The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The defense lawyers learned of Lopez’s dismay and, as they did so often when confronted with a delicate task, turned to investigator Pat McKenna. Outgoing and friendly, McKenna was the obvious choice to mollify Lopez and keep her from fleeing before she could testify. He did what he could. McKenna and Cochran arranged for Lopez to have her own lawyer. Unappeased, Lopez quit her job with the Salingers on February 10 and went into hiding with her daughter in Los Feliz. The press found her there, and she called McKenna to help her escape. The next day, McKenna picked her up and led a fleet of local television vans on a brief eighty-mile-per-hour chase through the streets of Los Angeles until he lost them. Still, Lopez fretted. A few days later she disappeared altogether. She spent the night of Wednesday, February 22, in her car, and then drove aimlessly until she wound up in New Mexico. From there she called her lawyer, who, on Cochran’s behalf, begged her to return. She agreed to fly back to L.A.—but only, she said, for a single day. She would come to court on Friday, February 24, but she vowed to leave for her native El Salvador the following morning. After nearly thirty years in the United States, she had decided to leave—tomorrow.

  Lopez’s flight from New Mexico landed in Los Angeles at 1:30 A.M. on February 24, and when she appeared in court at 9:00 that morning, she looked haggard and bewildered. Seated in the back row of the courtroom, waiting to be called to the witness stand, she wore a purple velour jumpsuit and a dazed expression.

  Born and raised in rural El Salvador, Rosa Lopez led a life of extraordinary hardship until she came to the United States. One of ten children, she dropped out of school at age nine to help her parents harvest their small crop of corn, beans, and rice. She married young and had seven children, but only four survived childbirth. Two more died in the course of her country’s long civil war: a fifteen-year-old daughter, who was kidnapped and killed, and a son, a government pilot whose helicopter was shot down by guerrillas. The two survivors came with her to Los Angeles, where she had worked as a maid for about thirty years. Rosa Lopez brought a survivor’s instincts to the witness stand in the Simpson case, as well as a considerable reservoir of street smarts.

  When Ito called Lopez to the witness stand, she revealed a quirky stage presence. Ito had called in a Spanish interpreter, but Lopez obviously understood all the English that was spoken around her. The purpose of the hearing this day was to allow Ito to decide whether he was going to interrupt the prosecution’s case and allow Lopez to testify. Was she actually going to leave for El Salvador the following day, and, if so, was she important enough for the defense to be allowed to call her as a witness out of the usual order?

  “Why were you living in another state over the course of the last several days?” Cochran asked Lopez during direct examination, which lasted only about ten minutes.

  “Because the reporters won’t leave me alone. I’m tired of looking at them. They have been harassing me.” Lopez’s style was cryptic, dismissive, and oddly grand.

  Lopez said she had reservations to fly to San Salvador on Saturday, and hoped to be on her way.

  Rising to cross-examine, Darden first made sure of one point that Cochran had already covered. Lopez had said she had a reservation but no ticket for the February 25 flight to San Salvador on Taca airlines.

  “You just made the reservation, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You made that today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Prior to coming to court this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  At that moment, Cheri Lewis, a prosecutor who was sitting next to Darden at their table, rose to go to the telephone in the courtroom. What she was doing was obvious: checking to see if Lopez really had made the reservation. Moments later, Darden had his answer.

  “Miss Lopez,” he said, “we just called the airline. They don’t show a reservation for you. Can you explain to the Court why it is that you just told us you have a reservation?”

  No matter how many times she was contradicted by the facts—and this was the first of many—Lopez was never rattled. She serenely adjusted her story, but never her supercilious demeanor. “Because I am going to reserve it, sir. As soon as I leave here, I will buy my ticket and I will leave. If you want to, the cameras can follow me.”

  Darden pursued her. “You lied to us, didn’t you? Yes or no?”

  “Because—because the agencies are closed. They open at 10:00 in the morning, and I was brought here very early, sir.”

  “You don’t have any plans to leave Los Angeles at all, do you?”

  Suddenly, Lopez answered in English: “Of course, sir. My bags are packed. Everything is ready.”

  And so it went—for hour after hour. Lopez remained unflappable even as her story crumbled around her. It turned out she had bought a round-trip ticket to El Salvador a few weeks earlier; she had looked into receiving unemployment benefits—not the act of someone planning to leave the United States permanently; she said she was anxious to see her ill sister in El Salvador—but she then admitted that they hadn’t spoken in many weeks.

  The exchanges between Darden and Lopez sometimes had a surreal quality.

  “You’ve been here twenty-seven years, correct?” Darden asked.

  “I came in ’69. You figure it out.”

  “Okay, why don’t you tell me how long you’ve been here?”

  “Let’s say thirty-four years.”

  Even Lopez’s supposed loathing for the press seemed questionable. She had actually given several television interviews, including one with a Spanish-language station just a week earlier—when she had said nothing about wanting to flee the country. During one break in the testimony, as she was leaving the courtroom, Lopez stopped to chat with Kristin Jeannette-Meyers, a reporter covering the trial for Court TV. Darden asked Lopez if she said, “I love you on TV,” to Jeannette-Meyers.

