The following morning, Friday, June 10, Nicole spoke with her friend Ron Hardy, a bartender and host at several Los Angeles nightspots. Nicole explained that she was just about to leave to go look at houses with McKenna. “She was happy,” Hardy later recalled. “She said everything’s great, she hadn’t felt this good in a while. She felt that she had finally put O.J. behind her.” Nicole made dinner plans with Hardy for Monday night, then spent the rest of the day with McKenna seeking a place to lease. “We were together all day, looking at houses,” McKenna later recalled. “She knew the kids really liked Bundy and wouldn’t want to move, so she wanted to do something special for them, to give them something they would want—especially a pool. And by the end of the day, we found a place for her in Malibu, a one-story contemporary with a pool and a view of the ocean, for five thousand a month. I remember walking up the hill there with her. We were smoking. Nobody smokes in Brentwood, so we used to sneak it together, and she was saying, like she couldn’t really believe it, ‘I can really do this. I can lease the house and move. I can really do this.’ ”
Nicole called McKenna on Saturday night to ask when the FOR LEASE sign would go up in front of her condo. “She was anxious to have it up,” McKenna said, “because she wanted to get on with her life, but also because she wanted O.J. to see it, to say ‘Screw you’ to him.” As it turned out, McKenna was then in the process of switching real estate agencies, so she couldn’t locate an appropriate sign until the following day, Sunday, June 12. At about seven that evening, a colleague from McKenna’s new office dropped off a sign with her just as she was leaving for a dinner party. McKenna figured she would put it up at Nicole’s afterward. She put her hammer in the car.
McKenna’s dinner party was in Beverly Hills, so as she was driving home she had to decide which way she was going to turn on Bundy. “At the time,” McKenna remembered later, “I lived north on Bundy and she lived south. I remember looking at the clock in my car when I hit the intersection of Bundy and San Vicente. It was 10:15. It would have taken me five minutes to get to her house. I said, ‘Screw it, I’ll do it tomorrow.’ ”
On the night of June 12, 1994, Pablo Fenjves watched the top of the ten o’clock news with his wife, Jai, a costume designer, in their third-floor master bedroom. They lived about sixty yards north of Nicole Simpson’s condominium. Both Nicole’s and Fenjves’s backdoors opened onto the same alley, though they had never met. Nicole had moved into the neighborhood shortly after Fenjves. In fact, 875 South Bundy was on the market when Fenjves was looking at houses, and he had walked through it during his search. He had found it too narrow, too expensive, and too noisy, which were common opinions about the property.
Pablo Fenjves was forty-one years old in 1994 and starting to reap the benefits of many years’ toil in Hollywood. His parents, Holocaust survivors from Hungary, emigrated to Venezuela, and young Pablo went to Illinois for college and to Canada for a brief apprenticeship in journalism. From Montreal, he ventured to Florida in the late 1970s, where he went to work writing “human interest stories” for the National Enquirer. Even though the job brought him the opportunity to interview such notables as the world’s oldest Siamese twins (they were in their twenties and employed in a traveling freak show), Fenjves quickly soured on the Enquirer and left after about a year. He has since made his living writing screenplays.
Fenjves’s progress in the business was slow but steady. In 1986, he moved from the East Coast to an apartment in Santa Monica. There he began a long and fairly prosperous interlude in a sort of shadow Hollywood; he sold script after script, and they all languished unproduced, yet still he sold more scripts. Finally, as the 1990s began, his luck changed. The turning point came, at least in part, courtesy of the surefire topic of interracial romance. HBO Showcase bought (and made) The Affair, the story of a black soldier who falls in love with a white woman during World War II. Fenjves bought a BMW and a Mercedes and decided to move to Brentwood. Since Pablo Fenjves would spend “only” about half a million dollars on a home, he was pretty much limited to south of Sunset.
Sometime after 10:00 on the night of June 12, Pablo and Jai began to hear the sound of a dog barking. The actual time, Pablo later testified, was right around 10:15. A few moments later, Pablo walked downstairs to his study to fiddle with a script called The Last Bachelor, a romantic comedy about an amorous baseball player. Shortly before 11:00, he walked back up to the bedroom, where his wife had been watching Dynasty: The Reunion. The credits on the show were rolling, and the barking had still not stopped. Fenjves remembered the sound because it was not the ordinary chatter of a neighborhood dog.
