“Ah, home, home for a while, got my car for a while, tried to find my girlfriend for a while, came back to the house.”
“So what time do you think you got back home, actually physically got home?” Vannatter asked.
“Seven-something.… Yeah, I’m trying to think, did I leave. You know, I always … I had to run and get my daughter some flowers. I was actually doing the recital, so I rushed and got her some flowers, and I came home, and then I called Paula [Barbieri, his girlfriend] as I was going to her house, and Paula wasn’t home.… I mean, any time I was … whatever time it took me to get to the recital and back, to get to the flower shop and back, I mean, that’s the time I was out of the house.”
This was an incomprehensible answer. Did Simpson buy flowers for Sydney before or after the recital? (She was holding flowers in a photograph taken at the recital.) Or were the flowers for his other daughter, Arnelle? Did he actually go to Paula’s house? If not, where did he go? Intentionally or not, Simpson gave the officers absolutely no way to check his story and determine if he was telling the truth. The officers could, of course, have pursued the issue and tried to pin Simpson down, yet Vannatter’s follow-up question was “Were you scheduled to play golf this morning someplace?” Yes, Simpson said, in Chicago, with Hertz clients.
Vannatter then established that Simpson had taken the 11:45 P.M. flight to Chicago the previous night. He followed that with a question about Simpson’s Bronco. When did Simpson park it on Rockingham?
“Eight-something, seven … eight, nine-o’clock, I don’t know, right in that area.” This was another meaningless answer, yet the detectives did not ask Simpson to estimate his arrival any more specifically than this two- or three-hour window. Rather, they established that Simpson had come home from the recital in his Bentley and then got into the Bronco.
“In the Bronco,” Simpson explained, “ ’cause my phone was in the Bronco. And because it’s a Bronco. It’s a Bronco. It’s what I drive, you know. I’d rather drive it than any other car. And, you know, as I was going over there, I called [Paula] a couple of times, and she wasn’t there, and I left a message, and then I checked my messages, and there were no messages. She wasn’t there, and she may have to leave town. Then I came back and ended up sitting with Kato.”
“Okay,” Lange now said. “What time was this again that you parked the Bronco?”
“Eight-something, maybe. He hadn’t done a Jacuzzi, we had … went and got a burger, and I’d come home and kind of leisurely got ready to go. I mean, we’d done a few things.”
Neither detective asked anything about this trip for a burger. Where exactly did they go? What time did they go? Who saw them? Did he use the cellular phone again that night?
Instead the detectives pursued a new subject: “How did you get the injury on your hand?”
“I don’t know,” Simpson replied. “The first time, when I was in Chicago and all, but at the house I was just running around.”
“How did you do it in Chicago?” Vannatter asked.
“I broke a glass. One of you guys had just called me, and I was in the bathroom, and I just kind of went bonkers for a little bit.”
“Is that how you cut it?”
“Mmm, it was cut before, but I think I just opened it again. I’m not sure.”
Lange asked, “Do you recall bleeding at all in your truck, in the Bronco?”
“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.” Lange asked where the phone was now. Simpson told him, but there is no evidence that the detectives ever examined it.
“So do you recall bleeding at all?”
“Yeah, I mean, I knew I was bleeding, but it was no big deal. I bleed all the time. I play golf and stuff, so there’s always something, nicks and stuff here and there.” Lange asked where Simpson had gotten the Band-Aid he was wearing on his left middle finger. “Actually, I asked the girl this morning for it.”
“And she got it?”
“Yeah,” Simpson continued. “ ’Cause last night with Kato, when I was leaving, he was saying something to me, and I was rushing to get my phone, and I put a little thing on it, and it stopped.”
The detectives never returned to the subject of the cut on his left hand, even though Simpson had not answered the most basic question about it: How had he first injured his hand? Again, the detectives changed the topic. They established that O.J.’s maid, Gigi, had access to the Bronco; that he had not argued with Nicole at the recital; and that he had worn black pants and Reebok tennis shoes the previous night. (Simpson said he left these clothes back at the house; the detectives did not even ask where, precisely—in the laundry? on a coat hanger?—Simpson had put them. They were never found, and Simpson’s lawyers never produced them, either.)
