Without A Doubt
by
Marcia Clark




During the fourteen years I spent as a deputy D.A.  for Los Angeles
County, I beleived in justice.  To me it wasn't an abstract idea.  I
felt the force was within me, if you know what I mean.  Even in the
difficult cases, I had faith my juries would rise to the occasion.  On
the morning of June 13,1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald
Goldman were found-their bodies butchered and discarded like grass
clippings-all of that changed.

Since the last day of the "Trial of the Century"-the criminal
prosecution of O.J.  Simpson for double murder-the most compelling
figure from that national drama has kept her silence.  Now Marcia Clark
finally tells us what we've been waiting to hear: the truth.

Without A Doubt is not just a book about a trial.  It's a book about a
woman.  Marcia Clark takes us inside her head and her heart.  Her voice
is raw, incisive, disarming, unmistakable.  Her story is both sweeping
and deeply personal.  It is the story of a woman who, when caught up in
an event that galvanized an entire country, rose to that occasion with
singular integrity, drive, honesty, and grace.

How did she do it, day after day?  What was it like, orchestrating the
most controversial case of her career in the face of the media's
relentless klieg lights?  How did she fight her personal battles-those
of a working mother balancing and crushing workload and a painful, very
public divorce?  When did she know that her case was lost?  Who stood by
her, and who abandoned her?  And how did she cope with the outcome?  As
Clark shares the secrets of her own life, we understand for the first
time why she identified so strongly with Nicole, in a way no man ever
could.

No one is spared in this unflinching account-least of all Clark herself,
who candidly admits what she wishes she'd done differently-and, for the
first time, we understand why the outcome was inevitable.  Clark speaks
frankly about: Lance Ito, whose weakness and preening ego forclosed the
possibility of justice; Kato Kaelin, the most not-so-dumb house guest,
who approached testimony as his personal screen test; Johnnie Cochran
and his mendacious "Dream Team," who checked their ethics at the door;
Mark Fuhrman, whose racial epithets disgusted her, but whose police work
was never in question; Christopher Darden, whose rashness often
infuriated her but whose humor and courage ultimately sustained her.

She also takes on her critics, the "armchair warriors" who scapegoated
her after the verdict, and tells us why they were wrong-and why the
cival trial was so different.

In a case that tore marcia apart, and that continues to haunt us as few
events of history have, Marcia Clark emerged as the only true heroine,
because she stood for justice, fought the good fight, and fought it
well.

Marcia Clark was a prosecutor in the office of the Los Angeles District
Attorney, trying cases for more than thirteen years before becoming the
lead prosecutor in the criminal trial of O.J.  Simpson, the "Trial of
the Century." She lives on the west coast with her sons.

Prologue

April 30, 1996

This is painful.  I don't even know where to begin.  When I try to find
a starting place, headaches, backaches, this damned cough that won't go
away, all pull me down.  My confidence collapses out from under me and I
have to curl up on the couch until I feel better.  I hope for sleep. But
sleep won't come.

I drink Glenlivet, but then you probably know that.  And you know that I
smoke Dunhills.  And you know, or at least you think you do, that my
"addictions" love crossword puzzles and detective novels, and that I
have "unpredictable" taste in men.  I am reading now from People
magazine.  I've never talked to anyone from People, but they seem to
like me.  Funny when the media likes you, they can take scraps that your
friends toss out, and spin them into flattering fairy tales.  (But when
they don't like you, they take the scraps from ex husbands.)  God, don't
get me started.  I look at myself in the Globe and see a man-crazy lush.
And then I look at Ladies ' Home Journal and see a serene professional
woman at the top of her game.  And I look and look and look and don't
see myself at all.

All the attention I've gotten it's something I still cannot wrap my mind
around.  There was a time when I would have been thrilled about it. Back
in high school, I wanted to be an actress.  No fifteen-year-old wants to
be an actress without wanting to be famous.  Somewhere along the line, I
outgrew wanting to be famous.  I wanted to do something truly useful
with my life.  I wanted to make a real contribution.

The irony, of course, is that the most serious job I ever undertook
turned into a damned circus.

During the fourteen years I spent as a deputy D.A.  for Los Angeles
County, I believed in justice.  To me it wasn't an abstract idea. Before
the Simpson case, I'd prosecuted twenty homicides.  I'd brought cases
against twenty defendants who I believed in my heart were guilty. And
all but one jury agreed.  I felt The Force was with me, if you know what
I mean.  Even in the difficult cases, it had been my experience that
when people got onto juries they usually acted in better conscience than
they did in their private lives.  I had faith they'd rise to the
occasion.

On the morning of June 13, 1994, when Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald
Goldman were found their bodies butchered and discarded like grass
clippings all of that changed.  Their murderer, O.  J.  Simpson, would
turn justice on its head.  By virtue of his celebrity, he would be
coddled by worshipful cops, pumped up by star-fucking attorneys,
indulged by a spineless judge, and adored by jurors every bit as addled
by racial hatred as their counterparts on the Rodney King jury.  O.  J.
Simpson slaughtered two innocent people, and he walked free right past
the most massive and compelling body of physical evidence ever assembled
against a criminal defendant.

I am not bitter.  I am angry.  And I ask myself over and over again, How
could this jury fail to see?  Was there something else we could have
done?  Something more we could have said?  How many times did I lead
that jury along the blood trail?  Following the bloody prints of that
rare and expensive Bruno Magli loafersize 12, the same as Simpson wears
leading away from the bodies, up the front steps to the rear gate of
Nicole Brown's condo.  A blood trail leading right to the foot of O. J.
Simpson's bed, for God's sake!  On Ronald Goldman's shirt, a head hair
that matched those of the defendant.  Simpson's hair.  On the navy-blue
cap dropped at the crime scene, the same black hairs, as well as a
carpet fiber matching those found in the defendant's Bronco.  Stop and
think for a moment.  How did all this stuff get there? The defendant's
blood is found where there shouldn't be blood.  The defendant's hair
where there shouldn't be hair.  There was enough physical evidence in
this case to convict O.  J.  Simpson twenty times over.

Prologue

Defendant "not guilty" on all counts.

I feel bad about a lot of things.  I feel bad for the Browns and the
Goldmans, for the way the system failed them.  I feel bad for my fellow
deputies, who so often stayed at the courthouse until two or three A.M.,
working themselves into a stupor of fatigue.  I feel bad for all the
good cops at LAPD who got a bum rap because of the transgressions of a
few.  I feel bad for the D.A.  investigators who pulled off some truly
extraordinary feats of behind-the-scenes investigation.  I feel
especially bad for our young law clerks, who poured their hearts into
this case for fourteen months only to have them broken by that
unthinkable verdict.

For many, it was their first case.  How could anyone explain to them
what an anomaly it was?  No other criminal case in American history has
generated such massive publicity.  No other criminal defendant has
entered the dock so perfectly insulated by personal wealth and public
sympathy.  What those fresh, idealistic young clerks saw, to their
dismay, was a defendant who was virtually unconvictable.  And that,
quite understandably, shook their faith in American justice.

I'm ready now to do this.  I'm upright at my laptop, ready to begin this
story.  Every time I feel overwhelmed by the desire to curl up on the
couch and pull an afghan over my head, I'll fight that urge down,
because this is important.  I just ask you to understand how hard this
is.  The event is so huge, it's difficult to figure out how to shrink it
into words, or even to make a start.  The definitive account, I cannot
give you.  No one can.  But I can tell you what the case meant to me.  I
can tell you about the strategies and the courtroom skirmishes.  About
moments of exultation and days of heartache.  I can give you my private
reflections.  Particularly those.  Because that's what it all comes down
to.  Just as all politics is local, all good history is personal.

About the best thing you could say about my life before Monday, June 13,
1994, is that my problems were my problems.

Nobody else was interested in them.  No one except a handful of
intimates, including my friend Lynn Reed, another deputy D.A.  in the
L.A.  County District Attorney's office.  For weeks, she'd been urging
me to file for divorce.

"Do it!  Just do it!" she would tell me.  I knew she was right.  I'd
been separated from my husband, Gordon, for about six months.  In
January he had moved out of our dilapidated tract house in Glendale,
suburb of Los Angeles.  He was not deserting me; I'd asked him to leave.
Our marriage had degenerated into the gray misery that appears vivid
only in retrospect.  I will not go into particulars because they are no
one's business but our own.

Suffice it to say that the previous year had been hell.  I'd just left
the D.A."s Special Trials Unit for a management job in Central
Operations.  That allowed me to spend evenings with my sons.  Tyler was
just a baby; Matthew was then a toddler.  I enjoyed better prospects as
a pencil pusher, but the work left me in a state of chronic discontent.

The trade-off for a carpeted office and a shot at six figures, I
discovered boredom.  Absolute, brain-numbing boredom.  Old line lawyers
like me are adrenaline junkies.  We like getting out on the streets with
the police and arguing before juries. Scheduling cases for other
attorneys to try is a drag.

So I was unhappy with my job and unhappy in my marriage.  I knew I could
limp along like this, or I could take some decisive action to turn my
life around.  In December 1993, I asked for my old job back.  And I
asked Gordon to leave.

I'd spent most of my adult life with a man under the same roof, and now,
trying to cope with plumbing problems, cable bills, and the furious
demands of being a working mother, I was constantly terrified.

It was, I knew, a hell of my own devisingI had no grounds to complain
about it.  At times I was ready to break down and ask my husband to come
back.  Yet I resisted the temptation to return to a lousy marriage just
for the sake of expediency.  Even so, I let the separation drag on for
six months before I took Lynn's advice: "Let him know it's over." So I
went out and bought myself one of those do-it-yourself divorce kits.
Money was tight; it seemed like a good idea at the time.

But the lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client.

There were no reporters in the bushes, no paparazzi peeping through the
windows, when I filed the divorce papers on June 10 Three days later, O.
J.  Simpson crashed into my life like a meteor.

On Monday morning, June 13, 1994, I was struggling to get out of the
house.  Any parent with a preschooler knows the drill.

Honey, we're late.

I don't want to go!

Shoe!

By the time he reaches nursery school, that same child will run off
happily to play with his pals.

I had a parking space in the lot behind the Criminal Courts Building,
and that morning when I pulled in I waved to one of the attendants,
Arturo.

"Mucho traiajo hoy?"he called out to me.

Ol, coma slempre.

In fact, that morning, I had no court appearances, no witness
interviews.  There was nothing on my calendar to indicate that this
could be anything other than a short-skirt day.  No need for the suit.

It was 9:30, and I was late as I usually am when I don't have to make it
in under the gavel.  Well, the truth is, I am just chronically late.

It's a character flaw, but one I can't seem to rectify.  My friends even
have a term for it: Marcia Standard Time.

I'm not proud of being late, but it does afford a slight advantage at
the CCB.  It allows one to avoid the crush at the elevators, which are,
By far, the slowest in L.A.  County.  During rush hours, attorneys who
are headed for Special Trials on the eighteenth floor and imprudent
enough to arrive on time often find themselves fifteen to twenty minutes
behind schedule for court, because the "express" elevator specially
designed by outside consultants inevitably stops mid-route.

However, running on Marcia Standard Time, often enjoy a dear shot.

At the eighteenth floor, the elevator doors open upon Mordor, Land of
Darkness: my private name for the courthouse's dreary labyrinth of
smog-soiled cement hallways.  On some mornings a touch of claustrophobia
leaves me breathless until I open the door of my high-ceilinged office,
where I find sunlight streaming through the window.  For seconds
afterward, motes of dust swirl like snowflakes in that strong, welcome
light.

No civil servant takes a window for granted.  Certainly not me.

During my early years on the job, I toiled away in sunless, airless cu
bides in a series of far-flung outposts of the L.A.  District Attorney's
dominion.  West L.A., Beverly Hills, Culver City.  In my early days as a
baby D.A., I caught mainly deuces drunk driving charges.  Every once in
a while I'd get to do the preliminary hearings on a homicide.

That was what made the overtime worthwhile.  Murder is so much more
compelling than other crimes.  There's more complexity, more
sophisticated forms of evidence.  You get tool marks.  You get blood
markers.  There's stuff to play with.

I was always itching to get beyond the preliminaries to trials.  Real
trials.  Criminal trials where you have to think quickly, react quickly.

I wanted to be drawn into an experience that was totally absorbing.

Trial work is especially appealing to the workaholic.  I'd go through
docket like Pac-Man, grabbing cases no one else would touch, putting in
ten- to twelve-hour days in the process.  What gave rise to this fervor
is hard for me to explain.  Work offers a defensible escape from a
private life on the skids.  Working myself to the point of exhaustion
left me feeling purified.  Exhilarated.  I think it also gave me a sense
that I was cheating mortality.  Ever since I was small, I've been dogged
by the premonition that I would die young.  I couldn't imagine living
past forty.  Forty-five, tops.  That kind of deadline adds a sense of
urgency to everything.  It's like I can keep on living if I run fast
enough.

Beyond that, the courtroom is the ideal venue for someone who likes to
argue.  For most of my life I've been contentious, and it's gotten me
into a lot of trouble.  But verbal dexterity and strong opinions are
welcomed at the bar.  There are dearly delineated rules of combat, rules
that favor reason.  Humans may be capricious but, to my naive way of
thinking, justice was not.

I was assigned to the Juvenile Division, where, early on, I volunteered
for the "county run." That meant traveling an exhausting circuit of
county juvenile court offices, some of them in neighborhoods so
dangerous no one even went out for lunch.  The advantage of the "run,"
however, was that it allowed me to try one juvy case after another.  In
juvenile cases, unlike regular trials, the defendant almost always
testifies.  For the most part the defendants are kids pumped up on ego.
They love the attention they get by simply taking the witness stand.  It
would have been sad, except that the juvy penalties aren't terribly
severe.  Generally the kids get HOP, home on probation.  So I logged in
a lot of time cross-examining the accused.  By the time I was finally
transferred Downtown to Central Trials in 1984, I had a reputation as a
hard charger.

Anyway, in 1984, the year I turned thirty, the district attorney, Ira
Reiner, made it a policy to scout out the rising stars and apprentice
them to veteran prosecutors.  I was one of those who came to his
attention.  Reiner brought me over to the CCB and assigned me to a man I
revered: Harvey Giss.  Harvey was a courthouse legend.  He was so
handsome that women jurors swooned during his final arguments.  He was
also brilliant, irreverent, and one great trial attorney.  To this day
Harvey Giss remains the only prosecutor in L.A.  County who has ever
gotten a death-penalty conviction against a client of Leslie Abramson,
the lawyer who would later mount the successful, if unorthodox, defense
of Erik Menendez.

But a trial lawyer has only so many of those big cases in him.  By the
time I moved my files into the windowless office, hardly bigger hen a
utility closet, across from Harvey's, he confessed to me that these
cases were wearing him out.  Harvey had been going through the Ringer
with a defendant named James Hawkins, a tough man to prosecute because
his neighbors considered him a good Samaritan.

One day, outside his father's grocery store, Hawkins had shot a man who
was supposedly trying to rob a local woman.  Upon closer investigation,
it turned out that our "hero" had gunned down his victim long after the
woman had left the scene.  That wasn't all.  Detectives looking into the
murders of two drug dealers developed evidence that led to other than
James Hawkins.  Harvey had fought like hell and won conviction on the
grocery store shooting; he'd just received that second case for filing.
By the time I moved my files and scrawny philodendron into the
CCB, the double homicide was nearing trial date.

Harvey assigned me the ballistics part of the case.  Every night I
hauled home volumes of arcane texts on firearms, studying them until my
eyes blurred.  Eventually I gained such expertise that I could have
Passed the qualifying tests given to police firearms experts.  As far as
the Hawkins case was concerned, however, this was academic: we hadn't
found a murder weapon.  A search warrant served on Hawkins's home had
turned up several different guns, but none capable of firing the bullets
found in the bodies of our victims.  Then, in one of several bazaar
turns in this case, Hawkins escaped from a holding cell in the CB and
went on the lam.

In the wake of that escape, both Harvey and I were assigned
round-the-clock security.  For myself, I frankly thought this was
overkill; the defendant had always been rather cordial to me.  But
Harvey, I knew, might well have been in danger.  Hawkins blamed him
personally for destroying his local-hero rep.  Several weeks later,
during a wild shoot-out, the fugitive was finally caught.  The search of
his car turned up two more guns and they were the same make and caliber
as the weapons used in the double homicide.

Hawkins had taken a metal file to the inside of both barrels, trying to
obliterate the fine strict that leave their imprint on bullets.  It
wasn't easy to tell if the guns had fired any rounds, let alone the ones
that killed those drug dealers.  But I finally got to put all my
ballistics knowledge to use.  Working with Sergeant Lou Barry of the
Sheriff's Department, I was able to match the bullet from one of the
victims'

bodies with the bullet Hawkins had fired into a wall during a random
robbery.  It was a coup, and it made me the deputy darling of the
moment.

That trial was almost two years of pure hell.  Hawkins's attorney was a
crafty, tenacious brawler named Barry Levin who made us fight for every
motion.  It took eight months to pick the jury and another excruciating
thirteen months to try this monster.  But I watched everything Harvey
did, and I learned from him.  I learned how to organize a big case, one
with forty or fifty witnesses.  I learned where you object and where you
don't.  I learned how to keep my head up and take the hits.

I also learned how to hold up in the face of a difficult judge.  Ours,
Marsha Revel, was a former prosecutor, and like a lot of old D.A.s
who've gone on to the bench, she seemed intent upon demonstrating her
impartiality by favoring the defense.  She lost no opportunity to
discredit us.  Harvey's objections were overruled so frequently that I
had to count paper clips to distract myself from the pain of it all. The
worst came during dosing arguments, when the defense objected over and
over again, intent on throwing Harvey off stride.  Though this is
regarded as a bush-league tactic and most judges won't tolerate it,
Revel refused to intervene.  The objections increased to the point that
Harvey couldn't utter three consecutive words without getting cut off.

The judge called for a recess and Harvey returned to his seat.  He
looked beaten.

"Marcia," he told me wearily, "it's time to cut my losses.  I'm going to
end after the break."

"But Harvey," I replied, "you can't just leave out the rest.  It's
important."

aYou can cover it in your argument," he told me.  "Barry won't want to
bully you in front of the jury.  This is best for the case.  You can -
do it."

It's possible Judge Revel caught the look of panic on my face, because
in an uncharacteristic gesture of thoughtfulness she recessed court for
the weekend immediately after Harvey concluded.

If anyone was going to finish our opening arguments, it would have to be
me.  Yet, I found myself paralyzed.  Over the months, I had seen ground
into the dirt by the same stresses that had gotten to Harvey.  My
spirits were at an all-time low.  I didn't have much fight left.  Above
all, I was inexperienced.  I'd never delivered a summation where this
much was on the line.

That weekend I went to a cousin's wedding in a suburb of L.A.  I
shouldn't have even attempted a social ordeal like this.  I knew
perfectly well that I was physically and mentally exhausted, that I
should have spent my two days preparing, or better yet, getting some
sleep.

Instead, I tried to put on a happy face in front of friends and family.

I was doing all right until I caught sight of my mother standing off to
one side.  You remember how it was when you were a kid?  You'd fall and
scrape your elbow and you could hold in the tear subtile you caught sight
of your mom?  Then the dam would burst.

"What's wrong?" she asked me.  That's all it took.

I threw my arms around her, sobbing.  "I can't do it, Mom.  It's just
too much.  I'll never be able to pull it together."

This was not the kind of scene that is welcome at a wedding.  And,
anyway, these outbursts were not my mother's style.

She patted me on the shoulder.

"You'll pull it off, Marcia.  You always do."

Her words hit me like a splash of cold water.  But she was right.  I
wasn't a child anymore.  I was an adult.  A professional.  I couldn't
count on my mother or anyone else coming to my rescue.  I realized, as I
stood sniffling in the reception line, that if I were to be saved, I'd
have to save myself.  Life's hardest lesson.

The following week, I marched back into court and delivered the rest of
the damned summation.  I don't know that I did such a brilliant job of
it.  Probably not.  The point is, I finished.  I didn't give in to
despair.  The memory of that experience gave me a world of confidence
during the years, and trials, to come.  As Lillian Hellman once said,
"Half the battle is being able to take the punishment."

We got our conviction.  Harvey transferred out to a quieter post in
Santa Monica.  I moved into his office and became one of five deputies
at Special Trials, the unit that handles L.A.  County's high-profile
cases.  Over the next five years, I caught some of the cases that might
ordinarily have come to Harvey.  One of these was the case of People v.
Robert Bardo.

The Bardo case was known more popularly as the Rebecca Schaeffer case,
after its victim, a pretty twenty-one-year-old actress who played Pam
Dawber's sister on the sitcom My Sister Sam.  An obsessed fan named
Robert Bardo wrote Rebecca a series of letters.  Unfortunately, she
wrote one back.  It was just a generic thank-you-for-your-interest, but
it was enough to make the twisted son of a bitch think they had made
some kind of connection.  He hired a private investigator, who turned up
Rebecca's address.  Then he showed up at her apartment with a bag
containing copies of his letters to her, a paperback of The Catcher in
the Rye, her publicity photo, and a gun.

When he rang the bell, Rebecca answered it herself.  That caught him off
guard.  I guess he was expecting she had servants to sweat the small
stuff.  She was gracious enough to shake his hand, but then eased the
door shut on him.  Bardo, apparently offended by the rebuff, retreated
to a nearby restaurant to collect his wits.  He went into a men's rest
room to load the last chamber in his handgun.  Then he went back to
Rebecca's apartment.  This time, when she came down to answer the
buzzer, he gestured that he wanted to give her something.

For whatever reason, she opened the door.  And he shot her point
blank-through the heart.

Bardo was my first "celebrity" case.  I didn't ask for it; it simply
landed on my desk.  The deputies at Special Trials do not as a rule
clamor for big assignments like hounds after hush puppies.  Our office
has learned from hard experience that every celebrity case carries with
it the potential for disaster.  Though it can be a career-maker, as the
Manson case was for Vincent Bugliosi, it is just as likely to be a sink
hole.  And the more titanic the celebrity, the deeper the potential
drop.

When Bardo landed on my desk, I'd never really had any experience with
the press.  To me, the attention this case attracted only created
annoying complications.  The trial was covered, gavel-to-gavel, by a new
cable network called Court TV.  In the Bardo case, the fact that
hearings broadcast seemed to have little impact on the proceedings. The
real problems began when TV and print reporters "interviewed" witnesses,
causing several to drop out of sight before we could get to them.
Journalists invariably wound up telling their sources things about the
case, which meant that the integrity of the witnesses' memory was
compromised.  Only after I sat down with each of them and did a careful
remedial interview was I able to get clean statements, unencumbered by
hearsay.

It was my job to convict Bardo of the heinous crime of murder while
"lying in wait"one of several "special circumstances" that can put a
defendant in line for the death penalty.

Bardo was claiming he suffered from a peculiar if convenient dental
deficiency that precluded premeditation.  Had he made this ,argument
fly, he would have avoided the special-circumstances sanction.

The defense hired Park Dietz, a psychiatrist of national renown, to
examine Bardo.  Then it submitted two hours of videotaped interviews
between the two, offered as proof that the defendant could not have
premeditated his gruesome crime.

At one point on tape Bardo reenacted his killing of Rebecca ichaeffer.
As I watched that scene, something bothered me.  I rewound it and
watched it again.  And again.

Bardo had claimed that the gun was in his bag, and that when he pulled
it out to look for something else, Rebecca panicked and Nabbed the
weapon In the struggle, he claimed, it discharged accidentally, killing
her.  But in Bardo's reenactment, he kept his right arm Behind his back
and drew it out as though he were holding a gun.

That was the physical equivalent of a Freudian slip something that would
tip the court off to the fact that this was no accidental or impulsive.
I've shooting.  It did precisely that.

I played the tape for Dino Fulgoni, the brilliant no-nonsense judge who
sat on this case.  (Bardo had forgone his right to a jury trial.)

He could see with his own two eyes that this was no accidental or
impulsive shooting.  He sentenced Bardo to life without parole.

Over the two years I worked on that case I got to know Rebecca
Sehaeffer's parents particularly her mother, Danna extremely well. If
anything will remind you that the practice of law is not just an
intellectual exercise, it's observing the effects of a homicide upon
those who have it over the victim.  Some survivors are too damaged to be
helpful.  Others are so driven by the desire for revenge that they can
actually obstruct a prosecutors efforts.  The Schaeffers were neither.

They managed their grief with patience and dignity.

I was always happy to take Danna Schaeffer's calls.  Sometimes we talked
about the legal aspects of the case.  Sometimes she'd just want to talk
about Rebecca.  On a couple of occasions I sent her letters to express
thoughts too painful to convey in person.

"Even as I'm writing this I'm crying again," I wrote her on one
occasion.  "As I feared, once you start letting yourself feel, it's an
end less thing....  If all goes well, the miserable slimy piece of cow
dung will be convicted of everything.  I can offer only that I will do
every thing in my power to see that her loss is avengedI cannot promise
justice because to me justice would mean Rebecca is alive and her
murderer is dead.  The one thing I can promise you is that when this is
all over I will honestly be able to tell you that I gave it my all, my
very best, without reservation Beyond that you have my love and my
empathy forever."

After receiving that letter, Danna actually called to comfort me.

She was so intelligent, so sensitive and caring the kind of mother
everyone should have.  A guilty verdict was such a small thing to give
that family in light of what they'd lost, but it seemed to bring them
some measure of peace It felt good to be their champion.  It was the
sort of feeling I'd missed during that year I spent in management: the
exultation of exhausting myself for the sake of a principle, and in some
small but significant way, avenging someone whose life had been stolen.
The long days and late nights; my desk strewn with coffee cups,
Werther's candy wrappers, notepads, and dog-eared briefs: I missed all
that.

I think I was probably the only person in departmental history actually
to ask for a demotion.  As I carried my potted philodendron back down
the hall to take my place among the grunts, I almost could hear my
colleagues whispering, "What kind of woman gives up a six figure salary?
Can't she cut it?"

On June 13, 1994, after nearly six months back in Special Trials, my
caseload still wasn't up to speed Arriving in the office that morning, I
propped the door open with a wooden doorstop and confronted a desk that
was nearly clean!  For a moment I studied that expanse of scuffed cherry
veneer.  It struck me as a reproach.  No case on my calendar was
anywhere near trial.  The only thing I had going was a kidnap-murder I'd
just taken to the grand jury.  My plans for the morning were to hole up
and study the "murder book," a large black binder of witness reports
compiled by the investigating officers.  Later in the day, I'd planned
to go to Lynn Reed's bridal shower.

The phone rang.

"Hey, Clark, got a minute?"

"I got one or two, man; what's up?"

It was Detective Phil Vannatter of the LAPD's Robbery/ Homicide
Division. --"I've got something for you."

"For me?"

I liked Phil.  We'd worked together on a murder case two years earlier,
The body never turned up, but we'd managed to get a conviction based on
the DNA in a single drop of blood.  Phil was crusty and hard to push
around, but somehow we got to be good friends.  We'd run into each other
all the time and go out for drinks.  We talked a lot about how great it
would be to work another case together.  But he was close to retirement
and it didn't seem likely that we'd ever team again.

"I've got this double," Phil continued evenly.  "I need to run it by
you."

Cops often do this, call a D.A.  to see if the facts of a case justify a
search warrant.

"Okay," I said, pulling out a fresh yellow county-issue notepad

"Fire away."

"O.  J.  Simpson.  Do you know who this guy is?"

The name stirred only a vague recollection.

"Wasn't he in Naked Gun or something?"

I've never been much of a sports fan.  I couldn't even remember for sure
what game O.  J.  Simpson had played.  I just had the general impression
that he was a has-been.

Phil ticked off the basics:

Two bodies Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown, and an unidentified male
companion.  Murdered.

Location.  Brentwood.  On Bundy Drive.

A lot of blood, in fact a trail of blood, leading away from the scene.

He makes sure everything is meticulously packaged, precisely labeled. He
goes to Jesuitical lengths to ensure that the chain of evidence is
intact.  That's the ideal, anyway;

unfortunately, most of the technicians at the police crime lab fell well
short of it.  The decent ones moved up in the department, or out of it.

The bad ones, unfortunately, stuck like barnacles to the hull of the
county bureaucracy.

