Vannatter and Lange conferred. They decided that Vannatter would radio a request for a police criminalist to come and test the stain and see if it really was blood on the Bronco door. More generally, as they testified later, Vannatter and Lange were growing concerned about what might have happened inside Simpson’s property. They had just come from the scene of a brutal murder. Someone was supposed to be living at the Simpson home—at least a housekeeper—and there was no answer, even though lights were on. There appeared to be blood on the car outside. As Lange said later in court, “I felt that someone inside that house may be the victim of a crime, maybe bleeding or worse.” Vannatter testified, “After leaving a very violent bloody murder scene, I believed something was wrong there. I made a determination that we needed to go over—to go into the property.” Fuhrman—by far the youngest and fittest of the four detectives on the scene—volunteered. “I can go over the wall,” he said. “Okay, go,” said Lange. Fuhrman hoisted himself over the six-foot-high brick wall, then stepped to his right and manually opened the hydraulic gate. The four detectives entered O.J. Simpson’s property.
Simpson’s dog—a black chow—did not stir as the detectives passed it on their way to the front door. Vannatter knocked. No answer. They waited two or three minutes, knocked again, and still heard no stirring inside. The four detectives decided to take a look around, and so, still using flashlights in the moments before dawn, they walked together toward the rear of the house. There they saw a row of three guest houses, though they were really more like connected rooms, each with its own entrance. Phillips peered into one.
“There’s—I see someone inside,” he said.
Phillips knocked, and almost immediately a disheveled man who obviously had just awoken answered the door. Shaking his mane of blond hair out of his eyes, Kato Kaelin stared at Phillips, who identified himself and asked, “Is O.J. Simpson home?”
The groggy Kaelin said he didn’t know, but suggested the officers knock at the adjacent guest house, where Simpson’s daughter Arnelle lived. Phillips, accompanied by Vannatter and Lange, then knocked on Arnelle’s door. Fuhrman stayed behind and asked Kaelin if he could come in. Fuhrman noticed that Kaelin seemed disoriented, even for someone who had just awakened. Fuhrman gave Kaelin a standard police test for intoxication: Holding a pen about fifteen inches in front of Kaelin’s face, he watched to see if Kaelin could follow it with his eyes. Kaelin passed—he just looked zonked. Fuhrman asked to look around the small suite. As Fuhrman poked around—among other things, checking the shoes in the closet for blood—the detective asked if anything unusual had happened the previous night.
As a matter of fact, something unusual had happened. At about 10:45 P.M., while he was talking on the telephone, Kaelin said, there were some loud thumps on his bedroom wall, near the air conditioner. The jolts were so dramatic that a picture on the wall was jostled. He had thought there was going to be an earthquake.
The two men chatted a while longer, then Fuhrman walked with Kaelin into the main house, where the other three detectives were speaking with Arnelle Simpson. Fuhrman then decided to follow up on what Kaelin had told him. He left Kaelin in the house with the other detectives, walked back outside, and tried to orient himself to see what faced the south wall of Kaelin’s bedroom—the wall where Kaelin had heard the loud noises. Fuhrman saw that the south wall faced the edge of Simpson’s property, which was marked by a Cyclone fence, and that there was a narrow passageway between the back of the guest houses and the fence.
“I took out my flashlight and I started walking down the path trying to figure out the residence architecture to figure out where Kaelin’s wall might have been,” Fuhrman testified later. “I saw a long, dark path covered with leaves.” When Fuhrman had walked about twenty feet along the path, he saw a dark object on the ground, but it wasn’t until he was practically upon it that he realized what it was. “At some point,” Fuhrman remembered, “I could tell that it was a glove.”
It looked out of place. There were no leaves or twigs on it, and the glove looked moist or sticky, with some parts adhering to one another. Fuhrman stepped around the glove and kept walking along the path, but he started hitting cobwebs, which he had not previously encountered. He followed the path all the way to the end, which was an untended patch of dirt, then headed back out, passing the glove once more. He didn’t touch it, but he noticed something about it: “It looked similar to the glove on the Bundy scene.”
