The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  The years Marcia and Gordon Clark lived together were the time that Marcia came of age as a prosecutor. Gordon stopped working for the Church of Scientology, returned to college, and became a modestly successful computer programmer. They had two sons. One day, a few years before the Simpson case, Marcia’s grandfather, Pinchas Kleks, who was visiting from Israel, spent an afternoon on a spectator bench in one of Marcia’s trials. Though he spoke little English and thus could not understand precisely what was going on, the experience of watching Marcia in court ranked as one of the great thrills of Pinchas’s long life.

  At the end of 1993, a few months after her fortieth birthday, Marcia Clark made several dramatic changes in her life. She told Bill Hodgman that she didn’t like her administrative job and wanted to return to the courtroom, even if it meant a cut in pay. In December, during a long drive north to the Bay Area to visit friends, Marcia told Gordon that she wanted a divorce. To both Gordon and her parents, she was cryptic about her reasons. “He’s not for me,” she told her father in Hebrew. And then about a month after she split with Gordon, Marcia told her parents that she never wanted to speak to them again. She said they had been icy and unsupportive, and she wanted nothing more to do with them. At just about the same time, Jonathan Kleks, an engineer in Northern California, told his parents that he, too, wished never to speak to them again.

  The Kleks were thunderstruck, heartbroken. They had become very close to Marcia and Gordon’s older child, who was four at the time his parents separated. They had less of a chance to know the Clark’s second boy, who was just a baby. They figured the crisis—whatever its mysterious origin—would blow over. It never did. Abraham took to making surreptitious visits to the older boy’s nursery school to spend a little time with him. Once he brought Roslyn with him. When Marcia learned of it, she denounced the school director in front of a roomful of people. Abraham called Marcia to tell her that her mother was undergoing major surgery in September 1994, the time of jury selection in the Simpson case. Marcia never called back.

  Gordon was shocked and bitter about the separation. When the Simpson trial began, Marcia’s sudden celebrity gave Gordon the opportunity to take a very public form of revenge. By coincidence, on February 24, the same day Marcia said she had to leave court during Rosa Lopez’s testimony, Gordon filed a motion in their divorce case to change their custody arrangements. The actual adjustment he sought was rather minor and reasonable: increased visitation while Marcia was working late on the case. But in his accompanying affidavit, Gordon portrayed Marcia as a workaholic and a neglectful parent. “I have personal knowledge that on most nights she does not arrive home until 10 P.M. and even when she is home, she is working,” Gordon wrote in the document, which his lawyers knew would quickly become public. In contrast to Marcia, Gordon said, he always made it home by 6:15 P.M. “While I commend [Marcia’s] brilliance, her legal ability and her tremendous competence as an attorney, I do not want our children to suffer because she is never home and never has any time to be with them.” It was this affidavit—made public just after she said she had to leave court to be with her children during Lopez’s testimony—that made Marcia’s personal life a matter of public controversy.

  Professionally powerful, Marcia was personally fragile. Gordon thought she drank too much. She smoked more than she wanted to—long greedy pulls on strong European cigarettes. The years of bulimia had exacted a painful price. Extreme tooth decay is a common side effect of bulimia, and in her original divorce petition with Gordon, Marcia said, “Within the last two years I have suffered a medical/dental catastrophe for which I initially borrowed $16,000.00, $14,000.00 of which is still unpaid. In addition, it was necessary to withdraw $26,000 from my pension plan, in order to finish my dental work.” Money stresses compounded the ugliness of the divorce. At the time of their separation, Gordon’s earnings amounted to a little more than half of Marcia’s $96,829 yearly salary, so he could not be counted on for major support.

  The shattered relationship with her parents caused Marcia additional worry. She knew that her parents were actually supporting their son-in-law’s efforts to obtain more time with their grandchildren. (Since the spring of 1994, all of the Kleks’ contact with the children had been through Gordon.) An acute student of public relations, Marcia knew that a public disavowal by her own parents would greatly compromise her image as a heroic working mother. Throughout the trial, in addition to all her other anxieties, she feared above all a public denunciation from her parents.