Over the years I'd gotten into beefs with the LAPD over who should be
assigned to collect and analyze evidence.  In the Hawkins case, I'd
peppered the brass with letters and phone calls demanding that they give
me more senior firearms experts to redo some of the haphazard work
already performed.  Tempers ran so high that they told me to take the
case to the Sheriff's Department, where, they figured, I'd be given the
standard treatment for a pushy babe: the cold shoulder.

They were wrong.  The Sheriff's Department came through for me in
spades.  It loaned me a meticulous expert who helped me salvage what
would otherwise have been a disaster.  I'd scrapped with the LAPD on
several other cases, too, hassling them to make sure they didn't botch
the fundamentals.

"How about Doreen Music?" I asked Phil.  Doreen was a field criminalist
who had recently been promoted to a supervisory position in the Firearms
Section.  Phil and I had worked with her on our no-body case, where she
had been fantastic.

"We've already got someone on it," Phil replied.  I thought he sounded
uneasy.  "I heard he was okay," he said.

"Okay" was not terribly reassuring.  Typical LAPD, I thought to myself.
Whoever's next up gets it.  "What's his name?" I asked.

"Dennis Fung."

Brentwood was definitely not my neck of the woods.  The conventional
wisdom about this upscale 'hood was that it was a place where people
air-kissed, compared implants, and did lunch.  During my stint in
Beverly Hills, I discovered that the cliches were pretty much true.

The hills north of Sunset were jammed with multimillion-dollar estates
hidden behind many millions more dollars' worth of landscaping.  All to
create the illusion of privacy.  The farther north you went, the higher
you got into the hills, the streets became narrower, the street signs
more obscure.  I strained to find Rockingham Drive.

There was a cruiser parked up ahead, where a uniformed officer directed
traffic.  A few civilians milled around outside an iron security gate.
Some of them had the nervous, uncomfortable look of reporters.  Still,
the scene was not exactly bustling with activity.  I got the impression
that the main show had come and gone.

I slipped unnoticed past the press and through the gate, where I got my
first look at the larger Tudor-style house overhung with old eucalyptus
trees.  The manicured grounds seemed to glow an unnatural shade of green
in the midday light.  In one corner of the lawn stood a child's
playhouse.  O.  J.  Simpson might be a has-been, I thought, but he must
still be bringing in serious bucks to manage the upkeep on this place.

A white Ford Bronco sat nosed into the curb on Rockingham.

Extending up the driveway from the rear of the vehicle was a trail of
reddish-brown spots.  The rust-colored droplets stopped several yards
short of the house.  The front door was open and in the foyer I could
see more droplets.  They appeared to be blood.  Gingerly, careful to
disturb nothing, I stepped inside.

Search warrant or no, it always felt weird to me to walk into the house
of a stranger.  But there's also a voyeuristic fascination: what a
person chooses to surround himself with tells you a lot about him.

This interior of O.  J.  Simpson's house was exquisitely appointed with
overstuffed white furniture, Lalique glass, and Berber carpeting.  And
yet the place gave off a faint odor of mildew and neglect.

Beyond the living room lay the gleaming kitchen.  Seated at a counter
was Bert Luper, one of Phil's buddies from Robbery/ Homicide.  Balding,
with tufts of curly hair rimming his head and bifocals perched at the
end of his nose, Bert was an old-timer in RHD and one of the few black
detectives in that division.  He had an offbeat sense of humor, and the
two of us always clicked.  It was good to see a familiar face.  Bert
motioned me over.

"Tom and Phil here?" I asked him.

O.  J showed up here, back from Chicago," he told me.  "Phil and Tom
scooped him up and took him downtown for questioning."

The house seemed awfully quiet.  No one was doing any searching that I
could see.

"Where's the team?" I asked.

"They left to check out the murder site, on Bundy." The criminalists,
Bert explained, had done some preliminary work here collecting blood
from the driveway and foyer; they'd return later in the after noon, when
Phil and Tom could get back to oversee things.  Great, I thought.  No
wonder things are moving at a worm's pace.  Still, I couldn't fault Phil
and Tom for leaving the crime scene to interview Simpson.  You get your
best shot before a suspect has had the chance to learn enough, or
collect his wits sufficiently, to compose a convincing lie.  By this
point Simpson was, at the very least, a potential suspect.

I was checking my watch, wondering whether to return to the office, when
I noticed a couple of guys in sports jackets approaching.

They had the unmistakable swagger of detectives.  I was familiar with
most of the downtown guys and I knew these weren't from
Robbery/Homicide.  They had to be from the West L.A.  station, so
Brentwood was their jurisdiction.  The older of the two identified
himself as Detective Ron Phillips.  He introduced me to his companion,
Detective Brad Roberts.  We shook hands and they asked me whether anyone
had shown me around the house.  I was about to reply when a third
detective joined the party.  He was a real straight arrow, hair closely
trimmed, shirt pressed a little more neatly than the others'.

"Marcia," said Ron Phillips, "this is Detective Mark Fuhrman."

So much has been said and written about Fuhrman since then that it is
difficult to conjure a pure and unbiased recollection of him.  He seemed
calm, professional, on top of his game.  He was not particularly
personable.  Normally in a situation like this, you lighten the
morbidness with some banter.  But there was none of that with Mark
Fuhrman.

Instead, as I think back on it, he was politely condescending.

It was Fuhrman, however, who seemed most thoroughly familiar with the
facts of the case.  And it was Fuhrman who ended up giving me the Grand
Tour.  He led me out the back door of Simpson's house, which opened onto
a patio and an impressive little grotto.  Off to one side, a waterfall
cascaded over natural boulders into a large amoeba shaped swimming pool.
To the south of the pool lay a Jacuzzi and The adjoining guest rooms. As
we strolled, Fuhrman gave me a clear, no-bullshit account of the events
of the early morning.

The guest house on the left, he told me, was where Vannatter and Lange
had found a young black woman named Arnelle, O.  J.  Simpson's daughter
by an earlier marriage.  I remembered Phil had said she'd been pretty
shaken up when he told her Nicole was dead.

Fuhrman himself hadn't interviewed Arnelle.  He'd gone to the middle
guest house, where he'd found a white male named Brian Kaelin, who, for
some reason, everyone called Kato.  Fuhrman awakened Kaelin at around
six A.M.  and began to question him about the previous evening's
activities.  Kato told him how he had heard "a thump" on his rear wall.
The sound was so loud he thought it might have been an earthquake.

Fuhrman told me how he'd parked Kato in the kitchen to wait for Phil.
Then, for my benefit, he retraced his own steps through the main house.
I followed him past a large pool table and through a trophy room studded
thickly with awards, plaques, and photos.  We left by the front door.
Then Mark turned left to an alleyway that cut along the south side of
the house.  I hadn't even noticed it when I first walked up the drive.
We went through one metal gate, then another.  Even on that bright,
sunny day, the overhanging trees left the path dark.  The air back there
felt damp.  The ground was littered with leaves, dirt, and debris.  When
we got to the point where the back of an air conditioner overhung the
path, Mark stopped.

"Here's where I found the glove," he said, pointing to the ground.

"So it was you who found it," I said.

"Yeah, it was lying right about here." He indicated a spot a foot or so
in front of the air conditioner.

"You didn't pick it up?" I asked him, already worrying about the
possibility that he might have carelessly contaminated the evidence.

"No," he answered scornfully.  He knew what I was getting at.  "I never
picked it up.  I left it there for the criminalist.

"I figure on his way down he must have run into this"he indicated the
air conditioner"and he dropped the glove without knowing it.

ù It was past noon, and yet the pathway was so dim and isolated that I
actually felt relieved to get back into the sunlight.

We checked out the pool house, which was outfitted with a kitchen and a
room that could function as a bedroom.  I stuck my head in and looked
around.

"Sure as hell nicer than any place I've ever lived," I remarked.

Fuhrman didn't comment.  During this entire walk-through he'd refrained
from small talk.  Once I got used to it, I kind of admired the severe
simplicity of his manner.

As we walked the lawn that sloped north toward Ashford, we came to a
bronze statue of a man in football uniform.  He was holding a helmet.

Fuhrman stopped in front of it.

"He got that when he won the Heisman Trophy," he said, as if it was
something I should know.  I sneaked a look at Fuhrman out of the corner
of my eye.  He was staring at that statue with unguarded awe.

I've thought about that moment often.  How ironic: Mark Fuhr man, the
man who supposedly lived and breathed to frame O.  J.  Simp son, stood
beside me in the bright June sunlight, indulging in a moment of outright
hero worship.

Fuhrman would later claim to have found a bloody fingerprint on the back
gate at Bundy, as well as an empty Swiss army knife box on the edge of
the tub in O.  J.  Simpson's master bathroom.  It's worth noting here
that during our tour of Rockingham, he did not once mention either the
print or knife box to me.  (Later we found a line concerning the print
in his notes, but by the time those reached my desk, the Bundy scene had
long since been washed down.)

"Hey, Marcia, come upstairs.  I want to show you something."

It was Brad Roberts.  I followed him up the spiral staircase, where the
wall was lined with photographs, mostly shots of O.  J.  Simpson with
various white fat cats.

It was on that stairway that I got my first look at the face of Nicole
Brown Simpson.

She was blond with handsome, almost mannish, features.  Her hair, teeth,
and skin all had that gloss peculiar to the West Side elite.

In some of the photos she was with a pair of lovely brown-skinned
children, a boy and a girl.  They all wore ski attire.  Her face was
difficult to read.  The expression in all the photos was uniformly
happy, but her eyes were glazed.  She had how would you describe it a
thousand-yard stare.

By now, I knew that the Simpsons had been divorced for two years.  I
found it peculiar that he still had her pictures everywhere.

The photos of my ex were long gone from walls and end tables.  I peeked
into the master bedroom suite.  From that vantage point I could see only
the top and one side of the bed.  Brad Roberts knelt on the floor.

He reached under the box spring and, using his fingertips, pulled out a
framed photo.  It showed Nicole and her husband in evening dress.

"Is that the way you found it?" I asked.

"Yep," he replied.  "Just like that.  Facedown.  Under the bed."

"Make sure they get a photo of that," I told him.

By now, it was almost one o'clock, and the search team still had not
returned.  What the hell was going on?  Bundy was on my way to the
freeway, so I decided to swing by.  And there I found the real mob
scene.  Jammed into the intersection of two winding residential streets
were scores of neighbors, reporters, and rookie-loos straining for
glimpses of a modest Mediterranean-style condo partially obscured by a
screen of foliage.  I muscled my way past them to a uniform guarding the
perimeter and gave him my card.

"Vannatter called me," I told him.  "I just came from Rockingham.

Any chance I can get in there?"

"Sorry, no one's allowed," he told me apologetically.

I suppressed my irritation.  I hadn't been formally assigned to this
case, so I was in no position to pull rank.

"Okay if I look from here?" I asked him.

"Sure," he said.  "But watch out for the press."

No shit.  Pretty soon they were going to need riot police to keep this
bunch in line.

Relegated to the status of a spectator, I stretched my neck to get a
look past the front gate at what was left of the killing ground.  From
outside the yellow tape, I could see the stain that covered the landing
of a set of cement steps.  Someone had bled rivers here.

At every crime scene there's some detail that catches your eye.  It's
not necessarily the most significant in terms of its importance to the
investigation, but it's the thing that stimulates your first visceral
connection to the case.  This time for me it was the bloody paw prints
of some animal, probably a large dog, that had tracked through the pool
of blood on the landing, leaving a cockeyed trail down the walkway
toward the street.  Had the animal belonged to the victim?

The killer?  What had happened here?

I couldn't see the members of the search team; they were too deep into
the property.  (Later, I Would see many, many photos of the two
criminalists, Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola, in their latex gloves and
shower caps, combing the grounds for evidence.)  What I could see was a
police photographer standing at the top of the steps, his camera set on
a tripod.  He was taking careful perpendicular aim at something on the
lower landing.  I couldn't make out what it was, but I guessed he was
documenting the blood trail that Phil had described to me earlier that
morning: the shoe prints leading away from the bodies to a gate at the
rear of the property and the drops of blood running parallel to the shoe
prints.

It's almost impossible for a criminal to get away from a crime scene
without leaving something of himself there or taking something away.
Usually, these things are traces, often invisible to the naked eye.

In law enforcement circles this is known as the Locard exchange
principle.  It holds that when you enter an environment, the environment
affects you, and you affect it.  In this case, the killer had
practically left his calling card.

This one could get interesting, I told myself.  I couldn't wait to tell
David.

David Conn was my boss; he was also my good friend.  Head of the Special
Trials Unit, David vitas witty, temperate, and an excellent judge of
character.  He was a forceful trial attorney and a cunning tactician.
But he didn't have the over mentality of so many aggressive
prosecutors.  I admired that David had real strength.

When I got back to the CCB, I went directly to David's office and
dropped into one of his armchairs

"You're not going to believe this' I told him.  I laid out the details.

The glove, the hangings on the wall.  The blood on the walkway.  The
blood in O.  J.  Simpson's foyer.

"Where's he now?" David asked.

"Phil and Tom took him downtown.  He's at Parker Center."

David was intrigued, I could tell.

"Sounds good," he said.  And a second later, "Do you want to I have this
superstition about running hard to get a case.  Nothing good comes of
it.  Sometimes trouble will find you when you're just running in place,
so why go looking for it?  But I'd been hoping for something bigger to
fill out my caseload.  And if I was going to catch this case eventually,
better to be in on it from day one.

"Sure," I told him.  "I'm free.  I mean, if you think it's okay."

"You've got it, as far as I'm concerned."

"You think Gil's gonna care about this one?"

Technically speaking, it was up to David to make this assignment.

But, of course, his choice was subject to approval by the D.A.  Frankly,
I didn't know if Gil Garcetti would warm to the idea of my taking this
case.  During my year in management, I'd been assistant to Bill Hodgman,
the director of Central Operations.  It had been my job to sit in on
meetings with the D.A.  when Bill couldn't make it.  I enjoyed a good
working relationship with Gil, but I spoke my mind freely, sometimes a
little too freely for the comfort of the brass.

Garcetti couldn't fail to see my qualifications in terms of handling the
DNA stud I had a strong record of convictions.  I was willing to put in
long hours.  But it was also no secret around the D.A."s office that I
had just filed for divorce, and consequently had incurred all the
single-parenting complications that went along with it.  I had also
bailed out of a management position, which might cause him to doubt my
political fealty.

I also knew that Gil had felt burned over assignments he'd made in
recent years.  The deputies he'd chosen to prosecute certain cases were
tough but, from Gil's perspective, too independent.  They'd cut him out
of the decision-making, and then it was Gil who'd taken the rap for a
series of high-profile acquittals.  I could see why he might worry about
me.  I'm no one's idea of a lapdog.  It wasn't that Gil couldn't
tolerate assertive women; in fact, he went out of his way to promote
them.  But I could see how he might look at me and think, Loose cannon.

"I'll talk to Gil," David promised me.  "In the meantime, you stay in
touch with the cops."

Patience is not my strong suit.  Wherever I go, I bring a file or book
with me in case, God forbid, I'm stuck waiting for someone.  By now, I
was beginning to feel edgy.  Nearly five hours had passed since I'd last
spoken with Phil Vannatter.  I supposed that he and Tom Lange were
finished interrogating Simpson and had him in lockup somewhere.

Best not to bug them, I told myself.

So I held off calling.  As I was looking back over my notes from the
morning's conversation with Phil, I suddenly realized I hadn't called my
friend Lynn.  I'd completely missed the lunch in her honor.  I rang her
up and apologized.

"No big deal," she assured me.  considerate, given that her upcoming
wedding was a very big deal to her.

"So," she said, "what do you think?"

"Of what?"

"Of this guy Simpson."

It was the first of an infinite number of queries about this case that
will likely continue until I am lowered into my grave.

"The evidence is looking pretty strong so far," I said.  "I can't wait
to find out what he's saying to the cops." i, As I was signing off with
Lynn, David poked his head into my ;' doorway.  "Why don't you give them
a call?" he said, sitting down across from me.

He was right.  Why sit here like sortie deb waiting for a prom date?

I rang Parker Center.

"Lange, here."

"Tom, it's Marcia.  Just called to find out what our man had to say."

"We talked to him for a while.  Took his blood.  Got some photos."

Typical Tom, wasting no words.  He did tell me that Simpson's attorney,
a local heavy hitter named E toward Weitzman, had gone to get coffee or
something, leaving his client to go into the interview alone.  That was
odd.  What could Weitzman have been thinking?

"Did you tape?" I asked him.  This was really important.  If they-.

I got the thing on tape, we wouldn't have to cope with challenges to
their note-taking or memories.

"You bet," he assured me.

"So where're you holding him?" I asked.

"We let him go."

Let .  .  .  him .  .  .  go?

I couldn't fucking believe it!

"You let him ...  go?" I was looking at David, whose jaw had dropped.

"He's not going anywhere," Tom told me, sounding a little defensive.
"He's too famous."

Give me a break.  Sure, he was famous.  Sure, it seemed unlikely that he
might bolt.  But we had a lot more to worry about than whether O.  J.
Simpson could find a place to hide.  "What if he decides to destroy
evidence?" I wanted to ask Tom.  "What if he starts to intimidate
witnesses?" But I kept it buttoned.  The last thing you want to do is
get into a pissing match with your investigating officers.  I told my
self, unconvincingly, that Phil and Tom were doing the best they could,
considering that they'd been up since at least two or three A.M.

Lange handed me off to Vannatter, and I could hear the fatigue in Phil's
voice as he summarized, rather disjointedly, the interview with O.  J.
Simpson.

"Suspect has a golfing date....  Suspect attends his daughter's dance
recital....  Suspect drives aimlessly in his Bronco making calls from a
cell phone." From there it was back to Rockingham, a limo to the
airport, and then a flight to Chicago.

"I don't know whether you heard about it," Phil paused to say, "but when
we met him at Rockingham, he had a big old bandage on the middle finger
of his left hand."

Of course.  The blood drops running parallel to the footprints on the
drive.

"No shit!" I said.  "Where'd he say he got it?"

First, Simpson told them he'd gotten the cut in Chicago, which left him
having to explain the blood in his driveway and foyer.  But then he
seemed to cover himself, saying he'd noticed the bleeding before he
left, as he was rushing to get to the airport for the outbound flight.
The way Phil told it, it was difficult for me to figure out whether we
had an incriminating slip or just a confused explanation.  I needed to
hear that tape.

"What's doing with the search?" I asked him, hoping earnestly that the
search team was not rooting around Rockingham unsupervised.

"We're on our way out there now," he assured me.

"Keep me posted."

"Sure thing." Phil hung up.

I looked at David.  For a minute, the two of us said nothing, both
silently assessing the magnitude of the cops' blunder.  Why had they let
Simpson walk?  It was true that once the police formally arrest some
one, they must be prepared to charge him within forty-eight hours.  If
they're not sure of their evidence, they can cut him loose, then pick
him up later when they have something more solid.  But why in this case,
where the evidence seemed so strong?

I had never seen the cops this jittery.  It was not so much what they
said as the reticence in their voices.  Something in Phil Vannatter's
tone reminded me of Mark Fuhrman's as, earlier in the afternoon, he'd
gone out of his way to tell me about Simpson's record on the playing
field.  At one level, I was hearing the perfectly ordinary sound of
people talking.  And beneath it, the cackle of It s the Juice, man.

Can you believe it?  It s the fucking Juice!

' it's An.  ___ .  .  _, I didn't work late that night.  The cops had
made it clear that they weren't going to let me into the loop until they
were good and ready.

I caught sight of my baby's head bobbing behind the crocheted curtains
of the picture window.  The sight of him always gave me a rush of joy.

No sooner had I gotten into the house than a tiny hand grabbed mine and
dragged me down the small flight of stairs to the crudely appended
addition that was my bedroom.  I called it the Swamp.

Whenever it rained, water cascaded down the wall behind my four poster
bed, causing mold to grow.  I was allergic to it.  During the rainy
seasons, spring and fall, I was sick all the time with respiratory
infections.  There seemed to be nothing I could do to get rid of either
the dampness or the mold.

There on a patch of well-discolored wall behind the bureau was an
evil-looking arachnid the size of a pinball.  She was starting a web,
apparently at home in the squalor.

Oh, swell.

For the millionth time, I told myself, "We gotta get outta this place."
What invariably followed was the dismal realization that we had nowhere
to go.  I was struggling just to make the mortgage payment on this dump.

Thoughts like these usually triggered an orgy of self-reproach.  But not
tonight.  I found, to my surprise, that I was in an indestructibly good
mood.  True, the cops had cut loose the suspect in a double homicide
when they had a mountain of evidence to hold him.  True, they were
holding me at arm's length.  But you work with what you've got.

The fact of the matter was, I loved having a new case.  A new case is
like a secret lover.  You think about it.  Plan for it.  It infuses
unrelated events with a sense of purpose.  We ordered in Chinese food
that night, and as we struggled with chopsticks, I found myself mentally
composing witness lists.  That's how it's supposed to feel.  Mind and
heart engaged, neither tripping over the other.  I hadn't been that
happy in a long time.

Do We Look Like Morons

"Marcia, it's crazy here!"

It was the delicate, nervous voice of Suzanne Childs on my car phone.
I'm weaving in and out of lanes, trying to balance the handset against
my cigarette.  The daroned window on the driver's side won't roll up.
I'm struggling to hear her over the traffic.

"You won't believe what's going on!"

"Calm down, Suzanne.  Just calm down."

Suzanne is our conscientious and permanently agitated media relations
director.  This is her third call to me that morning, and every one has
been urgent.  The press was hounding Gil for details about the Simpson
case, she said.  Please did I have any more info I could pass along?

"Geez, Suzanne," I told her.  "You probably know more than I do."

Which was true.  I'd caught some of the press coverage on TV the night
before, and right there in my car, the drive-time radio waves were
inundated with breathless news breaks about the double murder at the
home of the famous former "football great," as the L.A.  Times described
our suspect in a long page-one story.  The alarming pare of all this was
that the news reports were telling me all sorts of things I didn't know,
turning up witnesses I hadn't even heard of.  That meant that every
attention-hungry wannabe within broadcast range of L.A.  was going to be
coming forward with "evidence."

When I reached the office about half an hour later, Suzanne was waiting
for me.  "Do you think you could call Phil or Tom?" she asked anxiously.

I already had.  Several times.  They weren't calling me back.  I
motioned Suzanne to follow me into my office, tossed my purse and files
on the floor next to my desk, and picked up the phone to dial RHD.  No
luck.

"Let's talk to Gil right now," I said to her, hoping that by pooling our
information, we could stay abreast of events until I could get with the
detectives.  We walked to Gil's office, which was unfortunately located
right next to the pressroom.  Frances, the guard who sat by the door to
the D.A."s office, was staring at a gang of reporters who milled around
with jittery energy.  As soon as they sighted me, the vultures
descended.  I waved them off.

"Has it been like this all morning?" I asked Suzanne.

"They're driving us nuts," she moaned.

We've got to get a handle on this, I told myself.  It's gonna spin out
of Gil was on the phone.  When he saw me, he beckoned me in.

"Close the door," he said.

Our first meeting on the Simpson case.  I should remember it more
clearly than I do.  David was there; I know that.  He stood with arms
folded tightly, as he does when he's under stress.  Some of the brass
were there, I believe.  Frank Sundstedt and Bill Hodgman.  Everyone
looked agitated except Gil.  He sat behind his desk, wearing his usual
mask of composure.  He looked toward me, a signal to begin the briefing.

Briefing.  What a joke.  I barely had more than the top-of-the-hour
drive-time reports.  But I plunged in gamely.

"Here's what we know about the second victim," I told them.

"Ronald Goldman.  Twenty-five years old.  Would-be actor who works
part-time as a waiter at Mezzaluna."

I'd never been to Mezzaluna, but I'd noticed it driving through
Brentwood.One of those trendy West L.A.  bistros where tourists go in
hopes of sitting next to Michelle Pfeiffer.

"The night of the murders, Nicole Brown_ r

"Maiden name?" someone interrupted.

"Looks like it," I replied.

To me, that fact spoke volumes.  A woman who has children with her ex
usually doesn't choose to take back her maiden name unless she's
hell-bent upon reasserting her own identity.

David or someone put in that Nicole and her two children had eaten
dinner at Mezzaluna, and Goldman happened to be on duty.

She'd apparently dropped her glasses or something, and he went to her
place to return them.

"Is that all he went there for?" I asked.  No one had an answer.

We'd have to check whether the two were lovers.  I jotted this down on
my legal pad.

"How about the search?" Gil wanted to know.  "Did we find a weapon?"

Nothing yet.

Someone passed around a copy of the L.A.  Times.  It carried a report
that Simpson had roughed up his wife one New Year's Eve and that he'd
pled nolo contendere, no contest.  This is the standard plea a defendant
cops to when he's caught red-handed and wants to save face.

"When was that?" I asked.

" 'Eighty-nine," David replied.

"Nothing more recent?"

"There may be, but we don't have it."

Now, the fact that O.  J.  Simpson had beaten his wife didn't mean that
he'd killed her.  Not all the men who beat their wives end up killing
them.  But my years in law enforcement had shown me that men who kill
their wives have often beaten or abused them in the past.

Whether that was what we had here, I couldn't tell.  The fact that
they'd been divorced for two years still bothered me.  Do you carry a
torch for an ex after the paperwork's done?  I remembered the photo of
Nicole that Brad Roberts had pulled out from under Simpson's bed.

And I remembered the big glossy shots of her and the children mounted on
the wall by the stairs.  Yeah, I thought.  It could happen.

"Any word from the cops?" Gil asked me.

"I'm on it," I assured him.

For most of the morning, I'd been trying to reach Phil.  After the
meeting broke I put in a couple more calls.  Finally, around noon, he
rang me back.

"Phil, man.  What is going on?"

He seemed flustered and apologetic.

"It's the brass, Marcia.  They don't want us talking to you.

I let loose a choice expletive.

Phil tried to placate me.  "Listen, Marcia.  It's just temporary.  I
know we can work this thing out."

I had a pretty good idea what this was all about.  The brass at Parker
Center had gotten their knickers twisted over Michael Jackson.

What a fiasco that had been a case of child molestation that went
nowhere after Jackson's lawyers reached a settlement in January 1994
with the father of the alleged victim.  Not a surprising outcome when
you consider that the father had been asking for money.  But the cops
blamed us, thinking we'd stepped in where we didn't belong and botched a
perfectly good case.  Now that another celebrity suspect was in play,
they were freezing us out.

There has never been any love lost between the D.A."s office and the
LAPD.  Invariably, there are disputes on the big cases, where everyone
starts grabbing for turf.  But never before had I encountered a flat-out
stonewall.  This could seriously damage our chances for prosecution, if
and when we got there.  The resistance wasn't coming from Phil and Tom's
level.  Nor did it seem to be coming from the office of the Chief.  From
where, then?  The LAPD has such a labyrinthine hierarchy that it's
almost impossible to tell who's accountable for any given order.

I wanted a showdown with the cops right then and there; so did some of
the others.  But Gil counseled restraint.

"Hang back," he instructed us.  If the evidence is as strong as it
sounds, they'll have to pick him up in the next few hours."

So we hung back, each of us working our private sources.  I checked the
police crime lab and found out they were testing blood samples.  I
sucked in my breath.  Shit.  Whenever I had a case requiring DNA
testing, I tried to circumvent the Special Investigations Division, the
semiautonomous agency under whose auspices the crime lab fell.

Instead, wherever possible, I'd reroute samples to Cellmark Diagnostics
in Maryland.  Cellmark, a private lab, had done an outstanding job

Phil and I had worked together.  But now, stuck in hang-back mode, I was
in no position to direct the Simpson samples anywhere.  I knew the crime
lab was doing a relatively simple DNA test called DQ alpha.  I could
live with that.  With the suspect at large, it was crucial to get this
screening test done quickly.  If the preliminary markers linked Simpson
to the crime scene, the police would have plenty of grounds to arrest.

Later that afternoon, we were huddling in the conference room, kicking
around our options, when the call came in from SID.  I took it.

The blood on the walk at the murder scene matched O.  J.  Simpson's.

Bingo!  There was the evidence the cops needed to charge.  I grinned
jubilantly at David and Gil and held my wrists together, pantomiming
handcuffs.  I figured squad cars would be rolling toward Brentwood any
minute now.

Like hell.  O.  J.  Simpson remained at large.

