It wasn’t just that the reputation of our office was at stake. Maybe they wanted not only to see where the weak points lay, but to test me, to see if Marcia Clark could stand up to a pummeling.

“Give me a break,” I whispered to David when I finally got back to my seat.

We had to make a decision. What precise crime would we charge O. J. Simpson with? Three options were open to us: murder one, which required establishing premeditation; murder two, for which we would have to show intent to kill, although the killing could be on rash impulse; or manslaughter, which meant demonstrating an intent to kill mitigated by the heat of passion. The crucial question is whether the evidence shows a clear intent and decision to kill. I felt that it most certainly did. You could not look at those photos of the murder scene and think otherwise.

“I’d like to charge the defendant with two counts of murder in the first degree,” I said.

Not everyone agreed.

“You’re looking at an uphill battle to ask a jury to tag O. J. Simpson with anything,” said Peter Bozanich. Peter was director of Branch and Area. I respected Peter, who was among the best in sizing up the strength of a case.

“You got him, there’s no question about that,” he said, in a resigned, almost philosophical tone, “but the guy’s a hero, and people aren’t going to want to drop the hammer on him.”

Peter was right. I knew it. Hell, we all did. But I felt that as a matter of principle, we should ignore O. J. Simpson’s celebrity in our decision to charge. A defendant, regardless of personal popularity, should be held responsible for his acts.

Brian Kelberg felt that second-degree murder was the more legally correct choice. “I basically see this as a rage-type killing,” he said. “I think he did not go there planning to kill her.”

“But what about the fact that he brought the knife, the gloves, and the ski cap?” I countered. “Not to mention the fact that he conveniently had a flight to catch immediately afterward.”

“I think he went there intending to scare her,” Brian insisted. “And when he saw Ron Goldman walk up, he became angry and things got out of hand.”

That didn’t feel right to me. Simpson had packed a knife with a blade at least five inches long, along with cashmere-lined winter gloves and a ski cap-in the middle of June. This went beyond intent to scare. It was a plan to commit murder. It may well have been that the food run Simpson had taken with Kato was part of the planning, too. It seemed out of character for him to dash out for fast food with a houseguest cum lackey.

“Remember,” I told my colleagues, recalling what Kato had said about that night, “Simpson had never done that before. The whole thing has the feeling of an alibi setup.”

Gil looked to his two other top assistants, Frank Sundstedt and Sandy Buttitta, who hadn’t weighed in yet.

Frank was a big teddy bear of a guy with curly blond hair and a mustache. He was someone I’d grown to like and respect during my days in management. He really cared about the deputies and agonized like an overly concerned father over decisions affecting their welfare.

“First-at least, that’s what it looks like to me,” he replied.

Then everybody turned to Sandy. She was a strong, no-nonsense professional, the first woman to be appointed chief deputy. At that point, I’d had very little interaction with her, and had no idea what she’d say.

“I think it’s first-degree,” she said.

Gil’s silence was affirmation: we had a decision.

The case of Ron Goldman was a bit different. Nicole was obviously the intended target. Goldman, it appeared, was a visitor who happened onto the scene at the wrong moment. His death could have been classified as either first- or second-degree murder. But I was pushing for first-degree. “Remember,” I said, “the number and nature of his wounds alone show premeditation.” Everyone in the room understood what I meant: under the law, premeditation cannot be measured in time. It’s there or it’s not, even if it occurs mere seconds before the crime. The fact that Ron’s killer did not dispatch him with a single blow, but a series of them, to me showed deliberate intent.

“Also,” I continued, “it’s reasonable to assume that Ron’s murder was not the rash impulse of a jealous ex-husband, but the calculated elimination of a witness to Nicole’s murder.” That, of course, would also justify a charge of murder one.

No one objected. Most significant, Gil Garcetti once more tacitly agreed. There was a brief silence as we all recognized that the first momentous decision in this case had been made. We would charge Orenthal James Simpson with two counts of murder one.

Next item on the agenda: strategy for the prelims. The big question concerned how much evidence to put on. Normally, a preliminary hearing is a bare-bones production. The prosecutor submits just enough evidence for a judge to find probable cause that a suspect should be bound over for trial. If you go beyond that, you’re unnecessarily allowing the defense early access to your case and your strategy; the conventional wisdom says that you should make them work for it through discovery motions. But this case was anything but normal.

In effect, the defense already had access to our case: they were entitled to receive the grand jury transcripts. They’d be able to prepare themselves for most of the witnesses we intended to call. So now that we’d lost the advantage of a bare-bones strategy, I argued, we should present a relatively complete case-that way, we’d not only make sure that the public realized the strength of our case, but the municipal judge would feel more confident binding Simpson over for trial.

“Our evidence is strong,” I told my colleagues. “I think we should just lay it out there for the world to see.”

This meant that we would call the dog-bark and time-line witnesses for sure. And, of course, the blood witnesses.

Oh, God. That meant Dennis Fung.

“We’ll need to do some remedial work with the criminalists,” I mumbled, shuddering slightly at the prospect of watching Fung shuffle through his reports in front of millions of viewers. Still, he had collected the evidence. I’d have to spend some serious prep time to whip him into shape before the prelim. But there was no choice but to put him on.

Collin was another matter. I had confidence that Collin would turn out to be a pretty good witness at trial. (And, indeed, he was.) In the meantime, however, he needed some prep time to get down the lengthy technical explanations of DNA. I felt it would be better all around to hold off on DNA testimony until trial, when we could put on the sophisticated results from Cellmark. In the meantime, I suggested to my comrades, why not go with more conventional tests? I knew the person to do them.

“Think Special Investigations would let loose of Greg Matheson?” I asked, looking around the room.

Greg was a highly esteemed serologist at the Special Investigations Division. He was scrupulously honest, and I knew from his previous appearances on the witness stand that if we used him to augment Fung, he could present the evidence in a simple, straightforward way. He could also fend off attacks on cross without becoming irritable.

Someone asked whether Greg’s tests might use up too much of our blood samples. Good point. If we tested all the blood drops taken from Bundy for the prelims, we’d consume too much to allow for both the prosecution and the defense to do separate tests later on. And I wanted to have enough for both sides to do their own tests. Maybe it was a throwback to my days at the defense bar, but I always felt the prosecution should welcome independent verification of its lab work. If their results supported ours, we’d be golden.

Brian Kelberg offered a suggestion: “Why don’t you have Greg test just one of the blood drops at Bundy?” he asked. “A single drop on the trail would be enough to establish identity for the prelim. And if those drops are Simpson’s, he’s made.”

I saw nods all around the room. I scrawled a note to pull whatever strings necessary to get Greg Matheson assigned to us.

