by Kim Goldman
The murderer stared straight ahead during most of Dan’s statement, but occasionally he clenched his jaw, smiled in mock disbelief, or shook his head in protest. Rarely did he look at the jurors. Some members of his family busied themselves with “Word-Find” puzzles. His sister, Shirley Baker, and her husband, Benny, played “Hangman.”
As Dan neared his conclusion, we listened to his clinical, graphic description of how Ron died. We all held hands and tried to get through it. But we were unprepared when he concluded with a chilling fact.
“Ronald Goldman died with his eyes open,” Dan said. “In the last few moments of his life, he saw the person who killed his friend Nicole. The last person he saw through his open eyes was the man who ended his young life, the man who now sits in this courtroom, the defendant.” That image will always haunt us.
Patti and I left court at noon on Thursday to fly to Arizona. We would miss Robert Baker’s opening statement for the defense, and we would miss the first day of testimony, but there was no way that we would miss Parents’ Weekend during Michael’s freshman year.
Kim was able to attend.
Baker spoke without notes, sometimes seemed disjointed, and frequently backtracked. Kim concluded: He’s trying to cover his ass on everything.
Baker tried to convince the jury that Nicole’s own reckless and immoral behavior put her in harm’s way. He also attempted to show that some of the killer’s past frustrations with his wife were justified. Kim was repulsed by his depiction of Nicole as a heavy-drinking, promiscuous woman who kept company with a variety of low-life friends. In fact, he said, the defense would prove that Ron had gone to Nicole’s apartment for a prearranged “date.” He tried to paint his client as a man who was simply concerned for his children, and told the jury that he was the one who had been stalked, not the other way around. According to Baker, after the breakup of their marriage, Nicole had the audacity to send her ex-husband cookies and even showed up at his country club.
No wonder he had to slit her throat, Kim thought.
Going as far as the judge’s restrictions allowed, Baker tried to raise the old, tired issues of contamination and corruption of evidence. Although prohibited by the judge from mentioning Mark Fuhrman’s perjury plea, he managed to interject the controversial ex-detective’s name into his statement whenever possible.
Then Baker made a key mistake. He mentioned that the killer had once offered to take a lie-detector test, but the prosecutors had refused. This was a good news/bad news situation. It left the jury with the impression that he had not taken the test, but it opened the door for us to revisit the topic later.
Baker said one thing with which we heartily agreed. Above all, he told the jury, “listen to the testimony of O.J.”
With Kim as our only family member in attendance, the mind games began in earnest. She described the scene vividly in her journal:
Having to be in close proximity to the killer is much worse than even I expected. I knew it would be uncomfortable, but it’s nearly impossible to take. He stares at me, often running his tongue across his upper lip, with a smirking leer on his face. I stare back, willing the daggers in my eyes to pierce straight through him. It’s become a sick game of one-upmanship. I heard him whine to a reporter, nodding in my direction, “Look what I have to deal with. She does this 24 hours a day.” Then I was confronted by a woman, who is the killer’s self-proclaimed best friend. She walked over to him. He motioned towards me. She walked over and stood in front of me to block my view. I moved to the left. She followed. I moved to the right. She followed. I tilted my head, as did she. I looked at her and said, “Do you think what you are doing is effective? I could just move around you.” And I did. She turned to me and said, “He is pretty good looking to stare at, isn’t he?”
The killer and his idiot bodyguard were laughing. They knew exactly what she was doing and saying.
This is the beast whom I believe butchered my brother and left him to die. His ex-wife, the mother of his children, met the same horrible fate. Yet, he saunters around the legal system, mocking us, laughing at us, it’s like pouring salt into an open, oozing wound.
We are constantly warned to maintain decorum and dignity, to turn the other cheek and simply take it.
But I am ready to rumble.
I can feel it coming. I can feel it brewing inside me. I cannot maintain this much longer. An explosion is in the offing. And there is precious little I can do to stop it.
And then there was Sharon. Until now, we had ignored her, and she had returned the favor. But on this day, after court, she came up behind Kim and whispered, “Do you want to reconsider talking to me? You are making this obvious.”
