by Jenner, Kris
After the hour long service, family and friends paused outside the side entrance, surrounding O.J. Simpson, who was dressed in a black suit and wearing sunglasses. Guests embraced.
Simpson’s attorney, Robert L. Shapiro, said later that Nicole Simpson’s mother had expressed a wish to him at the service. “Mrs. Brown told me: ‘Please take good care of him (Simpson). The children need their father.’”
A mile-long funeral procession headed south to Orange County about 2 p.m. for burial services at Ascension Cemetery in Lake Forest. The site was not far from Dana Point, where Nicole Simpson graduated from high school in 1976 and where her parents still live.
Security was so tight at the service that even the Rev. Bruce Lavery, who would officiate, was made to show identification to sheriff’s deputies who kept guard at the iron gate in front of the cemetery.
Simpson, holding the hand of his son and followed by about 50 relatives and friends, walked slowly after the pallbearers onto a green baize carpet and under a light gray canopy that had been set up beside the grave site.
Lavery said Simpson looked “very solemn and hurt” during the service, where he was seated with Nicole Simpson’s family.
“There was no estrangement at all,” Lavery said.
At the gravesite, I wondered about the dynamic between O.J. and Nicole’s family. Nobody wanted to come out and say anything about anything. You wondered: What is going on here? What’s going to happen? It was like being in the middle of a mystery and nobody knew the outcome. We were all in the cramped little area beneath a burial tent and a gaping hole in the ground, all thinking the same thing: What happened and how did we get here? How did our lives end up at this place and what is going to happen next? That was the strongest question: what’s going to happen next?
Later it would be reported in USA Today that O.J. leaned over Nicole’s coffin during this incredibly dreadful day and kissed her on the lips.
“I’m so sorry, Nicki. I’m so sorry,” he was quoted as saying. After that, Nicole’s mother, Judi, supposedly asked O.J., “Did you have anything to do with this?”
“No, I loved your daughter,” O.J. reportedly replied, according to a 1994 television interview with Judi Brown.
Nicole was buried next to her grandparents and that’s where we left her. After the burial, I remember walking across the grass to the limousine and turning around and looking at the grave to say my last good-bye. Instinctively, I did what Nicole always did: I raised a hand in the air and flashed a peace sign. Finally, I thought, she was at peace.
After the funeral, everyone went back to Nicole’s mom’s house in Laguna. O.J., Robert, and A. C. Cowlings were all there, along with three of Nicole’s sisters: Minnie, Tanya, and Denise. We were all in her mother’s living room, which was an intimate kind of space. As always, we could hear the media helicopters overhead, closing in and taking over the house with their noise, a sound that was becoming the perpetual backbeat for these horrendous days.
Suddenly, I heard Robert say to O.J., “I think it’s time.”
I immediately walked over to him and said, “Time for what?”
“Never mind,” Robert answered.
Then I watched in shock as O.J. and A. C. Cowlings went into a back room and traded clothes in an attempt to mask their identities. I thought that was so weird. I mean, they were both wearing suits. How different can your suit be at a funeral? But they took off in their exchanged apparel, and Robert and O.J. drove off. God only knows where they were going.
The next day, June 17, was the day of the infamous low-speed, two-hour Bronco chase, when O.J. fled Robert’s house in Encino with A. C. Cowlings driving just before the police arrived to arrest him. Before news of the chase came on television, Bruce and I were sitting in our den in Beverly Hills. Before the chase began, two detectives, one of whom was Philip Vannatter, called the house. I picked up the phone, and Vannatter, the lead detective on the case, told me that O.J. had taken the Bronco and was missing.
“Do you know where he is?” he asked.
“Me?” I asked. “Why would I know where he is?”
“Well, Bruce has a plane,” he said. “We thought maybe he was with Bruce.”
“No, Bruce is sitting right here,” I answered.
