I should point out here that Werner Spitz became the expert witness who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs in the Simpson civil case. He was extremely helpful to them, describing how the cuts on O. J. Simpson’s hands had probably been made by the victims’ fingernails. He also proclaimed in unequivocal terms that the murders took only a minute and a half. It was damning stuff, and I wish to heck we’d had it. But we couldn’t get the good doctor to our courtroom. Looking back on it, I think that he and a lot of other potentially compelling witnesses might have been scared off by the frenzy surrounding the criminal trial and the gratuitous abuse they were likely to suffer at the hands of the defense. Bill ended up spending at least a hundred hours on the phone trying to enlist a reputable medical examiner. Not one would agree to help us.
So we went to our fallback position. We had Golden’s report redone under the direction of his boss, the chief medical examiner, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran. Dr. Lucky, as we called him, would have to use Golden’s memory and the police photos to splice together some description of the wounds. But at the time, the redone report was a work in progress. Dr. Lucky wasn’t ready to go to the top of the lineup. He wouldn’t have the original report completely redone; we’d have to start our case by admitting a whole lot of Golden’s original mistakes. Not a strong opening gambit.
Another possibility was leading with our most compelling evidence, the DNA. But that meant opening with Dennis Fung. More mistakes. More egg on our face. And besides, it was such technical stuff that the jury would have been asleep from the get-go. No, thank you.
Chris and Scott were pushing to open with domestic violence. As usual, I hung back. I knew the risks. We were dealing with ambiguous and volatile testimony. It’s difficult to convince jurors of either sex, of any race, that spousal abuse is a crime. And yet, opening with the New Year’s beating incident offered us a substantial logistical advantage as well. It would enable us to tell, in roughly chronological order, the tortured, complicated story of how O. J. Simpson’s obsession brought him to Bundy on the night of June 12, 1994. That tipped the scale. We’d open People v. Orenthal James Simpson with domestic violence.
“Mr. Darden,” Ito asked Chris, “who is your first witness?”
“Sharyn Gilbert, Your Honor,” he replied.
Gilbert, a neatly dressed black woman in her late thirties, raised her hand and took the oath.
“Ms. Gilbert,” Chris said, “were you a 911 operator and dispatcher [for the LAPD] on January [1], 1989?”
“Yes, I was,” she replied.
Gilbert explained that she had been at her console at 3:58 A.M. on New Year’s morning when she received a “drop in.” A distress call. At first, Gilbert couldn’t make out a voice on the other end. She made a note in her log: “trouble unknown.” A few moments later, however, she heard someone being hit.
Chris played the tape to a quiet courtroom. At first you could hear only the incongruous hiss of an empty line-then came a woman’s screams. In the distance blows were struck and there was more screaming. And then the line went dead. I stole a glance at the jury box. Glum stares. No evidence of thoughtful contemplation. No hint of emotion.
Gilbert told how she’d picked up the caller’s address off the computer and dispatched a cruiser to 360 North Rockingham. Detective John Edwards took the call. He was our next witness. Under Chris’s deliberate questioning, Edwards told how he’d driven into the hills on Rockingham. There was a thick mist that morning. It had been raining. He buzzed the security gate. A half-nude, mud-caked Nicole stumbled out of the bushes. When she managed to get the gate open she flung herself on him and clung tightly.
“She was wet,” Edwards recalled. “She was shivering, she was cold. I could feel her bones and she was real cold. And she was beat up.”
Nicole was also crying, “He’s going to kill me.”
Edwards’s testimony was very damaging to O. J. Simpson. He’d seen a one-inch-long cut on Nicole’s left upper lip. Her right forehead was swollen. One of her eyes was starting to blacken. Her cheek was puffy and she had a handprint on her neck. Moreover, Edward saw that Nicole Brown Simpson seemed genuinely terrified of her husband.
To my way of thinking, a smart defense attorney would want to get this guy off the stand as quickly as possible. Not Johnnie. He trotted Edwards back through the details of the incident, sniping at him for not going into the house to interview the maid. (Please keep in mind, this officer had an injured victim in his car!) Johnnie wanted to position Nicole as the provocateur and Simpson as the reasonable one. But that backfired. Asked to describe Simpson’s demeanor, Edwards replied, “He had veins… popping out right here [he gestured to his own temple] on the upper part of his head, along the side of his head. The veins were pulsing and popping out, and I’d never seen that before on television or anywhere.”
“So you associated that with anger?” Johnnie persisted.
Duh.
I have to believe that left to his own devices Johnnie would have been more effective with Edwards. He could have taken the tack, “Did you ever have the occasion to go out to Rockingham again, Officer Edwards?”…“No, I did not, sir.” That would have suggested to the jury that his client was reformed and repentent. I suspected that he did not do this because his client was pressuring him to take Edwards down. Still galled by the New Year’s Eve incident, Simpson was looking for any opportunity to rewrite history. (This perverse impulse, in fact, persisted into the civil trial, when, in the face of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, he continued to insist that he’d never struck Nicole. Never!) Unfortunately for Simpson, kicking Officer Edwards around was not his ticket to rehabilitation. It only served to repeat the facts of a crime to which he ultimately had pled “no contest.”
“Amateurish,” I scribbled on a Post-it to Chris. He rolled his eyes in agreement.
I wondered if the jury was taking all this in.
The 911 dispatchers and Detective Edwards had laid a credible foundation for our next witness, Ron Shipp. Chris and I were pinning a lot of our hopes on Ron. Of all of our domestic violence witnesses, he was potentially the most damaging to the defendant. His testimony was also the hardest won.
Back in July, the cops passed me a tip about Ron. A former LAPD officer, he’d suffered from a drinking problem and left the force about five years earlier. Since then, he’d apparently tried his hand at acting, without much success. The really interesting thing about him was that he’d been a longtime friend of O. J. Simpson’s. He’d even worked security details for O. J.-and, in fact, had had some contact with him after the murders. The cops suspected that Shipp knew “something very important.” I sent out the word that I wanted to speak with him.
Shipp showed up at the CCB on Thursday, July 28, in the company of his attorney, Bob McNeil-as it happened, a law school buddy of mine. Shipp was a compact black man, a few years younger than O. J. Simpson. His honest, open face, strewn generously with freckles, radiated decency.
I motioned them to an office down the hall from mine. Phil Vannatter joined us. He and Ron went back a long way on the force; I let him do the questioning.
“You know why we’re here, Ron,” Phil said. “We’re here to talk about O. J. Simpson and Nicole… And what I would like you to do… is just tell me what you know about their relationship. What was going on between them.”
Ron hesitated.
“I met Nicole before they were married and were living together… fifteen years [ago]… As far as I was concerned… they had a great marriage. A great relationship.”