For the time being, we decided to hold off on one major category of evidence: DV, domestic violence. We all agreed that the physical evidence alone demonstrated enough premeditation to warrant murder in the first. That meant we did not necessarily have to introduce any battering incidents to support the charge. And to tell you the truth, I was just as glad to stay clear of this issue for the moment. The only way DV might be thrust to the fore was if Simpson attempted to plead insanity, or tried to float some other kind of heat-of-passion defense. In that case, we had to be ready to refute. Lydia Bodin authoritatively cited several cases in which murders that arose from violent domestic quarrels were nevertheless prosecuted at first-degree. So even if Simpson tried to worm his way out of this by claiming temporary insanity, we could still charge murder one.

Early the following week, we served a second warrant on Rockingham.

I began to write this one myself, but thankfully, Curt Hazell took over to make sure that it was airtight. This was an abundance of caution, but caution was necessary. By now, of course, I had had an opportunity to read carefully through Phil’s affidavit in support of the first warrant served on Rockingham the morning of June 13, and was distressed to find several glaring errors.

Phil had written, for instance, that Simpson had left town unexpectedly, when, in fact, his trip to Chicago had been planned in advance. Phil had apparently gotten that misimpression as the result of asking Kato where Simpson was. Kato had passed him off to Arnelle, who’d said something to the effect of “Isn’t he here?”

Phil had described the stain on the Bronco’s door handle as “human” blood. But the criminalist had only done a presumptive test, which showed the presence of blood. In theory, it could have been animal blood.

The most serious thing I saw in that warrant, however, was not an error, but an omission. For whatever reason, Phil had failed to put in the affidavit that they’d had to leap the wall that morning to unlock the gate. He certainly hadn’t mentioned it to me when he’d called me for advice on the warrant. I was seriously annoyed by this.

Even though the warrantless entry seemed, under the circumstances, justified, the omission of it on the affidavit could serve to seriously undermine his credibility.

Both Curt and I knew that come the preliminary hearing, we would end up doing battle to justify the cops’ entry and defend their integrity. For now, I was content to see that the second warrant was done right. I wanted a thorough search for the items we now knew Simpson had on the night of the murders. Principally, we were looking for the knife from Ross Cutlery and the dark sweats Kato had seen Simpson wearing during the early evening, neither of which had turned up. I also wanted to search the Bentley. If we found no blood there, it would indicate that Simpson had not wounded his finger until after the outing to McDonald’s; that, in turn, would place the cut closer to the time of the murders.

The five of us-Tom, Phil, David, Bill, and I-arrived in a single car at Rockingham on the morning of Tuesday, June 28. Reporters blocked the gates. Overhead, I could hear the thrum of copters. The scene looked like something out of Apocalypse Now.

“Did you guys request those?” I asked Tom.

“It’s the media,” he replied, disgusted.

We parked on Rockingham and were ushered in by a couple of uniforms. I met up with John Stevens, a photographer for the D.A.‘s office, whom I’d asked to come on this search to videotape the grounds. I wanted him to record Allan Park’s view of the driveway and front door from his position facing the Ashford gate. This would allow me to demonstrate to a jury how Park’s vantage point allowed him to see Simpson entering the house. I also showed John a couple of other areas we should document-for instance, the south pathway where the glove had been found. If a case takes months to come to trial, you can forget little details of layout. You find yourself clinging to frames of videotape. It’s essential to capture those images right away.

As Tom and I walked through the kitchen I noticed a pretty young black woman standing in a small desk-and-bookcase nook. She looked uncomfortable. I hadn’t expected any civilians, so at first I assumed she was a cop.

“Marcia,” Tom said, “this is Arnelle Simpson. Arnelle, Marcia Clark is the D.A. on the case.”

Arnelle had no reason to like me. I’m sure she saw me as just one more intruder tramping through her home. I didn’t know what to say except “I’m sorry for all this. We’ll get out of your way as soon as possible.” She said nothing-just smiled weakly and shook my hand.

When Tom and I got to the pool area, we found Phil and Mark Fuhrman standing near a round glass table. I thought we might be able to grab a few minutes to talk. Sometime before the hearings we would all have to sort out the events of the detectives’ first trip out to Rockingham on the morning of June 13. I would need a solid, lucid accounting, not only of their actions, but of their frame of mind, in order to defend that search.

But as we spoke, the din of the news copters grew so loud that we were having to shout in one another’s ears. We stopped that when someone warned us that the media might have parabolic mikes pointed in our direction. “Let’s try writing notes to each other,” I shouted at Mark, and he nodded back, pulling out his pad. But before he’d managed to set anything on paper, one of the detectives motioned to us that some eye in the sky might be able to read them. I gave up. We agreed to meet later in my office to finish the interview.

We retreated inside, where I happened to glance at a television mounted on the wall in Simpson’s living room. The day’s news fare was… us. Local programming had been canceled in order to bring the viewers of Los Angeles a live, on-the-spot broadcast of the scene at Rockingham. The image on the screen was the exterior of the house. And I was inside the house, watching them watching us. Could this get any weirder?

I went through that house room by room to see how the search was going. Simpson’s bedroom was thoroughly tossed, but the day’s results were to be measured mainly in the negative: No knife; no bloody sweat clothes. Nor were there bloodstains in the Bentley.

We did, however, seize some additional pieces of evidence, among them a single leather glove, this one black, which I’d seen lying on a table in the living room during the first search. It had a different lining from the pair found at Bundy and in the south walkway, but both the single glove and the bloody pair in evidence had been manufactured by Aris. I thought this would tend to suggest that Simpson favored the brand.

When I reached the foyer, a cop called out to me, “I found his divorce file.” He handed me a letter typed on the letterhead of “O. J. Simpson Enterprises.” It was from Simpson to Nicole and was dated June 6, 1994. It put her on written notice that she did not have permission or authority to use his permanent home address at 360 North Rockingham as her residence or mailing address for any purpose, including tax returns. “I cannot take part in any course of action by you that might intentionally or unintentionally be misleading to the Internal Revenue or California Franchise Tax Board,” he wrote. It was signed “O.J.” and cc’ed to his attorney, LeRoy Taft.

Until now Simpson had been claiming that at the time of Nicole’s murder, his relationship with her had been amicable. But in this typed sheet I was holding, he was ordering her in icy legalese to steer clear of Rockingham. This pair had been divorced for two years, and they were still arguing over assets. When I saw the letters “IRS,” I knew we had our flashpoint.

I took the letter outside to show David. His eyes widened as he read it.

“See the date?” I asked him.

“Incredible,” he agreed. But neither of us knew exactly how to proceed.