The sound of the dog, Fenjves later testified, was like “a plaintive wail—sounded like a, you know, very unhappy animal.” Seven months before the murders, Fenjves had written a script called Frame-Up, a police drama that became a television movie on the USA Network. In the first scene of the screenplay, Fenjves wrote, “We hear the plaintive wail of a police siren.” In the best Hollywood tradition, Fenjves plagiarized, if only from himself, a line that had brought him a brief moment of renown.
Pablo Fenjves was not Nicole’s only neighbor who heard her grief-stricken Akita in the moments after 10:15. The “dog witnesses,” as they came to be known, reflected the peculiar nature of the neighborhood. Almost none of the residents, for example, had what most Americans would describe as a job—that is, a place of employment where one had to appear five days a week, eight hours a day. Rather, Nicole’s neighbors made their living as freelancers, mostly in the entertainment business—screenwriters, designers, and the like—and all were prowling for the big score that would catapult them north of Sunset. Many owned dogs, and in the atomized, car-oriented culture of Los Angeles, they tended to know only those neighbors who likewise walked their dogs. Finally, virtually every person in and around 875 South Bundy on the night of June 12 answered one question the same way: What were they doing at shortly after 10:00 P.M.? Watching television.
Steven Schwab watched reruns of The Dick Van Dyke Show seven nights a week. Like Fenjves, Schwab was a screenwriter. He had enjoyed less success in the business than Fenjves, however, and so lived more modestly, in an apartment on Montana Avenue, about three blocks from Nicole. The burly and bearded Schwab spoke in an almost eerie monotone, which seemed to match the extreme regularity of his habits. As he later testified, “During the week I would walk my dog between 11:00 and 11:30 so that when I got home I was able to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show on TV. On the weekends I walked the dog between 10:30 and 11:00 because The Dick Van Dyke Show ends at 10:30 on the weekend.” As June 12, 1994, was a Sunday, he set out with his dog, Sherry, shortly after his favorite program ended, at 10:30 P.M.
Schwab walked his regular route around the neighborhood, a circuit he followed as religiously as he did his television schedule. The route, he said, “is one that I designed to take about a half hour to get me home so I can watch whatever shows I want.” At about 10:55 P.M., when he passed the alley behind Nicole’s home, Schwab saw something unusual: a beautiful white Akita that was barking at a house. It paused to look at Schwab and then barked at the house again. Curious about the behavior and a little worried about this seemingly abandoned animal, Schwab approached the dog, let it sniff him, and examined its collar. He noticed that the collar was expensive—“It wasn’t something that I could afford to get for my own dog”—but it did not give a name or address. As he studied the dog more carefully, Schwab noticed something else. There was blood on all four of the animal’s paws.
Schwab couldn’t figure out where the dog belonged, so he just headed home. The Akita followed him. (In August 1994, the Akita would be “interviewed” by Sergeant Donn Yarnall, the chief trainer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s “K-9 Patrol.” Yarnall’s report described the dog as having a “very nice disposition” but “inadequate instincts or courage to protect his territory, owner or himself.”) With the dog right behind him, Schwab made it home shortly after 11:00, just after The Mary Tyler
Moore Show had begun. Eight months later, Schwab remembered that “it was an episode that I had seen previously, involving Mary dating someone from a rival station.” Schwab told his wife, Linda, that a large dog had followed him home. “You’re kidding,” she said, but then he pointed to the Akita, which was waiting patiently on the landing outside their second-floor apartment. While Steven and Linda pondered what to do, they gave the dog some water. As they were talking, at about 11:40 P.M. the Schwabs’ neighbor Sukru Boztepe walked into the apartment complex. A freelance laser printer repairman who still speaks with the accent of his native Turkey, Boztepe and his Danish-born wife, Bettina Rasmussen, had hosted a garage sale with the Schwabs earlier that day.