“Can we talk to Bruce?” he said. He wanted to make sure I was telling the truth. Once they confirmed Bruce was with me, Vannatter asked me, “O.J.’s not there, is he?”
“No, O.J.’s not here,” I answered.
A short time later we were watching TV when the regularly scheduled programming was interrupted by a special report. The screen showed O.J.’s white Bronco speeding down the 405 Freeway.
The LAPD had ordered O.J. to turn himself in for the murders by eleven that morning. He kept delaying. When the police finally came to pick him up at Robert’s house, he was gone, along with A.C. I was sitting at home that evening when I turned on the TV and, along with everyone else, I couldn’t believe what I was watching: O.J. and A.C. in the white Bronco, helicopters overhead, filming their every move, in what everyone agreed looked like a getaway scene from a movie.
No one really knew what was going on or where O.J. was going—except maybe Robert, who reportedly kept in touch with him by phone during the chase. There was much speculation. Some reporters said he was going to visit his mother. Right. Most reports speculated that O.J. was going to commit suicide. Some radio and TV stations put people who knew O.J. on the air to try to talk him out of it. KCBS sportscaster and former NFL player Jim Hill, who knew O.J., was one of those begging O.J. on the air to surrender: “You do not want to be remembered as someone who ran from a bad situation,” he said. On another station, USC coach John McKay asked O.J. to stop the Bronco and give himself up to the police.
As the chase continued, the Bronco never going more than sixty miles an hour, the police blocked freeway entrances so traffic wouldn’t interfere with their operation. People gathered on overpasses, actually cheering on O.J. and A.C. in what Newsweek later described as “equal parts police chase, VIP motorcade and demented victory lap.”
“More than a dozen news and police helicopters, flying in formation like some urbanized ‘Apocalypse Now,’ and a phalanx of patrol cars followed at a cautious distance,” read the report. “Inside the truck, Simpson held a gun to his head and told authorities on his cellular phone that he’d kill himself unless he got to see his mother. Spectators jammed the overpasses and frontage roads. ‘GO O.J.’ signs popped up, a grotesque parody of his airport dashes for Hertz. Old football friends, horrified by what they were watching, called L.A. television and radio stations, beseeching him to give up. ‘I love you, my mother loves you,’ said a weeping Vince Evans, a former University of Southern California quarterback.”
The chase would turn out to be one of the biggest television events in history, with an estimated 95 million people watching. Later, the court released a tape of LAPD detective Tom Lange speaking with O.J. on his cell phone during the chase, with O.J. telling the detective that he wanted to be with Nicole.
“I wasn’t running . . . I was just trying to go to Nicole’s grave and go to her,” O.J. told the detective. “I just can’t do it [commit suicide] here on the freeway. I couldn’t do it in the field. I want to do it at her grave. I want to do it at my house.”
O.J. also told Lange that he had tried unsuccessfully to visit the house where he had lived at the time of his first date with Nicole, saying, “That’s where we were happy.”
During the whole conversation, Lange pleaded with him to pull over and toss the gun out the window.
“Don’t throw it all away,” Lange told O.J., who replied, “I can’t take this.”
On the tape you can hear an emotional Lange repeatedly trying to convince a clearly distraught and emotional O.J. to go home. On that same day, June 17, 1994, as Detective Lange was talking to O.J. behind the scenes, I, like everyone else in America, was consumed with the case at home. Our TVs were on in every single room, every channel covering the case,
24/7, the entire nation transfixed, wondering what was going to happen next. At one point, I froze in absolute shock: there was my ex-husband, Robert Kardashian, in his light gray suit with a pink, black, and gray tie and an extremely serious expression, standing in front of a group of reporters, unfolding a piece of paper, which he was about to read.
What the hell? I thought I was going to fall to the floor.
Before I could process what was going on, Robert began speaking, reading what I could only interpret as a suicide letter from O.J. The letter, disjointed and long-winded, had supposedly been written by O.J. by hand right before he was supposed to turn himself in for the murder charges.