And when I arrived at work on the following morning, Wednesday, June 15,
he was still at large.  The papers were filled with speculation about
the case.  Somehow the L.A.  Times had gotten wind of the blood-test
results.  But we were still getting the freeze-out from the cops.
Normally, we'd be getting witness statements and reports within
twenty-four hours of a crime.  This time, we hadn't received so much as
a single sheet of paper.  Even Gil had realized it was time for a
showdown, and he'd finally brokered a meeting with the cops for later
that afternoon.

"So, what's the deal?" I wanted to know.  "Are they going to arrest?"

"I'm not saying that," Gil replied.  "Just go in there and meet with
them."

"We shouldn't be kissing ass here!" I muttered to David and Bill as we
walked the two blocks to Headquarters at Parker Center.

"They should have kept him in custody.  We should be looking at a
filing.  I think we should tell them we're considering the grand jury."

What I meant was this: if the cops wouldn't arrest, we could
unilaterally start an investigation of our own by taking the case to a
grand jury.  That way, the cops couldn't stonewall us because we'd have
the power to' compel their testimony. Furthermore, if we took the case
to a grand Jury and got an indictment, the police would have no choice
but to arrest Simpson.  Still, going grand jury was risky.  The cops
would take it as; an in-your-face insult.  My guess was that the very
mention of it would drive them crazy.

"Go easy," David advised me.  "Let's just see what they have to say." As
we rode the elevator up to Robbery/Homicide, I tried to imagine what
Bill Hodgman was thinking.  He'd been the front man on the Jackson case,
a role that had caused him to drop considerably in the LAPIO's
popularity polls.  But Bill was also a very sweet guy and the consummate
diplomat.  If anyone could soothe the cops' hurt feelings, he could.. My
concern at that moment was focused more on the police brass would they
continue to hold out?  Or would they put an end to this gambet and work
with us?

The Robbery/Homicide Division bullpen was a large room with about twenty
desks facing each other in two rows.  Consequently, the homicide rearm
that worked on the LAPD's most sensitive cases had absolutely no
privacy.  Their notes and reports were in plain view of any clerk
wandering through it was Leak City.  Tom Lange had repeatedly complained
to his bosses about it.  But nothing had been done.

I knew the bullpen pretty well.  I had been there often to talk with my
IOs, investigating officers.  I liked it: bare bones; gritty; real cops
working tough, nasty cases.  I'd always get good-natured ribbing as I
made my way through.  That Wednesday afternoon, however, I nearly got
frostbite.

Some one pointed us to a small room off the bullpen where the brass were
gathered.  There was Commander John White, chief of detectives;
Lieutenant John Rogers, of Robbery/Homicide; and Captain William
Gartland, head of RHD.  And, of course, Phil and Tom.

On the table in front of Tom was a stack of documents bound with a
rubber band.  Exactly what I'd been waiting for.

"Here're the reports so far," Tom told me.  His tone was neutral.  I
glanced over at Phil, who was looking distinctly ill at ease.  Our eyes
met.  Everything was still okay between us.

"Obviously, there's a lot more to be done," Tom said.  "But this should
get you started."

"Thanks, Tom," I said, not wanting to appear too eager, but itching to
get my hands on those reports.  We swapped some observations about the
case, making nice.  Nobody on the other side seemed willing to bring up
the thorny issue of arrest.

So I hit it dead-on.

"When do you plan to bring this for filing?"

"We want to interview more witnesses," Tom said slowly.  "We were
thinking maybe the early part of next week."

Bill, David, and I were silent.  The cops knew that this was not what
we'd wanted to hear.

Well, frankly," I said, "we're a little concerned about letting it go
that long." I paused to make sure they were paying attention.  "We've
been thinking about taking it to the grand jury."

Gauntlet thrown.

"Well, that's your prerogative," Tom replied, looking to his superiors
for support.  "We can't stop you.  But we'd prefer to wait a little
longer."

They were not going to budge.

The fire escapes that lattice the exterior of the CCB were a favorite
retreat of the smokers among us.  The one I used offered a vertical
slatted view of Parker Center and the Federal Buildings.  The narrow
veranda was furnished with a couple of dinette-type chairs.  Someone had
dragged out one of those tall cylindrical trash cans, which was always
overflowing.  There was a broom propped in one corner in case anyone
felt industrious and wanted to clean the place UD.  No one had for a
while.

The fire escape is where I headed when I got back with my spoils from
the LAPD.  Documents and notepads in one hand, cigs in the other.

I took a chair, propped my feet on the other one, and began leafing
through the slender sheaf of police reports.  Until now, I'd had only a
sketchy mental image of how the bodies at Bundy lay.

Now I learned that Nicole, upon whom death and the medical examiner had
bestowed the designation "decedent 94-05136," had been found at the foot
of the stairs at the front gate.  She was in fetal position on her left
side, wearing a backless black dress.  No shoes.

Her arms were bent at the elbow, close to the body.  Her arms, legs, and
face were stained with blood.  The coroner had found a "large, sharp
force injury" to her neck.

Ron Goldman, "decedent 94-05135," had been found to the north.  He'd
fallen or been pushed backward and was slumped against the stump of a
palm tree.  He was wearing blue jeans and a light cotton sweater.  Lying
near his right foot was a white envelope containing a pair of
eyeglasses.  Goldman had injuries to the neck, back, head, hands,
thighs.  He'd apparently put up a fierce struggle.

I absorbed the contents of these reports without emotion.  Over the
years, I'd learned to do that.  I imagine that emergency-room physicians
approach their work the same way first treat the symptoms; only after
the bleeding stops, notice the human beings.  I knew with painful
certainty that if I caught this case for keeps, the deaths described in
these pages would become personal.  And, like it or not, I would begin
to grieve for the victims.  Just as I'd written to Rebecca's mother,
Danna Schaeffer, once you start letting yourself feel, the misery is
endless.

But at this moment, the facts were all I needed or wanted.

Cause of death?  "Sharp force injuries from some kind of knife or bladed
instrument."

I hated that.  With a bullet you can match striations to the barrel of a
gun and be 99 percent sure that you have the murder weapon.  Blade
wounds are usually sloppy.  The injuries often can't be traced to a
single instrument.

Murder weapon?  No sign of one yet.  The cops had checked trash
receptacles and luggage lockers at LAX and were in the process of
searching the fields around O'Hare.  They apparently had a line on a
German hunting knife that Simpson had bought at an establishment called
Ross Cutlery close to the time of the murder.  Promising, but a long
shot.  Barring some anomalylike some pattern on the handle that got
pressed into the victims' skin we would never get a 100 percent match.

Time of death?  Coroner still working on that Suspect?  I lit up a
Dunhill and took a deep drag.  Then, on a clean sheet of yellow
notepaper, I wrote: "O.  J. Simpson." And after that, "ALIBI?"

During the first couple of days after the murders, Simpson's attorney,
Howard Weitzman, had been telling reporters that Simpson was enroute to
Chicago at the time of the murders.  Weitzman put it at eleven o'clock.
Turns out, however, that the red-eye left LAX at 11:45 P.M.

When was Nicole Brown last seen alive?  I skimmed a report taken from
the bar manager at Mezzaluna.  She'd seen Ron Goldman leave the
restaurant at about 9:30 or 9:45, on his way to Nicole's house.

Goldman had been talking to Nicole on the phone a few minutes earlier,
so it was probably safe to say that she was still alive at around 9:45
P.M.  O.  J.  Simpson's plane is lifting off at 11:45.  That's a lot of
time in between.

What else have we got here?

"FENJVES, Pablo." One of Nicole's neighbors is watching the Channel 5
news at ten.  I like witnesses who peg their memories to the TV Guide.
They're usually reliable.  At about a quarter past to half past the hour
he hears a dog barking "uncontrollably." The dog continues barking for
over an hour.

Nicole Brown's dog was a big white Akita.  His name was Kato.  I'd
learned that .  .  .  God, where did I learn it?  From the evening news?

Probably.  Anyhow, I'd learned that Kato related in some loony but as yet
unspecified way to the house guest, Brian Kaelinhad been wandering the
neighborhood with bloody paws when another neighbor walking his own dog
had found him.

If you assumed, for argument's sake, that the hound was Nicole's Akita
and that he began to bark when his mistress was murdered, that put the
time of death conservatively speaking somewhere around 10:15 P.M.  to
10:30 P.M.

What about O.  J.  Simpson?  Was there any time during which he was
unaccounted for?

The witness who seemed to have the most intimate knowledge of Simpson's
whereabouts on June 12 was Kato Kaelin.  He'd told detectives at the
West L.A.  Police Station that Simpson had gone to his eight-year-old
daughter Sydney s dance recital, which had begun at five P.M., then
returned home at .  .  .

The officers had not noted the time.

Kato then related what would become a familiar litney anyhow he and
Simpson had gone out at about 9:30 P.M.  to a McDonald's on Santa Monica
Boulevard.  Kato wasn't sure when they'd gotten back.

Ten P.M., he thought.  That was the last he saw of Simpson until around
a quarter to eleven.  Kato was back in his room on the phone to a friend
when he heard "a thump" against his wall.  When he went out to
investigate , Kato said, he saw a white limousine sitting outside the
gate.

"Limo .  .  .  limo .  .  .  limo .  .  ."

I flipped to the police interview with the limo driver who took Simpson
to LAX for his 11:45 P.M.  flight to Chicago.  You've gotta figure that
the livelihood of a limo driver depends upon close attention to the
clock.  Allan Park, as it turned out, was extremely conscientious about
time.

He'd been scheduled to be at Rockingham by 10:45 P.M., but just to be on
the safe side, he arrived twenty minutes ahead of schedule.

After waiting around for a bit, he rang the buzzer at 10:40.  He got no
answer.  For the next ten minutes he continued ringing without success.

At 10:50 he called his boss for instructions.  He was still on the line
three minutes later when he saw a white male walk from the back of the
house carrying a flashlight.  Obviously, Kato checking out the thumps.

Simultaneously, Park saw a black man he believed it was O.  J. Simpson
walk quickly from the far side of the driveway to the front door.  Park
got out of the limo and rang the buzzer again.  This time Simpson
answered, saying, "I'm sorry, I overslept.  I just got out of the shower
and I'll be down in a minute."

I made a big mark through this with orange highlighter.  Here was a
crucial witness.  One who could attest that up until 10:50 or so Simpson
was not answering his buzzer.  He could also attest that someone
resembling Simpson walked into his house around 10:53 P.M.  Shortly
after that, Simpson answered the buzzer.  O.  J.  Simpson, it appeared,
had lied about having been in the shower!

If you believed Park's account, it placed the suspect in his own front
yard at 10:53 P.M.  According to my rough calculations, Simpson had been
off the radar for close to an hour.  If Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had
been killed as early as 10:10, or even as late as 10:40, Simpson would
have had time to drive the three miles or so from Bundy to Rockingham.

From where I was sitting, O.  J.  Simpson had no alibi.

And still, the police would not arrest.

By the next day, Thursday the sixteenth, the tension in our office was
pushing into the red zone.  I got a call from SID.  The stain on the
brown leather glove from Rockingham contained genetic markers from both
victims, with a strong possibility that Simpson's blood was n the mix.
They'd also found Simpson's blood on the interior of the door of his
white Ford Bronco.  The case was getting stronger by the hour.  I'd
never seen so much damning physical evidence.  What were the cops
waiting for?  A sign from God?

If you ask the LAPD brass, they'll probably tell you they were in no
hurry to arrest because they knew exactly where the suspect was that
day.  In fact, most of the world knew where O.  J.  Simpson was that
day: he was attending the funeral mass of Nicole Brown at St. Martin of
Tours in Brentwood, and later, her burial in Orange County.

I caught a few minutes of news showing the Brown family at Nicole's
graveside.  Simpson was there, all right.  And he made a plausible show
of grief.  The slumping shoulders; dark glasses hinting at eyes too
swollen with tears to look fellow mourners in the eye.  I felt a jolt of
revulsion when I saw him steering his two children toward the bier. They
looked so innocent.  So trusting.  I had a momentary vision of them
upstairs sleeping while their mother struggled with her killer.

In the months to come I would flash from time to time on the image of
those children sleeping.  Sometimes a photo of them would trigger it.
Sometimes it would be a document.  Several weeks after the murders, I
finally received a report I'd been requesting from an Officer Joan
Vasquez.  She'd been assigned to escort the Simpson children out back
through the garage, never allowing them close to the crime scene.

Officer Vasquez reported that as the children sat in the back of the
cruiser, Sydney whimpered, "Where's my mommy?  .  .  .  I'm just tired
and I want my mommy."

Sydney and Justin stayed at the West L.A.  station for almost five
hours!  Officer Vasquez, dearly a kind soul, tried to distract them with
soda, candy, paper hats, paints.  Over that long morning, she'd taught
the children to spell their names in sign language and to play Hangman.

"I like the Power Rangers because I'm a green belt in karate," six
year-old Justin told her.  "My mommy is going to start going with me
again."

Sydney knew something was terribly wrong.  At one point, she turned to
her brother and said, "Justin, you know something happened to Mommy, or
she would have come for us by now."

"Why can't Dad just come for us?" Justin asked her.

"Because he doesn't stay with us sometimes," she replied.

At about 6:30, their older stepsister, Arnelle, picked them up, and they
left.

When I read this, I found it hard to keep back the tears.  That may have
been where the misery hit me in earnest.  On the day of Nicole's
funeral, however, I was simply struck by how surreal it all seemed.  You
had Nicole's California-perfect mother and sisters embracing and
comforting O.  J.  Simpson.  What was going on here?

I hadn't yet met the Browns.  Given the media frenzy surrounding this
case, we all agreed it was proper that Gil make the first contact.

During the chaos of the first week after the murders, however, he and
Nicole's father, Louis, had continually missed each other's calls.  How
the Browns felt about their son-in-law now was unclear.  I knew that
they had suspicions.  When Tom Lange called Denise Brown to tell her of
her sister's murder, the first words out of her mouth were "I knew that
son of a bitch was going to do it!"

They had to know about the New Year's Eve beating Simpson gave Nicole.
And yet there he was being welcomed as a son and brother, holding the
hands of his two children, weeping over the casket of their mother.
Could the aura of a celebrity blind even the family of a murder victim?

During the four days since he'd been cut loose, Simpson had been the
bereaved widower.  He'd spent his time in seclusion, "under a doctor's
care for depression," according to his new attorney, Robert Shapiro.

Bob had surfaced when Howard Weitzman bowed out of the case citing his
"personal friendship" with the suspect.

I'd always considered Weitzman a decent guy and a good attorney.

I could never figure out why he didn't insist upon being at his client's
interview with Vannatter and Lange.  (Much later in the case, I found
myself talking to Howard at a dinner party in West L.A.  He told me that
he'd cut out because the cops threatened not to talk to Simpson if he
had an attorney present.  That made no sense to me.  What really
happened, I suspect, is that Simpson's colossal ego, combined with his
confidence in his ability to sweet-talk and manipulate cops, had led him
to dismiss his own attorney from the interview.  Weitzman, of course,
would have had no choice but to comply.)

When Weitzman dropped out of the picture, Robert Shapiro stepped right
in.  I was flabbergasted.  O.  J.  Simpson's got bucks coming out the
wazoo, and this is the best he can do?  Weitzman, at least, had
credibility.  Shapiro, to my way of thinking, wasn't even a serious
trial attorney.  He had a stable of celebrity clients, Tina Sinatra,
Christian Brando, and Erik Menendez among them.  Still, he had a
reputation around the Criminal Courts Building as a deal-maker, not a
litigator.

A lightweight.

One of Shapiro's first moves was to write a letter to Vannatter and
Lange saying that his client "would be willing to consider" taking a lie
detector test.  The cops faxed me a copy and asked for my opinion.

Polygraphs are risky.  A subject can dope himself up to pass, which is
why cops don't like to administer the test unless they've had the
suspect in custody for a while.  (Unbeknownst to me or the cops, Simpson
had already taken a polygraph and scored a minus 22, meaning he failed
every single question about the murder.  I did not learn this until well
after the verdict.  Then I shook my head in amazement.  It's hard to
imagine that a lawyer would be stupid enough to offer his client up for
a second poly after he'd failed the first time.)

The offer seemed fishy.  My advice: "Stay away from it."

Shapiro also offered the services of his own experts Dr.  Michael Baden,
director of forensic sciences for the New York State Police, and Dr.
Henry Lee, director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science
Laboratory to "aid in the investigation." Specifically, he was asking
permission for Baden to re-autopsy the bodies.  "We .  .  .  would like
you to contact the next of kin for permission in this regard," he wrote,
"since I feel it would be inappropriate for me to contact them directly
during this period of grief."

I never answered him.  But Nicole's mother, Juditha, would later tell me
that during the funeral Shapiro came up and flat-out asked her for
permission to exhume the body.  She was too taken aback to reply.

Shapiro, no doubt realizing how unsympathetically this request would be
viewed by the public, wisely let the matter drop.

After the funeral, Simpson dropped off the screen.  He'd apparently
attended a gathering at Nicole's parents' home down at Dana Point before
returning to "seclusion" at Rockingham.  By Thursday evening, I was
climbing the walls.  I called the cops to check up on him.  That's when
I learned, to my amazement, that they did not have him under
surveillance.

"Lack of manpower," they said.  "Besides, where's he gonna go?"

This was too much even for Gil.  He called us all into his office that
evening and put the question to us: "Do we go to the grand jury or wait
for the police to file?"

We all agreed the case was well past the stage of being fileable.  The
cops were playing strictly cover-your-ass politics, which might have
been fine if they'd had the luxury of working without the constant
scrutiny of the press.  But that wasn't the situation we had here.  The
media was broadcasting every tidbit it could get its hands on, and a lot
of that information was amazingly on target.  Some creep with access to
documents was leaking like a rusty tub.

As the evidence piled up, so did O.  J.  Simpson's incentive to flee.

"What if Simpson pulls a Polanski?" I asked Gil.

Film director Roman Polanskiallowed to remain at large while under
investigation on charges of statutory rape had fled to France.

Why couldn't it happen here?  The clock was ticking, and we didn't want
to be the saps who failed to move because the cops didn't give us
permission.

There were other concerns as well.

"I'm worried about losing that guy Kaelin," I told the others.

He's very shaky.  We need his testimony now."

"David," Gil said at last, "tell Terry White [our office's grand jury
adviser] to arrange to convene the jurors for Friday afternoon.  We'll
hear Kaelin's testimony."

Finally, we were moving.  It wasn't until everyone stood up and began to
leave the conference room that Frank Sundstedt finally asked the
question that was uppermost in my mind.

"So, does Marcia have the case?"

I held my breath.  Suddenly it felt very important to me.  While part of
me probably the rational part recognized that this would not be a smooth
prosecution, I wanted to hear that Gil had the confidence to let me
handle a big one.

"Marcia has the case," he said finally, catching my eye.  "But not
alone.  She's going to do it with someone else." , There was a nervous
shuffling in the room.  Someone cleared his $ throat.  Truth is, if you
really trust a prosecutor, you make her the lead chair.  No doubt what
he intended was to pair me with another strong personality who would
keep me in check.  My pride wouldn't let me : show my disappointment.

But as David walked me back to my office, I fumed sotto voce. "Why does
he think I need someone else?"

David urged me to calm down.  Think of it from Gil's point of view, he
said.  The guy's under a lot of pressure and he's probably just hedging
his bets.  Your feelings are the least of his problems right now.

He was right, of course.  For Gil, this wasn't personal.  If I had to -
pair up with someone, maybe Gil would let me have David?

"How about you?" I asked him.  He shot back a look as if to say, "In
your dreams, babe." David was up to his ears in Menendez.  He had all
the alligators he could handle in that swamp.

:, Even before I left the office that night, I was hearing rumors that
the LAPD brass were in negotiations with Robert Shapiro to allow O.  J.
Simpson to surrender voluntarily.  Our threat to go grand jury must have
lit a fire under them.  But the news was a mixed bag. On the one hand,
the idea of a negotiated arrest made me nuts.  Once again, O.  J.
Simpson's celebrity status had gained him a legal advantage.  A
negotiated voluntary surrender signals to the public and potential jury
pool that the suspect is someone who deserves special privileges.  I'd
much rather see a righteously arrested suspect step out of a squad car
in handcuffs.  Still, my annoyance was all relative.  Compared to the
act of cutting him loose in the first place, a negotiated surrender was
a minor outrage.  If it worked, we'd all be happy.  But what if the
negotiations failed?  Would the police back down and delay the arrest
again?

Would they give Simpson a deadline?  We wanted to keep our options open
and that meant proceeding full speed ahead with the grand jury.

First order of business: reel in Kato Kaelin.  O.  J.  Simpson was
clearly Kato's benefactor.  I could just about bet that had Kato known
Simpson was a suspect, he would not have spoken so freely about the
thump, for instance, and risk dumping his meal ticket.  On the other
hand, however, I'd had a chance to study his witness statement pretty
thoroughly by now.  I felt he had to know a lot more about the Simpsons'
private lives than he'd told the cops.

Early Friday morning I dispatched a couple of detectives to West L.A. to
serve Kato with a subpoena.  David and I were in conference with Gil
when I got a call from one of the cops on the detail.

"Kaelin's here with us," he said.  "But he says he won't talk unless his
lawyer's with him."

"Bring him in anyway," I told him.

This was extremely unusual.  Witnesses don't arrive in the company of
lawyers unless they're worried about being charged with a crime.  From
what I could see, Brian Kaelin had no criminal liability.

The events he'd witnessed on the night of June 12 had clearly occurred
after the murders.  I was afraid that his request for an attorney meant
that Simpson had gotten to him.

The cops brought Kato into my office at a little past nine.  I looked up
from my paperwork and saw for the first time that wild mane of
dirty-blond hair, casual hip clothes, goofy surfer-boy slouch.  My first
thought: Zone-out case.

"Hey, guy," I greeted him.  Casual seemed the way to go.

He shook my hand and fidgeted like a puppy.

Have a seat while I call my boss."

"Hi, sure, no problem."

He plopped down in one of the chairs across the desk from me David said
he'd be delayed a few minutes, to start without him.

I began by asking Kato how much sleep he'd gotten that night.

Did he feel prepared to go before a grand jury?  He answered in half
sentences, nodding a lot, managing to say very little.  Great, I
thought, this guy can barely handle small talk what's going to happen
where eve put him on the stand?

I cut to the chase: "Do you remember what you were doing when you heard
the thump on your wall?"

"I think I was talking to my friend Rachel.  Yeah, I was talking to
Rachel."

Okay; that was what he had told the cops.

"Did you tell her about what you'd heard?"

"I really don't .  .  .  um .  . .  you know .  .  .  want to say
anything until my attorney gets here. I mean, you seem real nice and
all, and .  .  .

um .  .  .  I really want to help you out.  But .  .  .  um .  .  .  I
really can't talk about the case without him.  I'm real sorry, really,
Marcia.  I am."

His words tumbled over each other as he squirmed in his seat and cast me
a beseeching look.

I wasn't buying this act.  Kato wasn't as dumb as he appeared.

He'd cut off the questioning expertly.

"Kato, I don't get it," I told him.  "Why do you think you need a
lawyer?  As far as I can tell, you have no liability whatsoever.  If
there is more to it, please say so now and I won't say another word
until your attorneyer arrives.

"No, no.  It's not that.  It's just that my lawyer told me I shouldn't
say anything unless he's here."

When David finally showed up, he, too, lobbed Kato a few low and slow
ones.  No dice.  Then, Kato's lawyer, a young guy named William Genego,
finally arrived and demanded that we stop talking to his client until he
could read the witness report.  David offered them his office as a
conference room.  It was only about 9:30; Kato didn't need to get on the
witness stand until early afternoon.  But Genego said that wasn't good
enough.  He'd need the whole weekend to go over the statement.

That was ridiculous.  The statement was only two pages long.

David laid it on the line.

"Your client was subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury at
one-thirty this afternoon.  Make sure he's there."

The tussle with Kato was small-time compared to the trouble brewing
beyond the walls of the Criminal Courts Building.  I was oblivious to
the rumblings until about noon, when I was paged by the office's
indomitable senior legal assistant, Patti J<, Fairbanks.  Patti Jo had
the authoritative air of a four-star general and the voice of a drill
sergeant.

"Marcia!" she bellowed.  "I need to see you in my office, right now!"

It Sounded serious.  I walked the few short steps between her office and
mine, poked my head in, and asked, "What's the deal?"

"Come in and close the door."

Good news never comes when they tell you to close the door.

"It's Simpson," she said.  "He was Supposed to turn himself in at Parker
Center this morning and he didn't show."

What?

Shapiro, Patti Jo told me, was to [rave brought Simpson in to Parker
Center by eleven o'clock.  An hour later, still no sign of him.

"The cops are plenty pissed," she told me.  "They're going to send a
unit-out there to get him."

"I thought they didn't know where he was."

"He's staying over at Kardashian's place in the Valley," Patti Jo
replied.  She was referring to Robert Kardashian.  Up till then, I'd
never heard of the guy, but he was apparently a longtime buddy of O.  J.
Simpson.

Curiouser and curioser.  How did So much manage to happen without our
knowledge?  I'd never seen this before and it was certainly a bad sign.

The phone rang.  Robert Shapiro.

"Let me talk to him," I mouthed to Patti Jo.

"Just a minute," she told him.  "Marsha is sitting right here."

She handed me the phone.

I dispensed with pleasantries.

"What's going on, Bob?" I said.  This is no time to screw around."

"Marcia, I promise you.  He's coming in.  We just need to do a few
things," said Shapiro.

"What do you mean?" I shot back.  "He's had all week to get his things
together.  What are you guys doing?"

"He's being checked out by some doctors," said Shapiro.  His speech was
infuriatingly slow, his tone condescending.  "I'm sure you've heard that
he's very depressed.  We just need to be sure that he doesn't go into
custody in a suicidal frame of mind."

"Oh, I'm sure he's depressed." I snorted.  "He's got very good reason to
be depressed.  I just want to hear back from you in half an hour telling
me he's left."

Over the next few minutes, there was a flurry of calls between us.

Shapiro kept insisting that "It's going to be a little longer than we
thought." Simpson would need another hour, he insisted.  Then,
inexplicably , he passed the receiver to someone else.

"Who's this?" I asked the stranger.

"Saul Faerstein."

I knew that name.  Faerstein was a forensic psychiatrist who testified
in criminal courts around L.A.  County.  The line on him was good.  What
the hell was he doing at Kardashian's?  Were they laying the groundwork
for some kind of diminished-capacity defense?  I asked Faerstein for
directions to the house and he gave me some convoluted reply.  When I
tried to clarify them, he became even more evasive.

Finally, I lost my patience.

"Doctor, you'd better stop playing games here," I said.  "Do you
understand that you're obstructing justice?  That's a criminal charge,
and I don't think you need a record like that, do you?"

He must have tossed the phone like a hot potato; in an instant Shapiro
was back on the line.  I was in the process of extracting directions
from him when Patti Jo signaled me to break away.  She had the LAPD's
Valley Division chief on the line.  They'd finally gotten their own fix
on the safe house and were on their way.

I took a deep breath and pushed through the doors to the grand jury
room.  I flashed my best warm-up smile to the jurors seated in the
little three-tiered amphitheater.  I tried not to betray my anxiety as I
first welcomed them and then had to explain our departure from ordinary
procedure.  I would be deferring my opening statement until Monday.

"For today' I said, "we are convened for the testimony of only one
witness." And I called Brian Kaelin to the stand.

"Mr.  Kaelin' said the foreperson when Kaelin stumbled to the witness
chair, "please state and spell your full name, speaking directly into
the microphone."

He looked a bit dazed.  "B-R-I-A-N G-E-R-A-R-D K-A-E-L-I-N."

Well, at least he could spell his name.

I turned to him.  Mr.  Kaelin, were you acquainted with a woman by the
name of Nicole Simpson?"

He fidgeted a bit, and then looked down at a piece of legal paper.

Finally he Spoke, in the tremulous tones of a child reciting a poem he
doesn't quite understand.  "On the advice of my attorney," he said, "I
must respectfully decline to answer and assert my constitutional right
to remain silent."

God damn.

"You seem to be reading from a piece of yellow paper," I said.

"Did your attorney write that out for you this morning?" - "On the
advice of my attorney, I must respectfully decline to answer and assert
my constitutional right to remain silent."

