The Run of His Life

by Jeffrey Toobin

  Seen in retrospect—indeed, even in light of what Clark knew at the time—her examination of Fuhrman stands as her biggest miscalculation of the trial.

  This critical set piece in the Simpson trial—the testimony of Mark Fuhrman—represented another illustration, in microcosm, of why the trial ended the way it did. The prosecution’s arrogance led it to disaster. The defense’s obsession with race led it to victory.

  There was no mystery in the nature of the defense’s line of attack on Fuhrman. More than seven months before he took the stand, my story in The New Yorker had shown that the defense would attempt to portray the detective as first and foremost a racist but also, more speculatively, as the man who had planted the right-hand glove on Simpson’s property. But that story was only the beginning. As often happened in the Simpson case, a disclosure in the media flushed out additional people with similar stories to tell. In the case of Mark Fuhrman, my story provoked several people to come forward with tales of his racist behavior—a reaction that should have served as a warning to the prosecution.

  After “An Incendiary Defense” hit the newsstands on Monday, July 18, 1994, one person who saw a television report about it was Kathleen Bell. The report so startled her that she was moved to write a letter to Simpson’s attorneys.

  “I’m writing to you in regards to a story I saw on the news last night,” Bell wrote to Johnnie Cochran on July 19, 1994. “I thought it was ridiculous that the Simpson defense team would even suggest that their [sic] might be racial motivation in the trial against Mr. Simpson. I then glanced up at the television and was quite shocked to see that Officer Ferman [sic] was a man that I had the misfortune of meeting. You may have received a message from your answering service last night that I called to say that Mr. Ferman may be more of a racist than you can even imagine.”

  Bell went on to write that she had worked as a real estate agent in Redondo Beach in 1985 and 1986. Her office was above a marine recruiting station where Fuhrman sometimes visited friends. “I remember him distinctly because of his height and build,” Bell wrote. Talking about his police work one day, “Officer Ferman said that when he sees a ‘nigger’ (as he called it) driving with a white woman, he would pull them over. I asked would if [sic] he didn’t have a reason, and he said that he would find one. I looked at the two Marines to see if they knew he was joking, but it became obvious to me that he was very serious. Officer Ferman went on to say that he would like nothing more than to see all ‘niggers’ gathered together and killed. He said something about burning them or bombing them. I was too shaken to remember the exact words he used.…” Bell gave Cochran her name and number, and her story surfaced in the news media as well, several months before the trial began.

  On that same day—July 19, 1994—a deputy district attorney named Lucienne Coleman was going about her business in the Criminal Courts Building when she happened to run into LAPD detective Andy Purdy. Having seen the same reports Bell had seen, Coleman mentioned in passing that she thought it was absurd that the defense was alleging Fuhrman had planted evidence. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous at all,” Purdy answered. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Purdy went on to say that shortly after he married a Jewish woman a few years before, Fuhrman had painted swastikas on Purdy’s locker. A few weeks after receiving this news, Coleman ran into some other officers who said they had heard Fuhrman making remarks about Nicole Brown Simpson’s “boob job.” Coleman did the responsible thing. In early August 1994, she brought these remarks to the attention of Marcia Clark and Bill Hodgman.

  Coleman had once been among Clark’s closest friends in the office. The two women and their husbands had socialized together for several years. But as often happens in divorces, the Clarks’ friends had taken sides in their divorce, and Lucienne had taken Gordon’s. That, inevitably, cooled her relationship with Marcia, so Lucienne Coleman was a messenger Clark was only too pleased to shoot.

  “This is bullshit!” Clark cried when Coleman mentioned the reports about Fuhrman. “This is bullshit being put out by the defense!” Hodgman reacted less passionately, but he also appeared to pay Coleman’s report little mind. Clark told Coleman to take her complaints to the LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division.

  In fact, Fuhrman’s reputation was such that it almost reached into my own family. On the Friday after my story about Fuhrman came out, my wife called me from her office at the large corporation in Manhattan where she worked. One of her colleagues, a young African-American business-school graduate named Jarvis Bowers, had noticed the publicity about my story and sought advice about reporters who were now calling him about his link to Fuhrman. Jarvis had grown up in Los Angeles, and one day in 1984, when he was eighteen, he and his father had gone to a movie in Westwood. Officer Mark Fuhrman stopped Jarvis for jaywalking, put him in a choke hold, and threatened to kill him. Bowers was so outraged that he filed an official complaint against Fuhrman, which was sustained; the officer was docked one day’s pay.