“Sharon, walk away from me,” Kim replied.
“It’s ‘Mom’ to you,” Sharon said.
Kim turned to leave, aware that reporters and lawyers hovered everywhere. “You are a little bitch,” Sharon hissed in her ear. “Who do you think you are? You have an attitude. That is my son and you have no right to sit here. I don’t know who you are. You are not my daughter, and you can tell your father that, too. How dare you both make shit out of me on TV. I’ll get you back.”
“Stop talking to me!” Kim growled.
Kim was rattled, and very angry. She reported the incident to Dan, and he suggested that Kim just politely tell Sharon that this was not an appropriate time to be discussing such matters. For the sake of the trial, we did not need to air our dirty laundry.
But Kim had had enough. “No way,” she told Dan, “just tell her to stay the hell away from me.”
Once again Kim heard a witness recall Ron’s final words.
As testimony began on Friday, our “ear witness” Robert Heidstra told the jurors that he was walking his dog in an alley behind Nicole’s condominium at about 10:34 on the night of the murders when he heard the sounds of two men arguing. “I heard a clear voice yelling, ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!,’ ” he said. “It was a male, no doubt about it.” Then he said he heard “another voice, a deeper voice, talking very fast—it sounded like an argument…. Then I heard a gate clanging, bang.” Five minutes later he saw a white Jeep-like vehicle with tinted windows, come “out of the dark” and speed from the area.
In a surprisingly brief cross-examination, Baker got Heidstra to stress that the white vehicle turned south, speeding away in the opposite direction from the Rockingham estate. But Baker spent little time attacking Heidstra’s testimony because he, too, was satisfied with the later timeline.
Stewart Tanner, the Mezzaluna bartender, testified that Ron did not have a “date” with Nicole that evening, that he was, indeed, merely returning Juditha Brown’s eyeglasses; in fact, he said, he and Ron had had plans to meet another friend at Marina del Rey later that evening.
Other witnesses set the grisly scene. Brentwood resident Sukru Boztepe recounted how he tried to calm the frantic, bloodstained Akita that he found on Bundy Drive at about 10:55 P.M., and described how the dog dragged him to Nicole’s condominium, where he saw a bloody body.
As Boztepe testified, jurors leaned forward to stare at a crime-scene photo. There before them was the grisly sight of a bloody walkway, with Nicole’s body visible at the far end.
It soon appeared that testimony would speed along much more quickly than it had during the criminal trial. By midafternoon Dan told Judge Fujisaki that, because he had anticipated more rigorous cross-examination, he had run out of witnesses for the day.
Patti and I were back in court on Monday; Kim was back at work. Things continued to move along briskly. Our side called the first three LAPD officers who had arrived at the crime scene. Officers Robert Riske and Miguel Terrazas and Sergeant David Rossi described the crime scene and identified where they had found various pieces of evidence.
Dan used Riske’s testimony to introduce photographs of the crime scene. It was the first time since the criminal trial that Patti and I had seen the chilling pictures of the bloody, horrible place where Ron had died. This viewing was even more pa
inful than before. We were closer to the television screen, and this was our case. Patti and I were reduced to tears.
The officers testified that blood drops on both the walkway and the back gate appeared fresh and moist. Additional officers, who had responded a few hours later, said that the stains were bright red, not the brown color of blood that has been exposed to the elements for a long time. This early testimony was very important. The officers clearly established that there was blood all over the place about midnight. At midnight, there was blood on the back gate. The officers testified that they saw only one bloody glove at the crime scene. At midnight. Long before the detectives—including the maligned Mark Fuhrman—arrived on the scene.
The killer himself did not show up in court until the afternoon, and we noted his own reaction to the crime-scene photographs. At first, he did not wince or shed a tear or display an iota of remorse. But after he consulted with his lawyers during a short recess, whenever the photographs were shown, he turned his head away quickly.
“What a joke!” Patti murmured.