I couldn't believe that this twerp was taking the Fifth!  He read from
that paper three more times before the foreperson warned him that his
refusal to answer questions was "without legal cause" and that if he
persisted in his refusal, he would be held in contempt.  Now we had to
find a judge to do just that, pronto.  When Kato stepped down, David and
I went down to the court of Judge Stephen Czoleger, a former federal
prosecutor who was the designated hitter for issues that arose before
the grand jury, to ask him for a ruling on the plea.  I'd always pegged
Czuleger as smart and forceful and I hoped he'd put an end to this
nonsense. - He didn't At least not 100 percent.  While agreeing that
Kato's situation did not seem to warrant his invoking the Fifth
Amendment, the judge didn't find it unreasonable to allow him and his
attorney, rho reekend to confer.

I humbled myself before the grand jury, apologizing as hand Dmely as I
could for having dragged them in for nothing.  I silently Rayed they
wouldn't hold it against me.  Even worse, would they eject any of Kato's
future testimony because he had taken the Fifth?

Great.  What a way to start.

Shortly after I got back to my office, Phil called.  I could tell from
the agitation in his voice that something awful had happened.

"Simpson's escaped," he said.

The events of the next few hours defy linear recall.  I'd never seen
David so furious.  And Gil?  Poor Gil was in the unenviable position of
having been left out of the loop in the surrender negotiations by the
cops, and then having to take heat for it.  He handled it with his usual
cool, even taking pains to defend the police department for a
commendable job in preparing the evidence.

Me?  It's difficult in retrospect to sort out all the conflicting
feelings I had that afternoon.  I know I had one secret, unworthy
thought.

I'd been getting a bad feeling about this case.  Maybe I'd gotten myself
into something I couldn't handle.  Part of me was thinking, The most
graceful way out of all this would be if Simpson went on the lamb and
disappeared off the face of the earth....

News of the escape spread like a Santa Ana wind.  The phones in the
press office were ringing wild.  I felt strangely numb.  As I drove home
that night, I was too tired to listen to the nonstop reports on
drive-time radio.

The boys were with their father that weekend.  I just tossed my bags
into a corner and slumped into a chair at the kitchen table, trying to
summon the energy to throw something together for dinner.

Shoulda picked up fast food.  At 6:30 P.M., maybe a little after, the
phone rang.  It was Phil.

"Turn on your TV," he told me.

There he was.  Our fugitive in a white Ford Bronco, ghosting dowr the
freeway, police cruisers following at a discreet distance.  Commentators
were calling it a chase, but it looked more like a presidential motor
cade.  Of course, unless he's assassinated, a president never gets this
kind of coverage.  I surfed the dial.  It was incredible.  This surreal
slo-mo spectacle was being carried by all three networks.  (NBC even cut
away briefly from the NBA playoff game.  This was serious.)

Certain images burned themselves into my memory.  The sunlight streaming
across Al Cowlings's jaw.  The ghoulish frenzy of spectators waving
placards: "Go, Juice." An amorphous dark blob in which popular
historians would struggle to find the outline of a man holding a gun to
his head.  Ninety-five million people watching a police drama unfolding
in prime time!  It was one of those peculiarly American experiences
that, for years afterward, would lead strangers to ask one another,
"Where were you when O.  J.  skipped?"

On the evening of June 17, 1994, I knew that I was at the very epicenter
of this event, and yet I felt light-years away from it.  I couldn't
watch for more than a few minutes.  I don't know if that was because it
was too painful, or because I was just too disgusted. Sometimes you have
to distance yourself from things to stay objective. I told myself that
the risk to public safety was minimal.  Simpson did have a gun, but he
was not a serial killer.  He would be caught, or he would be shot.

The jerk.

I could never bring myself to call him O.J.  And it galled me when
everyone else did.  No one referred to Charles Manson as Chuck.

Yet even the people on my own team would talk about "O.J.  this," and
"O.J.  that." I had zero tolerance for it.  "O.J."s the ballplayer," I'd
tell them.  "This is 'the defendant."

" At one point, we even began fining offenders twenty-five cents each
time they slipped.  Bill Hodgman set out a big glass jar to collect the
levy.  The jar slowly filled with quarters.

Not one of them came from me.

I didn't hate Orenthal James Simpson.  At least I don't like to think of
it that way.  Hate is not an emotion that a prosecutor can afford.  Hate
clouds your thinking and distorts your priorities.  The public, by and
large, doesn't understand that.  When they see you standing up in court
leveling allegations against the man in the dock, they assume that your
conviction must spring from some deep personal animosity.  Usually
that's not the case.  You must never be drawn into a vendetta against
the defendant.  You can't let it get personal.

Having gone on record with that noble sentiment, let me say that I
reserve the right to consider Orenthal Simpson unregenerate, low-life
scum.

Prosecutors do not think much of defendants as a class.  I'm no
exception.  I enjoyed a brief and unrewarding career as a criminal
defense attorney.  After I graduated from Southwestern University School
of Law in 1979, I was taken on as an associate by a criminal defense
firm, where I was assigned primarily to represent drug dealers.  I was
okay defending the dopers.  After all, I was a child of the sixties.
"Skip a little rope; smoke a little dope"that was my motto.  I'd wrap
myself in the flag and declaim self-righteously about the Fourth
Amendment, how it protected us all against unlawful searches and
seizures.  I sprang some dubious clients and had few qualms about it.

But after a few months, I started drawing the violent crimes.  Now my
clients, for the most part, were defendants whose greed or stupidity had
wrecked not only their own lives but the lives of everyone around them.
For me, the thrill of victory was no longer enough, because every time I
scored an acquittal, I had to reckon with the possibility that I might
have released another rabid dog onto the streets.

The moment of truth came while I was assigned to help defend a man
charged with multiple murders.  They were vicious crimes, but the D.A."s
office didn't have the evidence.

To a defense attorney, that's very good news.  My assignment was to
draft a motion to dismiss.  And I did one hell of a job; several days
later, my boss, Jeff Brody, came in to tell me my motion had been
granted.  Instead of feeling jubilant, though, all I could think of was
that I might have helped spring a murderer.

My face must have betrayed my conflict.  "Don't worry, Marcia," Jeff
reassured me.  "The prosecution will refile." (Indeed, they did.)

And then he gave me a piece of solid advice.

"I think you'd feel more comfortable as a prosecutor."

He was right about that.  Every defendant is entitled to competent
counsel but it didn't have to be me.  So I got myself over to the CCB
for an interview with John Van de Kamp, who was then the D.A.  of Los
Angeles County.  I threw myself on his mercy.  "I can't do criminal
defense," I told him.  "I won't do civil.  This is the only job I want."

Van de Karnp hired me and I took the prosecutor's oath to represent the
People.  Now, that was an idea I could get behind.  The People
especially those who have been victimized by brutal crimes rave just as
strong a right to advocacy as defendants do.  Prose' lain"

was a fierce calling, and one I felt I could pursue with dignity.

I never worried that I'd do my job so well that an innocent man would go
to jail.  There were too many checks against such abuses.  The grand
jury wouldn't return an indictment.  A judge would throw out the case.
And even if those system checks went haywire, there was a Sail-safe: my
own conscience.  I could never throw myself into the pitched battle of a
major criminal trial unless I believed in my head, heart, and soul that
the defendant was guilty.  When the Simpson case fell into my lap, I had
been on the job for fourteen years.  I had prosecuted literally
thousands of defendants.  I could feel a clench in my gut when I
realized we had the right man.

By the time O.  J.  Simpson finally surrendered at his home the night of
June 17, 1994, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was the
one.  That familiar twist in my stomach confirmed it.

Even before the blood, we had a strong case.  But the blood clinched it.

His blood was on Nicole's walk.  Nicole's blood and that of Ron Goldman
were on the glove from Rockingham.  My God, the trail of blood literally
led to Simpson's bedroom.  From where I was sitting, it was dead-bang.

Somebody, probably Suzanne, had given me the tape of Robert Kardashian
reading Simpson's so-called suicide letter, a travesty I'd managed to
catch for only a few seconds when it was broadcast live.  I took it home
and, on the Saturday after the chase, I ejected a Disney tape from the
VCR in my living room, parked myself on the couch, and watched the whole
sorry performance.

"Please don't feel sorry for me....  I've had a great life, made great
friends.  Please think of the real O.J.  and not this lost person."

He sent his "love and thanks" to all his friends.  He started ticking
off golfing buddies.  Golfing buddies!

Are you fucking kidding?  Your children are left motherless and all you
can talk about is yourself the media, and your golfing buddies?

The only pain he could feel was his own.  That kind of total
preoccupation with self is the mark of a sociopath.  I'd seen it before.

These guys commit unspeakable acts and yet somehow things get twisted
around in their heads so that they are the victims.  Simpson's behavior
hardly surprised me.

For one week I couldn't decide  whether or not Shapiro would try some
kind of mental defense.  Would he try to claim a temporary insanity that
absolved Simpson of responsibility switching the penalty from life in
prison to an indeterminate spell in a mental hospital?  Gil was
convinced that Simpson would do this by asserting some Menendez-type
plea; at the very least he would argue it was a crime of passion.  Over
the weekend, on This Week with David Brinkley, Gil said, "It wouldn't
surprise me if at some point we go from 'I didn't do it' to 'I did it,
but I'm not responsible."

" (It made me a little nervous that Gil was speaking so frankly to the
media, but I trusted his judgment; I also understood that the defense,
with its own outrageous pandering to the media, was forcing Gil onto the
hustings.)  David and I also thought there was a pretty good chance of a
mental defense.  I was actually hoping Simpson would try it.  I had cut
the legs out from under Robert Bardo, and I knew the drill even a
sociopath knows the difference between right and wrong.

Over the weekend, Simpson had been placed in the high-security wing of
the Men's Central Jail, under a suicide watch.  Reporters were
scratching and clawing for information about him.  And Shapiro
cheerfully obliged them by slinging them maudlin slops.  Sunday was
Father's Day and Simpson, he said, had started to weep at the thought of
not spending this day with his children.  The press lapped that drivel
right up.  It was incredible.  Here you had two people slaughtered like
animals and yet the media coverage was actually creating sympathy for
the suspect.

That weekend, I was working at home, sitting cross-legged on my bed with
my laptop cradled between my knees.  The phone rang.  It was Shapiro.

"Hey, Bob, when's the real lawyer coming in?" I needled him.  On the
surface it was good-natured, but after the chasea debacle for which he
bore no small responsibility. I really wasn't joking.  I figured that he'd
be stepping aside to let a high-octane criminal attorney take over.

"I'm staying with this case, Marcia," he said, seeming to ignore the
taunt.  "I'm in it to the end." - ''Stop it, you're killing me," I said.
Now I got totally serious.

"Come on, who's the real lawyer going to be?"

"I mean it: I'm staying with the case."

Well' we re filing the complaint on Monday.  Are you going to ask for a
continuance ?"

He said they Probably would.  This was standard procedure.

Defense attorneys usually try to postpone the plea to give them chance
to review the evidence and see whether there's room for negotiation. And
so I expected that when we all went down to Municipal Court' the hearing
Could last only long enough for the judge to set a new date for
arraignment.  From there, we would head straight back to the real
show the brand jury.

The next morning, David and I had taken our places at the counsel table
when the bailiffs brought Simpson out of the holding cell I didn't have
to look up to know he'd entered the courtroom.

Spectators rustled ill their seats.  The reporters snapped to, straining
forward to see the Sileriff's deputies and, finally, the prisoner enter
the court.  I raised my head and got my first glimpse of O.  J Simpson.

He looked like he'd been sleeping on the street.  He wore a dark suit
that seemed to sag on his body.  In accordance with rules of the suicide
watch, he We're no belt or shoelaces.  His features were slack, his
manner distracted.  I suspected he was franked.  He looked half-angry,
half-scared, utterly deflated.  In the coming months I would watch an
alert, carefully CaCled O.  J.  Simpson put on an affable, confident
face for the jury and the world to see.  And I would remember the way he
looked this first morning.  A common thug, collared.

Shapro stood Close to him, patting his shoulder, whispering in his ear,
fawmng.  Seemed to me he wanted to be close enough to his client to make
sure he was in the photos.  The municipal judge, Patti Jo McKay, took
the bench and we all sat down.  When she asked Simpson if he was ready
to enter his plea, I opened my calendar, ready to pick a Pi new
arraignment date.  And to my shock, I heard Shapiro answer, "Yes, , Your
Honor, Mr. Simpson is ready to enter his plea No Continuance?.  The son
of a bitch.

Had Shapiro deliberately misled me?  Fortunately, an arraignment is a
routine procedure that most prosecutors can do in their sleep.  I looked
down at the complaint:

Count One: Orenthal James Simpson willfully, unlawfully and with malice
aforethought murdered Ronald Goldman on or about June 12, 1994, in Los
Angeles County....

Count two: Orenthal James Simpson willfully, unlawfully and with malice
aforethought murdered Ronald Goldman on or about June 12, 1994, in Los
Angeles County....

Everything was standard, except for one thing.  David and I had
carefully worded a Cause invoking "special circumstances." As I've
explain this means that the crime was particularly heinous this case a
double murder.  Invoking the Cause allowed us to consider the death
penalty

"Orenthal James Simpson, is that your true name, sir?" I asked him He
wouldn't meet my eyes.  He mumbled "Yes."

"To the charges stated in Counts One and Two of the complaint, how do
you plead, guilty or not guilty?"

Simpson's reply of "Not guilty" was jumbled.  In fact, it was barely
coherent.

Then Bob Shapiro did something that shocked me something that prefigured
the Grand Guignol that this case was destined to become.

Shapiro beseeched the court to allow Mr.  Simpson to red his plea.

You could have scraped me off the floor.  Did he think this was a
goddamned soundstage?  "Simpson plea: take two!"

I watched helplessly as the judge allowed Shapiro's outrageous request.
This time Simpson, drawing on the thespian skills doubtless honed by his
work in The television  reached down inside himself and hit the mark. He
restated his plea of "Not guilty in a dear, strong James Earl Jones
cadence.  Enraged, I watched as Shapiro, his comically heavy eyebrows
knitted in a show of concern, patted his client on the shoulder,
congratulating him on his splended performance.

And then suddenly, without warning, it was my turn to perform.

Suzanne Childs grabbed me outside the courtroom.  "Marcia, you've got to
go downstairs with David and Gil," she said.

It wasn't that I was a novice in front of the cameras. If  you'll
recall, was one of the first cases broadcast live on Court TV, find the
Hawkins case had received its share of headlines as well.  I haven't
gotten comfortable with press conferences and interviews; the media had
become such an intrusive presence in judicial proceedings that you could
deplore them, but hardly ignore them.

This appearance would be particularly difficult since my own role in the
case remained ambiguous.

For the past week, the media had been referring to me as "lead
prosecutor." Yet as Gil had emphasized so pointedly at Thursday night's
meeting, I was nothing of the sort.  I was more of a co prosecutor, with
a partner to be named later.  And so I was feeling overwhelmed and
unsure of my mandate.  I also felt that my energies should be focused
not on this little tap dance but on the chamber upstairs where
twenty-three jurors were twiddling their thumbs, waiting for me.  Didn't
matter.  I found myself being herded toward the cameras.

Press conferences were usually held in an antechamber off the D.A."s
office, but this one had been slated for the much larger western lobby
on the ground floor.  Gil, David, and I took the slower-than weight-loss
freight elevator for a few final seconds of strategizing.

Suzanne Childs fussed with my hair and straightened my suit.

"There's going to be a lot of press," she warned me.  That was the
under-fucking-statement of the year.

The elevator door opened onto a mob scene.  The lobby was jammed
wall-to-wall with bodies broadcast androids trying to muscle out the
print scruffs.  Photographers were dangling from the mezzanine.  I don't
think there had been a crush like this at a D.A."s press conference
since the death of Bobby Kennedy.

For a moment I thought fright would get the best of me.  That my voice
might quaver.  But then something remarkable happened.  As I drifted
toward that sea of reporters and cameras, I was enveloped by a sense of
calm.  All my life I'd felt sure that something would happen to me that
would make my life bigger, more profound.  As I walked toward the
lectern, I felt I wasn't even moving under my own power.

To say that I felt a sense of destiny might be overstating it.  But I do
remember thinking, This is it.  You were meant to do this.

"It was premeditated murder," I heard myself saying.  When one reporter
asked me if the killings might be considered an act of passion, a
"spontaneous meltdown," I shook my head.  "It was done with deliberate
and premeditation.  That is precisely what he is charged with, because
that is what we will prove."

"Are there plans to charge anyone else?" someone called.

"Mr.  Simpson is charged alone," I answered, "because he is the sole
murderer."

I'd blown it.  Man, had I blown it.  What I had meant to say, of course,
was that Simpson was not the sole murderer, but the sole suspect.  I
realized my slip almost immediately, but by then I was fielding other
questions and correcting my error would only call more attention to it.
I was sure I'd take heat for not using the word "suspect."

As it turned out, I did get heat but not for that.  The word that Robert
Shapiro almost instantly seized upon when reporters spoke to him later
that day was not "murderer," but "sole." The D.A."s office was not
investigating other suspects, he charged.  In fact, this was completely
untrue; the investigation was still wide open.

That was no excuse for my blunder, however.  I should have said that O.
J.  Simpson was the "prime suspect." That first news conference alerted
me to the unique perils of this case.  I knew that from this point on,
every word I spoke would be analyzed, scrutinized, and dissected in
detail.  Lesson learned.  I had to move on.  The grand jury was waiting.

Normally, I have weeks or even months to prepare for a grand jury.  By
the time a session formally convenes, I will have interviewed every
witness at least once, often more.  But now, the clock was ticking.  We
had to get the grand jury indictment within the ten days before the
preliminary hearing was set to begin.  If we didn't, we'd have the same
set of witnesses running between two courts to testify.  You can imagine
what a mess that would be.  On the other hand, if we could just get that
grand jury indictment, the entire matter would be settled.  We could
dispense with the preliminary hearing altogether.  And so the need for
haste.

David and I would have to grab our witnesses as we could get them.  We
went into court virtually cold, with only a few mounted photographic
displays.  These, as I look back upon them, were pretty damned
impressive, considering we'd had to pull them together over the period
of a couple of days.

Almost all of our first meetings with witnesses, even our expert
witnesses, had to be done on the day of their appearance.  David and I
would usher them into the small conference room off the grand jury room,
or, if there wasn't even enough time for a fifteen-minute session, we'd
huddle in the hallway.  I'd do a quick rundown of the witness's story,
and try to make an instant assessment.  Much of the time, really, was
spent instructing them not to give any indirect evidence that might
taint the record: "Only answer the question don't volunteer anything,
don't tell me what anybody told you," I'd advise them.

"That's hearsay, and it's inadmissible."

It was a sobered, marginally more cooperative Kato Kaelin who returned
to testify the morning of June 20.  I led him back through the story of
how he had met Nicole and convinced her to rent him the guest house. And
I had him explain why, when Nicole later moved to Bundy, Simpson balked
at Kato's taking a room there.  "He said it would probably not be right
to be in the same house," said Kato, who then accepted Simpson's offer
of quarters rent-free in the Rockingham compound.

Kato had mentioned to police that he'd witnessed a scuffle between
Simpson and Nicole in the fall of 1993.  Only later would I get the
police report documenting that fight.  A unit from West L.A. responded
to a 911 call from 365 Gretna Green and found a terrified Nicole.  "He's
in the back," she told them, "He's my ax-husband, he's O.J.I want him
out of there!" She showed them to the back door, which, she said,
Simpson had smashed.  "French doors wood frame splintered, door broken,
still on hinges," the cops wrote.  Simpson was railing angrily out back
in the guest house.  "She's been seeing other guys!" he yelled to the
cops.  The cops had recorded that Kato had apparently been trying to
calm him down.

But today, Kato down played the episode.  "I saw maybe an argument," he
admitted, twitching insistently.

"Do you recall the nature of the argument, or just that it was one?" I
asked.

"That it was one," he said.  He insisted that he didn't know about any
other fights.

Kato's testimony advanced us a few notches.  He had admitted that
Simpson was a jealous guy.  Certainly jealous enough to manipulate his
wife by buying her friends' loyalty.  And during my questioning about
the night of the murder, Kato had substantially widened the time period
during which Simpson was unaccounted for.

Now the window was open between 9:45, when they'd returned from
McDonald's which was fifteen minutes earlier than the estimate Kato had
given the cops and about 10:53, when Simpson responded to the limo
driver.

Kato also gave a fuller account of the now-famous thump on the wall of
his guest house, which he now recalled as a "three-thump noise." I asked
him to demonstrate what it sounded like, and he made a fist and pounded
three times on the table in front of him.  "Like that," he said.  It had
been strong enough, he added, to tilt a picture on his wall, and scary
enough to make him search the grounds for an intruder.

He would never actually say "intruder." Back in the office when I'd
tried to get him to tell me what he thought had caused the thump, he'd
danced all around the question.

"Uh, uh .  .  .  I don't know what I was looking for."

"A prowler," I probed.

"Uh, I don't know.  Maybe."

(Later, he would volunteer for the benefit of the plaintiffs in the
civil trial that the thumps sounded like a body falling against his
wall.)

On the stand, however, he did reveal, for the first time, having seen a
"knapsack" lying on the grass.  What happened was this.  Kato had
rounded the corner of the main house, flashlight in hand.  He checked
out the area behind the garage and, finding nothing, started back toward
the front yard and then opened the gate to let the limo driver in.  He
noticed a golf bag on a bench by the front door.  He went back to check
the area behind his own room, and by the time he ventured out front
again, Simpson himself was talking to the limo driver.

But now Kaelin noticed something else on the grass near the driveway.

It was "like, a bag," he said, in Kato-speak.  He didn't recall the
color, except to say it was dark.

"To the best of my recollection, it was like a knapsack-type bag," he
said.

That knapsack had not been found among the pieces of luggage Simpson
brought back from Chicago.  Could it have held evidence from the crime
scene?

Not bad for a recalcitrant witness.  But I was convinced even then that
Kato knew a lot more than he was telling.

Outside, in the waiting room beyond the grand jury chamber, were a
half-dozen prospective witnesses, crowded on benches like applicants for
passports, These were Nicole's neighbors, the limo driver, Ron Goldman's
coworkers, and our own technicians and criminalists.

Since I'd had the experience with DNA evidence in other cases, I told
David I'd take the criminalists.  Meanwhile, David debriefed the
coroner, Dr.  Irwin Golden.

Had this been a preliminary hearing, we wouldn't even have bothered
calling the coroner.  Cause of death is almost never in dispute, so the
defense usually agrees to stipulate to the medical examiner's testimony.
The prosecutor usually reads the coroner's conclusion into the record.
Since there are no defense attorneys present at a grand jury proceeding,
however, a prosecutor has to protect the record, and the rights of the
defendant, by giving all the witnesses a critical questioning.

Neither David nor I had worked with Dr.  Golden before.  The truth is,
most coroners are not Quincy.  After all, what happens if they screw up?
The patient lives?

The morning we put Golden on we had not given his file a thor enough
going-over.  David, in fact, received the report only minutes before
putting him on the stand.  One thing immediately struck us as strange.
The coroner's investigator had reported that Nicole Brown Simpson was
alive at eleven P.M., when she had spoken to her mother.

If this were true, of course, Simpson would be in the clear, since he
had been spotted at Rockingham at that hour.  The coroner's estimate
seemed too late.  (In fact, phone records would show that Nicole and her
mother had spoken at around 9:45 P.M.)  Now, a coroner's report is not
like a police investigative file, and these kinds of mistakes are
common.  Still, they give the defense something to seize upon.  And we
would learn, in the days and weeks ahead, that the coroner's report
would be scrutinized completely.

I sat at cunsel's table while David questioned Golden, a serious,
horse-faced man whose speech was marked by long pauses.  What I remember
mast about the testimony that afternoon was not the witness, but the
exhibits the pictures of the victims.  David had organized and mounted
the autopsy photos on a strip of cardboard.  It was a stroke Of superb
lawyering.  Up until then, I'd been busy with the criminalists end
hadn't even seen those unforgettable, gruesome photos.

"Good (God," I whispered to myself.  For the first time, I saw the
wreckage of Ron Goldman's body.  The gashes to the head, the gaping
slices But into his neck from ear to ear.  Stab wounds to the left thigh
and abdomen had soaked his shirt and pants in blood.  In death, his eyes
were open.  The killer had waged a merciless assault against an
unarmed' unsuspecting victim, a victim who was rapidly trapped in
cagelike corner of metal fencing and slaughtered.

Whether the motive was sexual jealousy or the need to eliminate a
witness, this killer had made a ruthless determination: Ron Goldman
would die.

While Goodman's wounds suggested that the killer had been in a frenzy to
kill him, Nicole's did not.  The attack had been swift, smooth, and
efficient.  There were no hesitation marks, no half cuts or superficial
throat wounds that might have shown uncertainty.  Her killer did not
romance the deed.  Nicole had apparently been swept up, thrown down,
slashed at the throat, and dropped at the foot of the steps.

I had looked en literally thousands of coroner's photographs over the
years.  None were worse than the last pictures taken of Nicole Brown.
Her lace was a grotesque white no wonder, since she'd bled out nearly 90
percent.  The slash across her neck had nearly decapitated her.  She lay
there, disjointed, like a marionette discarded by the puppeteer.  I had
a mental flash of the photo of her that hung by the stairs at
Rockingham-m I recalled her bright, glossy features.  That was a rich
man's wife, someone to whom I couldn't relate.  Now, as I saw her frail
and broken ill death, I felt a surge of helpless anger.

I fought back the feeling.  Times like this call for cool reason.  The
last thing you can afford is too much feeling.

I drove home that night feeling dejected.  Next to me was a stack of
files and documents high enough to qualify me for the car-pool lane.

The cell phone rang, but I didn't pick it up.  I'd answer calls when I
got home, after the kids were asleep.  That was when the night shift
began.

First priority was the grand jury.  But I also had to start drafting
replies to a blizzard of motions coming our way from Shapiro's office.
Most of them were absolute garbage.  I didn't get to sleep until the
early morning edition of the L.A.  Times was hitting the streets.  On
the front page, a story that read:

The task facing Dist.  Atty.  Gil Garcetti in the O.  J.  Simpson case
is daunting and unparalleled: he must try to win murder convictions
against an American sports legend well-known to the public for his grace
and charm.

You're tellin' me.

If the grand jury was to indict, we needed to demonstrate that O.  J.
Simpson had the opportunity to commit these two murders; then we'd have
to place him at the scene of the crime.  That's why I led Tuesday
morning's session with Jill Shively.  Jill, a clerk for a film supply
company, had called the police the preceding week and told them she'd
spotted O.  J.  Simpson in a white Bronco speeding north bound on Bundy
right around the time of the murders.  Talk about an alibi killer!

Jill Shively, I must say, seemed like a real gem.  She was dressed
neatly and conservatively for her testimony.  She was articulate.  She
was confident.  In fact, Scott Gordon, one of my fellow D.A.s, knew her
because their children went to the same school.

Just before she took the stand, David asked Shively if she had told
anyone that she had been called to testify.  "No," she told him.  "Just
my mother.

"Are you sure?" he pressed her.

"Absolutely," she said without hesitation.

If she could pin Simpson to that location, in that car, at that hour, it
would be almost as good as having an eyewitness.  So it was essential to
nail down the time she saw him.  On the witness stand, she did this
beautifully.  "I left my house at ten-forty-five P.M.," she said.

"Why are you so certain?" I asked.

"Because I was trying to get to the store that closed at eleven and I
wanted to get something to eat," she said.  Bingo.  Vannatter and Lange
had even checked with the store to confirm their closing time another
assurance that Shively was on the level.

Then she told her story.  "A white Bronco runs the red light and goes
through the intersection and almost hits me," she said.

"Were you able to see the person seated in the Bronco?" I asked.

"Yes, I was," Shively said.  "It looked like he was mad, or angry."

She explained that the Bronco driver was unhappy because a third cara
Nissanblocked his path.  The Bronco driver screamed at the Nissan, "Get
out of the way!  Move the car!" Finally there was room to pull around
the Nissan, and the Bronco sped away.

"Now, that whole intersection where you witnessed all these events, is
it dark or is it well lit?" I asked.

"It's well lit by streetlights and a gas station there," she said.

"So were you able to see the driver very clearly?"

"I recognized him right away."