  Clearly, then, there was not just smoke but fire in Fuhrman’s past. Clark, though, had her own method of determining whether Fuhrman was telling the truth: She simply asked him about the charges. He confessed that the psychiatric reports revealed in The New Yorker were genuine, but he said those problems were long in the past. Kathleen Bell? A liar. Swastikas? Never happened. Fuhrman even had an impressive character witness within the district attorney’s office. In recent years, the detective had worked closely with a prosecutor based in Santa Monica named Danette Meyers, a black woman. (Fuhrman had actually called Meyers to warn her that the New Yorker story was coming out and to make the case that he was a changed man.) Meyers told the Simpson prosecutors that Mark Fuhrman had never showed her the slightest hint of racism, and she gave him high marks as a detective and as a person.

  There were several ways the prosecution could have taken the middle ground with respect to Mark Fuhrman. Clark could simply have avoided calling him. She could have introduced the glove found at Rockingham through Lange or Vannatter, who had both seen it in its untouched state on the path behind Kaelin’s room. That strategy would have prompted some mockery from the defense—“They’re hiding him!”—but such criticism wouldn’t have amounted to much, because Simpson’s attorneys could always have called Fuhrman themselves. Similarly, Clark could have called Fuhrman but shown the jury—through both verbal and nonverbal signals—that the prosecution was not embracing the detective. A brief, chilly direct examination would have sufficed.

  But it was not in Marcia Clark’s nature to equivocate. It was, after all, her job to tell the good guys from bad guys, and she had no doubts about her ability to do it. Faced with a problematic witness like Fuhrman, many prosecutors would insist at a minimum that he undergo many hours of grueling mock cross-examination. Such an approach both tests the witness’s veracity and prepares him for what is to come. Clark and her team decided not to bother. Their preparation amounted to about a half an hour of Fuhrman fielding questions while he ate a sandwich. He spent much of the time complaining about the press. The prosecutors commiserated. They stood by their man.

  In court, Clark took Fuhrman briefly through his background and then had him tell the jury about the time he responded to a domestic-violence call at Simpson’s home in 1985, when O.J. shattered a Mercedes-Benz window with a baseball bat. Then she moved to a new topic.

  “Now, back in 1985 and 1986, sir, can you tell us whether you knew someone or met someone by the name of Kathleen Bell?”

  “Yes, I can tell you,” Fuhrman said evenly. “I did not.”

  Clark displayed Bell’s original letter to Cochran on the overhead projector. The jurors had the opportunity to study the precise, awful words that Bell said Fuhrman had uttered: that, among other things, Fuhrman wanted “all ‘niggers’ gathered together and killed.” It was one thing for Fuhrman to issue a general denial, but Clark pushed these ugly sentiments right in the jurors’ faces. This gesture was a measure of her confidence in her witness.

  Clark then
established that Fuhrman had been instructed to watch (what else?) Larry King Live when Bell had appeared on the program about a month earlier.

  “Did you recognize her?” Clark asked.

  “No, I did not.”

  Clark continued, “Did the conversation Kathleen Bell describes in this letter occur?”

  “No, it did not.”

  This entire exchange was little short of madness on Clark’s part. Bell was a credible witness. She had no ax to grind with the defense or the prosecution; indeed, as she had told Larry King, she thought Simpson was guilty. More important, Clark knew that the defense could corroborate Bell’s story with people she had told of Fuhrman’s comments at the time he made them. The psychiatric records established that at least at one time Fuhrman had claimed to harbor similar sentiments. Clark thus had to know that Kathleen Bell was almost certainly telling the truth. Yet still Clark went with her gut—and Fuhrman.

