Popular Crime

by Bill James

  Pam worked as a “media director” at a high school. In news reports about the case, she was routinely identified as a teacher, but the book about the case, Deadly Lessons, emphasizes that this is incorrect; she did not have a teaching certificate, and was never a teacher.

  She was 22 years old when she met Billy Flynn, and she was a knockout. Billy Flynn was 15, an awkward, dopey kid who spent his time smoking pot, listening to rock music, committing petty crimes and investigating the more serious drugs. Pam Smart, for reasons unclear to everyone except Pam Smart, began hanging out with Billy Flynn and his friends, going to the malls, listening to music, sharing the secrets of their tawdry and unpromising lives. On February 15, 1990, Pam seduced Billy. On February 16, she began pressuring him to kill her husband.

  Billy was crazy about Pam, but less than enthusiastic about murder. Time dragged. Billy talked to his friends about it. Pam talked to them, too; the whole gang of them, in the weeks leading up to the murder, appear to have talked about little else. Billy made at least two half-hearted efforts to carry out his assignment, contriving to fail. Pam made it clear to him that if he wanted to continue getting regular action, he was going to have to close the deal. His friends agreed to go along and help out.

  On May 1, while Pam attended a school board meeting miles away, Billy Flynn and Pete Randall waited in the dark for Gregg Smart to return home. Pam had left a door open for them. They staged a robbery. A third friend, who had borrowed the gun from his father’s collection, waited for them a few blocks away. When Gregg got home they jumped him, shot him and ran.

  Somebody talked, of course, and they all went to jail. The case became a staple of Hard Copy, Inside Edition, and shows of that ilk. CBS made a movie, Murder in New Hampshire. The book about the case, Deadly Lessons, was written by Ken Englade; that book is the source of most of this information.

  The wonderful 1995 movie To Die For, starring Nicole Kidman, is a fictionalization of the Smart case. Pam Smart was a study in contrasts—hardworking, but astonishingly immature; compulsively controlled, but fundamentally irrational. She dressed like Barbara Walters, whom she admired greatly, but hung out with teenagers from the mobile home park. She was addicted to having fun, to raucous music, flakey sex, light drink and drugs, yet she was as cold as ice. She spent weeks working out the details of the crime, yet failed to perceive the most glaring weaknesses in the plan. These contrasts create opportunities for humor and irony as well as pathos, and To Die For developed those. They changed the names and altered the story a little bit, because they were interested in making a good movie, rather than exploiting a highly publicized murder to make a quick buck. They made it fiction because, in some ways, only fiction can tell the whole truth. The movie, if you haven’t seen it, is very highly recommended.

  What is there that remains to be said, about the O. J. Simpson case? It was long enough ago now that a few of you won’t remember it. It was beyond belief. We didn’t have as many cable channels then as we do now, but a lot of people had 30, 40, 50 channels on their TV. When the O. J. Simpson trial was on, there would be live coverage of it on at least five channels, and often on most of the channels. I can remember dealing with a cable system of about 30 channels—of which, at times, 20 would be broadcasting the live feed of the O. J. Simpson trial.

  This unmatched level of saturation coverage turned everyone associated with the case into a household name. This was not a new phenomenon; in the late 1930s every informed American knew the names of Henry Breckinridge, John F. Condon, Violet Sharp and Amandus Hochmuth, peripheral figures in the Lindbergh case. In the 1920s, most everybody knew the names of the people involved in the Hall/Mills case.

  It was not new, but it was new to us; most people alive in 1994 had never seen anything like it. I think that there are essentially three questions that remain about the O. J. Simpson epic:

  1) Were the murders premeditated, or an act of blind rage?

  2) Why did the story grow to such phenomenal proportions?

  3) Why did the system of justice fail?

  On the first issue—did O. J. go to Bundy Drive intending to kill Nicole?—I simply do not know. My intuition is that he did not, but that he went there to spy on her, and something happened that caused the situation to get out of control. I don’t have a compelling argument to make on this issue. It seems like there should be some way to figure it out.

  On the issue of why the O. J. Simpson case took over the media and dominated it the way no other case ever has, my explanation would be this. If you were to write a formula to predict how much publicity would be given to a particular crime, that formula would use both variables and constants—that is, both stable and predictable elements, and irrational or arbitrary elements. The case of Scott and Laci Peterson, for example, became extremely famous, although no one could reasonably have predicted that it would. There are a thousand cases every year just like it that don’t become at all famous; no one can really explain why that one did. It just happened. It’s arbitrary.

  The notoriety that attached to O. J. Simpson’s murder of Nicole Brown Simpson was not arbitrary, because one can look at the elements of the case and predict that it would become very famous. O. J. Simpson was perhaps the greatest running back in the history of football. He can’t just murder a couple of people and nobody will say anything.

