by Kim Goldman
It was difficult to know at this point, for the killer left court early that day, claiming that he was ill. However, he was seen playing golf.
“Sometimes when I read the paper or listen to the news, I can’t believe that the reporters were in the same courtroom, listening and watching the same testimony I was,” Patti said. “If the criminal trial had to be televised, I think this one should have been, too.”
The press walked a tightrope. ABC TV’s Cynthia McFadden and Shoreen Maghame, and Court TV’s Dan Abrams had become close to us, especially to Kim, but their jobs required objective, nonbiased reporting and, just as in the criminal trial, their public accounts were sometimes difficult for us to listen to.
Shoreen told Kim that the killer had approached her and commented on the brace she was wearing to counter a carpal-tunnel problem. He had touched her arm and commented about arthritis. “Kim,” she said, “I was paralyzed. All I could see were the scars on his hands!”
The killer seemed to develop a crush on one of Dan Abrams’s colleagues, a tall, attractive redhead. He constantly made suggestive comments to her, winked, whistled, and flirted. The woman was repulsed, and attempted to avoid him.
Another reporter told us, “The day my editor says I have to interview him is the day I quit.”
Patti and I were sitting in court one morning, waiting for the judge, when we realized that Lawrence Schiller was sitting directly behind us. He was the writer who collaborated with the killer on his offensive book I Want to Tell You. He had also helped produce the killer’s videotape. Now Schiller had written his own account of the defense team’s antics, wherein he disclosed that the murderer had failed a lie-detector test, and reported that Robert Kardashian had developed doubts about the innocence of his longtime friend.
We had never spoken to Schiller, but Patti could not resist the opportunity now. She turned to him and commented, “You’re sitting on a different side this time.”
Schiller smiled and said of the defense, “They’re probably ready to kill me.”
“Oh, well—” Patti responded, and then turned her back on him.
Friday, November 8, was a dramatic day, when once more we had to steel ourselves to listen to gruesome autopsy testimony. The Browns chose not to come; once again we decided to tough it out. The murderer did not attend and everyone assumed that he was still feeling poorly. It was only later that we heard a report that he played golf this day also.
One of our talented co-attorneys, Ed Medvene, called upon an expert witness with an animated, friendly style. Dr. Werner Spitz, the author of the definitive pathology textbook, was without question our most interesting witness thus far.
An enlargement of the killer’s wounded left hand was flashed on a television monitor. Dr. Spitz pointed out the jagged edges of three curved wounds. “These are not caused by glass, and these are not caused by a knife,” he declared, explaining that broken glass or a knife blade would produce smooth-edged cuts. What, then, caused the lacerations? Dr. Spitz declared, “These are fingernail marks.” He testified that the gouges could have been inflicted by either Ron or Nicole during a struggle with the killer.
As the jury viewed a series of fourteen autopsy photographs and Dr. Spitz maintained a running commentary, we slumped forward and sobbed. Several times I had to flee the courtroom, but I forced myself to return. Kim remained throughout.
Dr. Spitz presented the jury with his own theory of how the murders occurred. He suggested that Nicole was slain in one furious knife assault. He described in detail the depth of the fatal slash across her throat, which went all the way back to the vertebrae and severed her carotid arteries. Using his hands to demonstrate, he showed how all of Nicole’s wounds could have been inflicted in fifteen seconds or less.
It was during this brief, terrible moment in time that Ron must have arrived and shouted, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Dr. Spitz described everything that happened to Ron—stab wounds to his chest, the stab wound to his left back that punctured the aorta and was likely the fatal blow, the slash to his left leg, the cuts and abrasions on his hands. In total, Ron suffered about thirty stab wounds. Dr. Spitz estimated that Ron struggled with his assailant for one minute or less.
From his examination of the evidence, this renowned pathologist concluded that one person, wielding one knife, could have committed the murders and escaped with few bloodstains on him.