I paused for a beat, because I wanted this next answer to have some
dramatic effect.

"And who is he?" I continued.

"I saw O.  J.  Simpson," she said.

You get a jolt of adrenaline from a nice courtroom moment.

There was no reason to believe that I had just presented the grand jury
with a flat-out lie.

But I had.

The next morning, I'd barely stepped out of the elevator on the
eighteenth floor when reporters began asking me whether I'd seen the
tabloid TV show Hard Copy the night before.  It turns out that His.
Shivelyour alibi killer had made an appearance.  Despite having insisted
to us that she had told only her mother about the Bronco incident, our
star witness had found time to address several million television
viewers, proudly displaying her grand jury subpoena for the cameras.

The news sent me reeling.  But things got worse.  On my desk was a fax
from a television actor named Brian Patrick Clarke.  He was claiming to
have lost money to Shively and considered her a consummate liar.

Normally, you take the imprecations of a disgruntled business partner
with a grain of salt.  But Clarke's story had a paper trail to back it
up.  According to Clarke, Jill had presented herself to him as a screen
writer and asked him to read a script she had purportedly written. She'd
said a production company was about to buy it for $250,000, and she
wanted Clarke to star in it.  Before this bonanza arrived, though, Jill
allegedly managed to borrow $6,000 from Clarke.  And guess what Clarke
later discovered?  The script wasn't Shively's.  In fact, it was the
screenplay for a film in preproduction titled My Life, which starred
Michael Keaton and Nicole Kidman.  Clarke filed a suit against Shively
in small-claims court and won a judgment of $2,000.

"Get that woman back in here!" I hissed to Phil.

We hauled Shively back into David's office and started grilling her
about Hard Copy.  It turned out that she'd done the television inter
view the day before her grand jury appearance for $5,000.  At the time
she appeared before the grand jury, she explained nervously, the show
hadn't aired.  It wasn't going to air until afterward.  She thought it
was okay.  She just "forgot." She hadn't slept well, and she was
nervous, and she "really wasn't thinking."

We'd been duped.  This was a serious screwup.  We had no choice but to
cut Shively loose.:

I was more loath to do this than anyone.  I did not, as one commentator
would later suggest, ditch her in a "fit of pique." There was a far more
serious principle at work here.  If I allowed Shively's testimony to
stand without amendment, suspecting as I did that it was fraudulent, the
grand jury proceeding would be tainted.  If an indictment against
Simpson resulted, the defense would be entirely justified in asking that
it be thrown out.  It was my responsibility to preserve the integrity of
the record.

And so I made His.  Shively return to the witness chair the next day and
made her repeat her squirming explanations to the grand jury.  It was an
uncomfortable experience, cross-examining my own witness anal watching
her credibility crumble.

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury," I said, "because it is our duty as
prosecutors to present only that evidence of which we are 110 percent
confident as to its truthfulness and reliability, I must now ask you to
completely disregard the statements given and the testimony given by
Jill Shively in this case."

It was a tough lesson for us, but a necessary one' In the Simpson case
as with no other case in history there was an incentive for people to
come up with phony stories in order to cash in on sudden fame.

In the end, the loss of Shively, thank God, was not ruinous.  We had
other time-line witnesses, and they turned out to be first-rate.  The
very best of the lot was the limo driver, Allan Park.

As usual, I got to talk with Park for only a few minutes before putting
him on the stand.  He struck me as a real straight shooter, well
groomed, well-spoken.  He wasn't eager to be there, but he wasn't
resisting.  And unlike Kato Kaelin, he wasn't beholden to Simpson and he
had no ax to grind.

I had prepared a diagram of the Rockingham estate, and once Park was on
the stand, I walked him through his story, reperking where the limo was,
and his line of sight, at every moment.  I told the grand jury how he'd
arrived at Rockingham twenty minutes before the 10:45 P.M.  pickup time,
and waited until 10:40 to ring the buzzer on the front gate.

"Did you notice any car parked in front?" I asked him.

"No, I did not," he replied.

This was important, because Simpson had told police that the Bronco had
been parked there since early evening.

Park recounted his repeated, futile buzzing, calling his boss, seeing
Kato wave.  He recalled seeing the black male crossing the lawn.  In the
police report, he'd pegged the time at 10:53.  Since then, we'd had the
opportunity to consult cell phone records, which placed the sighting of
the black man at around 10:55 or 10:56 P.M.  A minute later, Simpson
answered the buzzer.

Park then described a bag that he had seen sitting by the Rolls.

Kato, he recalled, had reached for it, but Simpson said, "No.  No.
That's okay.  I can get it." This had to be the missing "knapsack" that
Kato had mentioned earlier.

Complaining of being "hot." He'd rolled his window down and turned on
the air-conditioning.  In fact, the night was unseasonably cool.

Simpson then asked Park where the light was.  In the rearview mirror,
Park could see that Simpson was "checking his bags." What was in those
bags, I wondered.  Perhaps ...  a murder weapon?  Bloody clothes?  I
could see the grand jurors focusing closely on Park's words;

were they wondering the same thing?

All in all, Park's testimony dovetailed snugly with Kato's.  And it had
the effect of strengthening both.

Mezzaluna's weekend bar manager, Karen Crawford, was up next.

She testified that Nicole and her party left the restaurant between 8:30
and nine.  Shortly afterward, she'd gotten a call from "the older woman
in the party"obviously Juditha Brown saying she'd lost her glasses.

Karen found them lying by the curb outside the restaurant and sealed
them in an envelope.

"About five minutes later, there was another phone call," she said. This
one from Nicole.

"What time was that, approximately?" I asked.

"I would say it was between nine-thirty and nine-forty-five," she
answered.  Crawford called Ron Goldman over to the phone to make
arrangements to deliver the glasses.  Then he left the restaurant
carrying the envelope.

So where did that leave us in terms of time?  Nicole and her mother
spoke at around 9:45 P.M.  Police had talked to the neighbor, Pablo
Fenjves, who had reported being bothered by the wailing of a dog on the
night of the murders.  The barking, he thought, had begun between 10:15
and 10:30 P.M.  By midnight the victims were dead.

That's when Sukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen, came upon the
body of Nicole Simpson.

Sukru and his wife were one of those Mutt-and-Jeff couples.  He was
large, burly, and dark, with a long ponytail.  She was slender and fair,
her blond hair cropped short just below her ears.  The few minutes I had
with Sukru before testimony were tense.  He still hadn't gotten over his
discovery of a murder scene.  He stammered and groped for words until
finally, when he got to the point of telling how he'd first Taking the
witness stand somehow seemed to calm him.  He told how he'd come home to
his apartment on Montana Avenueonly about six hundred feet from the
crime scene around 11:40 P.M.

He found his upstairs neighbor sitting with a big white Akita.  This,
though Sukru didn't know it, was Nicole Brown's dog, Kato.  Sukru and
Bettina offered to keep the dog until they could get it over to an
animal shelter the following morning.

"How did it behave in your apartment?" I asked.

"He was pretty nervous, and he was going to the doors and windows,
running around in the house."

"Did you see anything unusual about his legs or his body?" I asked.

Sukru swallowed hard.  "On the legs, there was blood."

About midnight, the couple decided to take the animal out to see if they
could find its owner.  The animal headed toward 875 Bundy.

Home.

"When we got closer to the place, he started to pull me a lot harder
than normal," Sukru said.  "We were walking on the right side of Bundy
and the dog stopped and turned right and looked at"

There was silence in the courtroom as Sukru tried to go on.

"and I turned right and looked, too.  And I seen her body."

The Akita's role in all this was eerie, to say the least.  You had to
wonder what that poor animal had witnessed.  Had he tried to defend his
mistress?  Probably not.  Police canine experts later examined Kato,
summarizing their conclusions in a "witness statement." Kato, they
concluded, was such a low achiever that he probably could not have
defended himself, let alone a human.  The chief trainer for the LAPD's
K-9 unit reported that Kato had a "very nice disposition .  .  . [but]
inadequate instincts or courage to protect his territory, owner or
himself."

Thanks to his primitive loyalty, however, we were able to postulate that
the murders had occurred between the time he began to howl and the time
he was discovered wandering on Bundy with bloody paws window of perhaps
an hour.  That dog, it seemed, had a better handle on time of death than
the coroner did.

I only wish he could have spoken for the criminalists.

A case like this with no eyewitnesses save, possibly, a white Akita
clearly would hinge on physical evidence, especially blood evidence.

That's why I had been so concerned from the start about which
criminalists we could get assigned to the case.  It was critical that we
establish two things: first, that the blood samples had been collected
and preserved properly; and second, that the samples had undergone
reliable analysis.  The criminalists had to do their job competently,
and it was essential that they be able to present themselves credibly to
a jury.

Phil's tepid assurance that criminalist Dennis Fung was "okay" had set
off alarm bells in my head.

My first meeting with Dennis Kirk Fung had been on Monday, June 20, in
the waiting room outside the grand jury chamber.  He'd come with Collin
Yamauchi; Fung was the criminalist on the scene, and Yamauchi the
criminalist/analyst in the lab.  They'd handed over their reports to me,
and I'd scanned them quickly, trying to envision them as testimony that
would be coherent enough for a juror to follow.  Fung's task was
relatively straightforward: to tell where he collected the blood and how
he packaged it.  I'd told him to review his reports so he'd be prepared
when I took his testimony later in the week.  He bobbed his head up and
down as I spoke.

Then I'd turned to Collin Yamauchi.  In theory at least, he had the more
difficult task.

The LAPD crime lab had just recently begun to do DNA testing.

None of its technicians was all that experienced in the process.  They
were perfectly capable of performing the simplest test, called PCR DQ
alpha.  But it had to be done correctly.  When contamination occurs, you
get wildly erratic results.  That was why I breathed a sigh of relief
when I read Collins report: in this case, the results were perfectly
consistent.  Every blood drop on the trail at Bundy displayed O.  J.
Simp son's genetic markers, and only his genetic markers.  Bull's-eye.

It was even possible that his blood was on the Rockingham glove.

Preliminary tests indicated that this was the case.  We had already
found markers on that glove from Ron's and Nicole's blood.  If we could
establish that the glove bore a mixture of blood from both victims and
from the defendant, that would be very powerful evidence.

For that, however, we would need to send the samples away to Cell mark
for more sophisticated testing.

On the witness stand, Collin turned out to be pretty effective.  He
dawdled the glove business well, leaving open the possibility that it
had been stained with a mixture of the blood of both killer and victims.
He did scramble at explaining the fundamentals of DNA testing, but it is
very complicated stuff and he hadn't much experience on the stand.  I
assumed he would get better with practice.

Dennis Fung was another story.

When Dennis took the witness stand on Wednesday, June 22, I led him
through a proforma description of how he collected the blood samples by
wetting swatches of cloth with distilled water, then applying titers to
each bloodstain.  We established that he'd handed them over, as the
protocol required, to Yamauchi, back in the lab.

"Are you familiar with what is known as a stride analysis?" I asked him
Yes, I am," he replied.

Whenever shoe prints or footprints are found at a crime scene, the
criminalist may decide to do a stride analysis to determine whether the
Suspect was walking or running.  Fung claimed he had done such an
Naturally, I asked him if he could tell us whether the person making the
footprints was moving quickly or at a normal pace.

Not really, Fung said.

The stride analysis may also say something about the size of the perSon
based on the size of the print and the distance between the Steps The
prints at Bundy were from size 12 men's shoes.  And so, Civet I asked
Dennis if the bloody footprint on the walk at Bundy could come from a
man or a woman, all I expected was a very Qualified answer that tended
to favor a man.  Either it was a really big han or a little woman or man
in a pair of big man's shoes, or a big na.  There weren't that many
realistic options.

"I haven't been in the shoe analysis assist unit for about three ars,3,
he replied.  "So I'm kind of rusty on that aspect."

I was stunned.  If he was too "rusty" to make such no-brainer Seations'
what the hell was he doing at a murder scene as our analist?  This was
not good at all.

'GO you are disqualifying yourself?" I asked him incredulously.

eliding us you are not qualified to render an opinion as to that Wise of
a lack of experience or training?"

"Yes, at this point," he replied.

At that moment, I realized that I had no idea what might come out of
Dennis Fung's mouth next.  I was flying blind.  All I could do was
continue questioning him, and hope that there were no more ugly
surprises.  |`

No such luck.  Throughout the testimony, I watched helplessly as ] Fung
fumbled through his notes, constantly losing his place.  We went through
all the presumptive blood tests he had taken.  A presumptive :, blood
test is simply a quick, though not infallible, procedure to determine
whether a stain is indeed blood.  Several stains at Rockingham `, had
given a positive result, including stains in the foyer, on the door ;
handle of the Bronco, and on the glove found on the south pathway.

Fung had also done the tests on the drains in the master bathroom sink
and shower and they, tOo, had indicated blood!  This could :' mean that
Simpson had washed himself off before heading to the airport.

But Fung blew it.  As we got deeper into the questioning, I learned to
my dismay that he had not tested all the drains at Rockingham, only
those that had appeared to be in "recent use." Wher1 you do presumptive
tests for blood, you should always be aware that the results can be
impeached in court, because they can sometimes also give a positive
result for things like rust and vegetable matter.  Fungus failure to
test all the drains would play right into the defense's hands.  I could
already hear opposing counsel crossing him: "Oh, you mean you didn't
test the other drains?  So you don't know whether they, too, might have
given a positive result, do you, Mr.  Fung?  And if they had, you might
have conduded that the positive result you got in my client's bathroom
was nothing more than rust, isn't that so?  Or would you try to tell
this jury, Mr.  Fung, that blood had been washed down every sink in that
house?"

Fung had failed to obey the criminalist's first commandment: be
thorough.  His tendency to test selectively would later cripple our
efforts to get important blood evidence into the record.  And his
demeanor on the stand wouldn't give a jury the confidence that he could
change a lightbulb, let alone supervise a forensic investigation.

After he left the stand, I called my people and said, "This guy's a
fucking disaster."

They should have been supervised as they went over both crime scenes.
Tom and Phil should have returned to oversee that search.  When I'd
spoken to them mid afternoon after they'd interviewed Simpson, they'd
assured me they were on their way back out to Rockingham.  They didn't
make it back there until after five.  Too late.  By that time Fung and
Mazzola were packing up and heading home.

We'd be doing damage control on that sloppy search for a long time to
come.  We still are.

At the outset, I had assumed we would be offering the cops' taped
interview with Simpson into evidence.  But there was more foot-dragging
by the LAPD.  Not until the week the grand jury hearing began in earnest
did I finally get the cops to fork over the cassette tape of that
interrogation.

In the privacy of my office, I slipped the tape into my player, grabbed
a legal pad, and pulled my knees up into my oversized leatherette chair
to listen to what I assumed was at least a two-hour interview.  It was a
shock, therefore, when after thirty-two minutes, I heard Lange say,
"We're ready to terminate this at 14:07," and then heard nothing but the
white fuzz of unrecorded tape.  I didn't get it Simpson had spent three
full hours at the station.  What could they have been doing all that
time?

I was even more disturbed by what was on the tape.  Phil and Tom both
sounded exhausted that was understandable.  They'd been up since three
the morning of June 13.  But that was no reason to allow a potential
suspect in a double murder to set the program for the interview.

Any Monday-morning quarterback can now see that Simpson lied to Tom and
Phil all through that interview.  Of course, some of the lies weren't
apparent to them at the time.  For instance, Simpson claimed that he'd
been invited to dinner with the Brown family after the recital, which
Nicole's mother would later deny.  Tom and Phil couldn't have known that
yet.  But on other, more elemental points, like where and when he'd
parked the Bronco, there was plenty they could have done.

"Eight something," replied the suspect.  "Maybe seven, eight

''clock.  Eight, nine o'clock.  I don't know, right in that right in
that area."

The follow-up should have come hard and fast: "Well, what the hell was
it?  Seven, seven-thirty, eight, or nine?  You knew you had a flight to
catch, so shouldn't you have been aware of the time?  What time did you
park?  What did you do then?"

And what about Simpson's apparent lack of concern after Kato told him
that he'd heard thumps on the wall?  Kato was so worried that he'd taken
a dim flashlight and searched the grounds for an intruder.

And yet Simpson seemed strangely unconcerned he was more intent upon
finding a Band-Aid for the cut on his finger.  On that one Van natter
and Lange should have dug deep: "Did you check it out?  Did you call
your security people to check it out?  Why not?  Wasn't your daughter
Arnelle staying at Rockingham?  Weren't you concerned for her safety?"

Such pointed questions would have highlighted Simpson's evasiveness.

Instead, the detectives responded to Simpson's tentative statements by
saying "I understand," or simply "Yeah," or "Okay," or a mumbled
"Mmah-hm." On some fundamental level, I think, Tom and Phil wanted to
hear a plausible explanation that would eliminate Simpson from
suspicion.

Just when they got a big opening, they'd move on to something else.  For
instance, when they ask Simpson if he would take a lie detector test, he
vacillates:

"I'm sure I'll eventually do it," he says, "but it's like, hey, I've got
some weird thoughts now.  And I've had weird thoughts you know, when
you've been with a person for seventeen years, you think every thing.
And I don't" He stopped himself.

And what do Lange and Vannatter say?  "I understand." Not once but
twice.  And then they drop the subject!

Why didn't they swoop down on that?  "What sort of weird dark Thoughts
of hurting Nicole?  Did you ever share those thoughts with anyone?"

I'd seen plenty of people whose family members had been murdered.  An
innocent man who's just learned about the death of his children's mother
when the children were asleep in the house would Take Two most likely be
stunned, distraught, even hysterical.  And he wouldn't hesitate to take
a polygraph.  He'd be demanding, "How can I help you catch this
monster?"

But the O.  J.  Simpson who emerged from that police interview struck me
as cold and detached fundamentally unaffected by the news of his
ex-wife's murder.

Simpson chuckles as he shoots the shit about his relationship with his
girlfriend, Paula Barbieri.  He volunteers a story from after his last
breakup with Nicole.  She had returned an expensive diamond bracelet
he'd given her as a birthday present.  Simpson then presented it to
Paula and pretended he'd bought it for her.  Scamming one woman
immediately after his breakup with another, who, at that moment, was
lying on a cold metal coroner's table!  I couldn't believe the way he
told Vannatter and Lange about that.  "I get into a funny place here on
all this, all right?" he says.  Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.  "Yeah," they
chime back.  You could practically hear the towels snapping in the men's
locker room.

That jocular, almost flippant tone pervaded the entire interview.

Simpson tells them about how an endorsement deal gets him Bugle Boy
Jeans for free"I got a hundred pair," he brags.  He also tells them his
preference in sneakers"Reebok, that's all I wear." He even gives a
little rap, referring to himself in the third person, about how he
rushes for a plane, just like in the Hertz commercial"I was doing my
little crazy what-I-do.  I mean, I do it everywhere.  Everybody who has
ever picked me up says that O.J's a whirlwind at the end, he's running,
he's grabbing things."

In defense of Phil and Tom, I do know there's something to be said for
developing rapport with your suspect to get him talking.  It's just that
at some point, push has to come to shove.  And during this interview the
shove came way too late and way too gently.

"O.J.," Phil says uneasily.  "We've got sort of a problem."

"Mmnh-mmh," the suspect replies.

"We've got some blood on and in your car.  We've got some blood at your
house.  And it's sort of a problem."

Tom puts in, "Do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time
you were at Nicole's house?"

"No," Simpson replies.  "It was last night."

"Okay, so last night you cut it?"

"Somewhere after the recital .  .  ."

"What do you think happened?" Phil asks him.  " O.J. subtly puts the
detectives on the defensive.

"I have no idea, man.  You guys haven't told me anything.  I have no
idea....  Every time I ask you guys, you say you're going to tell me.

"Did you ever hit her, O.J.  ?"

"Uh, we had that one night we had a fight."

"Mm nh-m mph."

"That night that night we had a fight.  Hey, she hit me."

"Yeah."

"You know, and and, as I say, they never took my statement, they never
wanted to hear my side....  Nicole was drunk, she did her thing, she
started tearing up my house, you know."  "didn't punch her or anything,
but you know"

"Slapped her a couple times?"

"No.  I wrestled her is all I did"

"Uh, okay."

Nicole is dead, his children have no mother, he's talking about the time
he was arrested for beating her and once again, Simpson is whining about
how he feels mistreated.  As I sat listening to this crap, I thought:
This guy is going to deny everything all the way.  He's never going to
confess.  There wasn't one shred of remorse there; not enough real soul
for him to need to unburden it by telling the truth.  Some killers have
a need to confess, at least to themselves.  But I don't think he ever
did.

That interview was one of the worst bits of police work I'd ever seen
but I kept my thoughts to myself.  I couldn't afford to alienate my
chief investigators.  Besides, it was spilt milk.  Complaining about
their ineptitude would not help me get through this case.

I had serious qualms about playing this interview tape before the grand
jury.  And in the months to come I would debate endlessly whether to
play it at trial.  It was a very risky gambit.  That decision would rest
largely upon the composition and sentiment of the jury.

If we ended up with jurors who were star-struck by the defendant, would
they be offended by his callousness toward his wife and lover, or -would
they be beguiled by his crude jocularity?  Would they take his loss of
memory and vague responses for evasion, or would they see an innocent
man willing to talk to police despite his pain and exhaustion, and who
got nothing but suspicion in return?

I decided to hold off.

Instead I had Phil summarize the interview.  He touched briefly on
Simpson's self-pitying explanation of the beating on New Year's, 1989,
and then on what Simpson called an "altercation"the 1993 incident that
had also resulted in a 911 call.  "I kicked her door or something,"
Simpson had said.

That was as far as I intended to go into the issue of domestic violence
for now.  I'd handled DV cases before, and I knew they were very tricky.
Husbands usually do not batter their wives in front of others.

If a wife is killed, there is rarely an eyewitness to the murder.  Or to
the years of abuse that preceded it.

In this case, there was just too much we still didn't know.  Had friends
ever seen them fight?  Had they fought since the divorce?  How recently?
What were the Cashpoint issues between them?  I was willing to put
domestic violence on the back burner for the time being until Keith
Zlomsowitch forced our hand.

Zlomsowitch, a thirty something restaurateur, was passed on to us by the
LAPD.  He claimed to have witnessed O.  J.  Simpson stalking and
harassing his wife.  Zlomsowitch lived out of state and was due to board
a plane home the next day.  Like it or not, David and I had to bring him
in before the grand jury to preserve his testimony.

I had no idea what Keith Zlomsowitch intended to say, and didn't get a
chance to find out before he took the stand.  Instead I spent our
pre-interview trying to make sure he didn't taint his testimony with
hearsay evidence.  Since his story involved the victim, I had to make
sure that he didn't repeat anything she might have said to him.

"Keith," I told him, "please listen very carefully to my questions.

Anything that you heard O.  J.  Simpson say is fair territory, but don't
tell me anything which Nicole may have said to you."

Zlomsowitch said he understood.

So I wound up listening with innocent fascination along with everyone
else in the courtroom as Keith told how he had met Nicole n Aspen about
two years before her death.  At that time, he was director of operations
for the Mezzaluna restaurants' Colorado and California operations.
Nicole was legally separated from Simpson then and living at Gretna
Green.  In the spring of'92 he and Nicole became lovers, but only for
about a month.  During that time, Zlomsowitch said, O.  J.  Simpson
would follow Nicole when she went out in the evening.  Once Nicole and a
party of friends showed up at the Mezza una in Beverly Hills, where
Zlomsowitch was on duty.  As he was sitting with her at her table, he
noticed O.  J.  Simpson pull his car up to the parking attendant.
Simpson came in and went directly to Nicole's table.  He leaned over,
stared at Zlomsowitch, and said, "I'm O.  J.  Simpson and she's still my
wife."

"How would you describe his tone of voice?" I asked.

"Serious, if not scary," he said.  "Just deep, threatening to the point
where we were very intimidated."

Zlomsowitch told of another incident, in April 1992, which occurred at a
restaurant called Tryst.  After waiting for a table, Keith, Nicole, and
a few of Nicole's friends had just sat down when Simpson appeared.  This
time, he walked past them and took a table about ten feet away.  He
pulled the chair around to face them and just stared.

And stared.  That freaked Zlomsowitch out.

Not long afterward, Keith went on another date with Nicole, this time to
a comedy club where a friend of hers was performing.  From there, they
went dancing at a Hollywood club called Roxbury.  They had been there
less than an hour when Nicole said, "O.J.  is here."

I had to tell the jury to disregard the statement attributed to Nicole.
At that point, though, they seemed to be hanging on Zlomso witch's every
word, breathless to hear what happened next.

"We went back to Nicole's house," he continued.  "We lit a few candles,
put on a little music, poured a glass of wine, and we .  .  . began to
become intimate." After they'd had sex, Nicole told him she thought it
best if he went home and she went to bed.

The following day, Zlomsowitch came back to the house and sat with
Nicole by the pool as her children swam.  She complained of a stiff
neck; they went into a bedroom off the swimming pool where he gave her a
neck massage.  After about five minutes, Zlomso witch recalled, O.  J.
Simpson appeared two feet in front of them and said, "I can't believe
it....  Look what you are doing.  The kids are right out here by the
pool."

According to Zlomsowitch, Simpson went on to say, "I watched you last
night.  I can't believe you would do that in the house.  I watched
you....  I saw everything you did."

Then he demanded to speak with Nicole alone.  Zlomsowitch, who was still
sitting on Nicole's back at that point, eased off slowly.

He told us that he didn't want to make any sudden moves that might
incite Simpson to anger.

At Nicole's urging, Keith left her alone to talk to her estranged
husband.  Several minutes later, O.  J.  Simpson emerged from the bed
room.  Keith said he was frightened, but then, to his surprise, Simpson
stuck out his hand.  "No hard feelings, right?" he said, shaking
sowitch's hand.  "I'm a very proud man."

As Zlomsowitch spoke, I stood there with my mouth open in amazement.  O.
J.  Simpson was spying on his wife in the bushes while she was having
sex, then, the next day, shakes the hand of her lover?

That was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard.  (Since then, I've had a
chance to learn a lot more about the nature of domestic violence.
Batterers only rarely blame other men.  It's usually the wife or
girlfriend, "the bitch," who takes the heat.  But at the time I first
heard this story, Simpson's behavior struck me as utterly
incomprehensible.)

All in all, Zlomsowitch seemed an honorable guy.  He'd been a pallbearer
at Nicole's funeral, and all he seemed to want out of this was to see
justice done.  The fact that he had been willing to recount events
favorable to Simpson, like the handshake and apology, was reassuring
proof of his honesty.  And he had given us valuable new evidence
including the information about the stalking episodes of Simpson's
behavior as a jealous husband.

You take a risk putting any witness on blind, and here we were throwing
one after another on the stand without a vetting.

"I can't believe it," David groused to me as we ate lunch on the
afternoon break.  "We have five minutes to put this case together for
the grand jury, and law professors across the country are going to take
months dissecting and critiquing every word."

Man, if he only knew how true that would be.

Actually the grand jury was going pretty well.  The only real screw up
was Shively.I told myself we'd been lucky to find any witnesses whose
testimony had not been tainted by pretrial publicity.  The important
thing was to proceed step by step and not be distracted by the babble of
media around us.  The grand jurors had been admonished to do the same
thing.  "Turn off your radio, don't turn on your TV, don't pick up a
newspaper, don't scan headlines at a newsstand."

Grand jurors usually take their charge very seriously, but they are also
human and as curious as anyone else.  On Thursday, June 23, we were
wrapping up the testimony and I had already started drafting my closing
statement.  I'd give it on Friday, and we'd be done.  I think the jurors
would have had more than enough evidence to give us the indictment. Then
this hysterical pace would subside, at least until the trial started,
which would be months from now.  Maybe I could even go back to eating
dinner at home again.

These were my thoughts as I walked down the hallway toward Suzanne's
office.  I checked in with her at least once a day, usually around six
o'clock.  We'd kick back and shoot the breeze, or in more hectic times,
like these, she'd fill me in on any brushfires that needed
extinguishing.  That night, I could smell smoke even before I reached
her door.  Suzanne and a visitor, a local television reporter, were
sitting in front of the TV, riveted to the screen.  There wasn't much to
see, as I recall.  Just the staccato sound of a tape being played.  The
voice of an anguished young woman filled the room.

"He broke my door.  He broke the whole back door in...."

A second voice, apparently that of a 911 operator, interrupted her:

"And then he left and he came back?"