After a moment of silence, David looked at me. I could tell what he was thinking. This piece of evidence lay in a gray area. The letter was clearly not specified in the warrant. There had been no way we could have been aware of its existence. And yet we were standing with a piece of evidence that went clearly to the defendant’s state of mind during the days before the murders.

“I think the law is on our side,” David said finally. “I think we can take it.”

So we did.

Months later, at trial, the trial judge would thwart our first attempts to present the IRS letter as evidence. Because it was not mentioned in the affidavit to the search warrant, he ruled, it was inadmissible. He was right, or course. But by then I’d figured out a lawful way to procure that document. I promptly sent Attorney Taft a subpoena for the letter.

I was not losing that letter. No way. No how.

I set about our preparations for the prelims with my usual anal-retentive devotion, but it was like trying to neatly crayon in one of my sons’ coloring books while riding in a bumper car. I’d just get up to speed, and I’d be knocked outside the lines.

Case in point: it took a lot of phone calls and a lot of politicking before I finally persuaded SID to assign Greg Matheson to do the initial blood analysis to determine whether the blood might be Simpson’s. Conventional tests will usually narrow the number of possible donors to only 10 to 15 percent of the population. In a city like Los Angeles, with nearly three and a half million people, that’s still a whopping 450,000 candidates.

But we caught a real break. The blood type that came up on the drop at Bundy was fairly rare: it could have come from only one half of one percent of the population. Only one person in 200 had that blood type. And Orenthal James Simpson was one of them. Yes!

I carried my good news down to a meeting with Bill and some of the brass. But before I could utter a word, I was stopped dead in my tracks by their somber faces.

“I’ve got rather disturbing news,” Bill said to me. “The knife salesman sold his story to the National Enquirer.”

Jose Camacho was the salesman who’d told the cops how Simpson had purchased a stiletto only days before the murder. He had testified before the grand jury, where he’d come off as a pretty decent guy. Now he’d pulled a Shively? Oh, damn! How many times had we told our witnesses to stay away from the media? We’d even admonished them not to talk to anybody, because in this overheated atmosphere you couldn’t predict who might sell a story heard secondhand. But what good were our threats? If someone wants to talk to a reporter, there is no legal way to stop him. When the hand holding the mike is dangling a $10,000 check in front of a witness who barely makes minimum wage, it’s easy to see how abstractions like justice and integrity can get shoved aside.

Camacho’s interview-for-profit now limited our options. Technically, we could try to prosecute him for contempt. Unlike Shively, Camacho had sold his story after testifying before the grand jury, where he was instructed not to discuss his testimony with anyone. But I doubted that we could get a contempt ruling to stick. Camacho was a Spanish-speaking witness; he was already setting the stage to claim that he did not understand the admonition. Which was nonsense. Camacho had felt confident enough of his English to testify without an interpreter at the grand jury hearing. In fact, his English was excellent.

Was he ruined as a witness? Anything he said on the stand would be tainted by the fact that he’d sold his story, a story that was worth more to the tabloids if it incriminated Simpson. If we had the knife itself, it might have been worth our effort to overcome this taint. But we didn’t have the knife.

“I say we don’t call him,” I blurted. I looked around the table for reaction. Gil, as usual, was hard to read. Dan Murphy, one of the D.A.‘s top assistants, was leaning back in his chair, eyes turned to the ceiling, hand to cheek. Frank Sundstedt was slumped into his chair, hands folded together against his chest-his characteristic contemplative pose.

“Trial’s a long way away,” Frank said finally. “By the time you start picking a jury, this story won’t even be a blip on the screen. If we do turn up the knife, Camacho’s testimony will be important. I think we ought to preserve it, just in case he takes a powder.”

Frank had a point. If a witness testifies at a preliminary hearing, that testimony is usually admissible at trial even if the witness has absconded. That would be useful if by some chance we found the knife. Gil agreed: we’d put Camacho on. I understood their reasoning, but I doubted it would be worth the nasty hits we were going to take for putting on such a damaged witness. More specifically-the hits I was going to take. It was one thing to agree in principle around a conference table. But somebody has to stand up there with a straight face and present this opportunist as a witness for the People.

Our whole team worked like maniacs preparing for the prelims. I had no time to worry about how big the case was getting; it was all I could do to gather and organize all the material. After all, we had a week to do a job that normally we’d have had three months to complete. The day before the prelims were set to start was especially hectic. Shapiro filed his motion to suppress the evidence seized at Rockingham before Phil tried to get a warrant. We’d expected this, but just not so soon. So we got a judge to postpone testimony on the motion until we had some time to prepare. Then we went back upstairs to work.

We stayed until after nine on the eve of the prelims. I was sure that most of the press would have retreated to their respective hotel bars by then. Instead, as Suzanne, Bill, and I walked out the back of the CCB, we saw that the parking lot was more crowded than a tailgate party on homecoming weekend. For the past week, it had been jammed with vans, satellite dishes, and lunch wagons. ABC, NBC, CBS had all erected scaffolds that resembled medieval assault engines. The correspondents themselves, however, displayed the more modern enthusiasm of fans vamping behind the bleachers before the big game.

Suzanne wasn’t surprised: for the past few days her office had been handling hundreds of calls every hour, from every corner of the world. Just about all the callers, of course, wanted interviews.

Out of nowhere, a reporter with a video cameraman behind him shoved a mike in our faces.

“How do you feel tonight? Are you ready for court tomorrow? he asked.

Bill tossed off an innocuous one-liner as we hustled out of range.

I’d begun to realize that no matter what happened in court, the sheer amplitude of media coverage would distort these proceedings like never before. It made me feel out of control, angry and helpless.

I tried not to dwell on those things the next morning as I scrambled to get Matt ready for school and organize my thoughts at the same time. Just do what you always do, I told myself. I would repeat that many times to myself in the next year.

I arrived on time that morning. I believe I was even early. Bill and I had witnesses stashed all over the eighteenth floor and we ducked in and out of offices, touching base with them, reassuring them. Our last stop was the room used for press conferences. When Bill opened the door, I found myself face-to-face with a roomful of strangers. They were tense, their faces expectant. The victims’ families.

Usually, I meet with the next of kin almost immediately after I get a case. I go out to their homes or they come in to the office to meet me. Wherever they feel more comfortable. It’s important to make that connection right from the start. The unusual circumstances of this case had caused me to proceed more cautiously. For most of the first week after the murders, the case was not officially mine. It was a bad idea, I thought, to make contact and set about establishing rapport with these deeply hurt people when there was a chance that I might not be assigned to the case for keeps. The District Attorney’s office should convey to a victim’s family the feeling of strength and certainty. And that could not happen if they were being passed around from deputy to deputy.