Baker went on the attack during cross-examination, prompting numerous angry exchanges. Dr. Spitz held his ground and drew diagrams to explain his conclusions. Nicole’s blood had spurted forward and down, away from the killer standing behind her. Ron suffered massive internal injuries, but did not bleed very much outside his body until he had slumped to the ground.
During his contentious cross-examination, Baker made an unbelievable mistake. In an arrogant tone of voice, he asked, “Dr. Spitz, do you believe that Nicole Brown could have pulled the glove off Mr. Simps—uh, the assailant’s hand?”
Remarkably, he repeated this gaffe two or three more times. On one occasion he spoke the defendant’s complete last name and then added quickly, “—if he were the assailant.”
These were very telling Freudian slips. I said to Patti, “I guess the truth always comes out.”
* * *
When the trial resumed after a break for Veteran Day, Dr. Spitz was still under cross-examination. Baker must have had a bad weekend, for he was on a short tether. He sought yes-or-no answers to his questions, but Dr. Spitz felt the need to explain his points. Again and again Baker lost his temper. Once he shouted, “No, no, no, no, no … we’re not here to have you make speeches.”
Baker challenged the witness’s contention that the cuts on the defendant’s hand were caused by fingernails. He said in a derisive tone, “You don’t mean to tell me” that Nicole’s fingernails made the gouges?
Dr. Spitz answered, “I don’t know who made them.”
Baker observed that Ron had very short fingernails. Did Dr. Spitz think that Ron could have caused the gouges?
“Yes,” Dr. Spitz replied. He pointed out that his own fingernails were as short as Ron’s, and asked, “Would you like me to show you how this works?”
Baker moved quickly toward the witness stand. Pulling off his suit jacket, he challenged: “Go ahead. Gouge me!”
“You want me to scoop tissue out?” Dr. Spitz asked.
Judge Fujisaki jumped into the fray, warning, “I’m not going to have any gouging of flesh in my courtroom.”
Dr. Spitz said, “Then I’ll do it to myself.” He took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeve, and dug the four fingernails of his right hand into the skin of his left arm. He raised his arm for the jury to see. The marks were clearly visible. “You see? It can be done,” he declared. “When you fight for your life and you dig in deep, you push back the flesh so your fingernail suddenly becomes longer.”
A short time later, during a break in the testimony, I was standing near Dr. Spitz when a reporter asked to see his arm. The witness rolled up his sleeve and displayed the marks. All four of his short fingernails had broken the skin and drawn blood.
Dominick Dunne visited court on a few occasions. In reminiscing about the trial of his daughter’s murderer, he mentioned an effective tactic. To illustrate the time it took to commit the crime, prosecutors had stopped the court proceedings for a full five minutes. It had seemed like hours. “I will never, ever forget those five minutes,” Dominick said. “Everyone in the courtroom was crawling out of his skin.”
Kim passed this suggestion on to Dan, and we decided to try it to dramatize the sixty seconds we believed took Ron from us.
On redirect examination, Ed Medvene called for the courtroom to remain silent for one minute, and asked Dr. Spitz to mark the time. The witness checked his watch and tapped a pen against the edge of the witness stand to signal the start of the minute.
No one spoke.
No one moved.
We stared straight ahead.
We kept waiting to
hear the tap of Dr. Spitz’s pen, but the silence remained, and seemed to deepen.
Still the second hand ticked slowly.
It is amazing how long one minute is.
A dark depression engulfed me as I realized that in one minute such as this, Ron’s life had been snuffed out.
It was continually curious to watch the behavior of the killer and his lawyers before and after court and during breaks. Whenever the jurors were out of the room, they joked and backslapped one another, constantly discussing their golf games. They did not appear to take this matter seriously. Clearly this team of defense lawyers was spawned from the same garbage bin as the original “Scheme Team.”
FBI Special Agent Douglas W. Deedrick presented the results of his analysis of hair fragments and carpet fibers linking Ron and Nicole to the killer’s Ford Bronco, once more tightening the circumstantial case against the defendant.
