Chris also turned up a woman named Connie Good, whose boyfriend had lived next door to Nicole’s apartment in 1977 or 1978. She told how on one evening in particular, while she was visiting, she’d heard screaming from Nicole’s apartment. She’d also heard thuds.
“Sounded like it was either on the floor or against the wall,” she recalled. Simpson was shouting, “Fucking bitch!” Later, Good ran into Nicole in the elevator; the girl had two black eyes.
The DV dragnet turned up something else especially heartbreaking. Sojourn, a battered-women’s hotline out of Santa Monica, reported taking a call five days before the murder from a woman in West L.A. Her name was Nicole. She had two children and she was frightened because her ex-husband was stalking her. She’d called the cops more than eight times. Their response? “Nothing much ever done.”
As the evidence mounted, Chris and Scott put more pressure on me to give domestic violence a bigger role in the case.
“This is not some murder that incidentally involved domestic violence,” Scott would tell me. “It’s a domestic violence case that ended in murder.”
I had to admit that this approach afforded us a solid legal advantage. If we identified this as a domestic violence case that ended in murder, we could argue that the incidents of abuse that led up to the crime should be admissible. Being able to present those attacks in open court might have two beneficial effects: one, to strip the jury of their rosy illusions about the defendant; two, to give us the opportunity to present a compelling motive for murder.
Scott was pressing me to meet with a couple of domestic violence experts he’d brought in from out of town, Angela Brown and Dr. Donald Dutton. I kept putting him off. Finally, we’d run out of time. I remember very clearly one afternoon in mid-December when both experts had been hanging around all day to meet with me and Chris. Dr. Dutton had to get back to British Columbia. I looked at my watch. God-it was 8:30. They’d been waiting for me for more than five hours. I felt horribly embarrassed.
I grabbed my notebooks and ran to Scott’s cubicle. There, I found Donald, in his tweedy jacket and sensible shoes, and Angela, in her long, flowing skirt and silk drape blouse, sitting on the floor in Scott’s cubicle, surrounded by their binders and notes. I threw myself on their mercy.
“Do you have another hour or so of energy to talk to me?” I asked.
“I think we’re kind of bushed, to tell you the truth, Marcia,” Don replied. “But if you want to join us, we could probably continue our discussion for a bit over cocktails, hey?”
We went over to the Inter-Continental Hotel, where Chris joined us. There, we ended up engaging in one of the liveliest and most perceptive discussions any of us had ever had about the case.
The question pressing most heavily on my mind was whether, given all we knew of the Simpsons’ relationship and the events leading up to June 12, the experts would have predicted that Simpson was about to erupt into a homicidal rage. Was this murder the result of a long-standing plan, or one formulated on the night it was committed?
The critical variable, Don Dutton explained, was “estrangement.” When Nicole didn’t invite Simpson to sit with her at Sydney’s dance recital, when she declined to invite him to join them at Mezzaluna, she made a public declaration of her independence and embarrassed him in front of friends and family.
“A rebuff equals incitement to murder?” I asked, still incredulous. A month ago I would have had a hard time buying this proposition. But Don now made a cogent argument for how O. J. Simpson would have overreacted to rejection. His overweening ego and controlling behavior masked a fundamentally flawed, insecure, and extremely immature personality. To such an unstable man, violence would seem a justifiable means of reestablishing control.
Still, I wondered silently, why would these snubs, this evening, have proved so incendiary? Two years earlier, Nicole had divorced him, a development that he appeared to take with comparative equanimity. I suspected that there had to have been something else that incited him-and that it had to do with a string of calls made from the cell phone in his Bronco that night to Paula Barbieri. Paula, of course, was continuing to elude us, so I didn’t know for sure what had gone down. But my guess was that Simpson’s frustration over his inability to reach her that night had spilled over in rage against Nicole. The first time Nicole dumped him, he’d had Paula to catch him. The second time, he went into free fall.
Months later, of course, this hunch would prove correct. In a deposition given at the civil trial, Paula would testify that she had left a “Dear John” message on Simpson’s machine the afternoon before the murders. It was clearly the emotional trigger. We certainly could have used it at the criminal trial.
Thanks loads, Paula.
After that night of conversation, the domestic violence advocates finally won me over. I felt they should be allowed to take their best shot. So I gave them my blessing to draft a motion asking the court to allow into evidence all the incidents of domestic violence they had worked so hard to unearth.
The Dream Team, of course, fought tooth and nail to keep that motion under seal. Up to that point, they’d more or less succeeded in advancing the fiction that Simpson was a decent guy who had just hit a rough patch in his marriage. Now, he was about to be unmasked as a sadist.
The defense managed to get the hearing delayed for a month, until the jurors were safely sequestered at the Inter-Continental Hotel. For now, domestic violence was temporarily on hold.
While Chris and crew were planning their DV offensive, I’d remained on the sidelines of the action. I’d been up to my ears preparing the physical evidence, which was turning out to be a monumentally complicated task. All along, I’d expected Barry Scheck to object to the admissibility of the DNA test results. That meant we could look forward to a set of what are called Kelly-Frye hearings that would take us well past the first of the year. Suddenly, without warning, they changed their game plan.
I heard about it one Sunday morning, after a late night of work capped off by a game of pool and a shot of Glenlivet. Suzanne called to say that Art Harris at CNN was trying to get in touch with me. I had played phone tag with him the day before, but figured he had just wanted some inside skinny. As it turned out, he had something to tell me: the Simpson team was going to withdraw their challenge to the DNA evidence. On one level, this shouldn’t have surprised me. We’d known all along that they wanted to rush us into trial as quickly as possible-and cut our preparation time as much as possible. It also kept Simpson’s public image as a celebrity fresh in the public’s mind-the longer he sat in jail, the more like a criminal he would seem.
Even so, on hearing the news, I went into shock. I’d been planning on taking a lot of the physical-evidence witnesses, like Dennis Fung and Greg Matheson, myself. But the chunk of time I was counting on to prepare that part of the case-and maybe even have a day or two at home over Christmas-would now be gone. I am such an anal-retentive overpreparer by nature that this news from Art conjured up my personal vision of hell. I would have to pedal twice as fast just to finish everything I had to get done on my own part of the case as well as keeping an eye on the work of others.
It was at that point, I think, that I realized the impossibility of adequately preparing for the trial, now set to start in mid- to late January. The stress was getting to me. Most of the time, I felt ill. I suffered from respiratory ailments, head colds, aching joints. And these disturbing new illnesses were compounded by bouts of bone-crushing fatigue. I had enough self-awareness to realize where this was leading me. And I didn’t want to go there.