His Name Is Ron

by Kim Goldman

  One man shouted, “Golddigger!”

  Rob said jokingly, “He probably meant to say, ‘Goldman’!”

  Patti found it difficult to swallow. She took several deep breaths as Dan intoned, “Pursuant to California Evidence Code Section 776, we call to the stand the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson.”

  Patti felt her heart race, and her hands began to shake. She thought: This piece of human refuse is finally going to testify—to tell all of his lies—to be on his very best behavior—to do the most incredible acting job of his entire career.

  The killer was asked to stand and raise his right hand. Maybe he should raise his left hand, Patti thought, so it would be easier for him to lie.

  The clerk asked: “You do solemnly swear that the testimony you may give in the cause now pending before this court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

  The witness replied, “I do.” Then he began to tell one lie after another.

  He seemed to have difficulty knowing where to focus his eyes. If he looked straight ahead, he would be staring at Patti, Kim, and me, and he chose not to do that. Neither did he turn his gaze toward the jury. So he glanced at Dan, or toward the ceiling, or around the edges of the room. He looked very nervous. Several times early in his testimony he began to breathe heavily; we had learned during his deposition that this was a sign that he was at his most evasive.

  He pushed the microphone away from his face. The bailiff moved it back into position. The moment she turned her back, he defiantly pushed it away again, muttering, “They can hear my breathing.” Kim told the bailiff what he had done, and shortly thereafter Judge Fujisaki ordered him to keep it in front of him—no matter what.

  A few minutes into the questioning, Patti realized that the defendant’s children were nowhere in sight. She never expected Sydney or Justin to be there, but she thought that Arnelle and Jason might show some support for their ever-so-innocent father.

  The killer admitted that there had been some problems in his relationship with Nicole, and that she had hit him numerous times. Dan asked, “And how many times … did you hit Nicole?”

  “Never.”

  “How many times did you strike Nicole?”

  “Never.”

  “How many times did you slap Nicole?”

  “Never.”

  “How many times did you kick her?”

  “Never.”

  “How many times did you beat her, sir?”

  “Never.”

  Dan said, “Let’s talk about 1989, okay … tell this jury exactly how you caused all those injuries on Nicole’s face.”

  The killer responded, “I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I felt totally responsible.” When Dan displayed the famous photo of Nicole’s battered face, the witness explained: “A lot of this redness would normally be there most nights, once she picked and cleaned her face.” He admitted that he “wrestled her out of the room,” but he claimed not to know how she sustained a split lip and a welt over her right eye. He said, “Maybe my hand hit—hit or was on her face. I certainly didn’t punch her or slap her … I had her in a headlock at one point, in trying to get her out of the door, so I would assume that my hand was somewhere around her—her face.”

  He said this in a rather nonchalant manner, as if there were nothing unusual about putting your wife in a headlock.

  At the defense table, we heard one of the killer’s own attorneys mumble, “This is sad.”

  Judge Fujisaki looked on with raised eyebrows; it seemed as if he, too, found the killer’s denials implausible.

  In the World According to the Killer, this “altercation” was Nicole’s fault. She had run into the room, “jumped on me, on the bed, and with her knees and arms—and then I kind of grabbed her and we kind of fell over on the floor.”

  Dan pointed out that as the witness was answering the question, he had balled his right hand into a fist. He asked, “Is that what you did that night when you grabbed her?”

  “Quite possibly when I grabbed her arm, quite possibly I did.” As he answered this question, the killer put both hands into fists.

  Dan quoted from a book the murderer had published early in his football career, wherein he boasted, “I think I lie pretty effectively.”

  The killer blamed that passage on his ghostwriter.

  He even lies about lying, I thought. He doesn’t know how to tell the truth.

  Dan then quoted the killer’s words during an ESPN interview following the “altercation.” He told sports reporter Roy Firestone, “We were both guilty. No one was hurt, it was no big deal, and we both got on with our lives.”