After the two couples chatted for a few minutes, Boztepe agreed that he and his wife would keep the dog for the night. But when they took it inside, Boztepe later testified, the “dog was acting so nervous running around, scratching the door, and we didn’t feel comfortable sleeping with such a big dog in the apartment, and we decide to take the dog for a walk. So we took it.” They let the Akita lead them, and the dog pulled them back toward Bundy Drive—“It was getting more nervous and it was pulling me harder.” Just after midnight, the dog stopped in front of a gate on Bundy that was labeled 875. Boztepe remembered that the area was so dark that he never would have looked down the pathway behind the gate if the dog had not called his attention to it.
What did he see there?
“I saw a lady laying down full of blood.”
2. PARKER CENTER
Officer Robert Riske of the Los Angeles Police Department was patrolling West Los Angeles in a black-and-white squad car when his radio summoned him at 12:09 A.M. on June 13. There had been a report of a crime from 874 South Bundy, in Brentwood. Four minutes later, Riske and his partner arrived at the address, which was the home of an elderly woman, Elsie Tistaert. She had called the police because a few moments earlier, a man and a woman—Sukru Boztepe and Bettina Rasmussen, it would turn out—had banged on her door. It wasn’t the kind of thing that usually went on in the neighborhood, and Tistaert was scared. She called 911 and reported a possible attempted burglary of her home.
When Riske rolled up to the scene, he found Boztepe and Rasmussen, who were still tending to Kato-the-Akita, and the officer quickly straightened out the confusion about why the police were needed. Boztepe took Riske across the street and showed him the pathway to number 875. The officer shined his flashlight on the corpse of Nicole Brown Simpson.
Nicole was lying at the base of four stairs that led up to a landing and the front door. The pool of blood around her was bigger than she was. Blood covered much of the imitation-tile walkway leading to the stairs, a path that was bordered on both sides by shrubbery. When Riske pointed his flashlight to the right, he saw another body. It was a muscular young man with his shirt pulled up over his head. The man, later identified as Ronald Goldman, was slumped against the metal fence that separated 875 from the property next door. Near Goldman’s feet, Riske identified three items: a black hat, a white envelope stained with blood, and a single leather glove. Turning back to Nicole, Riske made out a single fresh heel print in the blood next to her body. Perhaps the most important thing to Riske was what he didn’t find: Despite all the blood, there were no bloody shoe prints coming out the front gate onto the sidewalk by Bundy Drive.
Careful not to make tracks in the blood, Riske tiptoed through the bushes to the left of the pathway, past Nicole’s body, and up to the landing. From the landing, he shined his flashlight on a walkway that stretched the entire northern length of the property. Along this 120-foot-long corridor, Riske saw a single set of bloody shoe prints. It appeared that the killer had gone out the back way, to the alley that Nicole shared with Pablo Fenjves and other neighbors. On closer inspection, Riske noticed something else: fresh drops of blood to the left of those shoe prints. While leaving the scene, the killer might well have been bleeding from the left hand.
The front door to 875 South Bundy was open. Riske walked in to a scene of domestic calm. Nothing was out of place: no signs of ransacking or theft. Candles flickered in the living room. The officer walked up the stairs. There were lighted candles in the master bedroom and master bath, too, and the tub there was full of water. There were two other bedrooms, with a young girl asleep in one and a younger boy in the other.
Robert Riske knew his place in the chain of command. Once he had identified the dead and closed off access to the scene, his only responsibility was to summon the investigators, who would begin looking for clues. This was a major crime in an unlikely locale. (Eventually, there would be 1,811 murder victims in Los Angeles County in 1994, but these two were only the ninth and tenth of the year in the West Los Angeles division of the LAPD and the first two of the year in Brentwood.) As Riske prepared to summon assistance on his “rover,” a portable walkie-talkie, he noticed a letter on the front hall table. The return address indicated that it was from O.J. Simpson. The former football star was also depicted in a poster on the north wall of the home. On closer inspection, Riske found photographs of Simpson among the family pictures scattered on tables.
These discoveries prompted a change in Riske’s plans. He decided to call for help on the telephone because, as he testified later, “I didn’t want to broadcast over my rover that there was a possible double homicide involving a celebrity.” Reporters monitored the police bands, and if he had used his rover, he said, “the media would beat my backup there.”
