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.”