  The witness explained: “It was a sport show, and yes, I most definitely on this sport show minimized what—minimized what happened in my personal life, yes. … To me and Nicole it was a big deal. To America—I didn’t think it was any of their business.”

  Dan took the witness through a series of incidents. The killer denied slapping Nicole’s face and knocking off her glasses during an argument in the parking lot of a veterinarian’s office. He denied slapping Nicole to the ground during an argument at the beach.

  He denied stalking his ex-wife. After the divorce, he said, it was Nicole who pursued him. He complained, “She showed up at the golf course where I was, she followed me to Mexico, she made me cookies and … she called my home and my office incessantly.” He was “a thousand percent sure” that Nicole was pursuing him.

  It was around Mother’s Day, 1993—little more than one year prior to the murders—when the couple decided to attempt a reconciliation. The killer testified that he was not sure things would work out, so, he said, “I gave her a year.”

  During the incident of October 25, 1993, when a 911 tape caught the sound of the killer’s voice raging in the background as a terrified Nicole called for help, he admitted, “I was pretty upset, yes.” But he denied that Nicole showed any signs of fear, and, a few minutes later, he challenged: “I will debate forever that she was not frightened of me that night.”

  Dan asked, “You heard that 911 tape, sir, did you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “… So you think she just lied to the 911 operator?”

  “Yes,” the killer stonewalled. “… I think she was trying to control—”

  Referring to the tape the police had made when they responded to the 911 call, Dan asked, “And it’s true, sir, that when you did get mad and angry, you would acquire a very animallike look, right?”

  The witness answered, “Yeah,” then he equivocated, adding, “… I can never recall being mad and looking in a mirror.”

  Thanks to a new law that we had encouraged the legislature to pass and had urged Governor Pete Wilson to sign, Judge Fujisaki ruled that we could introduce excerpts from Nicole’s diaries in order to show her state of mind.

  By the spring of 1994 the attempted reconciliation had come to an end. The murderer had resumed a relationship with Paula Barbieri, but he still had plenty of interaction with Nicole.

  Referring to an argument with her ex-husband on June 3, 1994—nine days prior to the murders—Nicole wrote that the killer had said to her, “You hung up on me last night. You’re going to pay for this, bitch.” He also called her a “fucking cunt.” But the killer denied the statements.

  Dan asked, “Nicole just made all this up?”

  “Absolutely. And this is not true.”

  The defendant’s social life was in a shambles. According to Paula Barbieri, they argued on Saturday night because he would not let her come to Sydney’s dance recital the next day. At 7 A.M., the day of the murders, Barbieri left an eight-minute message for him, declaring that she did not want to have anything more to do with him. Despite the fact that telephone records showed that he called his message manager at 6:56 P.M., and despite the fact that Paula’s message was the only one that had been left there all day, the killer claimed that he never heard the message.

  We supposed that the defense w
ould charge that the phone company had joined the multilayered conspiracy.

  To preclude such an absurd contention, Dan read from the statement that the defendant had given to Detectives Lange and Vannatter the afternoon following the murders: “And then I checked my messages. She had left me a message that she wasn’t there, that she had to leave town.”

  Dan orchestrated the day beautifully, so that he would leave the jury plenty to think about over the weekend, before the defendant’s testimony resumed on Monday. Like the second hand on the clock that ticked steadily toward 4 P.M., Dan moved the subject matter to the key issue. He asked, “Now, between 9:35 P.M. and 10:55 P.M. on Sunday, June 12, there is not a single living human being who you can identify that saw or spoke to you; is that true?”

  The killer acknowledged: “That’s absolutely true.”

  “You had gloves; you had a hat; you were wearing a dark sweat outfit, and you had a knife. And you went to Nicole Brown’s condominium at 875 South Bundy, did you not, sir?”

  The killer was well rehearsed. The defense team, of course, expected that Dan would ask such questions sooner or later. Until this moment, the defendant had never addressed the jury directly. Now, as if on cue, he turned his face and fixed a rather blind stare upon the jurors. He said firmly, “That’s absolutely not true.”