"Then he came and he practically knocked my upstairs door down, but he
pounded it and then he screamed and hollered and I tried to get him out
of the bedroom 'cause the kids were sleeping.

"What the hell is this?" I asked Suzanne.

"Nicole," she replied without taking her eyes from the screen.  "A 911
tape."

"What911 tape?"

I knew that there had been police reports on the New Year's Eve of 1989
and the door-kicking incident of 1993.  Both had been triggered by
Nicole's calls to 911.  But I was under the impression that the
audiotapes of those calls had been destroyed in a routine recycling
procedure.

My impression was wrong.  It turns Out that the city attorney's office,
which prosecuted that '93 case, had kept its own copies of the tapes.
The press had tracked them down and petitioned under the state Public
Records Act to get them.  And somehow, they had gotten those tapes
released before I had even heard that they existed.

Suzanne's reporter buddy handed me copies of the police reports on the
tapes.  I hadn't seen these, either.

"Oh, great," I fumed.  "Now I'm getting discovery from the press!"

Within the space of an hour it seemed that tape was everywhere.

You couldn't step within earshot of a radio without hearing Nicole's
pitiful, quavering pleas for help.  It was on all the television news
shows, and they didn't play it just once, but kept repeating it, in a
sick parody of MTV's heavy rotation.

"My ax-husband or my husband just broke into my house and he's ranting
and raving....  He's O.  J.  Simpson, I think you know his record....
He's fucking going nuts....  He's screaming at my room mate about me . .
.  about some guy I know and hookers .  .  .  And it's all my fault, and
now what am I going to do.  .  .  ?  I just don't want my kids exposed
to this...." When Nicole begged Simpson to calm down, for the sake of
the children, his anger only increased.  "I don't give a shit anymore!
Motherfucker!  I'm not leaving!"

The backlash was immediate.  Our lines were flooded by outraged callers.
And most of them took the side not of the panicked 119-pound woman, but
of the out-of-control former football player who was terrorizing her.
They said, "How can you do this to that poor man?"

Everyone assumed that the release of the 911 tape was part of a cynical
scheme hatched by the D.A."s office, the LAPD, and the City Attorney's
office to spin public opinion against Simpson.

What a joke.  Believe me, there wasn't enough solidarity among these
camps to coordinate a beer run, let alone an offensive like that.

For days afterward, we would all point fingers at one another, Gil lit
into the city attorney, James Hahn, for releasing the tape.  Hahn
insisted that he had acted in the belief that the LAPD had gotten
approval from the D.A."s office for his office to release the tape.  The
LAPD would say it was against releasing the tape, but felt it hadn't
gotten support for that position from the D.A.  In our office, it was
David who took the fall.  The cops had called, asking him if they should
authorize release of the tape under the Public Records Act.  And he had
told them, "Do what you normally do." It was the right instruction but
the result was disastrous.

The worst part of it was watching Shapiro exploit this screwup.  He
filed a motion to halt the grand jury hearing on grounds of excessive
publicity.  At a hearing hastily convened on Friday in the courtroom of
a former prosecutor named Lance Ito, Shapiro was preening like a peacock
in full plumage.  He accused the D.A."s office of misconduct in making
"improper expressions of personal opinion." He cited my "sole murderer"
slip as well as Gil's speculation that Simpson might cop an insanity
plea.

I couldn't let this pass.

"Robert Shapiro has lost no opportunity to exploit coverage in this case
to get sympathy for his client," I told the court.  "He has been no
stranger to the spotlight."

But the barbs exchanged by Shapiro and me were at that very moment being
rendered irrelevant.  That morning, our grand jury adviser, Terry White,
had come back to Gil with reports that a couple of jurors were
discussing the 911 tape.  That cinched it.  If we did get an indictment,
it could be thrown out on the strength of this revelation alone.  Gil
himself had no choice but to file a motion to dismiss the grand jury.
Superior Court Judge Cecil Mills heard the motion and began interviewing
the jurors to see if they had read or heard any thing that might affect
their judgment.  He concluded that they had, and granted Gil's request
to recuse the jury.

It was over.

In some ways I was not unhappy to see this grand jury go bust.  The case
had drawn such intense public interest that I was uncomfortable seeking
an indictment in a closed proceeding.  I felt we'd always be susceptible
to the charge that funny things were happening behind locked doors.
Better to bail out early and try for a better result at a preliminary
hearing Two dress rehearsal for what was to come sort of an overture to
the opera.

By totally immersing us in the case, it sharpened our perceptions of its
weaknesses and strengths.  I'd even prepared a grand jury summation that
was a very early first draft for a closing statement.

Still, the suddenness with which the grand jury was disbanded came as a
shock.  None of us could remember such a thing ever happening before. It
also put us in a very tough spot logistically.

Normally, we have weeks, or even months, to pull these things together.

But the deadline mandated by law was upon us.  We had less than a week
to prepare for a preliminary hearing.

A prelim is like a little trial where the witnesses you put up can be
cross-examined by the defense.  This means you have to go back, re
interview each one of them after comparing their statements to the grand
jury to those made to police.  We couldn't afford any unpleasant
surprises.  No more Jill Shivelys.  It would mean sorting through the
complex physical evidence and figuring out a comprehensible way to
present it.  We'd be clocking fifteen-hour days, at least.

This was a really low moment.  The only way I could keep my spirits up
was to hold on to my fantasy that Gil would relent and let me keep David
on the team.  That night, Gil called us both into his office..  He
looked straight at me, and something in that look told me it was
hopeless.

"Marcia," he began firmly, "you're going to have to pick a partner.

I'll try and accommodate any reasonable request, but I want you to find
someone who's as strong as you."

What he meant was I couldn't bring on some baby D.A.  who would just
carry my books.  Even though I knew what the answer would be, I turned
toward David and inclined my head in his direction.

"No," Gil said flatly.  "I need David on Menendez."

I could feel hairline cracks fanning out in crazy patterns all through
my confidence.  With David by my side I felt strong and sure.

Having him to strategize with would be a dream come true.  But there was
no appealing Gil's decision.  I'd have to find another partner.

Someone who had real strength.  Someone who could brace me against the
coming storm.

Although I admitted this to no one, I was scared to death.

He has to say yes there's no one else.

That was my mantra as I walked down the hall from my office to the
corner office occupied by Bill Hodgman.  I was about to change his life.
Right now he was in a relatively low-stress post as the director of
Central Operations; if he accepted my offer, and Gil approved, he'd be
subject to unprecedented heat.  I think he knew I was coming.  I almost
expected to find a sign on his -door that said "Leave me alone." I
wouldn't have blamed him.  But I also wouldn't have known where to go
next.

There were only seven deputies besides me in the Special Trials Unit,
and all of them were either already trying a case or about to start one.
I'd thought a bit about Brian Kelberg, a thin, intense man with a goatee
and dark glasses.  Brian was almost pure intellect.  He had spent a
little time in medical school before switching to law.  It would be
terrific, I thought, to have him as a sounding board for the complex
evidentiary issues of the Simpson case.  But I knew having him as co
counsel wouldn't work.  Though Brian was brilliant, he was a loner.

He'd always felt that the team approach to prosecution wasn't an
effective way to try a case.

Then my thoughts had turned to Bill.  We'd worked together in
management, and we'd clicked.  I was brassy and often abrasive; Bill was
gentle, a conciliator.  We laughed a lot together and a sense of humor
would be as essential as a law degree in a pressure cooler like this
one.  But most important, he was one hell of a lawyer.

Bill had started out in Long Beach, one of the branch courts.

Shortly after he arrived Downtown, he prosecuted savings-and-loan
executive Charles Keating.  The resulting conviction (though ultimately
reversed) was a thrilling triumph in an office starved for victories,
and for a while Bill was the golden boy.  He'd been with us only about a
year when Gil appointed him director of Central Operations.

He was the first real trial lawyer I can recall who ever held that job.

His placement had been a boost in morale to all of us on the front
lines.

All the same, Bill's experience with Downtown juries was fairly limited.
I'd done some of my juvenile work in Long Beach: the community was
conservative, so the jury pool tended to be law-and-order types.  The
judges pretty much mirrored that point of view.  As a result, criminal
trials were relatively orderly affairs, seldom the grueling battles that
were the daily experience of deputies Downtown.

The Simpson case was shaping up to be the ultimate Downtown case.  I
didn't know if Bill was up to the rough-and-tumble.  I didn't even know
if I was.  Of one thing, however, I was certain: Bill Hodgman had a gift
for evaluating the strengths and weaknesses in evidence.  Bill and I had
talked through a number of cases in the last year, and I had come to
admire his instincts.

I needed him.

His door was open, and I leaned in.  "Got a minute?"

"Sure, partner, come on in."

Bill took a seat behind his huge desk, framed by a postcard worthy
panorama of downtown L.A.  It was very luxurious by county standards.

It was even carpeted.

"Bill," I said, "remember how we've talked about wanting to try a case
together?"

He nodded.  I couldn't read his expression.

"How would you like to do Simpson with me?"

He smiled.

"I have been kind of anxious to get back into court," he said slowly. "I
don't know how my wife will take it, and I hate to miss my time with
Alec."

I knew what he meant.  When Bill had been trying Keating, I'd been
knee-deep in Bardo.  We'd find ourselves in the office on week ends
slaving away at our respective witness lists, and we'd commiserate about
how our cases were cutting into family time.  I remember him telling me
that his son, Alec, then four years old, was taking his absences hard.

But Bill was too intrigued by this once-in-a-lifetime case to let it
pass.  "Let me talk to my wife, see how she feels about it," he said
finally.  And we left it at that.

I don't know what went on in that conversation, but when Bill showed up
at my office the next day, he gave me the thumbs-up.  We went down to
Gil's office to get his blessing.  We received not only that but our
marching orders.

"I want you two to work as equals," said Gil.  "No first- or second
chair situation."

I didn't like that.  It wasn't that I felt competitive, but for
strategic reasons, every team needs a capo.  Otherwise, you lose too
much time negotiating over every little disagreement in approach.  I
also admit that it was disappointing to have Gil zing me like that.
Again.  I thought I'd hidden my feelings, but apparently not.  Bill
pulled me aside and said, "Marcia, it's your case.  I know what the
realities are."

And during the months to come, he was as good as his word.  Bill knew
someone had to lead.

We needed to move fast.  Shapiro was demanding that the preliminary
hearing be held within the time set by statute, ten days after the
arraignment.  That meant we would have to be ready to go within a week.
We knew that the media were gearing up to cover these hearings
extensively; they would be beaming testimony into the homes of our jury
pool.  Our office has an official policy about cameras in court rooms:
don't object to it.  So I had no choice in the matter.  This left no
room for the fumbles or rough spots that in normal circumstances are
routinely tolerated at an early stage of a case.  No more flying by the
seat of our pants.

I'd told Gil earlier in the week that we should assemble a team of
experts from our office to analyze the case a sort of war council.  That
way, deputies with different specialties could lend us their expertise
for formulating strategy.  Gil thought it was a good idea, and called a
meeting for Saturday, June 25.  On Friday, Gil and I hashed out who
should attend.  He first suggested Curt Hazel!, the head of the Narcotics
Unit.  Hazel! was an expert on search and seizure, and we needed someone
who would help us deal with problems arising from the search of
Simpson's house.

I also wanted to hear from Lydia Bodin, our expert on domestic violence;
she, I thought, might help us use Simpson's history to show that
Nicole's murder was premeditated, rather than an impulsive act of
passion.  Lydia would team with Scott Gordon, a deputy whose experience
in the Sex Crimes Division had led him on to a personal crusade against
spousal abuse.  He'd even drafted legislation on the issue.

To shore up the blood work, I wanted Lisa Kahn, the deputy who had given
me tutorials in DNA on that no-body case I'd done with Phil.  We still
didn't know if Simpson would try a mental defense, but if he did, I
wanted to have someone in the wings with medical training and Brian
Kelberg, whom I had briefly considered as a trial partner, would be
perfect.

Bill would be there, of course.  And I was happy when Gil said that
David should attend as well.

On Saturday morning, June 25, about fifteen deputies and brass all met
in the conference room next to Gil's office.  Most wore jeans and
workshirts, though I'd rejected my usual weekend attire of leggings,
Reeboks, and an oversized T-shirt in favor of slacks and a blouse. While
the clothes were casual, the atmosphere was tense.

"Go ahead, Marcia," said Gil, abruptly cutting off small talk.

"Brief us on what we have so far."

I laid it all out, beginning with the centerpiece of our case: blood.

That's what the Simpson case would be about.

Nicole's blood.

Ron's blood.

O.  J.  Simpson's blood.

Blood would tell the truth.  I was convinced it would convict.

"Here's how it breaks down," I began, speaking from notes I'd scribbled
on a yellow legal pad.  "The police lab did DNA testing on the blood
drops at Bundy leading away from the victims and they all come back to
Simpson.  The bloody shoe prints to the right of those drops are a size
twelve Simpson's size.  The blood on the Rock Rockingham glove seems to
be a mixture of Ron's and Nicole's blood, and possibly Simpson's.  We'll
send the samples to Cellmark for more sophisticated testing."

I glanced around the room to make sure I hadn't lost anybody.

Nope.

More results were coming in, I told them.  There was a bloody shoe print
on the driver's-side floorboard of the Bronco.  We were preserving it
for shoe-print comparison before we did the DNA testing.

The knit cap found between the victims at Bundy, I told them, was set to
be examined for hair and trace evidence, but nothing had been done on it
yet.

On the chalkboard mounted behind Gil's seat, I sketched a diagram of
Rockingham.  That's where Simpson parked the Bentley, I showed them.
Here's where Allan Park pulled his limo up to the gate.

And here's the back wall of Kato's guest house.

They began pelting me with questions:

When exactly did Simpson leave for the airport'

Where did Allan Park first see the black male walking toward the Howse?
could Kato not have seen him, too?

I could address some of these questions, but certainly not all of them.
When I didn't have an answer there would be an uncomfortable silence,
then more questions, with a slightly more aggressive tone.  In fact,
even though many of the people in this room were my friends, the
questioning at times was not entirely friendly.  It wasn't just that
everyone was feeling the pressure.  It wasn't just that the reputation
of our office was at stake.  Maybe they wanted not only to see where the
weak points lay, but to test me, to see if Marcia Clark could stand up
to a pummeling.

"Give me a break," I whispered to David when I finally got back to my
seat.

We had to make a decision.  What precise crime would we charge O.  J.
Simpson with?  Three options were open to us: murder one, are Games
which required establishing premeditation; murder two, for which we
would have to show intent to kill, although the killing could be on rash
impulse; or manslaughter, which meant demonstrating an intent to kill
mitigated by the heat of passion.  The crucial question is whether the
evidence shows a clear intent and decision to kill.  I felt that it most
certainly did.  You could not look at those photos of the murder scene
and think otherwise.

"I'd like to charge the defendant with two counts of murder in the first
degree," I said.

Not everyone agreed.

"You're looking at an uphill battle to ask a jury to tag O.  J.  Simpson
with anything," said Peter Bozanich.  Peter was director of Branch and
Area.  I respected Peter, who was among the best in sizing up the
strength of a case.

"You got him, there's no question about that," he said, in a resigned,
almost philosophical tone, "but the guy's a hero, and people aren't
going to want to drop the hammer on him."

Peter was right.  I knew it.  Hell, we all did.  But I felt that as a
matter of principle, we should ignore O.  J.  Simpson's celebrity in our
decision to charge.  A defendant, regardless of personal popularity,
should be held responsible for his acts.

Brian Kelberg felt that second-degree murder was the more legally
correct choice.  "I basically see this as a rage-type killing," he said.

"I think he did not go there planning to kill her."

"But what about the fact that he brought the knife, the gloves, and the
ski cap?" I countered.  "Not to mention the fact that he conveniently
had a flight to catch immediately afterward."

"I think he went there intending to scare her," Brian insisted.

"And when he saw Ron Goldman walk up, he became angry and things got out
of hand."

That didn't feel right to me.  Simpson had packed a knife with a blade
at least five inches long, along with cashmere-lined winter gloves and a
ski capin the middle of June.  This went beyond intent to scare.  It was
a plan to commit murder.  It may well have been that the food run
Simpson had taken with Kato was part of the planning, too.

It seemed out of character for him to dash out for fast food with a
house guest cum lackey.

"Remember," I told my colleagues, recalling what Kato had said about
that night, "Simpson had never done that before.  The whole thing has
the feeling of an alibi setup."

Gil looked to his two other top assistants, Frank Sundstedt and Sandy
Buttitta, who hadn't weighed in yet.

Frank was a big teddy bear of a guy with curly blond hair and a
mustache.  He was someone I'd grown to like and respect during my days
in management.  He really cared about the deputies and agonized like an
overly concerned father over decisions affecting their welfare.

"First at least, that's what it looks like to me," he replied.

Then everybody turned to Sandy.  She was a strong, no-nonsense
professional, the first woman to be appointed chief deputy.  At that
point, I'd had very little interaction with her, and had no idea what
she'd say.

"I think it's first-degree," she said.

Gil's silence was affirmation: we had a decision.

The case of Ron Goldman was a bit different.  Nicole was obviously the
intended target.  Goldman, it appeared, was a visitor who happened onto
the scene at the wrong moment.  His death could have been classified as
either first- or second-degree murder.  But I was pushing for
first-degree.  "Remember," I said, "the number and nature of his wounds
alone show premeditation." Everyone in the room understood what I meant:
under the law, premeditation cannot be measured in time.  It's there or
it's not, even if it occurs mere seconds before the crime.  The fact
that Ron's killer did not dispatch him with a single blow, but a series
of them, to me showed deliberate intent.

"Also," I continued, "it's reasonable to assume that Ron's murder was
not the rash impulse of a jealous ex-husband, but the calculated
elimination of a witness to Nicole's murder." That, of course, would
also justify a charge of murder one.

No one objected.  Most significant, Gil Garcetti once more tacitly
agreed.  There was a brief silence as we all recognized that the first
momentous decision in this case had been made.  We would charge Orenthal
James Simpson with two counts of murder one.

Next item on the agenda: strategy for the prelims.  The big question
concerned how much evidence to put on.  Normally, a preliminary hearing
is a bare-bones production.  The prosecutor submits just enough evidence
for a judge to find probable cause that a suspect should be bound over
for trial.  If you go beyond that, you're unnecessarily allowing the
defense early access to your case and your strategy;

the conventional wisdom says that you should make them work for it
through discovery motions.  But this case was anything but normal.

In effect, the defense already had access to our case: they were
entitled to receive the grand jury transcripts.  They'd be able to
prepare themselves for most of the witnesses we intended to call.  So
now that we'd lost the advantage of a bare-bones strategy, I argued, we
should present a relatively complete case that way, we'd not only make
sure that the public realized the strength of our case, but the
municipal judge would feel more confident binding Simpson over for
trial.

"Our evidence is strong," I told my colleagues.  "I think we should just
lay it out there for the world to see."

This meant that we would call the dog-bark and time-line witnesses for
sure.  And, of course, the blood witnesses.

Oh, God.  That meant Dennis Fung.

"We'll need to do some remedial work with the criminalists," I mumbled,
shuddering slightly at the prospect of watching Fung shuffle through his
reports in front of millions of viewers.  Still, he had collected the
evidence.  I'd have to spend some serious prep time to whip him into
shape before the prelim.  But there was no choice but to put him on.

Collin was another matter.  I had confidence that Collin would turn out
to be a pretty good witness at trial.  (And, indeed, he was.) In the
meantime, however, he needed some prep time to get down the lengthy
technical explanations of DNA.  I felt it would be better all around to
hold off on DNA testimony until trial, when we could put on the
sophisticated results from Cellmark.  In the meantime, I suggested to my
comrades, why not go with more conventional tests?  I knew the person to
do them.

"Think Special Investigations would let loose of Greg Matheson?" I
asked, looking around the room.

Greg was a highly esteemed serologist at the Special Investigations
Division.  He was scrupulously honest, and I knew from his previous
appearances on the witness stand that if we used him to augment Fung, he
could present the evidence in a simple, straightforward way.

He could also fend off attacks on cross without becoming irritable.

Someone asked whether Greg's tests might use up too much of our blood
samples.  Good point.  If we tested all the blood drops taken from Bundy
for the prelims, we'd consume too much to allow for both the prosecution
and the defense to do separate tests later on.  And I wanted to have
enough for both sides to do their own tests.  Maybe it was a throwback
to my days at the defense bar, but I always felt the prosecution should
welcome independent verification of its lab work.

If their results supported ours, we'd be golden.

Brian Kelberg offered a suggestion: "Why don't you have Greg test just
one of the blood drops at Bundy?" he asked.  "A single drop on the trail
would be enough to establish identity for the prelim.  And if those
drops are Simpson's, he's made."

I saw nods all around the room.  I scrawled a note to pull whatever
strings necessary to get Greg Matheson assigned to us.

For the time being, we decided to hold off on one major category of
evidence: DV, domestic violence.  We all agreed that the physical
evidence alone demonstrated enough premeditation to warrant murder in
the first.  That meant we did not necessarily have to introduce any
battering incidents to support the charge.  And to tell you the truth, I
was just as glad to stay clear of this issue for the moment.  The only
way DV might be thrust to the fore was if Simpson attempted to plead
insanity, or tried to float some other kind of heat-of-passion defense.

In that case, we had to be ready to refute.  Lydia Bodin authoritatively
cited several cases in which murders that arose from violent domestic
quarrels were nevertheless prosecuted at first-degree.  So even if
Simpson tried to worm his way out of this by claiming temporary
insanity, we could still charge murder one.

Early the following week, we served a second warrant on Rockingham.

I began to write this one myself, but thankfully, Curt Hazel! took over
to make sure that it was airtight.  This was an abundance of War Games,
but caution was necessary.  By now, of course, I had had an opportunity
to read carefully through Phil's affidavit in support of the first
warrant served on Rockingham the morning of June 13, and was distressed
to find several glaring errors.

Phil had written, for instance, that Simpson had left town unexpectedly
, when, in fact, his trip to Chicago had been planned in advance.  Phil
had apparently gotten that misimpression as the result of asking Kato
where Simpson was.  Kato had passed him off to Arnelle, who'd said
something to the effect of "Isn't he here?"

Phil had described the stain on the Bronco's door handle as "human"
blood.  But the criminalist had only done a presumptive test, which
showed the presence of blood.  In theory, it could have been animal
blood.

The most serious thing I saw in that warrant, however, was not an error,
but an omission.  For whatever reason, Phil had failed to put in the
affidavit that they'd had to leap the wall that morning to unlock the
gate.  He certainly hadn't mentioned it to me when he'd called me for
advice on the warrant.  I was seriously annoyed by this.

Even though the warrantless entry seemed, under the circum stances,
justified, the omission of it on the affidavit could serve to seriously
undermine his credibility.

Both Curt and I knew that come the preliminary hearing, we would end up
doing battle to justify the cops' entry and defend their integrity.  For
now, I was content to see that the second warrant was done right.  I
wanted a thorough search for the items we now knew Simpson had on the
night of the murders.  Principally, we were looking for the knife from
Ross Cutlery and the dark sweats Kato had seen Simpson wearing during
the early evening, neither of which had turned up.  I also wanted to
search the Bentley.  If we found no blood there, it would indicate that
Simpson had not wounded his finger until after the outing to McDonald's;
that, in turn, would place the cut closer to the time of the murders.

The five of us Tom, Phil, David, Bill, and Iarrived in a single car at
Rockingham on the morning of Tuesday, June 28.  Reporters blocked the
gates.  Overhead, I could hear the thrumb of copters.  The scene looked
like something out of Apocalypse Now.

"Did you guys request those?" I asked Tom.

"Incredible," he agreed.  But neither of us knew exactly how to proceed.

After a moment of silence, David looked at me.  I could tell what he was
thinking.  This piece of evidence lay in a gray area.  The letter was
clearly not specified in the warrant.  There had been no way we could
have been aware of its existence.  And yet we were standing with a piece
of evidence that went clearly to the defendant's state of mind during
the days before the murders.

"I think the law is on our side," David said finally.  "I think we can
take it."

So we did.

Months later, at trial, the trial judge would thwart our first attempts
to present the IRS letter as evidence.  Because it was not mentioned in
the affidavit to the search warrant, he ruled, it was inadmissible.  He
was right, of course.  But by then I'd figured out a lawful way to
procure that document.  I promptly sent Attorney Taft a subpoena for the
letter.

I was not losing that letter.  No way.  No how.

I set about our preparations for the prelims with my usual anal
retentive devotion, but it was like trying to neatly crayon in one of my
sons' coloring books while riding in a bumper car.  I'd just get up to
speed, and I'd be knocked outside the lines.

Case in point: it took a lot of phone calls and a lot of politicking
before I finally persuaded SID to assign Greg Matheson to do the initial
blood analysis to determine whether the blood might be Simp son's.

Conventional tests will usually narrow the number of possible donors to
only 10 to 15 percent of the population.  In a city like Los Angeles,
with nearly three and a half million people, that's still a whopping
450,000 candidates.

But we caught a real break.  The blood type that came up on the drop at
Bundy was fairly rare: it could have come from only one half of one
percent of the population.  Only one person in 200 had that blood type.
And Orenthal James Simpson was one of them.  Yes!

I carried my good news down to a meeting with Bill and some of the
brass. But before I could utter a word, I was stopped dead in my tracks.

"I've got rather disturbing news," Bill said to me.  "The knife salesman
sold his story to the National Enquirer."

Jose Camacho was the salesman who'd told the cops how Simpson had
purchased a stiletto only days before the murder.  He had testified
before the grand jury, where he'd come off as a pretty decent guy.

Now he'd pulled a Shively?  Oh, damn!  How many times had we told our
witnesses to stay away from the media?  We'd even admonished them not to
talk to anybody, because in this overheated atmosphere you couldn't
predict who might sell a story heard secondhand.  But what good were our
threats?  If someone wants to talk to a reporter, there is no legal way
to stop him.  When the hand holding the mike is dangling a $10,000 check
in front of a witness who barely makes minimum wage, it's easy to see
how abstractions like justice and integrity can get shoved aside.

Camacho's interview-for-profit now limited our options.  Technically, we
could try to prosecute him for contempt.  Unlike Shively, Camacho had
sold his story after testifying before the grand jury, where he was
instructed not to discuss his testimony with anyone.  But I doubted that
we could get a contempt ruling to stick.  Camacho was a Spanish-speaking
witness; he was already setting the stage to claim that he did not
understand the admonition.  Which was nonsense.  Camadho had felt
confident enough of his English to testify without an inter preter at
the grand jury hearing.  In fact, his English was excellent.

Was he ruined as a witness?  Anything he said on the stand would be
tainted by the fact that he'd sold his story, a story that was worth
more to the tabloids if it incriminated Simpson.  If we had the knife
itself, it might have been worth our effort to overcome this taint.  But
we didn't have the knife.

"I say we don't call him," I blurted.  I looked around the table for
reaction.  Gil, as usual, was hard to read.  Dan Murphy, one of the
D.A."s top assistants, was leaning back in his chair, eyes turned to the
ceiling, hand to cheek.  Frank Sundstedt was slumped into his chair,
hands folded together against his chesthis characteristic contemplative
pose.

"Trial's a long way away," Frank said finally.  "By the time you start
picking a jury, this story won't even be a blip on the screen.  If we do
turn up the knife, Camacho's testimony will be important.  I think we
ought to preserve it, just in case he takes a powder."

Frank had a point.  If a witness testifies at a preliminary hearing,
that testimony is usually admissible at trial even if the witness has
absconded.  That would be useful if by some chance we found the knife.
Gil agreed: we'd put Camacho on.  I understood their reasoning, but I
doubted it would be worth the nasty hits we were going to take for
putting on such a damaged witness.  More specifically the hits I was
going to take.  It was one thing to agree in principle around a
conference table.  But somebody has to stand up there with a straight
face and present this opportunist as a witness for the People.

Our whole team worked like maniacs preparing for the prelims.  I had no
time to worry about how big the case was getting; it was all I could do
to gather and organize all the material.  After all, we had a week to do
a job that normally we'd have had three months to complete.  The day
before the prelims were set to start was especially hectic.  Shapiro
filed his motion to suppress the evidence seized at Rockingham before
Phil tried to get a warrant.  We'd expected this, but just not so soon.