The cops had interviewed them, of course. Gil had spoken to them to convey his sympathy. They had been commended to the care of our “victims’ coordinator,” whose job it is to accompany them to court and answer their questions. I had had brief phone conversations with the Browns and the Goldmans several days earlier, but only to introduce myself. I was hoping they would forgive the awkwardness of meeting under these circumstances.

On one side of the room were the Browns, awesomely handsome and erect. Lou and Juditha, flanked by Denise, Dominique, and Tanya. The suspect was their son-in-law, their brother-in-law. Exactly what stance they were taking toward him was still unclear to me. I found them very hard to read.

On the other side of the room stood the Goldmans. Ron’s father, Fred; his stepmother, Patti; and, of course, Kim, a reed-thin girl whose pretty features were red and swollen from crying. Looking at her made me recall the pang I’d felt upon seeing her brother’s face for the first time, in the coroner’s photos.

“What’s going to happen now?” asked Patti Goldman. She was a petite woman with large, lovely green eyes. Fred stood with his arm draped around her protectively.

“We’ll have some motions to begin with, nothing major,” I said. “The defense has filed a motion to suppress evidence, but that will be heard later during the hearing.”

“Suppress the evidence!” Denise Brown snapped. “What do you mean?”

I could understand why this idea offended her. She would later express her concerns to reporters in even stronger terms. “If he’s innocent,” she would ask, “why does he want to suppress evidence?”

“It’s a motion we see a lot,” I explained. “The defense claims the police got evidence illegally, and they’ve asked the judge to throw it out. We’re prepared for that and I don’t think there’s any chance that the judge will grant it.”

We talked a little more about the sorts of things that the defense was likely to do. No matter how hurtful it might seem, I told them, they shouldn’t take it personally.

Easy for me to say.

At 9:10 A.M. on June 30, 1994, Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell bade us good morning and looked over her courtroom. It was packed-the hottest ticket in Hollywood. Only ten seats were available to the general public, and the media folk had to scramble to secure one of the twenty-five seats set aside for them. But no one had to miss a thing: the best seat in the house was reserved for the cameras.

I’d never appeared before Judge Kennedy-Powell before, but I’d actually worked with her in the eighties when she was deputy D.A. I knew her as a hardworking, conscientious prosecutor who took her job very seriously. She looked at ease on the bench. But we couldn’t get down to business. Someone was missing.

“Well, I guess the defendant is not out yet,” Judge Kennedy-Powell observed.

“This is the quietest courtroom I’ve ever been in, Your Honor,” Shapiro quipped, trying to fill the dead time.

“I don’t know how long that will remain, but we’ll see,” Kennedy-Powell smiled.

At last, the door opened. The courtroom went silent. O. J. Simpson strode in, impeccably dressed, looking surprisingly fit. What an impressive transformation from the bedraggled, confused defendant who had appeared for his arraignment. His new role was the O.J. You Know and Love, Falsely Accused. And no Shakespearean actor would play this one better.

Judge Kennedy-Powell asked the record to reflect the defendant’s presence and asked counsel to present themselves.

“Marcia Clark for the People,” I began.

It’s hard to believe that my first act that day was arguing about the hairs on O. J. Simpson’s head. But it’s true.

we’d requested hair samples from Simpson, so we could determine whether his matched several found at the crime scene. Shapiro had offered us a ludicrously insufficient number: three. It was up to me to argue first.

Oblivious to the hype and cameras, I launched right into my reasoning. This was my job; I had been doing it for years. Carefully, I explained how we needed samples from various parts of the head; the usual quantity is a hundred hairs. But only the criminalist taking the samples could determine how many were needed.

“Mr. Shapiro?” asked Judge Kennedy-Powell.

“Your Honor,” he said soberly, “according to Dr. Henry Lee, our chief criminalist, who is the head of the Department of Criminology in Connecticut, he tells us one to three hairs are sufficient.”

Judge Kennedy-Powell mused aloud that she had never seen a case where the prosecution was limited to a sample of three hairs. But then she faltered. She would not let us take more than ten hairs unless we could present expert witnesses who could establish how many hairs were required for a valid sample.

I was ready. Our expert was Michele Kestler, director of the SID crime lab. She backed me up in saying that a case like this commonly required seventy-five to one hundred strands.

On cross-examination, Shapiro immediately assumed the glacial pace that would become his trademark. He insisted upon a detailed recitation of Kestler’s credentials, her résumé, her experience-everything but what she ate for breakfast. He had her recite all sorts of minutiae about her profession and the specific samples of blood and hair she had received from our searches. Shapiro again cited the source for his contention that only a single hair was required.

“Are you familiar with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Henry Lee?” he asked her.

She was.

“Have you seen his fifty-page curriculum vitae lately?” he asked. Give me a break. And then Shapiro asked Kestler what sources she had relied upon for her opinion that seventy-five to one hundred hairs were required.

Michele produced a book co-authored and edited by none other than Dr. Henry Lee.

Judge Kennedy-Powell gave us our hundred hairs.

I savored that small victory even as I realized what this skirmish meant: nothing in this case would be conceded without interminable bickering.

Bill, bless his heart, had agreed to put on the knife salesman, Jose Camacho. It was predictably painful. Bill walked Camacho through a straightforward account of selling the stiletto to Simpson the morning of May 9. Then Bill fronted the Enquirer business. The clerk seemed like a harmless little man. I don’t think he was a liar, just a sellout. How he would have looked in the eyes of a jury, I don’t know. That question was rendered academic by the advent of a mysterious manila envelope.

It seemingly materialized from thin air. One minute, in the middle of Camacho’s testimony, Judge Kennedy-Powell left the courtroom, and the next minute she was back, producing with a flourish a yellow manila envelope containing some sort of solid object. She’d received, she said, an envelope containing evidence collected by a special court master at the defense’s request. She intended to open it. Shapiro shot out of his seat with an objection. I chimed in with one of my own. You didn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to guess what was sealed inside: a knife. But I couldn’t be sure. And for months down the road I wouldn’t be sure. Periodically, we would file motions to compel the defense to reveal the contents. The defense would object and our motion would be tabled. This happened time and again.

We were well into the criminal trial by the time we were allowed to learn that the envelope did indeed contain a stiletto. The report said that it had been discovered by Jason Simpson in the medicine cabinet of Simpson’s bathroom. Then it had been turned over by Shapiro to a special court master, who gave it to Judge Kennedy-Powell. (Shapiro was unhappy that she introduced it at the prelim-apparently he’d been hoping to blindside us with this evidence during the trial.) The knife’s discovery was supposedly made after our second search of June 28.