  The remainder of her direct examination was uneventful, underlining how minor a role Fuhrman had played in the overall investigation. As Clark intended, Fuhrman’s testimony mostly repeated what the jurors had already heard from Lange and the officers who discovered the bodies. Ultimately, a half dozen police officers made the same point: There was only one glove at the murder scene on Bundy Drive. With Fuhrman, the idea was to show (correctly) that there never was a second glove to move to Rockingham and, furthermore, that even if he had wanted to, Fuhrman never had the opportunity to move or plant any evidence. Clark also had the opportunity to finish the week with a flourish. Fuhrman testified that while he was examining the Bronco on the sidewalk outside Simpson’s home, he saw through a window a large heavy-duty plastic bag and a shovel. With great ceremony, Clark presented Fuhrman with a package wrapped in brown paper and police-evidence tape. She asked Fuhrman to unseal it, and he ripped the bag open and described what he saw.

  “It appears to be a bag that’s approximately three foot by four or five feet,” Fuhrman said.

  “And is that the plastic that you recall seeing in the rear cargo area?” Clark asked.

  “Yes, it is.”

  Fuhrman held it up. No one needed to point out that it looked like a human being could fit right inside—a sinister image for the jurors to savor all weekend long.

  Over that weekend, thanks to the televised broadcast of the trial, Bronco owners arose. They made telephone calls to the prosecution, the defense, even to the judge. Clark’s demonstration had suggested quite a bit more than the facts allowed. She had to begin the following week with a rather important, and sheepish, clarification.

  “Now, that plastic,” Clark said. “Do you happen to know whether it belongs in a Bronco or anything about it?”

  “Well, now I do,” Fuhrman replied.

  “And what is that?”

  “The spare-tire bag”—standard equipment that comes with all Ford Broncos. (And O.J. generally used the shovel as a pooper-scooper for his dog.)

  On that anticlimactic note, Clark turned over Mark Fuhrman to F. Lee Bailey.

  “Good cross-examination,” Bailey once wrote, “suffers at the hands of public misunderstanding. This achieves serious proportions because it is the public that fills our jury boxes. Too many jurors are waiting for Perry Mason; they expect the lawyer to bring the witness to the point where he cries out that the defendant is innocent, that he’s the one who killed the go-go dancer. Well, it happens—on television.”

  There was just such a public expectation when Bailey rose to cross-examine Fuhrman, but it was largely Bailey’s own fault. He was so hungry for the spotlight—and so embarrassed by his meager role to date in the trial—that he held a series of press conferences in the courthouse lobby during Fuhrman’s direct examination to announce how much he was looking forward to cross-examination. “Any lawyer in his right mind who would not be looking forward to cross-examining Mark Fuhrman is an idiot,” Bailey said, adding that he thought Fuhrman was comparable to Hitler. Bailey built expectations so high that even Perry Mason himself couldn’t have matched them.

  In a display of brooding courtroom machismo, Bailey had not objected a single time during Clark’s direct examination, preferring instead to smirk silently as Fuhrman told his story. But when his turn came, Bailey rushed to the podium in a burst of manic energy. He bounced on the balls of his feet as he asked questions.

  He began by driving home Clark’s folly with the plastic sheet. “After nine months of investigation, you discovered on Saturday that this important piece of evidence was perfectly innocuous, is that right?”

  Clark objected, but the point was made.

  Bailey, however, was so pumped with adrenaline that he couldn’t focus on any subject for more than a few moments. He talked about Fuhrman’s educational background—a high school dropout, Fuhrman later received an equivalency degree—and then the lawyer jumped to the domestic-violence incident at the Rockingham house in 1985. Bailey returned to Fuhrman’s activities on the night of the murder, and then he was off to the marine recruiting station where Kathleen Bell used to visit. As Bailey meandered on, Fuhrman grew confident enough to venture a little joke. Asked about Bell, the detective said, “The name Bell does not ring a bell.”

  Bailey grew frustrated, and by the end of the day, he was ready for a desperate lunge.

  “Did you wipe a glove in the Bronco, Detective Fuhrman?”