I’ll quote the letter here in part:
To Whom It May Concern:
First, everyone understand I have nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. I loved her. I always have and always will. If we had a problem it was because I loved her so much . . .
Nicole and I had a good life together. All this press talk about a rocky relationship was no more than what every long-term relationship experiences. All her friends will confirm that I have been totally loving and understanding of what she’s been going through.
At times, I have felt like a battered husband or boyfriend but I loved her, make that clear to everyone. And I would take whatever it took to make it work.
Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.
Thanks for making my life special. I hope I helped yours.
Peace and love, O.J.
Again, surreal. It would become a moment in television history, replayed continuously on televisions around the world. The TV would cut from the white Bronco to the cheering crowds on the freeway overpasses to Robert solemnly reading O.J.’s letter. Over and over and over again.
“Why are you doing this?” I practically screamed at Robert as he spoke on TV. “You can’t possibly believe O.J.! And he’s got you so on his team!”
The chase finally ended around nine that night, with O.J. back at home on Rockingham. After the chase was over, O.J. supposedly went inside, made a call to his mother, and drank a glass of orange juice. I was shocked that nothing more serious had happened. You would think that I would be relieved that the day had come to a peaceful end, but there was nothing peaceful about it.
Robert knew I was angry, and he was angry with me in return because he felt I was doubting his friend for no reason. I really believe in my heart of hearts that Robert truly thought at the time that O.J. was innocent and that he had nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. I believe Robert was determined to help his friend in a time of need. I know it’s hard to understand why Robert would stand behind O.J. so faithfully. But Robert was such a good person and had invested a lifetime of friendship and memories in O.J., whom he’d known since their days together at USC. They had been through marriages, divorces, babies, celebrations, and holidays. They were as close as brothers. As our friend Larry Schiller, who wrote American Tragedy, the book about O.J.’s defense strategies, would later tell the New York Times: “He [Robert] stood by O.J. irrespective of how he felt because he felt that nobody else was standing by O.J., not because of his innocence or guilt, but because there was a friendship there.” Robert didn’t know everything that I knew, everything that had happened between the time that he and I got divorced and I married Bruce, and Bruce and I became friends with O.J. and Nicole. As a girlfriend of Nicole’s, I knew so much more about what was going on than Robert did, even though I didn’t know everything.
So the cast of characters would soon be assembled: O.J.’s “Dream Team” of defense attorneys—eventually including Johnnie Cochran, Bob Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, and Robert Kardashian. And on the other side, Marcia Clark, the lead prosecuting attorney assigned to the case by the D.A.’s office, along with her co-counsel Chris Darden.
During the trial, I spoke constantly with case coordinator Patty Jo Fairbanks, an amazing woman who worked for Marcia Clark in the D.A.’s office. Patty kept us all sane, communicating with us when Marcia Clark couldn’t. She kept us all calm and gave us our updates. She would call witnesses and say, “You have to testify, and this is what time you have to be downtown.”
CHAPTER NINE
O.J. All the Time
Testify.
That was the least I could do. Oh, wait, it’s not like I had a choice. I was subpoenaed by the court to testify at O.J.’s trial.
We all felt like we were in uncharted territory, going through something that nobody could advise us on. I felt isolated, alone and scared. Everybody had an opinion. If you were Team O.J., you were really nasty to Team Nicole, and if you were Team Nicole, you were really nasty to Team O.J. What a lot of people didn’t understand is that when we lost Nicole, at the same time, oddly, we also lost O.J. O.J. and Nicole were two of my best friends, so while I was mourning the death of Nicole, I was also mourning the emotional death of O.J. Simpson. He had been in my life since I was seventeen, and he had been someone I admired and looked up to. He was like my big brother. I felt he would’ve done anything for me, and I would have certainly done anything for him. I loved him.