While Fuhrman had stopped in Kaelin’s room to talk to him, the other three detectives had knocked on Arnelle Simpson’s door, which she promptly answered. Phillips told her there was an emergency, and he needed to speak to her father—did she know how to reach him? Arnelle gestured to the main house and asked, “Isn’t he there?” The officers told Arnelle that her father was apparently not there. Leaving her guest house, Arnelle began walking toward the Ashford gate to see if her father’s car was there—that was where he usually parked it. The detective informed her that the Bronco was in fact parked on Rockingham. Using her key, Arnelle let them into the main house.
On the way they passed the third guest house—it belonged to the housekeeper, Gigi Guarin—and noticed that it was empty, the bed still made. Once they were inside the main house, Arnelle called Cathy Randa, her father’s longtime secretary, who always knew O.J.’s whereabouts. Arnelle handed the phone to Phillips, who told Randa there was an emergency that required their speaking with Simpson. Randa said he had taken the red-eye flight to Chicago the previous night and was staying at an airport hotel, the Chicago O’Hare Plaza.
Phillips called the hotel at 6:05 A.M. and asked to be put through to O.J. Simpson’s room. Though he recognized the voice, the detective still asked, “Is this O.J. Simpson?”
“Yes, who is this?”
Phillips chose his words carefully when he delivered news of Nicole’s death to O.J. “This is Detective Phillips from the Los Angeles Police Department. I have some bad news for you. Your ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, has been killed.”
Simpson was distraught. “Oh my God, Nicole is killed? Oh my God, she is dead?”
Phillips tried to calm him. “Mr. Simpson, please try to get ahold of yourself. I have your children at the West Los Angeles police station. I need to talk to you about that.”
“What do you mean you have my children at the police station? Why are my kids at the police station?”
“Because we had no place else to take them,” Phillips answered. “They are there for safekeeping. I need to know what to do with your children.”
“Well, I’m going to be leaving out of Chicago on the first available flight,” Simpson said. “I will come back to Los Angeles.” Phillips then handed the phone to Arnelle, who agreed with her father that she would ask his friend Al Cowlings to pick up the children.
Phillips never spoke to Simpson again. Later, the detective found it worth noting what Simpson did not say in their brief conversation. Simpson never asked how or when Nicole had been “killed.” Phillips had not said (and Simpson did not ask) whether she had been killed in an accident or a murder.
The drowsy children waited at the police station for someone to explain what had happened to them. At one point, eight-year-old Sydney Simpson asked to make a phone call, and she dialed her home number. The answering machine picked up, and Sydney left a message: “Mommy, please call me back. I want to know what happened last night. Why did we have to go to the police station? Please answer, Mommy. Please answer, Mommy. Please answer, Mommy. Please answer. ’Bye.”
3. BEING O.J.
The pace of events picked up quickly after Mark Fuhrman discovered the glove on the path behind Kato Kaelin’s room. After Phillips spoke to Simpson in Chicago, Tom Lange had the melancholy duty of notifying Nicole Brown Simpson’s parents of her death. LAPD policy called for detectives to notify a homicide victim’s next of kin in person if possible, but Lange learned from Arnelle that Lou and Juditha Brown lived in Orange County, about seventy-five miles away. Lange kne
w the media would soon learn about the murders and suspected that if he didn’t speak to Nicole’s parents immediately, they would learn of their daughter’s death from television news reports.
Lou Brown answered the telephone at 6:21 A.M. He took the news quietly. Lange did not know that Nicole’s sister Denise, the oldest of the four Brown daughters, lived at the family home and that she had picked up the phone on another extension.
Denise began screaming, “He killed her! He finally killed her!”
“Who?” asked Lange.
“O.J.!” said Denise.