Robert Riske was only a four-year veteran of the LAPD when he made his grisly discoveries. His name had never even appeared in the Los Angeles Times, but as his actions demonstrated, he had already developed an interest in, and some sophistication about, the ways of the press. In this he was typical. More than any other police force in the nation, the LAPD was locked in a strange and complex symbiosis, of several decades’ duration, with the media.
The modern Los Angeles Police Department was largely the creation of one man, William H. Parker. Born in 1902 and raised in the hard fields of South Dakota, Parker came to resemble in character the austere setting of his youth. He moved west to Los Angeles in 1923 and drove a cab to support himself while he studied at one of the many fledgling law schools that were springing up around the city. He joined the LAPD in 1927, worked a night shift on patrol, and became a member of the bar in 1930. Some years later, he made the acquaintance of another young LAPD officer, Gene Roddenberry, who eventually turned to writing science fiction and created Star Trek. The character of Spock is said to be based on Bill Parker.
Parker joined the force at a propitious time for an ambitious and incorruptible young officer. For years the LAPD, along with the rest of Los Angeles city government, had floated on a sea of graft and payoffs. The situation became so intolerable in the 1930s that the city’s business leaders decided changes had to be made. They hired from out of town a series of reform-minded police chiefs, who brought with them the gospel of “professionalization” of the force. The new leadership improved training, cracked down on corruption, and worked to insulate the police from what was then seen as the sinister influence of elected officials. This last goal became the special mission of Bill Parker. Working in tandem with the police union, Parker drafted changes in Section 202 of the city charter, which put a cast-iron shield of civil-service law around all police officers. After voters approved these measures in 1937, it became virtually impossible to fire cops; they could only be dismissed by a panel of their invariably sympathetic brethren. The law even decreed that the police chief would be selected according to civil-service guidelines, which meant that the LAPD would determine for itself who would serve as its leader. Once selected, the chief would also enjoy the protection of the civil-service law, which amounted to lifetime tenure in the top spot of the LAPD. As Joe Domanick, a historian of the LAPD, has written of the changes in Section 202, “A quasi-military organization had declared itself independent of the rest of city government and placed itself outside the control of the poli
ce commission, City Hall, or any other elected public officials, outside the democratic system of checks and balances.”
Parker became chief in 1950, when Los Angeles was in the midst of a period of spectacular postwar growth. At that point the city was no longer, in H. L. Mencken’s phrase, “a double Dubuque”—an insular, nearly all-white outpost of the Midwest on the Pacific Ocean. But if Los Angeles was changing, the LAPD was not. Parker’s model for his force was the Marine Corps, and so the police became tantamount to an army of occupation for those in the city who did not share Parker’s ethnic heritage. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, though, the LAPD under Bill Parker became known as a model of efficiency and skill. This did not happen by accident. Shortly after Parker took charge, he became acquainted with a young radio producer named Jack Webb. In 1949, Webb had started a radio series, Dragnet, based on the exploits of the LAPD. At first Parker was suspicious of the show, worried that it might place his beloved department in an unflattering light. Aware of his discomfort, Webb proposed a deal: In return for the LAPD’s cooperation, he would give the department the right to approve every script. Parker’s suspicions eased. When Dragnet moved to television, Parker understood just how advantageous an arrangement he had struck. Sergeant Joe Friday became the paradigm of what Parker wanted in an LAPD officer: an incorruptible white man who, with scientific detachment, descended on neighborhoods where he had no personal or emotional ties to clean up the messes made by the vaguely distasteful residents of the city. Soon Parker was only too happy to have Dragnet conclude each week with the announcement “You have just seen Dragnet, a series of authentic cases from official files.… Technical advice for Dragnet comes from the offices of Chief of Police W. H. Parker, Los Angeles Police Department.” Jack Webb, who later wrote an admiring biography of Parker, had created one of the longest-lived genres in television programming, the L.A. police drama, which has included, at various times, The Mod Squad, Adam 12, Felony Squad, Blue Thunder, S.W.A.T., Strike Force, Chopper One, The Rookies, Hunter, and T. J. Hooker. As Joe Domanick wrote, “For twenty-five consecutive seasons at least one LAPD police show was being aired on network television.” They portrayed the LAPD in a manner that made Bill Parker proud.
The Run of His Life Page 3
