Danielle was nervous about coming to our office. She’d seen how reporters pounced on anyone they suspected had been speaking to the prosecution, and she wanted no part of it. This distinguished her from any number of wannabe starlets who’d had even fleeting contact with any of the main players in the case and now were coming out of the woodwork and selling their stories to evening newsmagazines. This one wanted anonymity. Cool. We came up with a plan to meet her in an alley a short distance from the apartment of one of her friends.
Bill and I got into Phil Vannatter’s car, D.A. investigators flanking us before and behind. As we drove, Phil kept in radio contact with our escort. So far, so good. No tail spotted. I was beginning to think that we could all use a few weeks in therapy to lose the paranoia. No sooner had we pulled into the alley, however, than Phil pointed off to the left. Two men in sunglasses sat in a parked nuthin’-special car. One of the investigators checked them out-sure enough, they were reporters from a local TV station. He shooed them off like cowbirds.
We didn’t mention this little episode to Danielle. Poor kid was freaked out enough as it was. And all for nothing. As she stammered through her story it became clear to me that she might have simply misunderstood Rachel, whose main concern was not what Kato had done when, but that he had dragged her into this mess at all.
On the drive home, I was still boiling about the leak. What had alerted the station? A phone tap? A comment overheard in the hall? We never did find out. But after that we doubled our precautions. No more talking on cell phones. We had our cars and offices swept for bugs. From that point on, there was no more talking about the case in public. Not in the halls, not in the elevators, not even in the johns.
Meanwhile, the Fuhrman controversy showed no signs of slackening. It irritated the hell out of me to be drawn off the preparation of the case by diversionary tactics of the defense. But I also knew we’d never get back on track until we faced the problem head-on.
It did not seem logical to me that Fuhrman would try to frame O. J. Simpson with as little information as he’d had at the time he’d found the glove. How, for instance, could he have known that Simpson didn’t have an airtight alibi for the time the murders occurred? How could he know whether an eyewitness, or even an ear witness, might come forward to identify someone else? What if someone stepped forward to confess? How could he know whether Kato had already gone far enough down the south pathway to see the area where the glove was found? Did Fuhrman even have the opportunity to move evidence?
I’d asked the LAPD for a list of all of the officers who’d arrived at Bundy before Mark. There were sixteen of them. Only four had gotten beyond the perimeter to see the evidence near the bodies: Officer Robert Riske, first officer on the scene. Lieutenant Frank Spangler, one of the highest-ranking officers supervising the scene. Sergeant David Rossi, in charge of the patrol officers. And Detective Ron Phillips, Fuhrman’s supervisor, who arrived at precisely the same time Mark did. I interviewed those four men personally, and each was very clear about one thing: there had been one glove, and one glove only, lying between the bodies.
Except for Phillips, none of these guys knew Mark well. They would hardly risk their jobs, not to mention an indictment, to protect him. If their testimony was to be believed, it was a physical impossibility for Mark Fuhrman to have planted evidence.
From where I was sitting, Fuhrman was in the clear. I did my best to reassure him of that. But he was very anxious. Very paranoid. He complained about being treated like a “goddamned suspect.” He complained that the defense was targeting him, trying to destroy him. Things took a turn for the worse when the FBI found a single Caucasian hair on the glove from Rockingham. It most likely belonged to Ron Goldman, but no one could establish this conclusively. The defense asked for hair samples not only from Fuhrman, but from Phil, Tom, and Ron as well.
When I passed this request along to the cops, they went absolutely ballistic.
“We’re not going to be treated like goddamned suspects. Next they’ll want to take our blood,” they huffed.
I warned them that their refusal would look bad, but I said, “Fine. I’ll fight it.” I got myself charged up to oppose a court order for the hair samples. But before I could strap on my armor, the cops had a change of heart. Their attorneys had told them that in refusing, they’d appear to be hiding something. So they agreed to give the hair samples.
I got on the horn to Shapiro. “You won’t need a court order for the hair, Bob,” I told him. Fine, fine. Everything’s cool. I had barely gotten off the line when the cops did another flip-flop. “We’re not giving samples,” they insisted. “We’re not goddamned suspects.” Finally, they complied. And, thank God, when the results came back a few weeks down the line, nobody matched the mystery hair.
The thing that annoyed me was that I’d really gone to bat for those guys, and still they went around grousing that I was disloyal. I could already see the police distancing themselves from this case. By late September, Tom and Phil were “too busy” to do anything I asked. Finally, I just quit calling them and used our D.A. investigators instead.
Annoyed as I was with Tom and Phil, I felt very sorry for them. They’d been beaten down by a barrage of idiotic requests and make-work motions coming their way from the defense team. Shapiro had started his own “investigation” to find the real killer or killers. He’d set up an 800 number that during its first two weeks of operation drew over 250,000 calls. Most of them seemed to come from psychics, psychos, and general cranks who’d had dreams about where the knife was hidden. “Look in the sandbox.” “Look in the tree by the playhouse.” Like we hadn’t thought of that? We got our share of crank callers as well. My favorite was the one who theorized that Simpson, Nicole, and Ron had all sat around in a circle stabbing one another. Crazy stuff. But Tom and Phil had to follow up every lunatic lead or risk being harangued by the defense. After a couple of weeks of this, their expressions were hangdog, their eyes tired. I could just about tell what they were thinking: “We’re too close to retirement to take this bullshit.”
Naturally, Shapiro’s make-work motions ended up on my desk. He wanted murder logs. He wanted dispatching logs. He wanted records of all the people treated for dog bites at emergency wards. The message of this last request, I guess, was that any resident of West L.A. who’d been bitten by a dog during the late hours of Sunday, June 12, 1994, was a potential suspect in the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. That one gave me a laugh. The perpetrator of a grisly double homicide is going to walk into an emergency room to get treated for a dog bite?
As primary litigator, I shouldn’t have been saddled with these day-to-day distractions. I should have been concentrating on building what is called the case-in-chief-the essence of a presentation that proves the defendant committed the crime. But there was absolutely no time for overall planning or, indeed, any creative thought about this case.
After the prelims were over, I’d expected to have a little breathing room to sit down and organize the mountains of evidence gathering around my desk. A case like this one usually takes a year or more to come to trial. Generally, the defense wants to delay things as long as possible to give themselves time to prepare. They are also hoping that key witnesses will die or disappear in the meantime, so they’ll ask for postponement after postponement until either we or the judge says, “Enough, already. Let’s go.”