  At times, the compounded stresses of ending a long marriage, trying the Simpson case, and enduring the indignities of unsought celebrity nearly drove Clark to the breaking point. At the supermarket one day, as she bought some Tampax, the grocery bagger quipped, “I guess the defense is really in for it this week.” At another time, during Denise Brown’s testimony, the National Enquirer published topless photographs of Clark from when she had been on vacation years earlier with Gaby Horowitz. She was so humiliated that one day she actually began sobbing quietly at the counsel table in Judge Ito’s court. She scribbled a note to Scott Gordon, the prosecutor who was seated next to her. “I’m losing it,” Clark wrote. Darden noticed her distress and subtly shifted his position so that the courtroom camera would be directed away from Marcia. Thinking fast, the roly-poly Gordon jotted Clark a response: “The Enquirer was going to run the same pictures of me, but Greenpeace wouldn’t let them do it.” Clark smiled, and that crisis, at least, passed unnoticed by the public.

  Judge Ito had seriously considered ordering Rosa Lopez to jail for the weekend before she was to testify. Ultimately, however, the judge accepted her promise that she would appear on Monday, so he directed that the county put her up at a downtown hotel, the Checkers. Fearful of more surprises, Johnnie Cochran directed Pat McKenna to book the room next to hers and never let the housekeeper out of his sight until she appeared for court on February 27.

  They made an unlikely pair, the tiny El Salvadoran woman and the big, bluff Irishman, yet they became fast friends, after a fashion. McKenna would try to buy Lopez some food or a drink, but Rosa seemed scarcely to eat and never drank a thing. Trying to think of something that might cheer her up, McKenna remembered her room at the Salingers’ house. Like many Latin American women of her generation, Lopez liked to keep a little shrine of small candles, known as veladoras, on her dresser. McKenna had learned his Catholicism in Chicago, so he was unfamiliar with the custom. Still, just before they were to return to court, the investigator decided to improvise a gift to his charge. He went to a local drugstore and bought Rosa a few candles that she might use for her worship. Deeply touched, she invited McKenna to join her in prayer. A little rusty in this department, the investigator agreed to keep Rosa company and have a drink from the mini-bar while she prayed to God.

  Unfortunately, the candles McKenna had bought were somewhat larger than the usual veladoras. After a few moments of her devotions, the smoke detector in Lopez’s room went off. Rosa began crying. McKenna tried smothering the candles and covering the smoke detector with a laundry bag. Nothing worked. Their problems were compounded because this was the week of the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, and the Checkers served as the unofficial headquarters of the country-music contingent. The alarm wouldn’t stop ringing, so in a few moments the lobby of the hotel was packed with evacuees, mostly women in big hair, men in cowboy boots—and Rosa Lopez and Pat McKenna.

  The comedy of errors grew worse when court convened on Monday morning. Marcia Clark opened the session with a passionate appeal for Lopez’s testimony to be taken on videotape, not in front of the jury. The defense could play it later if it chose to do so; that way, defense evidence would not be deposited right in the middle of the government’s case. Ito agreed. Cochran, for his part, accused Clark of staging her child-care crisis of the previous Friday so she could reargue the issue of Lopez’s testimony. In response, Clark rose in righteous indignation. “I’m offended as a woman, as a single parent, and as a prosecutor and an
officer of the court to hear an argument posed by counsel like that of Mr. Cochran today,” she said. “Some of us have child-care issues, and they are serious and they are paramount. Obviously, Mr. Cochran cannot understand that, but he should not come before this court and impugn the integrity of someone who does have those considerations.” It was that sort of telegenic off-the-cuff eloquence that made Clark so impressive in court—even if, as was the case here, Cochran may have been right on the merits.

  Ito sent the jury back to the hotel and ordered that a video camera be brought into court to record Lopez’s testimony. Then he had to ask for a new interpreter because several television viewers had called or written and said that the woman on Friday had used a Mexican dialect rather than El Salvadoran. Then the defense admitted it had found a statement that investigator Bill Pavelic had taken from Lopez shortly after the murders. This was the kind of late disclosure that had caused such a tumult during opening statements. Clark had a chance to vent some more outrage on this score, and it wasn’t until the middle of the afternoon that Rosa Lopez returned to the witness stand.