I never believed the medicine cabinet story. I’d been at Rockingham all through the second search, and the rooms had been taken to pieces by officers looking specifically for that knife. But the question was largely academic. The knife didn’t matter. It is too easy to boil a knife to destroy traces of blood and tissue. It is not difficult to go out and buy a duplicate. No coroner could say with certainty that it was the murder weapon. Knives, unlike guns, do not smoke: they do not leave proof-positive evidentiary calling cards. If I’d really pressed to get it into evidence, however, I’m sure that all I would have gotten was a spanking-clean knife, property of a known collector of weapons. In the end, we let the stiletto rest in its eight-by-eleven manila envelope-where, I believe, it remains today.

Eventually, I imagine, O. J. Simpson will reclaim it and auction it off on Larry King Live.

After the knife interlude, we were finally able to begin proving that there was sufficient cause to charge our defendant. We clicked through the civilian witnesses briskly. Shapiro’s cross-examination was uniformly ineffective, so there was little or no cleanup needed on redirect. Every single witness helped our presentation.

One key witness was Steven Schwab, the dog walker who had first encountered Nicole’s Akita running loose in the neighborhood. We hadn’t been able to get him up before the grand jury, but his testimony was crucial to our time line. If the murders were committed after eleven o’clock, Simpson would be home free: he couldn’t possibly have done the killing and hooked up with the limo driver in time. The problem was that the first time Schwab talked to police, he said that he believed he’d first seen the Akita around 11:15 P.M. This statement was made to the cops at about five on the morning after the murders; Schwab had been awakened from a deep sleep and was slightly confused about times. Upon more clear-minded reflection, however, he realized he’d actually seen the dog at about 10:45.

Usually a prior inconsistent statement by a witness is a credibility killer. At best, you’re left doubting the witness’s memory; at worst, his honesty. But Schwab was so sturdily forthright you just knew he’d made an honest mistake. He endeared himself to the spectators in court by recounting the process by which he had verified in his own mind the Akita encounter. He had an unvarying nightly routine, centered on old reruns. A cable network showed his favorites and he always watched the Dick Van Dyke Show, which ended at 10:30. Then he would take his dog for a half-hour walk, returning in time to catch the opening minutes of the eleven P.M. showing of Mary Tyler Moore.

Such banal details mark all of our daily lives and give our days some predictability. Schwab’s recitation drew laughter, but no one could doubt the truth of his testimony. He had seen the dog at 10:45, not 11:15. Our time line was secure.

Pablo Fenjves was my essential “dog bark” witness, the neighbor who heard the Akita’s “plaintive wail” starting at 10:15 P.M. His description of that sound lodged in the memories of reporters and public alike. Taken in tandem with Sukru Boztepe and Bettina Rasmussen’s solemn, emotional account of finding Nicole’s body, it seemed to cast an eerie spell over the gallery. We were still in that state of morbid dislocation when Judge Kennedy-Powell dismissed us for the Fourth of July weekend.

I spent very little of that weekend at home. I worked all day Saturday. And on Sunday morning I drove out to Bundy, to the little condominium on the downscale side of Sunset.

For the past few days I been increasingly anxious to scope out the condo. I had not been to Bundy since the morning after the murders, and then I’d been detained at the perimeter, like a bystander. The condo’s various appointments-the security gate, the dog leap stairway, the landing where Nicole lay, the fenced-in corner where Ron was killed-had all become part of the public’s collective consciousness. Yet to me they remained abstractions.

I met up with Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter at the rear of the condo. Bill was there, too, as were Patti Jo and several officers from Robbery/Homicide. We were all silently relieved that the media hadn’t trailed us.

We’d gathered in the lane at the rear of the condo, when Lieutenant John Rogers noticed blood-drops of blood, on the back gate. What the hell? We stopped dead in our tracks and looked at one another. Could Dennis Fung have overlooked this crucial evidence on the morning of the thirteenth? We stopped everything and called for a criminalist.

The realization that we’d probably just stumbled upon another incredible fuckup cast a pall over the party.

Tom led us down the walkway toward the front of the condo. I could still see some of the blood droplets and the faint outlines of the bloody shoe prints, mere ghosts of the images I’d seen countless times in photographs. What had it been like, I wondered, for the officers that night to see all this evidence lying before them? I’d never seen so much left at a crime scene. This murder was obviously the work of an amateur.

At the front of the condo I stood on the upper landing and looked down on the area enclosed by the front gate. It was cramped and dark, even smaller than photos could convey. I turned to Bill and said, “The jury has to see this. When they realize how small it is, they’ll understand how impossible it would be for two men to have fit in here to commit the murders.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” he replied, clearly as moved as I was. Then, ever practical: “We’ll have to get a motion going on it.”

We’d been told by Nicole’s friend Ron Hardy that the intercom controlling the lock on the front gate was broken. If Nicole had wanted to let a visitor in, she’d had to go down and open the gate manually. If this was true, it was easy to conceive how Nicole and Ron were both at the front gate when Simpson moved in for the kill.

He could have attacked Nicole from behind, hitting her on the head, making a quick cut to her neck, and slamming her into the staircase wall. She would have been knocked unconscious long enough for him to deal with Ron before going back to dispatch her with the coup de grâce.

Frankly, I favored a slightly different scenario: Nicole Simpson hears something outside-the sounds made by her ex-husband lurking in the shrubs around her condo. Nicole steps outside to investigate. She ventures down to the front gate, looks down the walkway and into the shrubbery to the north. Nothing. And then, when she turns to mount the steps, to reenter the house where her children are sleeping, she walks right into him, smack into the man who she had vowed would no longer be the center of her life. He is dressed for silent combat-dark sweats, knit cap, gloves. He has come to take her life.

Somewhere during this time, Ron Goldman, on his innocuous errand, appears. Perhaps Ron has come up the walk while Simpson is in the midst of his stiletto mêlée. Why doesn’t he flee? Perhaps he has come too close and can’t escape. Or perhaps-and this seemed a stronger likelihood-Ron feels compelled to come to Nicole’s aid. He is about to engage in an act of selflessness that will lead to his death.

In either case, my strong feeling is that Simpson did not have to confront both of his victims simultaneously.

He murders first one, then the other.

The blood pools on the sidewalk.

The dog howls.

How many minutes for each?

How many times on other cases had I worked through this same gory calculus? You can never quite capture the factor of pain.

Like Rockingham, the interior of Nicole’s condo at Bundy was white with some muted pastels for accent. It had the tranquil, static quality of a photograph from House Beautiful. The kitchen was tidy, nothing out of place. In the center of the sunken living room sat a large square table. On it stood several candles, which had been burning on the night of the murders. The spent wax had dried in a pool around them. But everything in that room seemed like wax. Cold. Solid. Lifeless.