  This surprised the witness. Since Fuhrman did not know whether O.J. Simpson was even in the United States at the time of the murders, it was preposterous enough to suggest that he would take a bloody glove to plant at his house. But the idea that Fuhrman, or anyone for that matter, would use the glove as a sort of paintbrush to spread incriminating evidence—well, it was actually kind of amusing. (In the age of AIDS, the health risks alone to the glove planter would seem to render the suggestion absurd.) Yet there was an insidious cleverness to Bailey’s conjecture. If Fuhrman had wiped the glove in the Bronco, it would explain how Goldman’s blood wound up there. (In fact, after the trial, several jurors mentioned this as a possibility.)

  Fuhrman gave a small smile, a faint chuckle of perverse admiration. But all he said was, “No.”

  “You did not?” Bailey asked again.

  “No.”

  Bailey made no progress that day in budging Fuhrman from his story about his activities on the night of the murders; indeed, he never would. So the following morning, Bailey sought greener pastures: Fuhrman’s racial views. In a pretrial ruling, Judge Ito had held that the defense could question Fuhrman about his alleged statements to Kathleen Bell but not his comments to the psychiatrists in his disability case; those remarks, Ito ruled, were too remote in time to be relevant. On the morning of March 14, however, Bailey asked Ito to allow him to cross-examine Fuhrman about additional examples of his hostility to blacks. Bailey was willing to plumb the most obscure corners of Fuhrman’s life to shift the focus away from the bloody corpses at Bundy. Using Kathleen Bell as his wedge, Bailey sought to turn the Simpson trial into an examination of the social life at a marine recruiting station ten years earlier. Bailey wanted to ask about a statement that Fuhrman allegedly made in the presence of Andrea Terry, a friend of Kathleen Bell’s, at a bar in Redondo Beach. Terry said Fuhrman had asserted that for a black man and a white woman to be together was a “crime against nature.” According to Bailey, another witness, a former marine named Maximo Cordoba, would testify that at the recruiting station, Fuhrman had called him a nigger.

  Clark couldn’t refute the Terry remark, and Ito let Bailey ask about it. But the prosecutor professed amazement at the Cordoba request. “We have interviewed Max Cordoba a long time ago,” Clark said. “He never made such a statement, and he never alleged that Mark Fuhrman ever made such a statement.”

  Bailey loved twitting Clark, and he spoke in a near shout when he rose to refute her. Cordoba, Bailey vowed, would indeed say that Fuhrman had called him a nigger. “Your Honor,” Bailey said gravely, “I have spoken with him on the phone personally, marine to ma
rine. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he will march up to that witness stand and tell the world what Fuhrman called him on no provocation whatsoever.” In light of this disagreement about what Cordoba would say, Ito ruled that Bailey could ask Fuhrman about it only after the prosecution had had a chance to interview Cordoba again.

  Another fruitless day of cross-examination followed. Bailey tried to impeach Fuhrman with his testimony from the preliminary hearing. At one point in that testimony, Fuhrman had appeared to refer to more than one glove at the murder scene, using the plural “them.” But Fuhrman easily turned aside this line of questioning, pointing out that he was referring to the glove and cap as “them.” Bailey asked about Bell’s friend Andrea Terry, whom the height-obsessed Bailey referred to as “attractive but tall.” Fuhrman claimed never to have met her. But she’s “over six feet high”? Still Fuhrman claimed no memory—and still Bailey made no progress.

  That night, March 14, the NBC program Dateline broadcast an interview with Max Cordoba in which the ex-marine asserted that Fuhrman had called him a nigger ten years ago. It was all so ludicrously distant from the issues at hand, like a situation comedy playing on another channel: Max and the wacky crew of a beachfront marine recruiting station meet the flirty real estate agent from upstairs, Kathleen, who tries to fix up the handsome cop, Mark, with her excessively tall friend, Andrea. (Bailey even wanted the man who ran “the ladies’ wear shop next door” to testify.) Curiously, Cordoba also asserted on Dateline that he had never spoken to Bailey—marine to marine, or otherwise. Clark played that excerpt from the broadcast the first thing the next morning in court.

  Bailey was even more red-faced than usual, furious. He said that he had spoken to Cordoba, he just hadn’t discussed the facts of the case with him; Bailey had left that to Pat McKenna. In a phone call late the previous night, Bailey said, Cordoba had acknowledged to him that he had been mistaken on Dateline.