Meanwhile, behind the house, Fuhrman quickly appreciated the significance of what he had found. The detective later recalled in testimony that “when I found the glove back here on this pathway, I will have to—I have to admit to you that the adrenaline started pumping because I didn’t really know what was going on.… When I found the glove and actually realized this glove was very close in description and color to the glove at the crime scene, my heart started pounding and I realized what I had probably found.” One by one, Fuhrman took each of the other three detectives down the narrow pathway to study the glove without touching it. They all agreed that based on what they remembered, this right-hand glove looked like a match for the one at Bundy, but Vannatter sent Phillips and Fuhrman back to the murder scene to make a closer comparison. Lange would go back, too, to begin examining the evidence there, while Vannatter would await the criminalist at Rockingham.
The evidence stacked up quickly and led to a plausible theory of events: It appeared that the killer had dropped a left glove in a struggle at the murder scene and then suffered a cut on his exposed left hand. Bleeding, the killer then walked to a car in the back alley—very possibly Simpson’s Bronco. He then traveled to Rockingham where, perhaps in an effort to hide his clothes on the narrow path behind Kato’s room, he had dropped the other glove. “This is a crime scene,” Vannatter declared at Rockingham.
After the other three detectives left for Bundy, Vannatter decided to take a look around O.J. Simpson’s property. He stepped out the front door and onto the driveway, near the two parked cars. The sun was coming up at this point, and in the spreading daylight, Vannatter noticed what appeared to be a drop of blood on the ground. Then he found another … and another. The drops were all more or less in a row heading from the Rockingham gate to the front door. Vannatter opened that gate and took another look at the Bronco parked nearby. He stared in from the passenger side and noticed blood on the console between the two seats—and more blood on the inside of the driver’s door. Vannatter thought back to what he had seen at Bundy. The individual drops to the left of the bloody shoe prints leaving the two bodies resembled in size, shape, and color the drops here at Rockingham. Vannatter went back into O.J. Simpson’s home and found more blood drops in the foyer, just beyond the front door. The trail of blood now led right into Simpson’s home.
The criminalist, Dennis Fung, arrived at Rockingham at 7:10 A.M. and did a quick test of the red stain on the exterior of the Bronco. It was only a presumptive test, and so not 100 percent definitive, but it suggested the presence of human blood. Fuhrman returned from Nicole’s condominium a few moments later. He said the glove at Bundy was for a left hand, and told Vannatter that it did indeed look like a match for the right glove found behind Kaelin’s room.
That’s it, said Vannatter. We need to get a search warrant for this place. Vannatter left for the West Los Angeles station to write one up. Once there, he decided to touch base with deputy district attorney Marcia Clark. Vannatter and Clark had recently completed work together on a murder case that focused on blood and other trace evidence, and the detective wanted a second opinion on the facts he had gathered so far in this case. Checking with a prosecutor made sense for a detective; lawyers usually had better antennae than cops for determining whether a judge would grant a search warrant. For her part, Clark was only too pleased to receive Vannatter’s call at home shortly after eight on that Monday morning. A workaholic, and something of a crime junkie, she relished the details of criminal investigations as much as courtroom prosecutions.
Vannatter told Clark about the apparently matching gloves and then summarized the trail of blood—which wound from the left side of the shoe prints at Bundy, to the Bronco on Rockingham, to the driveway, and then to the foyer of Simpson’s home. Clark listened to Vannatter dispassionately and was struck only by one thing: the fancy neighborhood where the murders had taken place.
“Marcia,” Vannatter said. “It’s O.J. Simpson.”
“Who’s that?” Clark replied.
“You know, the football player, actor, Naked Gun.”
Marcia Clark had never followed sports. She went to the movies only once in a while. Just about her only connection to mass culture was when she listened to her Doors albums. For relaxation, she read novels about serial murderers.
“Sorry,” Clark said. “Never heard of him.”
On hearing the facts of the case, Clark thought there was more than enough evidence to get a search warrant—probably enough to arrest Simpson himself. But Vannatter said they should take it one step at a time, and he hung up. Then he began drafting the affidavit he would be required to submit in order to get a search warrant.
