I holed up in my office, trying to regain my composure. I couldn’t stop beating myself up for crying in court. Chris walked in without knocking and, with his usual lack of ceremony, dropped into a chair.
“I’m sorry I let you down today,” I apologized. “It won’t happen again.”
He shrugged.
“Don’t let them get you down, G,” he said. “In a week no one will remember it.”
He was right. Or at least I wanted to think he was right.
“Besides,” he continued, “I thought you looked real good in those pictures.”
“You really think so?”
“Sure.”
“You didn’t think I looked fat?”
He laughed.
“No way, man. It gave me a woody.”
I took a minute to get it. By that time Chris was grinning.
I laughed. Then we both started to laugh. And we laughed and continued laughing until we were actually howling. With a single bawdy quip, Chris had managed to restore my perspective. How, I asked myself, does he manage to do that?
Me Recuerdo
My first witnesses were not flashy, but they were rock-solid.
Pablo Fenjves and Nicole’s other neighbors were all emphatic in their testimony: they’d heard a dog start to bark at 10:15 to 10:20 P.M. By that time the killer was most likely on the premises. The murders were most likely in progress. In fact, Ron and Nicole were probably dead.
During the months after the trial a bleating throng of pundits would try to suggest that I declined to put on certain witnesses because they didn’t fit into my “time line.” That is absolute rubbish. At no time did I or any other member of the prosecution team lock ourselves in to 10:15 as the time of the murder. From the very start of this case, the window of opportunity we were looking at was 10:15 to 10:40. Even the later time would have given O. J. Simpson twelve to fourteen minutes to dash back to Rockingham in time to be seen by Allan Park.
Johnnie couldn’t put a ding in the dog-bark witnesses. Nor did he score any points on the employees of Mezzaluna. In fact, the defense seemed to be holding back. I knew they were saving their salvos for the cops.
Although we couldn’t make out any coherent strategy coming from the Simpson camp, we knew they would hammer away at two related themes: The cops messed up the scene. And Mark Fuhrman moved evidence. Our first LAPD witness, Officer Robert Riske, went a long way toward debunking both claims.
Riske, a muscular man with close-cropped sandy hair, had been the first officer to arrive at the scene. He described how he and all the cops after him had taken particular care to avoid tracking through the pools of blood. Most important, when Riske arrived at Bundy, there had been only one glove at the scene. That was a full two hours before Mark Fuhrman arrived.
Let’s think through this again: the defense lives and dies on the premise that Mark Fuhrman pocketed one of the murder gloves and carried it to Rockingham. But it couldn’t have happened. There wasn’t a second glove to steal.
I thought Riske made a superb witness. He didn’t embellish; he didn’t minimize. Johnnie, however, tried to make Riske out to be an inexperienced klutz.
The officer had found Nicole’s bathtub full of water. Had he tested the temperature?
No.
The officer and his partner had found a cup of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream sitting on a banister inside the house. Did they have it photographed?
No.
Sounds bad, huh?
Well, it isn’t. In fact, it wasn’t within the scope of their responsibilities to do any of those things. Riske and his partner were responsible for calling their superiors and securing the crime scene. Period. I made sure to establish this on redirect.
Johnnie then called Officer Riske’s attention to two photos. The first showed the knit hat, the envelope, and the glove in one position; the second showed them at slightly different angles to each other. Johnnie contended that this showed that evidence had been moved while Mark Fuhrman was in the “same general area.”
I leaped in with an objection.
“This is the same thing Mr. Cochran has been doing throughout this trial,” I complained to Ito. “This is another distortion; this is another deception.”
Here’s what I was talking about: between the time the first and second photos were taken, the bodies had been removed from the scene. In one photo, in fact, you could see the toe of Ron Goldman’s boot; in the second, you could not. The simple act of moving the bodies caused the area around them to be disturbed. That’s why we take “before and after” photos.
Johnnie was also angling to play a laser disc with isolated segments of a crime-scene video.
Chris tried to block that kick. “We have never been provided a copy of this video,” he told the court. And, indeed, we hadn’t. The tape showed the back of an unidentified cop traipsing straight through a pool of blood on the Bundy walk. An image that, of course, shot to hell our contention that the cops had taken precautions to keep the crime scene intact.
Chris and I argued that there was no way of telling when this video had been taken. It hadn’t been shot by police, so there was no time stamped anywhere on it. You could tell from the sun line that it had to be sometime in the afternoon. And that was all. But, once again, Lance waffled. He disallowed the video, but permitted the defense to show Riske the photo of the unidentified cop to see if he could ID him. Of course, he couldn’t. Riske left the crime scene at 7:15 A.M., and the photo had been taken well after that.
That photo business really galled me. In the lower left-hand corner there was a gray square where something had been blocked out. A TV show’s logo? I beckoned one of our law clerks.
“Get this photo to Suzanne, ASAP,” I whispered. “I need to know who took it and whether it was before or after the crime scene was released. Go now!”
The clerk shot out of the courtroom. By the break, Suzanne had located the source: Darryl Smith, a freelance photographer on assignment for Inside Edition. Smith was a very cool guy, about six and a half feet tall. Suzanne arranged for him to come to my office and look at the video.
“Yep,” he said, “that’s mine.”
We watched the original footage, which preceded the shot offered by the defense. It showed the officers taking down the yellow tape and rolling it up. The Bundy crime scene had been broken down! After that, the cops could walk anywhere they pleased. I put Darryl himself on the stand to confirm that the officers were in the clear. Man, was that satisfying.
How, I wondered, did Johnnie think he could get away with a trick like that? Giving your client a vigorous defense is one thing. Deliberate deception is another. But then-did this jury realize that the defense was selling them snake oil, deceiving them with these “before and after” photos? They should have taken that as an insult to their intelligence. Did they realize how cynically the defense was trying to manipulate them? Did they care?
It seemed to me that the boys over at the defense table had whipped each other up into such a macho frenzy that they had totally jettisoned the ethics of our profession. Each was trying to outdo the others with feats of chicanery, which some collective hallucination had allowed them to believe constituted intrepid lawyering. Even refined former law school dean Gerald Uelmen had been sucked into slapping high fives with the guys.
We could not let our guard down. Not for one minute.
My alarm went off at five A.M. It was Sunday, February 12. It was still dark. I was still on duty.
This was the day we were scheduled to take the jury out to see Bundy and Rockingham. Oh, shit. As I stumbled to the shower, I wondered if there was any way to call this thing off.
Believe it or not, the “walk-through” was originally my idea. Taking the jury to the crime scene usually works to a prosecutor’s advantage. Taking murder out of the courtroom and onto the killing grounds makes it less of an abstraction. It gives us an opportunity to turn the jury’s attention back to the victims.