  I would explain it this way: that in the case of O. J. Simpson, both the stable and the random elements controlling the publicity turned up extremely large. It happened mostly because of small details concerning the white Ford Bronco slow-speed chase. On June 17, 1994, O.J. arranged to surrender to authorities—and then didn’t. He apparently was thinking about trying to run away, and also contemplating suicide. The news that O. J. Simpson—a fixture on our TV screens as a football star, football commentator, product pitchman and a minor movie star—the news that Simpson had become a fugitive from justice shocked the nation. In the hours after that shock, Simpson’s Ford Bronco (being driven by a longtime friend) was spotted by police, and news media began watching the pursuit, which went on for an inexplicably long time. More channels and more channels began to join in the coverage. NBC television, which had paid millions of dollars for the rights to broadcast the NBA playoffs, dropped coverage of the fifth game of the final round to join all of the other networks in watching O. J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco being followed through the streets of Los Angeles by an armada of police cars.

  It was that chase that made the case into a national obsession; if you take away that incident, the case would have been famous, but there would have been one network broadcasting the trial, rather than all of the networks. Crime cases increase in fame when there is continuing action in the story.

  In most crime cases, the continuing action in a story is predictable. A beautiful little girl goes missing. It is predictable that, at some point, her body will be found. At some point, somebody will be arrested. An attorney will be hired or appointed. There will be a trial. There will be a conviction. There will be sentencing. There will be appeals.

  All of this is continuing action in the story, but it is largely predictable. When there is an unpredictable second act in a case that the nation is already following, that tends to cause the coverage to explode. The Boston Strangler became extremely famous because, after the case was already in the news, there were several additional murders. The Zodiac committed additional murders after he had begun writing to the newspapers. Ted Bundy became as famous as he did because, after he was already in the news at a certain level, he escaped from prison and committed additional atrocities. This caused his story to explode. The white Ford Bronco chase, being covered by all of the television networks in real time, was a gigantic explosion within a story that people were already covering.

  And the timing was right for it. The number of cable television networks increased substantially in the late 1980s. By the early 1990s those networks were searching for an audience. At the time of Nicole Brown’s murder, there was a lot of cable
television air time that wasn’t strongly committed anywhere. It could go wherever it saw an audience. It just happened.

  On the third issue … why did the system of justice fail in this case … there are six culprits who get smacked for it:

  The police, who screwed up the investigation,

  The prosecutors, who bungled the presentation of the case,

  The defense lawyers, who deliberately obfuscated the issues,

  The judge, who lost control of the trial,

  The jury, who failed to perceive what was obvious to most people, and

  The news media, whose intrusion into the story made it more difficult for the machinery of justice to work.

  I would allocate the blame as follows:

  To the police, about 5%. The police investigation of Nicole Brown’s murder was not bungled; the case was well investigated, the culprit was promptly identified, and much more than sufficient evidence to convict the accused was given to the prosecutors. Some mistakes were made. An inexperienced criminologist was sent to the crime scene. Some evidence was mishandled. These mistakes were minor, and would not ordinarily have been noteworthy.

  To the prosecutors, about 35 to 45%. District Attorney Gil Garcetti made a mistake in allowing the case to be prosecuted in downtown Los Angeles, rather than the Santa Monica courthouse nearer to where the crime was committed. This decision was apparently made as a consequence of a recently instituted policy about where to file cases; Garcetti simply failed to perceive that this very unusual case might not be best handled by routine policy directives. The result of that essentially inexplicable decision was that Simpson, a black man accused of murdering a white woman, would be tried by a predominantly black jury.

  Chief Prosecutor Marcia Clark offended the jury by hammering for weeks on prior incidents of domestic abuse, rather than simply presenting that evidence and moving on. She put her case in slowly and deliberately, making it an ordeal for the jurors, who were sequestered and thus unable to live normal lives. Defense Attorney Johnnie Cochran realized that a sequestered jury would appreciate it if he put on his case as quickly and directly as he could—in contrast to Clark, who sometimes had experts spend four to six hours presenting their credentials. As the case dragged on Clark became progressively more shrill and unlikable. I couldn’t stand the woman, myself, and the jury couldn’t, either.

  Assistant Prosecutor Chris Darden made a huge error in asking O. J. Simpson to try on gloves left at the scene, which had stiffened and shrunk, allowing Simpson to pretend that the gloves didn’t fit.

  Prosecutors failed to call to the stand several witnesses who could have placed O. J. Simpson near the scene of the crime, but who had damaged their credibility as witnesses by attempting to profit from their story. They failed to fully vet Officer Mark Fuhrman, whose testimony they didn’t desperately need, and whose racist history became a central focus of the trial. The prosecution made numerous large errors, and bears substantial responsibility for the failure to convict.

  To the defense lawyers, 0%. The defense attorneys did what defense attorneys are supposed to do: they made it as difficult as possible to convict their client.

  To the judge, Judge Lance Ito, about 35 to 45%. Ito started well, but lost control of the case. He allowed irrelevant issues to take center stage in the trial. He ruled that the issue of whether Mark Fuhrman had made racist comments at some point in the past was irrelevant and the testimony inadmissible—and then inexplicably allowed the defense attorneys to spend days talking about the matter and presenting witnesses and evidence about the matter. The entire issue had nothing to do with the case, and should never have been allowed to enter the trial.