Deedrick was cross-examined by defense attorney Daniel Leonard. One of his main lines of attack was to show that Deedrick was a biased witness. He got the FBI agent to acknowledge that he displayed in his office a photograph of himself posing with Kim and me. This was a surprise to us, and we discovered that the photo had been taken during Phil Vannatter’s retirement party, which we all attended.
Later, we learned Deedrick’s theory as to how the defense discovered the existence of the photo. Someone claiming to be a writer had come to his Washington office and asked for an interview. Deedrick became suspicious when the “writer” nosed about his office and specifically commented about the photo.
We cut to the chase. Under direct examination by Tom Lambert, our three DNA experts, Dr. Robin Cotton of Cellmark Diagnostic Laboratory and Renee Montgomery and Gary Sims, both from the California Department of Justice DNA laboratory, presented the evidence in a “user friendly” manner.
The statistics were familiar to us, and as damning as ever: The probability that blood leading away from the crime scene came from someone other than the defendant was as low as 1 in 170 million and as high as 1 in 1.2 billion. The chance that blood on the socks found in the killer’s bedroom came from someone other than Nicole was 1 in 6.8 billion people. The probability that blood found on the back gate at Bundy came from someone other than the defendant ranged from 1 in 57 billion to 1 in 150 billion.
It was the task of defense attorney Robert Blasier to counter these incredible probabilities. Despite the fact that the defense, prior to the trial, had agreed to accept the DNA results, Blasier fired question after question in an effort to confuse and confound the jury.
When I tried to summarize what Blasier was trying to say, I wound up with a mishmash of thoughts: There are an enormous number of cells in the body; if you took all of the DNA in someone’s body and you took each DNA marker and separated them by half an inch, they would stretch twice around the earth; and, of course, you have to consider how many nanograms of blood were tested in this case; by the way, a nanogram is a billionth of something; and don’t forget that the computer has to calculate an error factor; blah blah blah.
I said to Dan, “I think it would be fair to say that Blasier is a bit anal.”
Neither Blasier nor any of the other defense attorneys addressed the issue that, considering the volume of the evidence, it was outrageous to contend that there was a conspiracy and contamination. Ron’s blood, Nicole’s blood, and the defendant’s blood was all over the crime scene. It led away from the bodies, crawled into the defendant’s Bronco, spattered onto the glove found behind his home, dripped into his foyer, and came to rest on the socks in his bedroom. If any of this blood had been planted, it all had to be planted. If any of it was contaminated, it all had to be contaminated. The killer would have to be the unluckiest man on the face of the earth to be the victim of such an incredible set of coincidences.
Dan explored the defendant’s well-known penchant for beating Nicole. LAPD Sergeant Mark Day described the 1984 incident, before the couple was married, when the defendant had used a baseball bat to smash the windshield of Nicole’s Mercedes.
Then Detective John Edwards testified about his investigation of the couple’s vicious fight on New Year’s Day, 1989. In his deposition the killer had explained away this brutal fight by claiming that he and Nicole were “rassling.” Patti thought: That is not exactly the word I would use if I suffered the bruises and cuts that I saw on the pictures of Nicole’s face and arms.
Finally Dan played a tape recorded by an LAPD officer when he responded to Nicole’s 911 call on October 25, 1993. Nicole’s description of her ex-husband echoed that of Faye Resnick. “He gets very animalistic-looking,” Nicole said. “All his veins pop out and his eyes get black, black and cold, like an animal.”
Like it or not, our family was increasingly visible. I was involved almost daily with early-morning and late-night interviews for Safe Streets—primarily on radio—but even on the Internet. I had to be careful not to comment on the trial; rather, my job was to promote a book entitled Freed to Kill. Offered at no cost, it chronicled the life histories of eight violent criminals and their journeys through the revolving doors of our broken criminal-justice system.