  She wore a new purple dress with a beaded collar and shiny black pumps. They had come as gifts from a defense-team supporter in Las Vegas who used to call McKenna now and then. Questioning her through her now appropriately Central American interpreter, Cochran finally began walking Lopez through the events of June 12, 1994. At one point, Cochran put up a map of the area around Rockingham on the video monitor next to the witness stand. Amid all her recent moves, Lopez had lost her eyeglasses. Cochran began canvassing the courtroom for glasses. “How about somebody near her age?” Cochran quipped. “I’m looking for Mr. Bailey.” After sampling several pairs, Lopez narrowed her choices to Bailey’s aviator model and a bright-green pair donated by a spectator. For several long minutes, Lopez, Cochran, Bailey, and the interpreter were all huddled around the witness stand—giving it the look of the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera.

  When Lopez reached the critical moment in her testimony—what she saw at around 10:00 on the night of the murders—she hedged. She said she took her dog for a walk and saw O.J.’s Bronco sometime after 10:00, but it clearly could have been anywhere from two to fifteen minutes after the hour. What was clear from the outset, then, was that Rosa Lopez was simply not a very important witness. She didn’t help or hurt either side very much. Yet because of her, Ito had allowed the trial to come to a crashing halt.

  At the end of the day, Cochran confessed that the defense team had found another previous statement by Lopez, this one a taped interview with Pavelic. Ito devoted the bulk of the following day to a hearing on why the defense had failed to turn this statement over to the prosecution. The answer, it became clear, was that chaos had reigned while the case was in Shapiro’s hands, and no one knew where anything was. (Shapiro did not even attend an important conference in Ito’s chambers on this subject on Tuesday; he remained in the courtroom to chat with Barbara Walters.) Ito finally resumed Lopez’s testimony late Tuesday afternoon, saying, “We will finish the questioning by Mr. Cochran, and then I’ll order you to come back on Thursday to complete this.”

  But the housekeeper, recognizing her newfound clout, decided she was through for the day. She informed Ito, in English, “I am very tired. I want to go rest, sir. I don’t want any more questions. Thank you.” And then she just walked out the courtroom door.

  Ito appeared incapable of putting the Lopez issue to rest. The judge devoted all of Wednesday, March 1, to the subject of sanctions on the defense for its failure to turn over Lopez’s previous statements. One after another, Douglas, Uelman, and Shapiro offered their apologies, which Clark spurned with acid contempt. (Ito ultimately imposed some modest fines on the lawyers and told the jury, in a rather convoluted way, that the defense had misbehaved.) On Thursday Lopez finally returned to the stand, and she completed her testimony on Friday. Her singsong voice saying “no me recuerdo”—“I don’t remember”—and references to Cochran as “Mr. Johnnie” briefly became national touchstones. Darden made many points in his cross-examination, but it, too, wandered all over the map, from the important (Lopez admitted she had never really looked at a clock on June 12) to such irrelevancies as her taste in food (“I love tamales!”).

  In the end, the jurors did not return to the courtroom until Monday, March 6—nine days after they had last heard testimony. The Lopez interlude amounted to another example of the prosecution’s bad luck and the defense’s good fortune. Cochran had been livid when Ito ruled that Lopez’s testimony would not be presented live to the jury. But if the jurors had been present, they would have seen this witness implode on cross-examination. As a result of this defense “loss,” Cochran could decide later whether he wanted to show the tape of her testimony to the jury. (In a characteristic show of defense-team harmony, Shapiro told reporters after Lopez stepped down that the defense would decide later whether the jury would see her testimony; that same night, F. Lee Bailey went on Larry King Live to declare that the defense would definitely be playing the Lopez tape to the jury.) Ultimately, of course, the defense would decide not to play the tape.

  The real loser in the Lopez episode was Lance Ito. The handling of Lopez’s testimony represented an appalling piece of judicial mismanagement. At great expense to Los Angeles County, Ito forced the sequestered jurors to sit in their hotel for all that time—just so the defense could call a witness who didn’t help either side very much. Not once over those nine days did the judge hurry the lawyers along. As so often happened in moments of stress for the judge, he simply froze.