Nicole’s bedroom was done in the same white and pastels, but the room felt anything but tranquil. Attached to one of the posts of her large four-poster bed was a pair of toy handcuffs. Something else interested me about the bed: the blankets and sheets. They lay in a rumpled heap, just as they’d been found by the first officer on the scene. Until now I had left open the possibility that Nicole had sexual designs on Ron. If so, I figured it had been a spontaneous idea, occurring after Juditha Brown lost her glasses. But the sight of Nicole’s messy bed made me doubt this theory. What woman plans an intimate night with a man and leaves the bed unmade? You just wouldn’t do it. Not even if you intended to limit your fooling around to the couch downstairs.

Ordinarily I would not have allowed myself such intimate speculations about a woman I’d never met. And yet a couple of times of late I’d been surprised by a sense of connection to Nicole. Looking back on it, I don’t know why it seemed so improbable that I might identify with a woman who was taking her first toddler steps into the world after divorce. And yet it seemed strange to me at the time. The sight of Nicole’s chaotic bed and the cold dead wax of her candles chilled me. So did the memory of her pale, bloodless face. And so I did what I always do with emotions too painful to confront: I pushed them to the back of my mind.

Things continued going well for us the following week. The limo driver, Allan Park, was concise and unimpeachably credible. I even managed to extract some new information from the eternally stumbling Kato Kaelin. His recounting of Simpson’s activities that night preserved our time line, and the description he gave of the thumps outside his cottage and the confusion around Simpson’s attempt to hook up with the limo driver made a clear pitch to the judge-and to millions on television-that something undeniably suspicious was afoot at the Rockingham residence.

Then, late on Tuesday, July 5, we began arguments on the defense’s search-and-seizure motion. A lot was riding on it. The main target, of course, was the Rockingham glove. Shapiro would have tried any kind of crazy stunt to keep that out of the record. At the heart of his argument to suppress was the allegation that all four officers went out to Rockingham that morning believing Simpson was a suspect. In that case, they might have needed a warrant to enter the grounds.

By now I’d looked thoroughly into these allegations. In follow-up interviews, all four detectives led me through their individual movements during the early-morning hours of June 13. I’d read all of their reports and made notes on my informal conversations with each of them.

What I heard was encouraging: the four were acting under official orders to make a humanitarian notification-and that in itself went a good distance toward discrediting the defense’s claim. In murder cases, you always try to notify the next of kin personally. Sometimes cops will drive two hours to make the contact. And when the case involves a celebrity, there’s even more urgency-you don’t want the first notification to come from the media.

The officers had just come from a scene where two victims had been savagely slain. Simpson’s two young children had been roused from their beds at Bundy and were at West L.A. Station waiting for their father or some other member of the family to pick them up. Where was he? Was he all right? The uncertainty mounted when they reached Rockingham and rang the buzzer at the Ashford gate. No answer. For nearly ten minutes, no reply.

Finally, Ron Phillips got Simpson’s phone number from the private security service. He called it on his cell phone, letting it ring over and over again. No response. The detectives fell back to try and figure out what kind of situation they had. It didn’t feel right that the place should be deserted at 5:30 in the morning. Especially considering that the lights were on and cars were in the driveway.

They were reviewing their options when Mark Fuhrman walked down to the white Ford Bronco parked just outside the Rockingham gate. The way it was parked, rear wheels jutting out from the curb, struck him as odd. He pulled out his penlight and began to examine the vehicle more closely. A package in the cargo area was addressed to Orenthal Productions. Fuhrman moved around the car with his penlight and when he came to the driver’s door he stopped. On the clean surface he noticed a tiny dark spot. He called Phil over. They both agreed: it looked like blood.

There was a real possibility that someone was in danger. Their choices: leave and get a search warrant, in which case precious minutes would be lost, or go in right away and hope they weren’t too late. Everything spelled urgency. Phil decided to go in. He asked Mark, who was the youngest and fittest of the four, to climb over the wall and open the gate. Fuhrman did so and opened the gate from inside. The detectives knocked on the front door and got no answer, so they went to the back of the house, fanning their flashlights around the pool area looking for signs of disturbance-or more victims. Nothing.

I asked all the cops whether they’d done a thorough search of the grounds-waded through shrubbery or gone inside the pool house. They all told me no. That wasn’t their goal. They were looking for bodies or for someone who could tell them how to reach O. J. Simpson.

When they found Kato Kaelin and Arnelle Simpson in their respective guest houses, they learned that Simpson wasn’t there. Mark told me how he and Ron Phillips had approached the first of the guest rooms at the back of the house. Ron looked through the glass door and saw someone on the bed. When they knocked, a white man in his thirties came to the door. He appeared dazed and confused.

I laughed to myself when I heard this. Kato always seemed that way. Mark had shone a penlight into his eyes to see if he appeared to be under the influence of drugs. Not visibly. Mark then checked his clothes and boots for blood. Clearly, Mark, at least, considered him a potential suspect. Kato told Mark Furhman about the thump on the wall. When Mark went outside to investigate, he saw a small lump, barely visible, on the ground. As he drew nearer, the lump began to take the shape of a glove. Earlier that morning, he’d seen a glove lying on the ground between the victims at Bundy. Was this its mate?

Until that point, no one inside the house had been searching for evidence. Only when Mark returned to tell them what he’d found did that change. Fuhrman escorted the others to the site, one by one. By the time it was Phil’s turn, the sky had lightened so that he was able to see without the aid of a flashlight. As he looked toward the Bronco parked just outside the Rockingham gate, he noticed spots on the cobblestoned driveway. He moved for a closer look. Again, blood. The drops stretched between the Bronco and the front door.

That was enough for Phil. He declared Rockingham a crime scene and called for a criminalist. Shortly after that, he left to prepare the warrant.

The big question seemed to be whether Vannatter, Lange, Fuhrman, and Phillips had gone to Rockingham early that morning to notify Simpson-or to investigate him. Believe me, I grilled Phil with plenty of hard questions.

“Phil, man,” I said. “You’re tellin’ me straight that you didn’t think that Simpson might be a suspect when you went out there?”

Phil was unshakable. All that he would say was that Simpson was a “potential suspect,” just like everyone else who had come in contact with the victim. He was not an actual suspect, meaning they had no actual evidence linking him to the murders.

“We took Mark and Ron along so they could stay with him, get his kids out of the station, and calm him down when we went back to the crime scene,” he insisted.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “But really, Phil, didn’t you consider him a suspect after Mark told you he’d been out to the place before?”