Two people I adored, loved, and considered family were both gone, along with the entire world as I had known it. Everything was just gone.
Our future memories were gone and our former memories were obliterated by this tragedy. Our Saturday tennis games were gone, our dinner parties were gone, our family vacations were gone. Everything was so messed up. These were the people with whom we spent Easter and Christmas Eve and Mother’s Day. We celebrated the births of our children with them. When I gave birth to my kids, Nicole and O.J. were there, and when Nicole gave birth to their kids, I was there. My daily runs with Nicole, after we both dropped off our kids at school, were how I started my day. Our weekends were spent together too. Without her, my life, and so many other lives, would never be the same.
There wasn’t anything that we didn’t celebrate together. I thought about the football games that we went to in San Francisco when O.J. was a San Francisco Giant, and all the times that Robert went to support O.J. when he played for the Buffalo Bills. I never went, because I worked for the airline and was always flying, but Robert would always fly back to Buffalo when we were dating to support O.J. I thought about the happy times, the fun and the laughter—all gone. Nicole was no longer there to represent herself, and I was consumed with mourning her. Everybody has his or her own personal journey to go through when a loved one dies, but this was unique in that it was so tragic and public, a death that became international news every single day, all day long. It was as if I was watching intimate details of my life and the people in it unfold on the most public of stages. When it all began, I didn’t know if I had the tools to be able to deal with that. I would have to tap into my inner strength and become a lot stronger than I ever knew possible. This would come to serve me well later in life, but for now it was overwhelming. I honestly didn’t think I could get through it.
By the time the trial was getting ready to begin in January 1995, around six months after the murders, there had already been a lot of innuendo and leaked information from both sides of the case. It was chilly between Robert and me, for sure. It was a difficult time for us. It was hard to be neutral and civil to each other in front of the kids because the situation was so volatile, and there was so much going on, and there were issues cropping up daily.
Robert was doing media interviews. I did Larry King Live and The Barbara Walters Special, with Nicole’s parents’ blessing, and a handful of other interviews that the family wanted me to do. We taped my interview with Barbara Walters in a suite at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. I was frankly scared to death; I had watched enough Barbara Walters Specials to know that her specialty was making every guest cry. She always asked the most interesting yet the most dramatic questions. And in those days, if you wanted your story told to the widest possible audience, you did an interview with Barbara Walters. I was such a fan
and admirer of hers. But never in a million years did I dream that I would ever be interviewed by Barbara . . . and especially not in the context of a murder case.
They didn’t give me questions in advance, and I was so nervous and anxious. But I kept reminding myself: this wasn’t about me. I felt like I was there to be a voice for Nicole. Somebody had to speak about her, someone who knew her and loved her, and that somebody was me.
I came to the interview with my friend Ron Hardy, who had washed Nicole’s blood off of her stairs. We sat down in the hotel suite, me sitting across from Barbara. The lights came on, and Barbara stared at me with her intense eyes and began asking questions. I can’t remember specific answers, although I know I told Barbara what a good person Nicole was and how much we missed her, all while refraining from giving my opinion about the case and trying my best not to cry. The interview seemed to last two minutes.
Barbara was famous for taking her guests on a walk during her interviews. She did our walk after my interview was over. As I was walking through the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel grounds with Barbara Walters, I felt, This just keeps getting crazier. It was surreal, but it was only the beginning.
When the trial started, Robert would come over to pick up the kids. We would meet in the driveway, because he actually thought that if he came into my house, someone might be taping him.
“Are you wired?” he would ask.
“No, are you wired?” I would say.
“Nope,” he would say.
Robert and I would stand there in the driveway, a healthy distance from each other, because neither of us truly trusted what we’d told each other about not being wired. It was very weird. We’d pass off the kids, and they’d get in the car and wave good-bye.
Finally, after a few of these ridiculous driveway encounters, Robert called and said, “I want to come over and talk to you. Do you have a minute?”