It was a rewarding feeling to be able to speak out in public about much-needed reforms. But it did raise our profile.
Walking to and from court was a constant concern for Kim and Patti. During the criminal trial, the D.A.’s investigators escorted us. Now we were unprotected. We tried to stay in a tight group with the attorneys and walk briskly, avoiding eye contact with the throngs of people who gathered.
After court one day, as we walked across the street, a stranger infiltrated our circle and accompanied us right into the lobby of the Doubletree. Afterward, Kim berated me for speaking to him. I shrugged my shoulders and commented, “He didn’t look shifty.”
“These people are capable of surrounding us and yelling at us,” Kim pointed out. “How do we know one of them doesn’t have a knife or a gun? There are lunatics out there.”
One of Dan’s interns, Steve Foster, took Kim’s fears seriously and arranged for three Santa Monica police officers to escort us. But as soon as they were spotted, the questions started flowing: “What’s the matter, Goldmans? Did you guys get a death threat?” It seems we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
Dan confided, “I went into the men’s room the other day, and he was there. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re not going to beat me up, are you?’ ”
The encounter disturbed Kim. “Dan, do you realize that could have happened to my dad?” she asked. “Anytime he’s out of the room, I’m terrified for him.”
During the killer’s deposition, Dan had elicited comments concerning the Bruno Magli shoes that had left bloody shoe prints at the crime scene. Dan had asked, “Did you ever buy shoes that you knew were Bruno Magli shoes?”
“No,” the killer had answered. He did not say that he could not recall owning a pair of Bruno Magli shoes. He used no qualifying words, such as “perhaps” or “maybe.” His response was unequivocal, and he was stupid enough to embellish it.
“How do you know that?” Dan asked.
The witness replied, under oath, “Because I know, if Bruno Magli makes shoes that look like the shoes they had in court that’s involved in this case, I would never have owned those ugly-ass shoes.”
Those words came back to haunt him. Earlier in the trial, photographer Harry Scull, Jr., in a videotaped deposition, described how he took a picture of the killer at a Buffalo Bills football game on September 26, 1993, in which he was sporting Bruno Magli shoes. We displayed the complete contact sheet for the entire roll of film, proving that the specific shot showing the shoes was part of the photographer’s work on the day in question.
Now FBI Special Agent William Bodziak compared the bloody crime-scene shoeprints to the pattern of the soles of the shoes in the photo. He detailed the angled heel, the waffle-pattern sole, the deep stitching groove—eighteen features in all—that matched exactly.
“He nailed
the son of a bitch,” I muttered.
Even after our best days in court, Kim found herself unable to maintain optimism, and she sometimes voiced those sentiments to Dan.
“Don’t rain on my parade,” Dan pleaded.
Kim shot back: “Dan, please hear me. I trust you. But we got hit in every possible way the first time around. I don’t have any faith in the system. Why should I? I can’t get my hopes up. I can’t let myself get that way. I will not allow myself to trust the system again. Ever.”
THIRTY-FOUR
The sky was overcast, somber, providing a fitting backdrop. It was Friday, November 22.
Rob and Barb Duben were with us. “This is what we’ve all been waiting for,” Patti said to Barb, “ever since the criminal trial—when the bastard didn’t have the nerve to take the stand.”
As we emerged from the Doubletree Hotel, we saw that today’s crowd was two or three times larger than usual. Cameras and microphones were shoved in our faces, and the normal barrage of questions rang out: “How are you feeling?” “Are you nervous?” and, one reporter’s particular favorite, “What did you have for breakfast?” If she had been willing to respond Patti would have replied in sequence: “Sick to my stomach,” “Cool as a cucumber, of course,” and, “A banana, what else!” But mum was the operative word.
A cacophony of cheers and jeers assaulted our ears. Some shouted, “Goldmans, we love you!” “Don’t give up, O.J.’s a murderer!” and “We’re on your side!” Other demonstrators yelled, “Free O.J.” and “We love you, Juice!”