So we got a judge to postpone testimony on the motion until we had some
time to prepare.  Then we went back upstairs to work.

We stayed until after nine on the eve of the prelims.  I was sure that
most of the press would have retreated to their respective hotel bars by
then.  Instead, as Suzanne, Bill, and I walked out the back of the CCB,
we saw that the parking lot was more crowded than a tailgate party on
homecoming weekend.  For the past week, it had been jammed with vans,
satellite dishes, and lunch wagons.  ABC, NBC, CBS had all erected
scaffolds that resembled medieval assault engines.  The correspondents
themselves, however, displayed the more modern enthusiasm of fans
vamping behind the bleachers before the big game.

Suzanne wasn't surprised: for the past few days her office had been
handling hundreds of calls every hour, from every corner of the world.

Just about all the callers, of course, wanted interviews.

Out of nowhere, a reporter with a video cameraman behind him shoved a
mike in our faces.

"How do you feel tonight?  Are you ready for court tomorrow?" he asked.

Bill tossed off an innocuous one-liner as we hustled out of range.

I'd begun to realize that no matter what happened in court, the sheer
amplitude of media coverage would distort these proceedings like never
before.  It made me feel out of control, angry and helpless.

I tried not to dwell on those things the next morning as I scrambled to
get Matt ready for school and organize my thoughts at the same time.
Just do what you always do, I told myself.  I would repeat that many
times to myself in the next year.

I arrived on time that morning.  I believe I was even early.  Bill and I
had witnesses stashed all over the eighteenth floor and we ducked in and
out of offices, touching base with them, reassuring them.  Our last stop
was the room used for press conferences.  When Bill opened the door, I
found myself face-to-face with a roomful of strangers.  They were tense,
their faces expectant.  The victims' families.

Usually, I meet with the next of kin almost immediately after I get a
case.  I go out to their homes or they come in to the office to meet me.
Wherever they feel more comfortable.  It's important to make that
connection right from the start.  The unusual circumstances of this case
had caused me to proceed more cautiously.  For most of the first week
after the murders, the case was not officially mine.  It was a bad idea,
I thought, to make contact and set about establishing rapport with these
deeply hurt people when there was a chance that I might not be assigned
to the case for keeps.  The District Attorney's office should convey to
a victim's family the feeling of strength and certainty.  And that-could
not happen if they were being passed around from deputy to deputy.

The cops had interviewed them, of course.  Gil had spoken to them to
convey his sympathy.  They had been commended to the care of our
"victims' coordinator," whose job it is to accompany them to court and
answer their questions.  I had had brief phone conversations with the
Browns and the Goldmans several days earlier, but only to introduce
myself.  I was hoping they would forgive the awkwardness of meeting
under these circumstances.

On one side of the room were the Browns, awesomely handsome and erect.
Lou and Juditha, flanked by Denise, Dominique, and Tanya.  The suspect
was their son-in-law, their brother-in-law.  Exactly what stance they
were taking toward him was still unclear to me.  I found them very hard
to read.

On the other side of the room stood the Goldmans.  Ron's father, Fred;
his stepmother, Patti; and, of course, Kim, a reed-thin girl whose
pretty features were red and swollen from crying.  Looking at her made
me recall the pang I'd felt upon seeing her brother's face for the first
time, in the coroner's photos.

"What's going to happen now?" asked Patti Goldman.  She was a petite
woman with large, lovely green eyes.  Fred stood with his arm draped
around her protectively.

"We'll have some motions to begin with, nothing major," I said.

"The defense has filed a motion to suppress evidence, but that will be
heard later during the hearing."

"Suppress the evidence!" Denise Brown snapped.  "What do you  mean?"

I could understand why this idea offended her.  She would later express
her concerns to reporters in even stronger terms.  "If he's innocent,"
she would ask, "why does he want to suppress evidence?"

"It's a motion we see a lot," I explained.  "The defense claims the
police got evidence illegally, and they've asked the judge to throw it
out.  We're prepared for that and I don't think there's any chance that
the judge will grant it."

We talked a little more about the sorts of things that the defense was
likely to do.  No matter how hurtful it might seem, I told them, they
shouldn't take it personally.

Easy for me to say.

At 9:10 A.M.  on June 30, 1994, Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell bade us
good morning and looked over her courtroom.  It was packed the hottest
ticket in Hollywood.  Only ten seats were available to the general
public, and the media folk had to scramble to secure one of the
twenty-five seats set aside for them.  But no one had to miss a thing:

the best seat in the house was reserved for the cameras.

I'd never appeared before Judge Kennedy-Powell before, but I'd actually
worked with her in the eighties when she was deputy D.A.  I knew her as
a hardworking, conscientious prosecutor who took her job very seriously.
She looked at ease on the bench.  But we couldn't get down to business.
Someone was missing.

"Well, I guess the defendant is not out yet," Judge Kennedy Powell
observed.

"This is the quietest courtroom I've ever been in, Your Honor," Shapiro
quipped, trying to fill the dead time.

"I don't know how long that will remain, but we'll see," Kennedy Powell
smiled.

At last, the door opened.  The courtroom went silent.  O.  J.  Simp son
strode in, impeccably dressed, looking surprisingly fit.  What an
impressive transformation from the bedraggled, confused defendant who
had appeared for his arraignment.  His new role was the O.J.  You Know
and Love, Falsely Accused.  And no Shakespearean actor would play this
one better.

Judge Kennedy-Powell asked the record to reflect the defendant's
presence and asked counsel to present themselves.

"Marcia Clark for the People," I began.

It's hard to believe that my first act that day was arguing about the
hairs on O.  J.  Simpson's head.  But it's true.

We'd requested hair samples from Simpson, so we could deter mine whether
his matched several found at the crime scene.  Shapiro had offered us a
ludicrously insufficient number: three.  It was up to me to argue first.

Oblivious to the hype and cameras, I launched right into my reasoning.

This was my job; I had been doing it for years.  Carefully, I explained
how we needed samples from various parts of the head; the usual quantity
is a hundred hairs.  But only the criminalist taking the samples could
determine how many were needed.

"Mr.  Shapiro?" asked Judge Kennedy-Powell.

"Your Honor," he said soberly, "according to Dr.  Henry Lee, our chief
criminalist, who is the head of the Department of Criminology in
Connecticut, he tells us one to three hairs are sufficient."

Judge Kennedy-Powell mused aloud that she had never seen a case where
the prosecution was limited to a sample of three hairs.  But then she
faltered.  She would not let us take more than ten hairs unless we could
present expert witnesses who could establish how many hairs were
required for a valid sample.

I was ready.  Our expert was Michele Kestler, director of the SID crime
lab.  She backed me up in saying that a case like this commonly required
seventy-five to one hundred strands.

On cross-examination, Shapiro immediately assumed the glacial pace that
would become his trademark.  He insisted upon a detailed recitation of
Kestler's credentials, her resume, her experience everything but what
she ate for breakfast.  He had her recite all sorts of minutiae about
her profession and the specific samples of blood and hair she had
received from our searches.  Shapiro again cited the source for his
contention that only a single hair was required.

"Are you familiar with a gentleman by the name of Dr.  Henry Lee?" he
asked her.

She was.

"Have you seen his fifty-page curriculum vitae lately?" he asked.

Give me a break.  And then Shapiro asked Kestler what sources she had
relied upon for her opinion that seventy-five to one hundred hairs were
required.

Michele produced a book co-authored and edited by none other than Dr.
Henry Lee.

Judge Powell gave us our hundred hairs.

I savored that small victory even as I realized what this skirmish
meant: nothing in this case would be conceded without interminable
bickering.

Bill, bless his heart, had agreed to put on the knife salesman, Jose
Camacho.  It was predictably painful.  Bill walked Camacho through a
straightforward account of selling the stiletto to Simpson the morning
of May 9.  Then Bill fronted the Enquirer business.  The clerk seemed
like a harmless little man.  I don't think he was a liar, just a
sellout.

How he would have looked in the eyes of a jury, I don't know.  That
question was rendered academic by the advent of a mysterious manila
envelope.

It seemingly materialized from thin air.  One minute, in the middle of
Camacho's testimony, Judge Kennedy-Powell left the court room, and the
next minute she was back, producing with a flourish a yellow manila
envelope containing some sort of solid object.  She'd received.  she
said, an envelope containing evidence collected by a special Master
appointed at the defense's request.  She intended to open it.

Shapiro shot out of his seat with an objection.  I chimed in with one of
my Own.  You didn't have to be Hercule Poirot to guess what was Seadd
inside: a knife.  But I couldn't be sure.  And for months down the road
I wouldn't be sure.  Periodically, we would file motions to compel the
defense to reveal the contents.  The defense would object and our motion
would be tabled.  This happened time and again.

We were well into the criminal trial by the time we were allowed to
learn that the envelope did indeed contain a stiletto.  The report said
that it had been discovered by Jason Simpson in the medicine cabinet of
Simpson's bathroom.  Then it had been turned over by Shapiro to a
special court master, who gave it to Judge Kennedy Powell.

(Shapiro was unhappy that she introduced it at the prelim apparently
he'd been hoping to blindside us with this evidence during the trial.
The knife's discovery was supposedly made after our second search of
June 28.

I never believed the medicine cabinet story.  I'd been at Rockingham all
through the second search, and the rooms had been taken to pieces by
officers looking specifically for that knife.  But the question was
largely academic.  The knife didn't matter.  It is too easy to boil a
knife to destroy traces of blood and tissue.  It is not difficult to go
out and buy a duplicate.  No coroner could say with certainty that it
was the same weapon.  Knives, unlike guns, do not smoke: they do not
proof-positive evidentiary calling cards.  If I'd really pressed to get
it into evidence, however, I'm sure that all I would have gotten was a
sparkling-clean knife, property of a known collector of weapons.  In the
end we let the stiletto rest in its eight-by-eleven manila envelope
where, I believe, it remains today.

Eventually, I imagine, O.  J.  Simpson will reclaim it and auction it
off.

After the knife interlude, we were finally able to begin proving that it
was sufficient cause to charge our defendant.  We clicked through the
civilian witnesses briskly.  Shapiro's cross-examination was
ineffective, so there was little or no cleanup needed on redirect.

Even single witness helped our presentation.

the key witness was Steven Schwab, the dog walker who had first
encountered Nicole's Akita running loose in the neighborhood.  We hadn't
been able to get him up before the grand jury, but his testimony was
crucial to our time line.  If the murders were committed after eleven
o'clock, Simpson would be home free: he couldn't possibly have done the
killing and hooked up with the limo driver in time.  The problem was
that the first time Schwab talked to police, he said that he believed
he'd first seen the Akita around 11:15 P.M.  This statement was made to
the cops at about five on the morning after the murders;

Schwab had been awakened from a deep sleep and was slightly confused
about times.  Upon more clear-minded reflection, however, he realized
he'd actually seen the dog at about 10:45.

Usually a prior inconsistent statement by a witness is a credibility
killer.  At best, you're left doubting the witness's memory; at worst,
his honesty.  But Schwab was so sturdily forthright you just knew he'd
made an honest mistake.  He endeared himself to the spectators in court
by recounting the process by which he had verified in his own mind the
Akita encounter.  He had an unvarying nightly routine, centered on old
reruns.  A cable network showed his favorites and he always watched the
Dick Van Dyke Show, which ended at 10:30.  Then he would take his dog
for a half-hour walk, returning in time to catch the opening minutes of
the eleven P.M.  showing of Mary Tyler Moore.

Such banal details mark all of our daily lives and give our days some
predictability.  Schwab's recitation drew laughter, but no one could
doubt the truth of his testimony.  He had seen the dog at 10:45, not
11:15.  Our time line was secure.

Pablo Fenjves was my essential "dog bark" witness, the neighbor who
heard the Akita's "plaintive wail" starting at 10:15 P.M.  His
description of that sound lodged in the memories of reporters and public
alike.  Taken in tandem with Sukru Boztepe and Bettina Ras mussen's
solemn, emotional account of finding Nicole's body, it seemed to cast an
eerie spell over the gallery.  We were still in that state of morbid
dislocation when Judge Kennedy-Powell dismissed us for the Fourth of
July weekend.

I spent very little of that weekend at home.  I worked all day Saturday.
And on Sunday morning I drove to Bundy, to the little condo. For the
past few days I been increasingly anxious to scope out the condo.  I had
not been to Bundy since the morning after the murders, and then I'd been
detained at the perimeter, like a bystander. The condo's various
appointments the security gate, the dog leap stairway, the landing where
Nicole lay, the fenced-in corner where Ron was killed had all become
part of the public's collective consciousness. Yet to me they remained
abstractions.

I met up with Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter at the rear of the condo.
Bill was there, too, as were Patti Jo and several officers from
Robbery/Homicide.  We were all silently relieved that the media hadn't
trailed us.

We'd "parked in the lane at the rear of the condo, when Lieutenant John
Rogers noticed blood drops of blood, on the back gate.  What the hell?
We stopped dead in our tracks and looked at one another.  Could Dennis
Fung have overlooked this crucial evidence on the morning of the murder?
We stopped everything and called for a criminalist.

The realization that we'd probably just stumbled upon another incredible
fuckup cast a pall over the party.

Tom led us down the walkway toward the front of the condo.  I could
still see some of the blood droplets and the faint outlines of the
bloody shoe prints, mere ghosts of the images I'd seen countless times
in photographs.  What had it been like, I wondered, for the officers
that night to see all this evidence lying before them?  I'd never seen
so much left at a crime scene.  This murder was obviously the work of an
amateur.

At the front of the condo I stood on the upper landing and looked down
on the area enclosed by the front gate.  It was cramped and dark, even
smaller than photos could convey.  I turned to Bill and said, "The jury
has to see this.  When they realize how small it is, they'll under stand
how impossible it would be for two men to have fit in here to commit the
murders."

"Yeah, no kidding," he replied, clearly as moved as I was.  Then, ever
practical: "We'll have to get a motion going on it."

We'd been told by Nicole's friend Ron Hardy that the intercom
controlling the lock on the front gate was broken.  If Nicole had wanted
to let a visitor in, she'd had to go down and open the gate manually. If
this was true, it was easy to conceive how Nicole and Ron were both at
the front gate when Simpson moved in for the kill.

He could have attacked Nicole from behind, hitting her on the head,
making a quick cut to her neck, and slamming her into the stair case
wall.  She would have been knocked unconscious long enough for him to
deal with Ron before going back to dispatch her with the coup de grace.

Frankly, I favored a slightly different scenario: Nicole Simpson hears
something outside the sounds made by her ax-husband lurking in the
shrubs around her condo.  Nicole steps outside to investigate.

She ventures down to the front gate, looks down the walkway into the
shrubbery to the north.  Nothing.  And then, when she turns to mount the
steps, to reenter the house where her children are sleeping, she walks
right into him, smack into the man who she had vowed would no longer be
the center of her life.  He is dressed for silent combat dark sweats,
knit cap, gloves.  He has come to take her life.

Somewhere during this time, Ron Goldman, on his innocuous errand,
appears.  Perhaps Ron has come up the walk while Simpson is in the midst
of his stiletto melee.  Why doesn't he flee?  Perhaps he has come too
close and can't escape.  Or perhaps and this seemed a stronger
likelihood Ron feels compelled to come to Nicole's aid.  He is about to
engage in an act of selflessness that will lead to his death.

In either case, my strong feeling is that Simpson did not have to
confront both of his victims simultaneously.

He murders first one, then the other.

The blood pools on the sidewalk.

The dog howls.

How many minutes for each?

How many times on other cases had I worked through this same gory
calculus?  You can never quite capture the factor of pain.

Like Rockingham, the interior of Nicole's condo at Bundy was white with
some muted pastels for accent.  It had the tranquil, static quality of a
photograph from [Iouse Beautiful.  The kitchen was tidy, nothing out of
place.  In the center of the sunken living room sat a large square
table.  On it stood several candles, which had been burning on the night
of the murders.  The spent wax had dried in a pool around them.

But everything in that room seemed like wax.  Cold.  Solid.  Lifeless..

Nicole's bedroom was done in the same white and pastels, but the room
felt anything but tranquil.  Attached to one of the posts of her large
four-poster bed was a pair of toy handcuffs.  Something else interested
me about the bed: the blankets and sheets.  They lay in a rumpled heap,
just as they'd been found by the first officer on the scene.  Until now
I had left open the possibility that Nicole had sexual designs on Ron.
If so, I figured it had been a spontaneous idea, occurring after Juditha
Brown lost her glasses.  But the sight of Nicole's messy bed made me
doubt this theory.  What woman plans an intimate night with a man and
leaves the bed unmade?  You just wouldn't do it.  Not even if you
intended to limit your fooling around to the couch downstairs.

Ordinarily I would not have allowed myself such intimate speculations
about a woman I'd never met.  And yet a couple of times of late I'd been
surprised by a sense of connection to Nicole.  Looking back on it, I
don't know why it seemed so improbable that I might identify with a
woman who Divas taking her first toddler steps into the world after
divorce.  And yet: it seemed strange to me at the time.  The sight of
Nicole's chaotic bed and the cold dead wax of her candles chilled me.

So did the memory of her pale, bloodless face.  And so I did what I
always do with emotions too painful to confront: I pushed them to the
back of my mind.

Things continued going well for us the following week.  The limo driver,
Allan Park, was concise and unimpeachably credible.  I even managed to
extract Some new information from the eternally stumbling Kato Kaelin.
LIis recounting of Simpson's activities that night preserved our time
line, and the description he gave of the thumps outside his cottage and
the confusion around Simpson's attempt to hook up with the limo driver
made a clear pitch to the judge and to millions on television that
something undeniably suspicious was afoot at the Rockingham residence.

Then, late on Tuesday, July 5, we began arguments on the defense's
search-and seizure motion.  A lot was riding on it.  The main target, of
course, was the Rockingham glove.  Shapiro would have tried any kind of
crazy Stunt to keep that out of the record.  At the heart of his
argument to suppress was the allegation that all four officers went out
to Rockingham that morning believing Simpson was a suspect.  In that
case, they might have needed a warrant to enter the grounds.

By now I'd looked thoroughly into these allegations.  In follow-up
interviews, all four detectives led me through their individual
movements during the early-morning hours of June 13.  I'd read all of
their reports and made notes on my informal conversations with each of
them.

What I heard was encouraging: the four were acting under official orders
to make a humanitarian notification and that in itself went a good
distance toward discrediting the defense's claim.  In murder cases, you
always try to notify the next of kin personally.  Sometimes cops will
drive two hours to make the contact.  And when the case involves a
celebrity, there's even more urgency you don't want the first
notification to come from the media.

The officers had just come from a scene where two victims had been
savagely slain.  Simpson's two young children had been roused from their
beds at Bundy and were at West L.A.  Station waiting for their father or
some other member of the family to pick them up.

Where was he?  Was he all right?  The uncertainty mounted when they
reached Rockingham and rang the buzzer at the Ashford gate.  No answer.
For nearly ten minutes, no reply.

Finally, Ron Phillips got Simpson's phone number from the private
security service.  He called it on his cell phone, letting it ring over
and over again.  No response.  The detectives fell back to try and
figure out what kind of situation they had.  It didn't feel right that
the place should be deserted at 5:30 in the morning.  Especially
considering that the lights were on and cars were in the driveway.

They were reviewing their options when Mark Fuhrman walked down to the
white Ford Bronco parked just outside the Rockingham gate.  The way it
was parked, rear wheels jutting out from the curb, struck him as odd. He
pulled out his penlight and began to examine the vehicle more closely. A
package in the cargo area was addressed to Orenthal Productions. Fuhrman
moved around the car with his pen light and when he came to the driver's
door he stopped.  On the clean surface he noticed a tiny dark spot.  He
called Phil over.  They both agreed: it looked like blood.

There was a real possibility that someone was in danger.  Their to
choices: leave and get a search warrant, in which case precious minutes
would be lost, or go in right away and hope they weren't too late.

Everything spelled urgency.  Phil decided to go in.  He asked Mark, who
was the youngest and fittest of the four, to climb over the wall and
open the gate.  Fuhrman did so and opened the gate from inside.

The detectives knocked on the front door and got no answer, so they went
to the back of the house, fanning their flashlights around the pool area
looking for signs of disturbance or more victims.  Nothing.

I asked all the cops whether they'd done a thorough search of the
grounds waded through shrubbery or gone inside the pool house.  They all
told me no.  That wasn't their goal.  They were looking for bodies or
for someone who could tell them how to reach O.  J.  Simpson.

When they found Kato Kaelin and Arnelle Simpson in their respective
guest houses, they learned that Simpson wasn't there.  Mark told me how
he and Ron Phillips had approached the first of the guest roofing at the
back of the house.  Ron looked through the glass door and saw someone on
the bed.  When they knocked, a white man in his thirties came to the
door.  He appeared dazed and confused.

I laughed to myself when I heard this.  Kato always seemed that way.
Mark had shone a penlight into his eyes to see if he appeared to be
under the influence of drugs.  Not visibly.  Mark then checked his
clothes and boots for blood.  Clearly, Mark, at least, considered him a
potential suspect.  Kato told Mark Furhman about the thump on the wall.
When Mark went outside to investigate, he saw a small lump, barely
visible, on the ground.  As he drew nearer, the lump began to take the
shape of a glove.  Earlier that morning, he'd seen a glove lying on the
ground between the victims at Bundy.  Was this its mate?

Until that point, no one inside the house had been searching for
evidence.  Only when Mark returned to tell them what he'd found did that
change.  Fuhrman escorted the others to the site, one by one.  By the
time it was Phil's turn, the sky had lightened so that he was able to
see without the aid of a flashlight.  As he looked toward the Bronco
parked just outside the Rockingham gate, he noticed spots on the
cobblestoned driveway.  He moved for a closer look.  Again, blood.

The drops stretched between the Bronco and the front door.

That was enough for Phil.  He declared Rockingham a crime scene and
called for a criminalist.  Shortly after that, he left to prepare the
warrant.

The big question seemed to be whether Vannatter, Lange, Fuhr man' and
Phillips had gone to Rockingham early that morning to notify Simpson or
to investigate him.  Believe me, I grilled Phil with plenty of hard
questions.

You're tellin me straight that you didn't think that Simpson might be a
suspect when you went out there?"

Phil Was unshakable.  All that he would say was that Simpson was a
potential suspect," just like everyone else who had come in contact with
the victim.  He was not an actual suspect, meaning they had no actual
evidence linking him to the murders.

We took Mark and Ron along so they could stay with him, get his kids At
the station, and calm him down when we went back to the crime scene," he
insisted.

Yeah, I know," I said.  "But really, Phil, didn't you consider him a
suspect after Mark told you he'd been out to the place before?"

This was one aspect of the case that puzzled me.  Back in the mid
eighties, Then he was still a patrolman, Mark Fuhrman had been called
out to 360 North Rockingham for some unspecified family-dispute call
This was a fact that he apparently had confided in his superior, Ron
Phillips, on the morning of June 13.  Ron, in turn, told Phil, who
professed not to know quite what to make of it.  Later I would receive,
among documents sent over by the City Attorney's office, the copy of a
letter Furman had written at that office's request to shore up its 1989
battery case against Simpson.  In the letter, Mark had mentioned how
he'd come upon O.  J.  Simpson pacing in his driveway.  Nicole sat on
the hood of a Mercedes-Benz, its windshield shattered, apparently by
Simpson wielding a baseball bat.  When Fuhrman inquired as to what had
happened, Simpson replied, "I broke the windshield .  .  .  it's mine
there's no trouble here." Fuhrman had asked Nicole if she'd wanted to
make a report, and she'd said no.

The Most curious part of the letter was its closing: "It seems odd to
remember such an event, but it is not every day that you respond to a
celebrity is home for a family dispute.  For dhis reason this incident
was indelibly Pressed in my memory."

This Squared perfectly widh the Mark Fuhrman I had seen admiring the
bronze statue of Simpson on the morning of June 13.  Clearly, Fuhrman
adored the Juice and was not about to arrest him if he didn't have to.
Still, didn't the mere fact that Fuhrman knew of prior domestic violence
between the Simpsons color the cops' thinking about Simpson as a suspect
on the morning dhey left Bundy for Rockingham?

Frankly, all I Member was him saying he'd been there a long time ago and
it may have involved domestic violence.  It was a passing remark and it
didn't mean much at the time.  A call from ten years ago Sure didn't add
up to what we saw at Bundy."

Do I think Phil was naive?  Yes.  Do I think he was lying?  No That
conviction grows stranger as time wears on.  What you had in dhis
Situation was four Cops who, on one hand, worshiped O. J.  Simpson and
on the other, were seriously shaken by the mayhem at Bundy.  I believe
in my heart that they were actually resisting the idea that the Juice
could have caused this horror.

Everything about the situation bore out their story They'd left without
so much as a whisper to anyone to advance the investigation. They hadn't
even called the coroner.  Why?  They thought they'd be right back. Their
actions at Rockingham were also consistent with their story.  One over
the wall, they'd done nothing more than checked the grounds with their
flashlights, looking for other victims, until they reached Kato.  When
Arnelle let them into the house, They waited as she tried to locate her
father.  They didn't so much as open a drawer in all that tirade.  They
didn't venture upstairs.  How did that conform with the notion that
they'd come to Rockingham to grab their number-one suspect?  It didn't.

As a witness in the preliminary hearings, Mark Fuhrman was simply
splendid.  He remained poised and patient in the face of defense
attorney Gerald Uelmen's long-winded cross.  He sounded like a nobel
cop.

The public has long since forgotten this fact, but the press had begun
lionizing Fuhrman even before he left the courtroom.  They followed him
down the corridor, clamoring for soiled bites.  As I watched this scene
unfold, I had an uneasy feeling.  Now I know why.  I've come to
recognize reflexive adulation as the kiss of death.

Suddenly Mark turned and waved off the reporters.  He looked my way and
motioned me over.  We pulled away from the crowd.

"I've got to talk to you," he said urgently.  "But this has to remain
confidential.  I can't tell anyone but you."

What I thought, could be so damned urgent?  I was hip-deep in motions
and had no time for distractions.

"Can't it wait?"

"No I've got to tell you now, he replied.  We sat down on one of the
benches that lined the court hallways.  ' Sitting beside him, I glanced
conspicuously at my watch

"Marcia, you have to know about this Because the press is going to pick
it up any minute," he continued.  A long time ago, I thought I wanted to
leave the force.  I was strung out over my divorce and feeling burnt
out.  I put in for a stress disability claim There's a file with some
Shrink's reports in it.  Mine claimed I said things that I never said.

He got it all wrong.  I tried to get them to take it out, but I
couldn't.

When the press gets hold of it, they'll smear me to kingdom come "

"Well, what exactly did you say ù ù ù or did he claim you said?" I asked
I was hoping this was a tempest in a teapot.  It is not an uncommon
thing for government employees, especially cops, to try and get out
early, with their pensions and benefits intact, on a stress disability
claim.  They would invent stories about how they were falling apart,
Couldn't handle the job, were suicidal The claims were often nonsense.
And everybody knew it.  ''Anyway I don't know how anyone can get a
shrink's files, I told him, "I thought that stuff was privileged."

"I don't know, but I know they will, he insisted.  "I just wanted you to
be prepared."

At the time, Marks concern Sounded to me like paranoia.  I couldn't
imagine what would be in those reports that would be so awful nor could
I understand how it could all become public knowledge e as easily as he
implied.  As for being prepared, Mark was not helping me out with
specifics.  Once I got clear of the prelims, I would have to get that
file myself.  Certainly Mark could request it.  For the moment, however,
I wanted reassurance on one point only

"Mark," I asked slowly, "is there anything in that file that would
affect the truth of what you said on the witness stand?  Is your
testimony all accurate?"

"Oh, absolutely," he told me.  "This has nothing to do with this case at
all.  That stuff was a long time ago."

I've been asked a million times since why I didn't know all about Mark
Fuhrman and his disability-claim file.  The truth is simple.  No one
told me.  Phil Vannatter swore to me afterward that neither he nor Tom
had a clue.  I believe him.  Cops generally do not gossip outside their
own divisions.  A guy from the Wilshire Division isn't going to tell
tales about the guys from his office even to COPS in another area of
town.