Kim met us at court on Thursday. It happened to be Halloween, but Kim was tired of wearing a mask. She said, “You know, Dad, we are not behaving normally. People commend us on our ability to remain calm and dignified under these terrible circumstances and it just isn’t right. We should be screaming, yelling, and clawing at him.”
Our attorneys cautioned her to stay calm, and not to say or do anything that might jeopardize our case. “People watch every single move we make,” she complained. “If they catch us smiling, they want to know why. If we look upset, they assume the worst. Why don’t I have the right to just be myself and permission to say the things that are churning inside me all the time?”
We wished the cameras were there to catch the derisive expression the killer developed for Kim. His eyebrows would arch, one side of his mouth would turn upward, and his eyes scanned her body from head to toe.
This proved to be a ghoulish day that left us all limp with anger and despair. Former Dectective Tom Lange testified about the passport, revolver, money, underwear, socks, and the fake moustache and goatee that the killer had brought along with him while fleeing arrest five days after the murders. Prosecutors in the criminal case chose not to deal with this evidence, but we contended that he was carrying supplies to enable him to escape the country. To us, it was clear evidence of “consciousness of guilt.”
However, it was Tom’s duty to portray the horror of the crime scene for the jury, and this entailed the presentation of photographs that were larger and far more vivid than the ones displayed previously.
As the court viewed Nicole, slumped in a fetal position, surrounded by her own blood, the killer looked away, just as he had done in the criminal trial. He mouthed words to himself and seemed to be breathing rapidly. A few jurors audibly gasped, but listened attentively as Tom pointed out the positions of the bodies, and the bloody trail of footprints and drops on the walkway.
Kim glared at the murderer. It was her way of saying: You’re not going to get any more of me. I’m going to make sure you know I hate your guts.
Then photos of Ron were on display. Kim and I hung our heads and struggled to maintain composure. As many times as we had heard this testimony, as many times as we had seen the photos, it did not get any easier. Kim whispered, “I can’t even close my eyes, because the pictures are already in my mind.” As she listened to Tom describe Ron’s wounds in a clinical, professional manner, she thought: He tried so hard to ward off the knife. What were his last thoughts? Was he scared? Did he know what was happening? Did he think about us? Did he know he was dying? Did he know how much we loved him?
A part of us wished that the public could see these ghastly photographs. People would have to say, “Oh my God, this is real!”
I could only glance at the photos briefly before I had to look away. I wanted to see Ron. But I did not want to see Ron this way. I stayed in court longer than I wanted to, to support Kim. Finally, knowing that I was close to hysteria, my daughter sent me out.
By day’s end, our nerves were shot and our emotions were raw. Court was adjourned and the room was almost empty. We were still inside, with our attorneys. I happened to turn and see that the killer was near the closed courtroom door. He was staring in our direction with his face contorted into a sneer. As he opened the door and was confronted by reporters, I shouted, “Don’t give me any of your goddamn dirty looks!”
Appearing indignant, he raised his voice to respond, “I wasn’t looking at you. I was looking at your daughter, who was staring at me. She plays staring games.”
Later, Patti had to listen to my rage: “That scumbag lying son of a bitch who first murders my son and then has the colossal gall to stare at my daughter and give me a snotty look. He’s trash, that’s all there is to it!”
THIRTY-THREE
On our way home from court one day, Patti pulled into the shopping center at Kanan Avenue and Lindero Canyon Boulevard. She stayed in the car while I went into Ralphs to pick up a few groceries. As I was going through the checkout line, my gaze fell upon the cover of Globe magazine. In the lower left-hand side of the page was the caption: RON DIED WITH HIS EYES OPEN. Underneath was a close-up of Ron’s eyes.
Somehow I made it out of the supermarket and back to the car. Patti started to shift into drive, but I reached out my hand and said, “Stop.”
Patti hesitated. When she saw tears pouring from my eyes, she shoved the gearshift back into park. “What is it?” she asked.
I told her what I had just seen.
Patti slipped her arm around my shoulder and asked, “Do you want me to go in to see it?”