  “And you confronted Nicole Brown Simpson and you killed her, didn’t you?”

  “That is absolutely not true.” The answer came out devoid of any sense of pain or passion.

  “And you killed Ronald Goldman, sir, did you or did you not?”

  “That’s absolutely not true.”

  Kim confided to a friend, “You almost expect to see his face on television or on the covers of magazines, but it never really hit me how close, physically close, he is to us until one of the law clerks told me she walked into a sushi bar and there he was. I realized at that moment that the same thing could happen to me, anytime, anyplace. He’s free to roam. Free to prowl. Free to walk wherever he chooses.”

  Kim’s fear of encountering him continued to grow when Dominick Dunne told her a third-hand story. Dominick said that Lawrence Schiller had recounted a conversation he had with the killer: The murderer had bragged about donning his disguise and driving along Sunset Boulevard. He said that he pulled up to a stoplight and found himself directly next to Kim. It was a great joke! He was proud of himself because Kim had not recognized him. Kim thought: This is the kind of sicko who probably spends his spare time pulling the wings off flies.

  Kim found herself constantly checking her rearview mirror. She spotted his car outside the Doubletree Hotel and wrote down his license plate number, 3RJE923. The knowledge that he could be behind any tree or under any rock haunted her.

  Kim’s friend Paul Geller came to court with us on Monday to hear the second day of the killer’s testimony. As they walked the gauntlet across the street, and Paul realized what Kim was going through day after day, he asked a simple question: “How do you do this?”

  “I just do it,” Kim responded.

  We will never understand that segment of the public that seeks a glimpse, a smile, an autograph from this man. After spending a day in the same room with him, we just wanted to go home, take a shower, and wash off the stench.

  Before court convened, Harvey Levin from Channel 2, the local CBS affiliate, told us about an incident that had occurred at the killer’s house the previous night. A security guard thought he had seen a prowler. The LAPD was called to investigate. As it turned out, the suspected prowler was simply another security guard. How ironic, we thought, that the murderer would call for help from the inept, corrupt, and racist organization that had spawned the “twin devils of deception.”

  Dan began the day with further questions concerning the defendant’s statement, the day after the murders, to Detectives Lange and Vannatter. The killer had since, in various forums, changed details of his story, but he refused to admit that he had lied to the police. He explained the discrepancies by claiming that his story was just “more accurate now,” or that the transcript of the police interview was wrong.

  For example, in trying to explain why there was blood in his Ford Bronco, he had told the detectives that he cut his hand Sunday evening. He had said, “I recall bleeding at my house and then I went to the Bronco. The last thing I did before I left, when I was rushing, was went and got my phone out of the Bronco.”

  Only later did he learn that his cellular phone records showed that he tried once more to reach Paula Barbieri at 10:03 P.M., and he did not want anyone to place him in the Bronco shortly before the murders. So his “more accurate” story was that he was standing in his yard when he made the 10:03 P.M. call and, later, as he was rushing about getting ready to go to the airport, he ran to his Bronco and retrieved, not the phone, but the accessories for it.

  Dan asked the killer to explain at length what he did after returning from McDonald’s with Kato Kaelin. The witness said that he went to his garage to look for his old, favorite sand wedge to take along on his business/golfing trip to Chicago. “And I also needed some balls that I play with, a ball called a Maxflite 100HT,” he said. “Unless you play golf, you don’t understand how important that is to a golfer, the type of ball that they play with.”

  As the subject turned to golf, his entire demeanor changed. He seemed relaxed and confident. We found this incredible. During his trial testimony for the vicious murder of his ex-wife and Ron, he was giving golfing tips!

  After hitting a few chip shots on his lawn and allowing his dog, Chachi, to do “her business” in the yard of his neighbor, Mr. Sheinbaum, he went inside, “turned off the lights downstairs, except for my lamps that I normally keep on, and I went upstairs.”

  Dan forced the murderer to admit that he had not told Lange and Vannatter anything about chipping golf balls or walking his dog or turning off lights. This, in fact, was the killer’s well-rehearsed version, designed to fit in and around the details supplied by other witnesses—details that he did not know when he gave his initial statement to the detectives.