Finally, Vannatter said, “O.J., we’ve got sort of a problem.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“We’ve got some blood on and in your car, we’ve got some blood at your house, and sort of a problem.”
“Well, take my blood test,” Simpson volunteered.
“Well, we’d like to do that,” Lange responded. “We’ve got, of course, the cut on your finger that you aren’t real clear on. Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at Nicole’s house?”
No, Simpson said. “It was last night.… Somewhere when I was rushing to get out of my house.”
Vannatter, in effect, just threw up his hands and asked, “What do you think happened? Do you have any idea?”
“I have no idea, man. You guys haven’t told me anything. I have no idea. When you said to my daughter, who said something to me today, that somebody else might have been involved, I have absolutely no idea what happened. I don’t know how, why, or what. But you guys haven’t told me anything. Every time I ask you guys, you say you’re going to tell me in a bit.”
“Understand,” Lange said a few moments later, “the reason we’re talking to you is because you’re the ex-husband.…”
“I know I’m the number one target, and now you tell me I’ve got blood all over the place.”
“Well,” Lange said, “there’s blood at your house in the driveway, and we’ve got a search warrant, and we’re going to go get your blood. We found some in your house. Is that your blood that’s there?”
“If it’s dripped, it’s what I dripped running around trying to leave.… You know, I was trying to get out of the house, I didn’t even pay attention to it. I saw it when I grabbed a napkin or something, and that was it. I didn’t think about it after that.… That was last night when I was … I don’t know what I was … I was getting my junk out of the car. I was in the house throwing hangers and stuff in my suitcase. I was doing my little crazy what I do.… I mean, I do it everywhere. Anybody who has ever picked me up say that O.J.’s a whirlwind, he’s running, he’s grabbing things, and that’s what I’m doing.”
And after a few more desultory exchanges, the interview drew to a close. At 2:07 P.M., Lange said, “We’re ready to terminate this.” LAPD investigators never had the opportunity to speak with O.J. Simpson again. The interview on June 13 had lasted thirty-two minutes.
It became known almost immediately that Simpson had given a statement to the detectives, and the news media’s legal “experts”—a group that became a ubiquitous presence in the case (and that often included me)—promptly excoriated Howard Weitzman for allowing his client to answer questions. This was understandable, for it rarely works to a prospective defendant’s advantage to commit himself to a single version of the facts at an early stage of the investigation. In the months afterward, Weitzman often said in his own defense that he had tried and failed to stop Simpson from talking. It is true that such a decision is always the client’s to make. And given Simpson’s vast ego, he undoubtedly thought he could talk his way out of trouble—and similarly, he probably dreaded the humiliating prospect of the police leaking word to the publi
c that O.J. had been afraid to talk.
But the debate over Weitzman’s role missed the larger significance of the detectives’ interview of Simpson. The real lesson there concerned Vannatter and Lange—and the LAPD as a whole. In both the 1989 abuse incident and the murder case five years later, the police behavior suggested a fear of offending a celebrity. In the domestic-violence case on New Year’s Day, the officers could have—and probably should have—put handcuffs on O.J. as soon as they arrived on his doorstep. But they let him go upstairs to change out of his bathrobe—and then, inexplicably, allowed him to get into his car and drive off. (And Simpson, of course, was never punished for what might be seen as a rehearsal for his more celebrated flight from arrest in 1994.) Simpson was then prosecuted only because a single police officer out of the many who had seen the results of his past mistreatment of Nicole had the integrity to step forward. This crime then earned Simpson an almost comically inadequate punishment—an opportunity to network with the advertisers he longed to cultivate.