This was one aspect of the case that puzzled me. Back in the mid-eighties, when he was still a patrolman, Mark Fuhrman had been called out to 360 North Rockingham for some unspecified family-dispute call. This was a fact that he apparently had confided in his superior, Ron Phillips, on the morning of June 13. Ron, in turn, told Phil, who professed not to know quite what to make of it. Later I would receive, among documents sent over by the City Attorney’s office, the copy of a letter Fuhrman had written at that office’s request to shore up its 1989 battery case against Simpson. In the letter, Mark had mentioned how he’d come upon O. J. Simpson pacing in his driveway. Nicole sat on the hood of a Mercedes-Benz, its windshield shattered, apparently by Simpson wielding a baseball bat. When Fuhrman inquired as to what had happened, Simpson replied, “I broke the windshield… it’s mine… there’s no trouble here.” Fuhrman had asked Nicole if she’d wanted to make a report, and she’d said no.

The most curious part of the letter was its closing: “It seems odd to remember such an event, but it is not every day that you respond to a celebrity’s home for a family dispute. For this reason this incident was indelibly pressed in my memory.”

This squared perfectly with the Mark Fuhrman I had seen admiring the bronze statue of Simpson on the morning of June 13. Clearly, Fuhrman adored the Juice and was not about to arrest him if he didn’t have to. Still, didn’t the mere fact that Fuhrman knew of prior domestic violence between the Simpsons color the cops’ thinking about Simpson as a suspect on the morning they left Bundy for Rockingham?

“Frankly, all I remember was him saying he’d been there a long time ago and it may have involved domestic violence. It was a passing remark and it didn’t mean much at the time. A call from ten years ago sure didn’t add up to what we saw at Bundy.”

Do I think Phil was naive? Yes. Do I think he was lying? No. That conviction grows stronger as time wears on. What you had in this situation was four cops who, on one hand, worshiped O. J. Simpson-and on the other, were seriously shaken by the mayhem at Bundy. I believe in my heart that they were actually resisting the idea that the Juice could have caused this horror.

Everything about the situation bore out their story. They’d left Bundy without so much as a whisper to anyone to advance the investigation. They hadn’t even called the coroner. Why? They thought they’d be right back. Their actions at Rockingham were also consistent with their story. Once over the wall, they’d done nothing more than check the grounds with their flashlights, looking for other victims, until they reached Kato. When Arnelle let them into the house, they waited as she tried to locate her father. They didn’t so much as open a drawer in all that time. They didn’t venture upstairs. How did that conform with the notion that they’d come to Rockingham to grab their number-one suspect? It didn’t.

As a witness in the preliminary hearings, Mark Fuhrman was simply splendid. He remained poised and patient in the face of defense attorney Gerald Uelmen’s pedantic and long-winded cross. He sounded like a model cop.

The public has long since forgotten this fact, but the press had begun lionizing Fuhrman even before he left the courtroom. They followed him down the corridor, clamoring for sound bites. As I watched this scene unfold, I had an uneasy feeling. Now I know why. I’ve come to recognize reflexive adulation as the kiss of death.

Suddenly Mark turned and waved off the reporters. He looked my way and motioned me over. We pulled away from the crowd.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said urgently. “But this has to remain confidential. I can’t tell anyone but you.”

What, I thought, could be so damned urgent? I was hip-deep in motions and had no time for distractions.

“Can’t it wait?”

“No. I’ve got to tell you now,” he replied. He sat down on one of the benches that lined the court hallways. This forced me to stop and sit beside him. I glanced conspicuously at my watch.

“Marcia, you have to know about this because the press is going to pick it up any minute,” he continued. “A long time ago, I thought I wanted to leave the force. I was strung out over my divorce and feeling burnt out. I put in for a stress disability claim. There’s a file with some shrink’s reports in it. Mine claimed I said things that I never said. He got it all wrong. I tried to get them to take it out, but I couldn’t. When the press gets hold of it, they’ll smear me to kingdom come.”

“Well, what exactly did you say… or did he claim you said?” I asked. I was hoping this was a tempest in a teapot. It is not an uncommon thing for government employees, especially cops, to try and get out early, with their pensions and benefits intact, on a stress disability claim. They would invent stories about how they were falling apart, couldn’t handle the job, were suicidal. The claims were often nonsense. And everybody knew it. “Anyway, I don’t know how anyone can get a shrink’s files,” I told him. “I thought that stuff was privileged.”

Why did he seem so certain that the press would get to it?

“I don’t know, but I know they will,” he insisted. “I just wanted you to be prepared.”

At the time, Mark’s concern sounded to me like paranoia. I couldn’t imagine what would be in those reports that would be so awful, nor could I understand how it could all become public knowledge as easily as he implied. As for being prepared, Mark was not helping me out with specifics. Once I got clear of the prelims, I would have to get that file myself. Certainly Mark could request it. For the moment, however, I wanted reassurance on one point only.

“Mark,” I asked slowly, “is there anything in that file that would affect the truth of what you said on the witness stand? Is your testimony all accurate?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he told me. “This has nothing to do with this case at all. That stuff was a long time ago.”

I’ve been asked a million times since why I didn’t know all about Mark Fuhrman and his disability-claim file. The truth is simple. No one told me. Phil Vannatter swore to me afterward that neither he nor Tom had a clue. I believe him. Cops generally do not gossip outside their own divisions. A guy from the Wilshire Division isn’t going to tell tales about the guys from his office even to cops in another area of town.

Frankly, I didn’t know what to do with the information Mark had given me. In hindsight, of course, I should have requested the file immediately. But in the heat of the moment, I just made a mental note to check it out. To be honest, it seemed that Mark was just getting a bit panicky at being thrust into the spotlight. I certainly had no reason to think that it would turn into a major issue. At that moment, the most important thing was getting back to the courtroom, where Phil Vannatter was due on the stand. If we lost the search-and-seizure motion, all the Mark Fuhrman evidence wouldn’t matter.

Gerald Uelmen had argued for the defense. The officers, he charged, were not so much interested in notifying Simpson or attempting to stop a potential crime in progress as in conducting an illegal investigation. He wound up by quoting Justice Louis Brandeis, hinting darkly that the Fourth Amendment itself was at risk.

When I took the podium I congratulated Uelmen on his rhetoric.

“But none of… the fine quotations can change the facts as they existed on those early morning hours,” I said. “He attempts to depict in very graphic terms the search… as though a Sherman tank were being driven through the backyard and being plowed in through the doors. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth.” I refuted his arguments point by point, walking the judge through the June 13 events as the police saw them: Their vision of the scene at Bundy. Their uncertainty about what was happening at Rockingham. The blood. The thumps of an intruder. How quickly it all happened. How, if someone had been bleeding and cops had waited for a warrant, we now would all have been calling them derelict and incompetent.

Judge Kennedy-Powell agreed. She upheld the warrant.