  “Yes. Because I see her on TV.”

  “You weren’t terrified of that TV reporter, were you?”

  “No, because she doesn’t have a camera in front of my face.”

  At the end of Lopez’s long day of testimony, Ito gave the defense a break. He conceded that Lopez had contradicted herself any number of times, but he thought she was sincere in her determination to leave the country. Based on Cochran’s representation that she would say she saw the Bronco at 10:15 P.M. on June 12, Ito thought she was important enough to delay the trial. It was already after 5:00 P.M., but Ito ordered the bailiffs to bring the jurors from their hotel to the courtroom. Ito was ready to sit until midnight if necessary.

  At 5:49 P.M., Marcia Clark stood at the podium and, her voice husky with emotion, made a request. “I have informed the Court that I cannot be present tonight because I do have to take care of my children, and I don’t have anyone who can do that for me. And I do not want proceedings to go before a jury when I can’t be here.” She said she had thought that Ito was going to order Lopez’s testimony for Monday, not this very day.

  Nearly crying, Clark added, “I can’t be here, Your Honor.”

  The situation placed Ito, in effect, squarely between two women: Rosa Lopez, who said she was planning on leaving the country the following day, and Marcia Clark, who had to care for her children.

  Ito backed Clark, putting off Lopez’s testimony until Monday and betting that the maid could add one more weekend to the decades she had already lived in the United States. The judge called Lopez to the podium where the lawyers usually held forth. Ito said he would put her up in a hotel for the weekend. Elbows propped on the podium, Lopez wailed, in English, “I don’t want to be here any longer. All these reporters have destroyed my life.”

  “Ms. Lopez,” the judge continued solicitously, “the planes fly, as you know, to El Salvador on a regular basis. I will start your case, your testimony in front of the jury, the first thing we do with the jury Monday at 9:00.”

  Suddenly almost coquettish, Lopez said to the judge, “I will do it for you, Your Honor.”

  Marcia Clark’s problem w
as not so easily solved. She had been separated from her second husband, Gordon Clark, for a little more than a year. On June 9, 1994—just three days before the murders on Bundy Drive—she had filed for divorce. As the months passed, their relations grew more strained. Clark’s sudden celebrity, combined with the extraordinary demands on her time generated by the Simpson case, increased the tensions between them.

  The events of February 24 were typical of their problems. Marcia and Gordon Clark had two boys, aged three and five at the time. According to the interim custody-sharing agreement they had worked out, Gordon would have the boys every other weekend, starting at seven o’clock Fridays. Two weeks earlier, Marcia had arranged for Gordon to pick up the kids at Marcia’s home at seven. However, according to Marcia, the boys preferred for her to take them to Gordon’s rather than for their father to pick them up. During the court day on February 24, she had told Ito several times that she had to be home in time to take the kids to her husband’s by seven. She lived in Glendale, not far from downtown, but when Ito shut down court shortly before six, Clark barely had time to make the seven o’clock limit.

  Gordon Clark wasn’t watching the trial on February 24—he made it a point never to watch—but when he found out what Marcia had said to Ito about her child-care obligations, he and his lawyers were aghast. According to their understanding of the custody arrangements, Gordon could easily have picked up the kids himself. In their view, Marcia was lying to the court to gain a tactical advantage for the prosecution—that is, additional time to prepare for cross-examination of Rosa Lopez—and public sympathy for herself as a working mother. Thus did a private and, alas, fairly typical divorce become part of the communal narrative of the Simpson case—with, of course, the public nature of the dispute racheting up the rancor between the parties.

  Spurred by Garcetti’s PR director, Suzanne Childs, the media took Marcia’s side with a vengeance. The Clarks’ divorce was promptly elevated to the cover of Newsweek, where the headline declared, “Marcia Clark Fights for Her Kids. Are Mothers Penalized for Working?” The stories inside included a full-page of instructions to Gordon Clark, written by a New York book editor who had never met anyone in his family, about how he should behave during the divorce proceedings. Based on a single courtroom exchange and a few snatches of information from her divorce file, Marcia became an overnight female icon—the heroine of working women everywhere. There was some truth in this cardboard-cutout portrayal of the prosecutor. However, real life was considerably more complicated, too.

  A young Russian émigré named Pinchas Kleks arrived on the shores of what was known as Palestine in 1918. At the beginning, he made his living delivering kerosene by donkey. From that modest start, Kleks came to open a gas station, and then he devoted his professional life to running a modest chain of service stations in what would become the nation of Israel. In 1930, Pinchas and his wife had a son, Abraham.

  A tall and strapping sabra, Abraham Kleks came of age with the young nation. He graduated from high school and went straight into the Israeli army, where he served as a seventeen-year-old lieutenant in the War for Independence. Shortly after that war was won in 1948, Abraham decided to see the world a little and followed some friends to the University of California at Berkeley. At the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Abraham met and fell in love with a girl from Brooklyn. Abraham and Roslyn married, settled in the United States, and a year later, on August 31, 1953, had their first child, Marcia.