“It’s up to you,” I said.
Patti consoled me for a few moments. Then she slipped out of the driver’s seat and disappeared into Ralphs. When she returned she, too, was shaking. “Why did they have to print that?” she asked.
We sat in the parking lot for several minutes, hugging one another.
“It never ends,” I said.
We had heard it in court, but we were unprepared to see the photograph on a tabloid cover.
* * *
Yet events were racing toward a conclusion. Many of the same witnesses who had testified at the criminal trial took the stand. They generally presented similar testimony, but there was a refreshing crispness to the proceedings. Dan stuck to business, asking the key questions and refusing to get bogged down in nit-picking details. In the process, he stymied the defense team, which could only address issues that we raised during direct examination.
This tactic left Baker almost in shock, seething with questions that Judge Fujisaki would not allow him to ask. By the time the relatively brief testimony of Detectives Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter ended, Baker seemed, as I said to Patti, “confused and dazed.” He frequently took out his frustrations by demeaning his son in open court. Philip Baker was a young associate counsel on the defense team, clearly there as his father’s whipping boy. Kim referred to him as “Little Baby Baker.”
During the criminal trial, LAPD chemist Gregory Matheson spent five days on the witness stand. Now, when he testified that the defendant was one of about 550 individuals in the population who could have left a blood drop on the front walk at the murder scene, he was on and off the witness stand in a matter of hours.
Criminalist Dennis Fung testified that he had found possible traces of blood in the killer’s shower, in his bathroom sink, and on a wire dangling in an alleyway on the killer’s Rockingham estate, near the site where Fuhrman found the bloody glove. The stains were so tiny that Dennis could perform only a basic chemical test, but those results indicated the possible presence of human blood.
This was critical new evidence, disallowed into the criminal trial record. If there was blood on a wire in the alleyway, it strengthened our assertion that the defendant was bleeding when he vaulted the fence behind Kato Kaelin’s room—and it refuted the theory that the glove was planted. The relevance of the shower and sink s
tains was obvious.
Cross-examination was conducted by Robert Blasier, a holdover attorney from the criminal trial, who tried to mount a blistering attack. Dennis acknowledged that he could have done some things differently, but contended that his procedures overall were correct. During the criminal trial, Dennis had endured a nine-day ordeal on the witness stand; now he was finished in little more than an hour.
Richard Rubin, the former president and general manager of Aris Glove Company, once more testified that the bloody gloves fit the defendant. He acknowledged that the fit was of “poor quality,” but he said that was because they had shrunk by about 10 percent. Judge Fujisaki allowed the defense to show a video from the criminal trial, reprising the murderer’s infamous “attempt” to force his hands into the gloves. The judge, however, would not allow the jury to hear the audio portion of the performance. It was quite remarkable to watch this scene without sound. There was the image of the killer holding his hands up in front of the jury with an insolent look of amused victory on his face. But without the distraction of his dubious comments, the gloves did, indeed, appear to fit.
Turning to the subject of the cuts on the killer’s hands, Dan and his team had a barrage of interesting information to present to the jury. The public seemed to remember only the one dramatic cut on the middle finger of his left hand, but Dr. Robert Huizenga testified that when he examined the defendant days after the murders, he found three lacerations and seven abrasions on his left hand. The cuts measured from inch to ½ inch, and were all fresh.
In one of the versions of his story, the defendant had said that he first cut himself at his home the day of the murders, and then reopened the wound in Chicago when he broke a drinking glass in his hotel bathroom. But our attorneys now read from the deposition of Detective Kenneth Berris of the Chicago police, one of the investigators who had examined the killer’s hotel room. There was not one drop of blood in the bathroom. There was a broken glass in the sink, but no blood was found on it. And there were no chips of glass on the vanity or on the floor, as one would expect to find if the defendant had backhanded the glass with his left hand. Berris said that he found blood on the bedsheets, and we displayed photos for the jury. Would the killer have to change his story, claiming that he crawled back into bed for a nap after learning of Nicole’s murder?