  There was a witness to the murder, an earwitness who heard O.J. shout “Hey!” three times about the time of the murder. The witness reportedly told police that, when he heard the voice, he thought it was O.J., but in the trial, he wasn’t allowed to say that; he was allowed only to say that he thought it sounded like the voice of an African-American man. This led to a silly extended debate about whether the witness could recognize a black voice as opposed to a white voice. That issue should never have arisen; the witness should have been allowed to say what he had heard.

  I don’t think Ito’s a bad guy; I think he’s a very good guy, and a good judge. People make mistakes. I’m sure that if Ito could do it over again, he would never allow testimony about whether Mark Fuhrman had, at some point in his past, used the N-word. But he did, and he bears more responsibility for the failure of the trial than any other individual.

  To the jury, about 2%. The jury was denied information about the case that was available to everybody else in the country—not irrelevant information, not prejudicial information, but valid and legitimate information to which they should have had access. They could have seen through the fog of distortions created by the defense better than they did, but it wasn’t really their fault.

  To the news media, about 10 to 15%. The media did intrude into the case in ways that were improper, making financial arrangements with witnesses that compromised their testimony. The extraordinary level of attention to the case distorted everything, making it impossible for things to be done in a normal fashion. Some witnesses seemed to be playing for the cameras; other witnesses seemed to be afraid of the cameras. Jurors had to be sequestered for months because everybody was talking about the case all the time, and this led to jurors having a peculiar perspective on the case. If the trial could be run again, it would have a better chance of finding justice if it could be run without being covered by hundreds of reporters.

  O.J. is in jail now, where he belongs, and perhaps it doesn’t matter for what, or anyway it doesn’t matter to me. But the O. J. Simpson case re-ignited the Popular Crime industry. From then until now, people have been looking for the next really big case. I don’t know if there will ever be another case as big.

  XXXI

  One of the things that will cause an everyday, run-of-the-mill crime to erupt into a media circus is fictional elements. Fictional elements are things that a fiction writer might put into a story to make it more interesting, but which commonly would not be a part of a real-life crime if you picked one at random. There are four types of elements that distinguish real from fictional crimes:

  1) Careful planning. In real life most violent crimes involve little or no planning. An argument breaks out, somebody grabs a fireplace poker and, boom, there’s a murder for you. In fiction, however, crimes are often meticulously planned, with alibis carefully established and false clues planted in advance to throw off the police. In real life these things rarely happen.

  2) Wealthy and attractive participants, prominent in the community. In real life the people involved in crime stories tend to be poor, anonymous, and notably unattractive—not always, of course, but this is the tendency.

  3) A twisting narrative, covering layers of deception. The story appears to be going in one direction, takes off in some other direction, and you discover that nothing was what it originally appeared to be. In real life most often people are exactly what they appear to be.

  4) Bold characters. There are characters in real life every bit as rich and striking as those in fiction, but in fiction there are more of them.

  The story of Lawrencia Bembenek, for example, is rife with fictional elements. An extremely attractive woman is accused of murder—a fictional element. Studies show that in real life only three-tenths of one percent of accused murderers are red-hot mamas, and these are often cases in which the public takes an interest.

  Bembenek was not just any pretty woman; she was known to the Milwaukee community before she was accused of the crime. She was an ex-cop, suing the city for firing her and accusing members of the police force of miscellaneous wrongdoing, some of it related to sex. The crime of which she was accused was, in all probability, carefully planned, and evidence was almost certainly planted by other cops to implicate Bembenek. This doesn’t happen a whole lot in real life. It happens in fiction.

&
nbsp; She escaped from prison, and fled to Canada. Doesn’t happen in most cases. She became the subject of an international incident when Canada refused to return her to American authorities. Books were written about her, and she appeared often on television to discuss her case. This is a very unusual case.

  I would argue that there is no other case in American history, however, which has so many fictional elements as does the murder of Carol Neulander. There are six principal actors in the story of the murder of Carol Neulander—all of them bold characters:

  The victim, Carol Neulander,

  Her husband, Rabbi Fred Neulander,

  His girlfriend, Philadelphia radio personality Elaine Soncini,

  The murderer, Len Jenoff,

  The murderer’s accomplice, Paul Michael Daniels, and

  Nancy Phillips, a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who focused on Len Jenoff, and eventually persuaded him to tell his story.

  Carol Neulander was beaten to death in her home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on November 1, 1994—about five months after the death of Nicole Simpson. Rabbi Neulander was a beacon to his community. He had established and led one of the largest Reformed congregations in New Jersey. He was widely regarded as a charismatic and devoted rabbi.

  Carol Neulander, in addition to raising a family, had started a bakery, Classic Cakes, which had done very well. By the time of her death it was reported that she would sometimes carry home thousands of dollars in cash. It didn’t take police a long time to discover that Rabbi Neulander had been involved with a number of his congregants in a manner not recommended by the Talmud. For almost two years his main squeeze had been Elaine Soncini. Ms. Soncini, a tall, cultured and attractive woman who had come to Rabbi Neulander for counseling after the death of her husband in December, 1992, had found comfort in Neulander’s arms. The two had been carrying on a rather intense relationship, requiring seven-day-a-week trysts. The police found out about this, among other things, and focused their attention on the good Rabbi.