Then, on the afternoon of June 13, 1994, though Vannatter and Lange already had considerable evidence that O.J. Simpson was likely a murderer, they too treated him with astonishing deference. Time after time, as Simpson gave vague and even nonsensical answers, the detectives failed to follow up. The entire purpose of a police interrogation is to pin a suspect down, so that the prosecution can, if necessary later on, demonstrate in minute particulars that his story is false. An effective interrogation forces a suspect to repeat, in ever greater detail, his version of the facts. Incredibly, Vannatter and Lange never forced Simpson to account specifically for his whereabouts between the end of Sydney’s dance recital and his departure for the airport. (This failure allowed Simpson’s attorneys to claim later, as they did at various times, that their client spent this period sleeping, showering, and chipping golf balls in the dark.) The detectives never pressed him to describe completely what clothes he was wearing and what had happened to them. Even if Simpson had said he could not remember these basic facts, such a failure of recollection might have been highly incriminating. In a murder case, it is common for the police to question a suspect for many hours, but Vannatter and Lange surrendered after barely half an hour—even before Simpson himself could ask for a break.
When the prosecutors heard the tape, they knew immediately how dreadfully the detectives had botched this opportunity. They seethed with frustration—in private. To berate Vannatter and Lange would have been futile, and might also have damaged a partnership that faced a long and difficult investigation. But among themselves the prosecutors had a nickname for the police interview of the defendant on June 13: “the fiasco.”
4. “I CANNOT PROMISE JUSTICE”
By noon on Monday, June 13, the media frenzy surrounding the case had begun in earnest. At about 10:00 A.M., just ten hours after the bodies were discovered—and before the coroner had removed them—the first local news satellite trucks showed up at the Bundy crime scene. By noon, several stations were transmitting live pictures of Nicole Brown Simpson’s bloodstained walkway. Shortly after the cameras appeared at Bundy, several more were set up outside O.J.’s home. Even though nothing conspicuous was going on there, the growing corps of police officers at the Simpson house suggested that something was up, and soon there were twice as many cameras at Rockingham as at Bundy. Media people and cops gathered, watching each other. The two journalists whose actions that week would have the longest-term implications for the case never came to either scene, but Dennis Schatzman and James Gaines nevertheless studied with care the events unfolding in Brentwood.
A forty-five-year-old black man with a salt-and-pepper beard, oversize tortoiseshell glasses, and a predilection for brightly colored African robes, Dennis Schatzman covered the Simpson case for the Los Angeles Sentinel, a paid-circulation weekly devoted to the city’s African-American community. His reports were syndicated to many other black papers around the country, and Schatzman was interviewed frequently on black-owned radio stations. More than anyone else, he set the black conversational agenda on the Simpson case.
The Sentinel, which was founded in 1934, is a broadsheet, with a red, white, and blue logo framed by the slogans “The Largest Black-Owned Newspaper in the West” and “Education Will Lead to the Truth.” In 1994, its circulation was just short of twenty thousand, and falling; it lost many readers when, in the post–Rodney King riots of 1992, many of the small stores that sold the paper were looted and closed. The Sentinel is fairly typical of the bigger black papers around the country. Generally, the political views reflected in its pages are conventionally liberal; the paper’s dominant theme, not surprisingly, is pride in African-American accomplishments, but it is expressed without the ideological excesses of, say, Louis Farrakhan. In many respects, the Sentinel is old-fashioned, with extensive reporting about the cotillions and awards banquets of black society; the paper aims its coverage at a settled and reasonably prosperous middle-class audience—the kind of people who, among other things, tend to answer a summons for jury duty.
A single moment from the events of June 13 stood out for Schatzman: the televised image of Simpson being handcuffed, then released. After first broadcasting Ron Edwards’s scoop exclusively, KCOP, an independent local station, later allowed its competitors to use it, and the scene was rebroadcast frequently. The handcuffing was probably not the most famous videotaped moment to come out of the case, but for one audience in particular, African-Americans in Los Angeles, it immediately linked the Simpson case to their long and tortured relationship with the LAPD. From the beginning, while the mainstream press was using the Simpson case mainly to focus on the issue of domestic violence, the Sentinel was presenting the story of a black man searching for justice in a white system.