  When her testimony concluded, Rosa Lopez did indeed return to her remote hometown of Sensuntepeque, El Salvador. There was one fitting postscript. In April 1995, a comedian from Baltimore named Mike Gabriel traveled to El Salvador hoping, on a lark, to meet Rosa. He managed to find her, and they took a few photographs together. When Gabriel—who performs as a “sensei” mystic, teaching yoga to cats—returned to the States, he announced that he and Rosa were engaged to be married. The hoax succeeded beyond Gabriel’s greatest hopes. For many months, the pending nuptials were reported deadpan in any number of newspaper reports, magazines, and television shows. Rosa Lopez, still single, has never returned to the United States.

  17. “IN THE PAST TEN YEARS,

  DETECTIVE FUHRMAN …”

  After the conclusion of Detective Lange’s long-delayed testimony just before lunch on March 9, the trial reached a critical juncture.

  “The People call Detective Mark Fuhrman,” said Marcia Clark.

  Neither side made even a pretense of treating Fuhrman as just another witness. His arrival was timed with military precision. Before most witnesses in the trial were summoned to Ito’s courtroom, they waited in the ninth-floor hallway, chatting nervously with passersby. Not Fuhrman. The D.A.’s office had gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate him from any unplanned encounters. Unlike any other witness in the case, Fuhrman came down from the district attorney’s headquarters on the eighteenth floor on the freight elevator—the same one used by the jurors. Even the prosecutors crammed into the passenger elevators along with all the other courthouse denizens, but the D.A.’s office didn’t want to take that chance with Fuhrman. And unlike other witnesses, Fuhrman walked into court surrounded by a quartet of beefy bodyguards, investigators assigned to the district attorney. Clark’s examination promptly bore out the metaphor implicit in Fuhrman’s arrival: She—and her office—were protecting him.

  In the flesh, Mark Fuhrman was an imposing figure, a muscular six foot three inches, the first man in the courtroom who appeared a physical match for the defendant. He fit perfectly into his blue suit, and his white shirt and red-print tie made a handsome match to his freshly cut dirty-blond hair. The room perked up when Fuhrman walked in, and even O.J. Simpson looked a touch startled by the detective’s commanding physical presence.

  Marcia Clark stepped to the podium, cocked her head to one side, and asked her first question as if it had just popped int
o her head. (It was, in fact, carefully planned.)

  “Detective Fuhrman, can you tell us how you feel about testifying today?”

  “Nervous,” Fuhrman said, not at all nervously.

  “Okay,” Clark prompted.

  “Reluctant,” Fuhrman continued.

  “Can you tell us why?” she asked.

  “Throughout—since June thirteenth, it seems that I have seen a lot of the evidence ignored and a lot of personal issues come to the forefront. I think that is too bad.”

  “Okay,” Clark said. “Heard a lot about yourself in the press, have you?”

  “Daily,” Fuhrman said gravely.

  “In light of that fact, sir, you have indicated that you feel nervous about testifying,” Clark went on. “Have you gone over your testimony in the presence of several district attorneys in order to prepare yourself for court and the allegations that you may hear from the defense?”

  “Yes.”

  Clark asked if this preparation session concerned the events at Bundy and Rockingham.

  “No,” said Fuhrman.

  “It dealt with side issues, sir?”

  “Yes, it was.… It seems that the issues we were concerned with weren’t evidentiary in nature or about the crime; mostly of a personal nature.”

  Clark paused, soaking up the answers from her witness, and then turned to her pad and the beginning of the conventional portion of her direct examination. “Can you tell us how you are employed right now?…”

  Seen on its own terms, Clark’s unorthodox introduction of Fuhrman to the jury succeeded. Under her sympathetic questioning, Mark Fuhrman presented himself as an earnest civil servant who tried to do his job in the face of unwarranted and irrelevant personal attacks. Clark’s message to the jury could not have been clearer: Here before you is a good man.