“Ms. Clark,” he greeted me, in a drawl that suggested an haut bourgeois pedigree. When he rose to shake my hand, I caught the flash of gold cuff links. Bill noticed them, too. They became our private joke. After that, any time we ran into something pretentious, we’d refer to it as “very cuff link.”
Vinson was full of grand plans. He urged us to let him try out our case in front of a mock jury. It would work this way: He’d recruit a demographically diverse group of people to serve as jurors. He’d make a videotape of me giving a final argument for the prosecution, and Bill giving one for the defense. The jurors would deliberate and vote to convict or acquit. We would be allowed to watch them through a one-way mirror.
Bill frowned. I knew that he, like me, favored doing things simply, without all the flash. But I just sipped my Chardonnay and tried to sort out my thoughts before speaking. It was absolutely imperative that the results be kept confidential. Bill and I would have to lay our evidence on the line. We certainly didn’t want that leaked to the press.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Vinson told us confidently. “We’ve never had a problem before.”
So, against my better judgment, and in deference to my boss, I gave my okay to this plan.
This would require some work. After all, pulling together a closing argument was not easy to do. At that point we did not have the DNA evidence back, so I would have to cobble something together from the prelims. It took time we didn’t have, but Bill and I completed our respective arguments, and taped our presentations one evening down in the conference room. Then we sent them off to Vinson.
Several days later, Vinson called me to say that he could not use my tape. It was important that the mock jurors not know which side, prosecution or defense, was sponsoring the testing. I had become “too famous,” he said. If he showed my tape, we’d give ourselves away. He now wanted to redo my argument, with one of his male associates presenting it.
On Saturday, July 23, 1994, Gil, Bill, and I met Vinson at an office building near the airport. The consultant ushered the three of us into a darkened room, where we got the first peek at our “jurors” through a one-way glass. There were ten. Four black, two Hispanic, two Asian, two white. They’d been warned to base their decision solely on the evidence, but they quickly tossed that admonishment to the wind and began kicking around the question of whether Mark Fuhrman could have planted the glove. The battle lines were drawn. Blacks were convinced he had; the others professed neutrality or disbelief. Then they moved on to the juicier, yet totally tangential issue of whether Kato and Nicole had been lovers.
“They were supposed to be talking about our videos, not gossip from the six o’clock news,” I complained to Vinson.
He stepped into the room to remind the group to confine its comments to the evidence.
“Well, yeah,” they argued. “But everyone knows about all this stuff anyway.”
Reluctantly, they agreed to try again. Within two minutes they were off and gossiping on another subject not mentioned on the tape-the Bronco chase. Black jurors believed Simpson had only wanted to visit Nicole’s grave. When one of the more neutral jurors suggested that it might-just might-have been the escape attempt of a guilty man, one of the female blacks shot back with a defense of Simpson, referring to him as “my man O.J.”
“My man?” I thought to myself. The only way he’d be your man is if you were white, twenty-five, and built like a centerfold.
The racial divide did not come as any great shock to us. As early as the second week of the investigation our grand jury adviser, Terry White, had come to us warning that a couple of black female jurors seemed protective of Simpson. They’d gone so far as to say that Nicole “got what she’d deserved.” What was disturbing to me was how the popular media had permeated the thinking of the mock jury. Not a soul among them seemed capable of critical thinking. If it was on TV, it must be true. Of course, many of the reports they’d seen were based upon nothing more substantial than a loose comment dropped in the hallway outside of court, but they had entered the canon as God’s own truth.
The jury hung, five to five.
Naturally, we were deflated. For my part, I was content to take what lessons we could from the session-specifically, the reaffirmation that black females would be a hard sell-and cut our losses. Not so, Don Vinson. He insisted we try again. This time, he wanted to go with a full-blown facsimile of a trial. We’d present more of the scientific evidence and maybe get an idea of how to simplify it. It was likely, he said, that a more detailed presentation would elicit more specific opinions than the knee-jerk loyalties we’d gotten in the first go-round.
I was uneasy about this. It was August now, nearly two months since the murders. If this case had had the normal life cycle of a major criminal trial, the media frenzy would have been slackening. But the madness was actually intensifying. It was a miracle that the results of the first mock jury had not gotten out. How would we keep the details of an even more elaborate dress rehearsal from leaking to the press?
Vinson agreed that keeping the experiment under wraps would be difficult. But the jurors, he said, were required to sign an oath of confidentiality.
“And what do we do if they violate this agreement?” I asked him.
Well, there was really nothing anyone could do, he conceded. But no one in his experience had ever breached an agreement of this kind. To assure secrecy, he proposed doing it out of state-specifically, in Phoenix, Arizona. No one would follow us there, he assured me. People weren’t as hot on this case outside Los Angeles.
So, on August 18, Bill and I met at the airport to catch a flight to Phoenix. When the idea of this trip first came up, Vinson had talked about flying us out on a private jet. He never came through with that. Instead, we were booked on a commercial flight. This should have been our first tip-off to the troubles afoot.
Bill and I hid out in the terminal bar, the only dark, quiet corner that would afford us some privacy while we waited for our flight. Immersed in reviewing our notes, we lost track of the time. Bill looked at his watch and yelped, “We’d better hustle.” We gathered our bags and sprinted to the metal detectors that separated us from the jetway. Just as I was about to send my purse through the metal detector, it hit me:
“Shit, I’ve got my gun in there.”
I’d forgotten to get clearance to carry it on board. Bill and I looked at each other, neither of us quite knowing what to do.
“Keep it for me,” I begged the security guard at the station. “I’ll get it on my way back.”
“No can do,” she told me. “You’ve got to fill out the paperwork.”
One look at her face told me she would not be moved.
“Go without me!” I shouted to Bill. Then I raced back to the ticket counter to find someone who could help me. One agent, a sweet and sympathetic woman, agreed to hold the gun for me. I thanked her breathlessly and was headed for the metal detector when I saw Bill walking toward me, forlorn, his suit bag over one shoulder.
“Stand down, partner,” he said. “We missed our flight.”
Man, did I feel stupid.
The airline gave us its conference room, where we spent a little time going over prospective presentations. Then we napped. The pace of this thing was sapping both of us.
When at last they called our flight, we were making our way wearily to the gate when I heard someone call my name.
“Do you ever read the National Enquirer?” the disembodied voice asked. I was about to say, “Are you crazy?” when I saw a guy with cameras slung around his neck. The tabloids! Somebody had dropped a dime on us. Bill and I turned and ran all the way to the gate.