I felt that we were home free. We’d already established a time line, and the next step was putting Simpson at the scene of the crime. That’s where the blood expert I had worked so hard to get on our team, Greg Matheson, came in. His testimony was pure dynamite. Only 0.5 percent of the population could have left the blood in the trail at Bundy. And Simpson was one of that tiny group! It was hard evidence that linked Simpson, and very few others, to the crime scene. Of those others, how many had blood in their cars and blood on their driveways? How many knew the victim, Nicole?

On Friday, July 8, Judge Kennedy-Powell ruled. “The court has carefully considered the evidence in this case and the arguments of counsel,” she said. “There is sufficient cause to believe this defendant guilty.”

I can’t represent it as a stunning victory. It was the outcome I’d expected. And yet, in this season of the unexpected, who knew?

For the next few days, as we ramped up preparation for the trial we now knew would be held, things almost seemed normal.

And then, suddenly, the timbers collapsed beneath our feet.

It was the third weekend in July, a little over a week after the end of the prelim. I had taken the kids to play at the home of one of my fellow D.A.s, who also had children. We were in the backyard when my beeper went off. I didn’t recognize the number, but that wasn’t unusual-I had been bombarded by calls since this case began. I went inside to return the call. It was Mark Fuhrman.

“I guess you know about The New Yorker,” he said glumly.

Dread started its prickly progress up my spine.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’m sitting here with a couple of executives from Channel Seven. They want to give me a spot to tell my side of the story. Marcia, I really think I should do this.”

Mark thought his new friends at Channel Seven were real “straight shooters,” and he handed me over to a young woman who proceeded to read to me from an advance copy of a New Yorker article by a writer named Jeffrey Toobin: “An Incendiary Defense.”

In it, a lawyer for the defense, who spoke on condition of anonymity, laid out how the Simpson team intended to portray Fuhrman as a racist rogue cop who had planted the bloody glove at Rockingham in an attempt to frame Simpson. Shapiro, I thought. It had to be Shapiro. The idea that he would even attempt such a thing was monstrous. My nausea deepened when the cheery TV producer read me quotes from Fuhrman’s psychiatric file. How out of control is this? Not only am I first hearing this information from the press, but even that account is secondhand.

How on earth did a reporter get hold of a cop’s psychiatric records? The only legal way I know of getting into an officer’s personnel file is by bringing what is called a Pitchess motion. The defense usually files one when a defendant is charged with assault on a police officer or with resisting arrest. If the defense can show that the cop had a history of such misconduct, it’s a great way to pump up the credibility of that claim. But that wasn’t an issue in this case. Fuhrman hadn’t even seen Simpson, let alone arrested him.

According to the story, Fuhrman had been an enthusiastic marine, but he had purportedly told Dr. Ronald Koegler that he had stopped enjoying his military service because “there were these Mexicans, niggers, volunteers, and they would tell me they weren’t going to do something.” He told another shrink, a Dr. John Hochman, that his work among street gangs in East L.A. had given him “the urge to kill people that upset me.”

I just couldn’t imagine Mark having said things this awful. I couldn’t believe that was how he felt. I asked the producer for the date of the report. It went back to the early eighties. That was a long time ago. Had he really believed all that, or was he just saying something outrageous to support a disability claim?

After Mark had made his urgent but vague references to this file in the hallway after his testimony, I’d made a note to follow up. A week later, it was still on my “To Do” list.

I’ve thought about that a lot in retrospect. And when I find myself beating myself up over it, I stop myself and ask, “Would history have been changed so radically if I’d run right down and filed a request for that disability file right after Mark told me about it?” Probably not. After all, it was too late to keep Mark off the stand. He’d already testified. About the only advantage I would have had was not being blindsided by this call from Channel Seven.

“Let me talk to Mark,” I said to the producer firmly. My tone must have scared her; she put him back on immediately.

“Do you believe that shit, Marcia?” he asked me.

“About planting the glove? That’s ridiculous. But it may not matter what I think once people get a load of those shrinks’ reports.”

“I never said that stuff! That’s what I was trying to tell you before. I just told him I hated gang bangers. I couldn’t stand the way they screwed over innocent people. I don’t know how he got all that shit in there.”

“Is that how you feel now?”

“Hell, no. I’m no racist, Marcia. You can ask anyone. Some of my good friends are black. Shit, ask Danette Meyers if you don’t believe me.”

I knew Danette Meyers, a striking African-American woman who was a D.A. in Santa Monica. She was smart, feisty, and nobody’s fool. She certainly wouldn’t tolerate racist crap from anyone. I needed to talk to her. But for the moment, I had to take a very, very deep breath and think this through.

What were the actual chances of Fuhrman’s shrink report coming into evidence? Pretty slim. I felt I could successfully argue that a shrink’s report from a decade before the crime in question was too ancient to be admissible. But in practical terms, what would it matter? The article, with all the attendant publicity, would ensure that anyone out there with a pulse would know about Mark’s statements to his psychiatrists. Which is exactly what Shapiro wanted when he planted his poison with a stooge holding a press card.

So the nightmare began. It was, however, not unprecedented. In countless cases involving a black defendant, the defense makes some effort to play the race card. But in this case, one would have thought that this particular odious card just wasn’t in the deck. It just seemed so patently inappropriate: O. J. Simpson lived a rich man’s life among friends who were, by and large, white. His ex-wife and current girlfriend were white. His entire legal team was white. How, I wondered, could Shapiro or Uelmen sell a racial defense?

As for the planting theory, it was more bizarre than anything I’d heard of so far. How would Shapiro account for the fact that other cops had been at the Bundy crime scene and viewed the evidence before Mark arrived?

“So what do you think about my talking to Channel Seven?” Mark asked me again.

“I want to talk to Gil about this,” I told him. “Tell them to sit tight for now.”

I don’t think I’d ever paged Gil Garcetti before. “Sorry to bother you on a weekend,” I told him when he called me back, “but there’s something you should know about.” I laid out the damage.

He had no instant panacea, and who would have expected one? This isn’t one of the situations they teach you about in law school. “Just when you think you’ve heard them all…” he finally said, his voice trailing off. “Let me think about this. I’ll call you back.”

Gil phoned me again about a half an hour later and told me to deny Mark permission to do the interview. “I think we have to keep playing by our usual rules,” he said. Mark wasn’t happy when I told him, but he agreed to go along with us. I promised him we’d talk on Monday.

Outside in the sunlit yard, the children were giggling uncontrollably. I shut out everything for the moment except the sweetness of that scene. Fortunately, they hadn’t a clue about the misery that could befall adults. I needed to regain my perspective. In the months to come I would find myself grasping at the strangest diversions to restore that precious clarity. But at the moment it was enough to join the kids on the swing set and let them push me until I could see my feet against the sky.