  The witness continued: “I went upstairs. I recall having a little time before the limo driver would call me.

  “My limo drivers always call me fifteen minutes before the call time, and that historically is when I go into gear, doing my final preparations to leave, and I knew I had time to sit on my bed, which I did when I went back in the house.”

  It was about 10:35 or 10:40 P.M. when, he said, he glanced at the clock and realized that he was running late. He jumped into the shower. Over the sound of the water, he may have heard the phone ringing, announcing the arrival of the limo driver.

  Minutes later, half-dressed, he brought a suit bag downstairs. He stepped outside briefly to look in his golf bag to make sure he had his black golfing shoes. That, he claimed, was the moment when Allan Park said that he saw a man entering the house.

  To us, the entire story sounded absurd, and it was certainly memorized. Dan commented to us that if he asked the killer to repeat his story, he would get it back verbatim.

  A series of questions brought a series of denials.

  Dan asked, “You have no explanation for how your blood was found in that Bronco?”

  The witness answered, “That’s correct.”

  “And you have no explanation, sir, for how blood of Nicole’s was found on the carpet of the driver side, do you?”

  “No.”

  “And you have no explanation for how Ron Goldman’s blood got in your car that night, do you?”

  “Me personally, no.”

  Then who? we thought.

  The killer acknowledged that he had told Detectives Lange and Vannatter that he cut his finger sometime between 10 P.M. and 11 P.M. that night, and may have reopened the cut in Chicago. He now said, “I didn’t see that or any mark on my hand between ten and eleven on June 12,” and explained the contradiction by saying that, earlier, he must have assumed that he cut his hand the night before.

  He den
ied that he had any other injuries to his fingers when he returned from Chicago. He really did not know how he sustained other cuts by the time he was examined on June 15. If they were fingernail gougings, they must have been inflicted by his seven-year-old son, Justin, as they were roughhousing.

  Paul looked at Kim in amazement and said, “Did he just say Justin?!”

  “Sickening, huh?” she replied.

  Dan exhibited close-up photos of the defendant’s hand, taken by the police on June 13. Although there were clearly other cuts depicted in the photos, the killer was evasive, first denying that he could see them; then, when Dan asked where he had sustained the injuries, he replied, “Who knows?”

  We had not seen these particular photos before, and they made Patti squeamish. She realized that these cuts might have been made by Ron as he struggled to save himself.

  Watching the killer on the witness stand, lying through his teeth, brought us a certain amount of relief. His arrogance was sickening, but until now we had been unable to have the satisfaction of knowing that he was under pressure, that the world could now know him for who he is. Without question, it was unfortunate that this trial was not being broadcast on live TV.

  Over the lunch break, numerous reporters told us they were astonished at the level to which he had sunk; he was not responsible for anything; he could not explain anything. The only thing he could say with certainty was that no one in the whole wide world knew where he was between 9:35 P.M. and 10:55 P.M. on the night of the murders.

  Dan returned to the subject of the killer’s actions after he was informed of Nicole’s death. The witness sighed and took a deep breath. Kim passed Patti a note saying that she could not believe his lack of emotion. She wrote: “Every time I think about you and Dad calling me to tell me the horrific news, I get choked up, and I always will. And when HE relives that event, the call? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.”

  We knew that from that moment until his arrival back in L.A. he was on the phone almost constantly. He used the phone in his hotel room. On the way to O’Hare Airport, he used his cell phone. He used the Airfone during the flight back to L.A. He spoke several times with his assistant, Cathy Randa, and his business attorney, Skip Taft. He spoke with his daughter Arnelle, and others. He arranged to have criminal attorney Howard Weitzman on hand when he returned to Rockingham. But he was also frantic to contact Kato Kaelin. Kaelin was the last person he tried to call from his cell phone while on the ground, and the first person he tried to reach from the Airfone. He tried at least two more times during the flight, but he was unable to get Kaelin on the phone.