In his affidavit, Vannatter said he had been a police officer for over twenty-five years and a detective for fifteen. He wrote that after examining the crime scene, he and his partner had traveled to 360 North Rockingham to notify O.J. Simpson of the murder of his ex-wife. When they examined the Ford Bronco, Vannatter went on, they “noticed what appeared to be human blood, later confirmed by Scientific Investigation personnel to be human blood on the driver’s door handle of the vehicle.” Vannatter continued, “It was determined by interviews of Simpson’s daughter and a friend Brian Kaelin [that Simpson] had left on an unexpected flight to Chicago during the early morning hours of June 13, 1994, and was last seen at the residence at approximately 2300 hours, June 12, 1994.”
A magistrate signed the warrant in the late morning, and Vannatter returned to the Rockingham estate at just about noon on Monday, June 13, which was, as it happened, almost the same time O.J. Simpson arrived home from his abbreviated trip to Chicago.
Simpson’s friends often used the same expression to describe him: “He loved being O.J.” That was, in many respects, his occupation—being O.J. By 1994, he was long retired from his days of football glory. He had modest visibility as a sports broadcaster and some minor success as an actor in occasional self-mocking roles in the Naked Gun movies. He judged beauty contests. He shilled for Hertz. He pitched in an infomercial for an arthritis cure. At the time of his arrest for murder, Simpson had only a vaporous, peculiarly American kind of renown: He was famous for being O.J. (When Nicole Brown Simpson called 911 on October 25, 1993, and complained that her ex-husband was “going nuts” outside her home, she assumed that his name would be immediately recognizable; but having heard it, the dispatcher asked, “Is he the sportscaster or whatever?”)
The event Simpson planned to attend in Chicago on Monday, June 13, demonstrated how he made his living as a “sportscaster or whatever.” He was due that day at the Mission Hills Country Club, in suburban Northbrook, to play in the Hertz Invitational, the rental car company’s annual tournament for its top corporate customers in the neighboring thirteen-state area. In 1994, playing golf was pretty much all O.J. Simpson did for Hertz, though he did a lot of it. (The previous week, he had played for Hertz in Virginia.) It had been a different story when he first signed with Hertz in the 1970s, when he was still playing football. At that time Simpson starred in some of the best-known television advertisements of the era, which featured the handsome athlete leaping over furniture in airports to make a swift connection to his rental car. “Go, O.J., go!,” a grandmotherly matron shouted after him. At the time Hertz even tied its corporate slogan to its celebrity spokesman, touting itself as “the superstar in rent-a-car.” But a decade and a half later, the company paid him about half a million
dollars a year to be, as his friends put it, “the house golfer for Hertz.”
The creation of a public image—that is, defining what “being O.J.” meant—had been Simpson’s life work. In the years before he was arrested for murder, O.J. Simpson was interviewed countless times about his life story, and he would invariably invoke the same themes, even the same anecdotes. Though it is now difficult to remember in light of the notoriety of the murder case, Simpson for many years enjoyed a clean-cut and lovable image. This was a man who, after all, had been sanctified with a nationally televised “roast” by Bob Hope before he was twenty-five years old. So Simpson often went out of his way to boast in interviews about his hardscrabble origins and rascally past—a history that would take on a more sinister cast after his arrest.
Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 7, 1947, the third of four children of James and Eunice Simpson, in San Francisco. (His unusual first name, which O.J. loathed, was an aunt’s suggestion of obscure origin.) His father was an intermittent presence in his life; in later life, he came out as a homosexual, and he died of AIDS in 1985. His mother, who worked nights as an orderly and then a technician in the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital, supported the family as best she could.
In an authorized, highly laudatory biography published in 1974, when O.J. was twenty-seven, Larry Fox wrote of Simpson’s childhood: “There was the throwing rocks at buses, the shoplifting (after all, they were too young to buy beer and wine), the breaking up of parties, and, above all, the fights, the constant fights.” And Simpson himself admitted in an extensive Playboy interview in 1976, “If there wasn’t no fight, there wasn’t no weekend.… Sports was lucky for me. If I hadn’t been on the high school football team, there’s no question but that I would’ve been sent to jail for three years.”
The Run of His Life Page 5