Schatzman’s first article on the case, in the issue dated June 16, 1994, set the tone. It began: “Los Angeles police officers first handcuffed, then unhandcuffed, football Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson before whisking him from his Brentwood mansion to police headquarters for questioning.” On June 13, of course, Simpson was never actually arrested. Of all the issues raised by the murders on Bundy Drive, the Sentinel’s coverage focused on how and why Simpson had been handcuffed. The headline on a front-page sidebar, also by Schatzman, asked, WERE THE HANDCUFFS REALLY NECESSARY? In the breezy style that characterized many of Schatzman’s stories, the sidebar started thus: “Think hard. How many times did you see convicted cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer handcuffed during his well-publicized arrest and subsequent trial? If you say ‘none’ then you get the prize.” Schatzman went on to note that a police spokesman never directly answered his questions about why Simpson was cuffed. “So why was he handcuffed?” Schatzman wrote. “Still no satisfactory answer. The black/white double standard just won’t go away.”
From the outset, Schatzman viewed the case not as an anomaly but rather as an especially important moment in Los Angeles black history. To him, it never mattered that Simpson had previously made a conscious choice to play a negligible role in that history. Schatzman wrote in his initial story, about the handcuffing, “And, it just didn’t happen to O.J.; this is not an isolated incident with prominent black men and local law enforcement.” It was true that in the years leading up to the Simpson case, taxpayers in Los Angeles had had to pay substantial amounts to settle lawsuits alleging that the LAPD had illegally detained, in separate incidents, the former baseball star Joe Morgan and the track-and-field Olympian Al Joyner. “When O.J. got handcuffed without being charged, that was the thing,” Schatzman explained later. “With the brothers on the corner, the attitude was ‘There they go again.’ You see, these things happen to us every day.”
At just about the same time Schatzman was deciding to lead the Sentinel with the handcuffing angle to the Simpson story, Jim Gaines also had a choice to make. At the end of the first week after the murder, the managing editor of Time magazine contemplated what he later would call the “decision that is in a way the culmination of every week: the choice of a cover.�
� From the moment the bodies were discovered in the early morning of Monday, June 13, there was never any doubt that the Simpson story would lead the magazine, which sells about 4 million copies of each issue. Early that week, Time had commissioned a painting of Simpson, and as the days passed, the magazine’s New York headquarters was inundated with a multitude of photographs as well. Then, at 2:00 A.M. on Saturday—just hours before Time’s deadline—the LAPD released Simpson’s mug shot. As a final option, Gaines later wrote in the magazine, “we decided to commission another artist’s portrait, using the mug shot as a starting point. For this assignment we turned to Matt Mahurin, a master of photo-illustration (using photography as the basis for work in another medium, in this case a computerized image). Mahurin had done numerous other Time cover portraits in the same genre, including the one of Kim Il Sung two weeks earlier. He had only a few hours, but I found what he did in that time quite impressive.
“The harshness of the mug shot—the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson’s face, the cold specificity of the picture—had been subtly smoothed and shaped into an icon of tragedy,” Gaines elaborated in the self-dramatizing idiom of Time. “The expression on his face was not merely blank now; it was bottomless. This cover, with the simple, non-judgmental headline, ‘An American Tragedy,’ seemed the obvious, right choice.” A simpler way of describing the cover is this: Time darkened the mug shot.
And the roof fell in. As USA Today put it in a prominently played story just a day after Time hit the newsstands, “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then Time’s ‘photo-illustration’ cover this week of a darker O.J. Simpson is speaking volumes—and raising charges of racism. ‘The way he’s pictured, it’s like he’s some kind of animal,’ says NAACP Director Benjamin Chavis Jr.… ‘The photo plays into the stereotype of the African-American male as dangerous and violence prone,’ Chavis said.” The civil rights community rose up as one in outrage. “The cover appeared to be a conscious effort to make Simpson look evil and macabre, to sway the opinion of the reader to becoming fixated on his guilt,” said Dorothy Butler Gilliam, president of the National Association of Black Journalists. And on CNN, Jesse Jackson ascribed the Time cover to “the devastating dimension of something called institutional racism.”
The Run of His Life Page 8