  Abraham was promptly drafted into the U.S. Army for the Korean War. Thus began nearly two decades of extraordinarily peripatetic family life. Abraham had studied microbiology at Berkeley, and he pursued this interest in assignments at army medical laboratories in Texas and later Washington State. From the army, Abraham joined the Food and Drug Administration, where he moved up the career ladder with jobs across the nation: five years in Los Angeles, four near San Francisco, one in Detroit, one near Washington, D.C., and two in New York City. During that last tour, young Marcia completed her high school requirements at Susan Wagner High School in Staten Island. By this point she also had a brother, Jonathan, six years her junior.

  Marcia was a quick-minded, good-natured girl with an extraordinary talent for languages. She mastered Spanish and, after just two months in Israel one summer, gained a fluent command of Hebrew as well. Notwithstanding the frequent moves (or perhaps because of them), she became a great joiner of activities—cheer-leading, school plays, and the like. Her home life was neither especially contentious nor highly religious. To her mother, at least, it seemed that they quarreled no more than most adolescent children and their parents.

  A rift between Marcia and her parents began when they moved from New York back to Los Angeles—their final relocation—in 1970. The family bought a house in the San Fernando Valley, and Abraham served as the district director of the FDA until he retired in 1985, while Roslyn worked for a county supervisor. Marcia had little to do in that first year back west. The local high schools required a year’s residency before they would give her a degree, but she had already fulfilled all her course requirements. Marcia wanted badly to get out of the house, but she couldn’t go to college without a high school degree. Amid the tension at home and frustration about school, Marcia developed bulimia, an affliction she would battle on and off for more than twenty years.

  At last Marcia escaped to UCLA. She was still an undergraduate when she met her first husband, a dashing and handsome young man, Gaby Horowitz, like her father an immigrant from Israel. As Gaby used to tell the story, he was driving his Mercedes around the campus when he saw this gorgeous woman—Marcia—and decided then and there he had to meet her. The courtship was brief but intense, and they married shortly after she graduated, without even telling Marcia’s parents first.

  Gaby Horowitz made his living as a professional backgammon player while Marcia started law school. The late 1970s were boom years for the game, and for a while Horowitz thrived in the epicenter of the craze. He played occasionally at Pips, a glitzy club founded by Hugh Hefner and frequented by many modest celebrities of the era (including, now and then, O.J. Simpson). But mostly Horowitz frequented the Cavendish West, a haven for serious backgammon and bridge players on the Sunset Strip. Marcia Horowitz became an unlikely regular at the Cavendish, too. She rarely played the game, and instead studied her law books at unoccupied gaming tables. “She was around all the time, a quiet girl,” Buddy Berke, a Cavendish regular, said later. “She was attractive, she was sweet, always very cordial, a lot better with the social graces than Gaby was.”

  Gaby was, in fact, a controversial figure in the backgammon world. According to Danny Kleinman, who self-publishes books about backgammon and bridge in Los Angeles, “Gaby was a fine player but, more importantly, a flashy, spectacular player. He looked like Jean-Claude Van Damme, about six-three, and he kept himself in good shape. He was a health-food nut.

  “He was a very good player, but he used to cheat. In one case, I saw him move pieces on the board when his opponent’s head was turned. I walked out of the club with him and asked him why he had done it. He gave me his rationale. He said he was a much better player than his opponent, and the only way he might lose was through luck. So he felt he had a right to win and a right to cheat.”

  Though Marcia was often present at the club, no one ever suspected her of being involved in Gaby’s cheating. “Everything that I know about Marcia is that she was honest and straightforward,” Kleinman said.

  Marcia prodded Gaby to develop a career interest beyond backgammon, and he decided to learn about real estate. He didn’t have much confidence in his English in a professional setting, so a friend of his—a backgammon-playing dentist named Bruce Roman—asked Gaby to join him at Scientology meetings. Marcia never joined the church herself, but she did tag along with Gaby and Bruce on occasion. In 1979, she told her parents she was divorcing Gaby. About a month later, she announced she was marrying Gordon Clark, whom she had met at the Scientology meetings. At tw
enty-two, he was five years her junior, and an administrator with the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles. Bruce Roman, who was also a lay minister in the church, performed their Scientology wedding ceremony. (Marcia didn’t invite her parents to that wedding, either.)

  Gaby’s fortunes went south with the end of both his marriage and the backgammon craze. According to Kleinman, “His cheating became much more extensive and elaborate. He used a variety of methods—manipulation of dice, magnetic dice, electromagnetic boards.” In the spring of 1989, Gaby Horowitz was accidentally shot in the head while he and a friend were examining a gun. In a bizarre coincidence, the friend was Bruce Roman. In the investigation of the shooting, which ended without any charges being filed, Roman’s lawyer was Robert Shapiro. Several people who have seen Gaby Horowitz since his accident say he can no longer walk or talk. Shortly before the Simpson trial, Horowitz moved to Israel. (The Cavendish did not prosper, either. In 1987, the police raided it as part of an investigation for illegal gambling; however, no charges were ever filed against its owner, who was also represented by Robert Shapiro. Nevertheless, the club closed for good in 1994.)