Frankly, I didn't know what to do with the information Mark had given
me.  In hindsight, of course, I should have requested the file
immediately.  But in the heat of the moment, I just made a mental note
to check it out.  To be honest, it seemed that Mark was just getting a
bit panicky at being thrust into the spotlight.  I certainly had no
reason to think that it would turn into a major issue.  At that moment,
the most important thing was getting back to the courtroom, where Phil
Vannatter was due on the stand.  If we lost the search-and-seizure
motion, all the Mark Fuhrman evidence wouldn't matter.

Gerald Uelmen had argued for the defense.  The officers, he charged,
were not so much interested in notifying Simpson or attempting to stop a
potential crime in progress as in conducting an illegal investigation.
He wound up by quoting Justice Louis Brandeis, hinting darkly that the
Fourth Amendment itself was at risk.

When I took the podium I congratulated Uelmen on his rhetoric.

"But none of .  .  .  the fine quotations can change the facts as they
existed on those early morning hours," I said.  "He attempts to depict
in very graphic terms the search .  .  .  as though a Sherman tank were
being driven through the backyard and being plowed in through the doors.
In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth." I refuted his
arguments point by point, walking the judge through the June 13 events
as the police saw them: Their vision of the scene at Bundy.

Their uncertainty about what was happening at Rockingham.  The blood.
The thumps of an intruder.  How quickly it all happened.  How, if
someone had been bleeding and cops had waited for a warrant, we now
would all have been calling them derelict and incompetent.

Judge Kennedy-Powell agreed.  She upheld the warrant.

I felt that we were home free.  We'd already established a time line,
and the next step was putting Simpson at the scene of the crime.  That's
where the blood expert I had worked so hard to get on our team, Greg
Matheson, came in.  His testimony was pure dynamite.  Only 0.5 percent
of the population could have left the blood in the trail at Bundy. And
Simpson was one of that tiny group!  It was hard evidence that linked
Simpson, and very few others, to the crime scene.  Of those others, how
many had blood in their cars and blood on their drive ways?

How many knew the victim, Nicole?

On Friday, July 8, Judge Kennedy-Powell ruled.  "The court has carefully
considered the evidence in this case and the arguments of counsel," she
said.  "There is sufficient cause to believe this defendant guilty."

I can't represent it as a stunning victory.  It was the outcome I'd
expected.  And yet, in this season of the unexpected, who knew?

For the next few days, as we ramped up preparation for the trial we now
knew would be held, things almost seemed normal.

And then, suddenly, the timbers collapsed beneath our feet.

It was the third weekend in July, a little over a week after the end of
the prelim.  I had taken the kids to play at the home of one of my
fellow D.A.s, who also had children.  We-were in the backyard when my
beeper went off.  I didn't recognize the number, but that wasn't
unusual. I  had been bombarded by calls since this case began.  I went
inside to return the call.  It was Mark Fuhrman.

"I guess you know about The New Yorker," he said glumly.

Dread started its prickly progress up my spine.

"What are you talking about?" I asked.

"I'm sitting here with a couple of executives from Channel Seven. They
want to give me a spot to tell my side of the story.  Marcia, I really
think I should do this."

"I C," war Games Mark thought his new friends at Channel Seven were real
"straight shooters," and he handed me over to a young woman who
proceeded to read to me from an advance copy of a New Yorker article by
a writer named Jeffrey Toobin: "An Incendiary Defense."

In it, a lawyer for the defense, who spoke on condition of anonymity,
laid out how the Simpson team intended to portray Fuhrman as a racist
rogue cop who had planted the bloody glove at Rockingham in an attempt
to frame Simpson.  Shapiro, I thought.  It had to be Shapiro.  The idea
that he would even attempt such a thing was monstrous.  My nausea
deepened when the cheery TV producer read me quotes from Fuhrman's
psychiatric file.  How out of control is this?  Not only am I first
hearing this information from the press, but even that account is
secondhand.

How on earth did a reporter get hold of a cop's psychiatric records?

The only legal way I know of getting into an officer's personnel file is
by bringing what is called a Pitchess motion.  The defense usually files
one when a defendant is charged with assault on a police officer or with
resisting arrest.  If the defense can show that the cop had a history of
such misconduct, it's a great way to pump up the credibility of that
claim.  But that wasn't an issue in this case.  Fuhrman hadn't even seen
Simpson, let alone arrested him.

According to the story, Fuhrman had been an enthusiastic marine, but he
had purportedly told Dr.  Ronald Koegler that he had stopped enjoying
his military service because "there were these Mexicans, niggers,
volunteers, and they would tell me they weren't going to do something."
He told another shrink, a Dr.  John Hodhman, that his work among street
gangs in East L.A.  had given him "the urge to kill people that upset
me."

I just couldn't imagine Mark having said things this awful.  I couldn't
believe that was how he felt.  I asked the producer for the date of the
report.  It went back to the early eighties.  That was a long time ago.
Had he really believed all that, or was he just saying something
outrageous to support a disability claim?

After Mark had made his urgent but vague references to this file in the
hallway after his testimony, I'd made a note to follow up.  A week
later, it was still on my "To Do" list.

I've thought about that a lot in retrospect.  And when I find myself
beating myself up over it, I stop myself and ask, "Would history have
been changed so radically if I'd run right down and filed a request for
that disability file right after Mark told me about it?" Probably not.

After all, it was too late to keep Mark off the stand.  He'd already
testified.  About the only advantage I would have had was not being
blind- sided by this call from Channel Seven.

"Let me talk to Mark," I said to the producer firmly.  My tone must have
scared her; she put him back on immediately.  .

"Do you believe that shit, Marcia?" he asked me.

"About planting the glove?  That's ridiculous.  But it may not matter
what I think once people get a load of those shrinks' reports."

"I never said that stuff!  That's what I was trying to tell you before.
I just told him I hated gang bangers.  I couldn't stand the way they
screwed over innocent people.  I don't know how he got all that shit in
there."

"Is that how you feel now?"

"Hell, no.  I'm no racist, Marcia.  You can ask anyone.  Some of my good
friends are black.  Shit, ask Danette Meyers if you don't believe me."

I knew Danette Meyers, a striking African-American woman who was a D.A.
in Santa Monica.  She was smart, feisty, and nobody's fool.

She certainly wouldn't tolerate racist crap from anyone.  I needed to
talk to her.  But for the moment, I had to take a very, very deep breath
and think this through.

What were the actual chances of Fuhrman's shrink report coming into
evidence?  Pretty slim.  I felt I could successfully argue that a
shrink's report from a decade before the crime in question was too
ancient to be admissible.  But in practical terms, what would it matter?

The article, with all the attendant publicity, would ensure that anyone
out there with a pulse would know about Mark's statements to his
psychiatrists.  Which is exactly what Shapiro wanted when he planted his
poison with a stooge holding a press card.

So the nightmare began.  It was, however, not unprecedented.  In
countless cases involving a black defendant, the defense makes some
effort to play the race card.  But in this case, one would have thought
that this particular odious card just wasn't in the deck.  It just
seemed so latently inappropriate: O.  J.  Simpson lived a rich man's
life among friends who were, by and large, white.  His ex-wife and
current girl friend were white.  His entire legal team was white. How, I
wondered, could Shapiro or Uelmen sell a racial defense?

As for the planting theory, it was more bizarre than anything I'd heard
of so far.  How would Shapiro account for the fact that other cops had
been at the Bundy crime scene and viewed the evidence before Mark
arrived?

"So what do you think about my talking to Channel Seven?" Mark asked me
again.

"I want to talk to Gil about this," I told him.  "Tell them to sit tight
for now."

I don't think I'd ever paged Gil Garcetti before.  "Sorry to bother you
on a weekend," I told him when he called me back, "but there's something
you should know about." I laid out the damage.

He had no instant panacea, and who would have expected one?

This isn't one of the situations they teach you about in law school.

"Just when you think you've heard them all .  .  ." he finally said, his
voice trailing off.  "Let me think about this.  I'll call you back."

Gil phoned me again about a half an hour later and told me to deny Mark
permission to do the interview.  "I think we have to keep playing by our
usual rules," he said.  Mark wasn't happy when I told him, but he agreed
to go along with us.  I promised him we'd talk on Monday.

Outside in the sunlit yard, the children were giggling uncontrollably.

I shut out everything for the moment except the sweetness of that scene.
Fortunately, they hadn't a clue about the misery that could befall
adults.  I needed to regain my perspective.  In the months to come I
would find myself grasping at the strangest diversions to restore that
precious clarity.  But at the moment it was enough to join the kids on
the swing set and let them push me until I could see my feet against the
sky.

On most days Jim Morrison hovers on the periphery of my consciousness.
During my last few years as a deputy, I kept a four foot-high poster of
him mounted on the wall behind my desk.  Jim is on stage, wearing tight
leather pants and that signature pout.  As a teen, I was a big fan of
the Doors, and Morrison's expression just hooked me.  Here was a guy who
looked Strangeness in the eye without blinking.  Well, ultimately he did
blink.  But it was my guess that throughout the preliminary hearings,
Morrison was parked on a couch in the Valhalla of dead icons, watching
CNN and grinning.

This is the strangest life I've ever known.  It was Morrison's line, but
I found myself saying it over and over.  In the days following the
prelims I could not believe what was happening.  What a Breaking
spectacle.  In the space of three weeks this case had grown from a
straightforward double homicide- which incidentally concerned a
celebrity into a national obsession.  It was like Desert Storm with a
docket number.

Why is the American public such a sucker for any drama unfolding live?
Will Baby Jessica make it out of that well?  Will the baby killer whale
make it to open sea?  Will O.  J.  Simpson blow his brains out?

The lure, I suppose, is the honesty of an uncertain outcome.

Strange Days but even now, in the cold gray light of hind sight, I still
don't fully understand the appeal of this case.  I know that the Bronco
chase offered a powerful rush.  The first hit is finding the jolt it got
during those two hours of unprogrammed airtime, the public came looking
for another.  And another.  The media fed the addiction, covering every
twitch in the case as a "stunning new developments, By the time we got
through those preliminary hearings, nothing was ordinary.

Nothing was allowed to be ordinary.  It was all reported at the same
hysterical, accelerating pitch.

God forbid there should be a slow news day, fir the press would settle
its frenetic, predatory attentions on me.  No one ever came right out
and asked the question on everyone's mind: "How could Gil Garcetti pick
a girl for this job?" The subtext, however, was clear: Criminal
prosecution is guy's work.  You gotta be tough.  And for a case this big
you gotta be real tough.  You gotta put your best man in there.  Is your
best man really a woman?

I've never been one to cry sexism.  But I know the score.  I know that I
have to be tougher and better than the guys I work with.  My attitude
has always been, So what?  Having to be tougher and better makes me just
that, tougher and better.  And I tried looking at this particular
situation philosophically.  I knew that anybody Gil picked for this job
was going to come in for a lot of scrutiny and a whole lot of grief. But
the kind of grief I got was the sort I thought had gone out of fashion
with foot binding.

After that blast of exposure during the prelims, my appearance became
the subject of seemingly endless speculation (You remember, don't you?)
The circles under my eyes.  When I'm tired, I tend to get circles under
my eyes.  People I scarcely knew would come up and say, "When are you
going to do something about those.  circles?" And I'd tell them, "I'll
do something after the trial.  I'll get some sleep."

During the prelims, my facial features became one of the leading
indicators of the prosecution's fortunes.  As in, "Marcia's looking
bummed out or the prosecution must be having a bad day."

Once I wore a short-sleeved white dress.  There was no significance to
it except that it was clean, comfortable, and not Something I usually
wore in front of a jury because it was just a little too casual.  Since
we were in pretrial motions and didn't even have a jury at that point, I
could choose comfort over formality.  And so, as I got off the elevator,
reporters started hectoring me: "Marcia, what is the significance of the
dress?  What does it mean?"

What does it mean?  The dress means nothing, /except the fact that you
have to ask means a lot.  It means there sure as hell is such a thing as
pink coverage versus blue coverage.  It means "She may lead the CEO of
General Motors, boys, but she's still a woman."

The debate inevitably descended to the length of my skirts.  Drive time
radio jocks wore themselves out complaining that my hems were "too
short." Let me explain something here.  When I'm on my own time I wear
my skirts any damned length I please.  And that is usually about three
inches above the knee.  It's not an attempt at seduction.

It's not the Dance of the Seven Veils.  But when it comes to what I wear
in front of a jury, I have always been conservative.  I wear what I
consider to be smart, lawyerly suits with hems slightly above the knee.
Now, if you check the hems of the other female D.A.s, I suspect you'll
find a number of them at precisely the same length.  (But, of course,
while the controversy over my skirts was at full boil, none of them came
forward to say "Check out my hems.")

The real problem was that I was overexposed.

During that week, my image had been beamed for some seventy hours into
the living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens of strangers. That's
about five years' worth of Seinfeld episodes in seven days!  No wonder
strangers felt a false sense of intimacy with me.

One day after work I swung by the grocery store to pick up some ground
turkey and green peppers for dinner.  By the time I got to the checkout
counter, my cart was loaded with stuff, including the obligatory
Popsicles and Cheerios.  The girl at the counter looked up at me and
said, "What are you doing here?"

Meaning, "Big shot like you must certainly have people to do this kind
of stuff for you."

I felt like telling her, "Look, honey.  I live in a rat hole with a
leaky bedroom.  My car window is busted.  I can't pay the mortgage.  My
nanny doesn't drive.  Who do you suppose runs my errands?"

But I didn't.  Some kid who makes $4.25 an hour bagging groceries
probably doesn't care about the distinction between Princess Diana and a
public servant who stumbled into the spotlight.

Like it or not, I was a celebrity.  I guess I was getting a taste of
what drove my man Morrison nuts.  Everywhere I turned, people seemed to
be grabbing at me.  They felt that they were entitled to interrupt me,
no matter what I was doing.  When I went out to dinner, they'd come over
to my table.  Or worse, they'd make that cute gesture of sending a
waiter over with a glass of o.j.  I'd try to be gracious, but I'm not an
extrovert by nature.  And I found dealing with these flat-footed
overtures very depleting.

Everywhere I looked, there were hands.  Hands wanting to shake mine.
Hands wanting autographs.  Hands wanting to touch me.  It was getting to
me.  I had a recurrent waking nightmare that one of those hands reaching
out to me, slow motion, held a gun pointed at my heart.

This was not some irrational, free-floating anxiety.  During the Rebecca
Schaeffer case, I'd learned about the pathology of obsession from Gavin
de Becker, a security consultant and perhaps the world's wisest
authority on the psychology of stalking.  Gavin helped me develop a
psychological profile of Rebecca's killer.  When the Simpson case broke,
I didn't even have to call him.  He phoned me to see if I was okay.

"Marcia"Gavin's mellifluous voice is unmistakable"have you been
receiving mail?"

I had, in fact by the box load.  I hadn't read it.  I didn't have the
time.  Gavin offered to sort through it for me to see if there was
anyone to watch out for.  He also told me how to mitigate the risk
factor in signing autographs: "Never sign more than your name," he
warned.

Even a meaningless expression like "sincerely" could give encouragement
to an unbalanced fan.  If a situation seemed the least bit weird a guy
looking twitchy, avoiding eye contactI should get the hell outta there.

"Kind of ironic, huh, Gavin," I told him.  "Whoever thought I'd be on
the receiving end of this bullshit?"

There were others looking after me, too like Lieutenant Gary Schram, a
big, barrel-chested ex-marine who was in charge of the D.A."s
investigators.  Schram was this sweet, wonderful guy who wanted me to
know how to handle a pistol.

Having one in your purse, though, is a whole different trip.  It
requires a CCW, a permit to carry.  Schram took me down to the police
firing range in the hills behind Glendale.  The old cop who ran the
range gave me a quick refresher on cleaning and loading procedures.

We reviewed safety tips that I already knew.  I fired a few shots at a
silhouette to demonstrate I could aim at Van Nuys without taking out
Long Beach.

It usually takes weeks to get a permit, but Schram and his buddies had
one laminated and in my hands before I left the range.  On the way out,
Schram fixed me with his steady blue eyes.  "I want this in your purse
at all times," he told me.  "It won't do you any good in your desk
drawer."

I kept forgetting it.  It was a form of denial on my part, I suppose.

If I wasn't in danger, I wouldn't need a weapon.  Right?  Schrarn didn't
buy this pretzel logic.  If I happened to pass the lieutenant on the way
out of the office, he'd hold me up for a random inspection.  If he
didn't find the Smith & Wesson in my purse, he'd send me back to my
office to get it.  I finally got used to carrying that gun as a matter
of habit.

I'd gotten word through the rumor mill that one of the networks was
having me tailed, that the National Enquirer was having me tailed, that
O.  J.  Simpson's private investigators were having me tailed.  All of
them were presumably competing for lane space with my own security
detail.  Every time I climbed into my car I felt like Goldie Hawn in The
Sugar lard Express.

It was no longer possible for me to walk down the hall to the bathroom
without seeing one of his men.

He assigned his men to follow me around.  If I was out on the freeway,
I'd look up and see one of them in my rearview mirror.  If I changed
lanes without thinking and lost my escort, my car phone would scream
almost instantly.  It would be Schram, chewing me out for my
carelessness.

At Gary's insistence, I began carrying a handgun, a .38-caliber Smith &
Wesson revolver.  I wasn't opposed to the idea in principle; a lot of
criminal prosecutors carry guns.  And I was certainly no green horn when
it came to firearms.  My ax-husband had been a gun enthusiast, and we'd
gone out to the range together now and then for some target practice.
Since I'd been living alone, in fact, I'd kept a handgun on the utter
shelf of my kitchen cabinet.

I'd have to meet in the D.A."s office and take a meeting with Gil
Garcetti.  Now, the sight of me opening those glass doors excited too
much speculation.  So Gil showed me a back way.  There's an entrance on
the north side of the building that lets you circumvent the reception
area and enter the D.A."s office unobserved.  I'd spent ten years in
this place and nobody had ever bothered to tell me about it.

Used to be that Bill and I could jump in a car and go visit a witness.
No fuss.  No armed escort.  Now, we couldn't leave the CCB together
without staging a major military operation.  One day, Bill and I had to
interview a witness named Danielle Rose.  She was a friend of Kato's
girlfriend, Rachel Ferrara.  Danielle had called us about a conversation
she'd had with Rachel a day or two after the murders.

According to Rachel, Kato had seen Simpson outside the house within
moments of hearing the thumps on his wall.  It was hearsay on hearsay,
but we still had to check it out.

Danielle was nervous about coming to our office.  She'd seen how
reporters pounced on anyone they suspected had been speaking to the
prosecution, and she wanted no part of it.  This distinguished her from
any number of wannabe starlets who'd had even fleeting contact with any
of the main players in the case and now were coming out of the woodwork
and selling their stories to evening newsmagazines.  This one wanted
anonymity.  Cool.  We came up with a plan to meet her in an alley a
short distance from the apartment of one of her friends.

Bill and I got into Phil Vannatter's car, D.A.  investigators flanking
us before and behind.  As we drove, Phil kept in radio contact with our
escort.  So far, so good.  No tail spotted.  I was beginning to think
that we could all use a few weeks in therapy to lose the paranoia.  No
sooner had we pulled into the alley, however, than Phil pointed off to
the left.

Two men in sunglasses sat in a parked nuthin'-special car.  One of the
investigators checked them enough, they were reporters from a
local TV station.  He shooed them off like cowbirds.

We didn't mention this little episode to Danielle.  Poor kid was freaked
out enough as it was.  And all for nothing.  As she stammered through
her story it became clear to me that she might have simply misunderstood
Rachel, whose main concern was not what Kato had done when, but that he
had dragged her into this mess at all.

On the drive home, I was still boiling about the leak.  What had alerted
the station?  A phone tap?  A comment overheard in the hall?

We never did find out.  But after that we doubled our precautions.  No
more talking on cell phones.  We had our cars and offices swept for
bugs.  From that point on, there was no more talking about the case in
public.  Not in the halls, not in the elevators, not even in the Johns.

Meanwhile, the Fuhrman controversy showed no signs of slackening.

It irritated the hell out of me to be drawn off the preparation of the
case by diversionary tactics of the defense.  But I also knew we'd never
get back on track until we faced the problem head-on.

It did not seem logical to me that Fuhrman would try to frame O.  J.
Simpson with as little information as he'd had at the time he'd found
the glove.  How, for instance, could he have known that Simpson didn't
have an airtight alibi for the time the murders occurred?  How could he
know whether an eyewitness, or even an ear witness, might come forward
to identify someone else?  What if someone stepped forward to confess?
How could he know whether Kato had already gone far enough down the
south pathway to see the area where the glove was found?  Did Fuhrman
even have the opportunity to move evidence?

I'd asked the LAPD for a list of all of the officers who'd arrived at
Bundy before Mark.  There were sixteen of them.  Only four had gotten
beyond the perimeter to see the evidence near the bodies: Officer Robert
Risked, first officer on the scene.  Lieutenant Frank Spangler, one of
the highest-ranking officers supervising the scene.  Sergeant David
Rossi, in charge of the patrol officers.  And Detective Ron Phillips,
Fuhrman's supervisor, who arrived at precisely the same time Mark did. I
interviewed those four men personally, and each was very clear about one
thing: there had been one glove, and one glove only, lying between the
bodies.

Except for Phillips, none of these guys knew Mark well.  They would
hardly risk their jobs, not to mention an indictment, to protect him. If
their testimony was to be believed, it was a physical impossibility for
Mark Fuhrman to have planted evidence.

From where I was sitting, Fuhrman was in the clear.  I did my best to
reassure him of that.  But he was very anxious.  Very paranoid.  He

complained about being treated like a "goddamned suspect." He complained
that the defense was targeting him, trying to destroy him.

Things took a turn for the worse when the FBI found a single Caucasian
hair on the glove from Rockingham.  It most likely belonged to Ron
Goldman, but no one could establish this conclusively.  The defense
asked for hair samples not only from Fuhrman, but from Phil, Tom, and
Ron as well.

When I passed this request along to the cops, they went absolutely
ballistic.

"We're not going to be treated like goddamned suspects.  Next they'll
want to take our blood," they huffed.

I warned them that their refusal would look bad, but I said, "Fine.

I'll fight it." I got myself charged up to oppose a court order for the
hair samples.  But before I could strap on my armor, the cops had a
change of heart.  Their attorneys had told them that in refusing, they'd
appear to be hiding something.  So they agreed to give the hair samples.

I got on the horn to Shapiro.  "You won't need a court order for the
hair, Bob," I told him.  Fine, fine.  Everything's cool.  I had barely
gotten off the line when the cops did another flip-flop.  "We're not
giving samples," they insisted.  "We're not goddamned suspects."

Finally, they complied.  And, thank God, when the results came back a
few weeks down the line, nobody matched the mystery hair.

The thing that annoyed me was that I'd really gone to bat for those
guys, and still they went around grousing that I was disloyal.  I could
already see the police distancing themselves from this case.  By late
September, Tom and Phil were "too busy" to do anything I asked.

Finally, I just quit calling them and used our D.A.  investigators
instead.

Annoyed as I was with Tom and Phil, I felt very sorry for them.

They'd been beaten down by a barrage of idiotic requests and make work
motions coming their way from the defense team.  Shapiro had started his
own "investigation" to find the real killer or killers.  He'd set up an
800 number that during its first two weeks of operation drew over
250,000 calls.  Most of them seemed to come from psychics, psychos, and
general cranks who'd had dreams about where the knife was hidden.  "Look
in the sandbox."

"Look in the tree by the playhouse."

Like we hadn't thought of that?  We got our share of crank callers as
well.  My favorite was the one who theorized that Simpson, Nicole, and
Ron had all sat around in a circle stabbing one another.  Crazy stuff.

But Tom and Phil had to follow up every lunatic lead or risk being
harangued by the defense.  After a couple of weeks of this, their
expressions were hangdog, their eyes tired.  I could just about tell
what they were thinking: "We're too close to retirement to take this
bullshit."

Naturally, Shapiro's make-work motions ended up on my desk.

He wanted murder logs.  He wanted dispatching logs.  He wanted records
of all the people treated for dog bites at emergency wards.  The message
of this last request, I guess, was that any resident of West L A. who'd
been bitten by a dog during the late hours of Sunday, June 12, 1994, was
a potential suspect in the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.  That
one gave me a laugh.  The perpetrator of a grisly double homicide is
going to walk into an emergency room to get treated for a dog bite?

As primary litigator, I shouldn't have been saddled with these day
to-day distractions.  I should have been concentrating on building what
is called the case-in-chief the essence of a presentation that proves
the defendant committed the crime.  But there was absolutely no time for
overall planning or, indeed, any creative thought about this case.

After the prelims were over, I'd expected to have a little breathing
room to sit down and organize the mountains of evidence gathering around
my desk.  A case like this one usually takes a year or more to come to
trial.  Generally, the defense wants to delay things as long as possible
to give themselves time to prepare.  They are also hoping that key
witnesses will die or disappear in the meantime, so they'll ask for
postponement after postponement until either we or the judge says,
"Enough, already.  Let's go."

Shortly after the prelims, however, Shapiro announced that his client
intended to invoke his right to a speedy trial.

When the news reached me, I just put my head on my arms and moaned.
"Speedy trial," by law, means no more than sixty days after an
arraignment.  It was a good strategy.  In fact, I'm surprised that more
defense attorneys don't use it.  What it meant was that we had to be
ready in eight weeks.  It was an absolutely impossible deadline.

I knew that Shapiro was no more ready than we were, but he didn't have
to prepare a case to prove his client's innocence.  All he had to do it:
was stand by and be ready to kick us in the shins.  He wouldn't have to
present any evidence until we finished our case.  We were at a bigger
disadvantage than he was.

The clock started running on July 22, the morning of the defendant's
second arraignment.  (A second arraignment is standard.  A prosecutor
may have acquired more information that would change the charges.  In
this case, however, they remained the same.)

Simpson arrived at court that morning sporting an expensive dark suit
and an irritating swagger.  This was new.  I remember thinking that his
handlers must have adjusted his medication because he was clear eyed and
alert.  He appeared confident, which gave me odd comfort.

My guess was that Simpson's confidence often led him to do stupid
things.  He seemed in the mood to bluster.  I wondered if he was being
coached to display that swagger in hopes that press and public would
remember that the guy in the dock here was the ostentatiously confident
O.  J.  Simpson.

"Do you understand the charges against you, sir?" asked the supervising
criminal court judge, Cecil Mills.

Simpson stood up straight and answered as if breaking from a huddle.
"Yes, Your Honor."

"How do you plead?"

Simpson snapped to full attention and boomed, "Absolutely, one hundred
percent not guilty."

You asshole, I thought.  You unregenerate, scum-sucking creep.

I watched Simpson as the deputies led him out of the courtroom.

He gave the crowd a thumbs-up.  Beneath that three-thousand-dollar suit
he's just one more sadistic punk, I told myself.  You've put a lot of
those away.  He's no different.

But, of course, he was.

By my estimate, O.  J.  Simpson had already sunk more than a million
dollars into his defense, and the case was barely six weeks old.

Shapiro alone must be pulling down a retainer well into six figures.
Possibly seven.  With each passing week, the defense team seemed to be
doubling in size.  There were at least three private investigators we
knew of working for the team, with scores more P.I.s on the freelance
pad.  Their names kept turning up in the press as did those of defense
attorneys around town looking to get something.

One of those was Johnnie Cochran.

Johnnie's name began circulating through the rumor mill almost
immediately after Howard Weitzman dropped out of the picture.  At first,
Cochran demurred: he was too close to O.  J.  Simpson to take the case.
"He's a friend," he would later be quoted as saying.  "And that's a
mess, when you start trying to represent a friend."

I was not surprised to hear that Johnnie knew Simpson.  Johnny knew just

about everybody worth knowing in L.A.  Smooth, affable, urbane, he was
one of those guys who seemed welcome wherever he went, whether it was a
political fund-raiser, a film screening, or the courthouse corridors.
Johnnie joked and glad-handed like a politician.

"How ya doin?  How ya doin?  How ya doin?"

Everybody wanted to be his friend.  He'd done a short stint in the
D.A."s office as an assistant to John Van de Kamp.  That was a political
plum; his duties were largely ceremonial and administrative.  As for
private practice, no one in our office could recall his trying a single,
big murder case, save one.  During the early seventies he'd defended
Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther who'd been accused of murdering a white
schoolteacher.  He lost; Pratt was sentenced to life in prison.

Rather, Johnnie had made his reputation as a litigator in civil
suits ones brought against the city by blacks and other minorities who
claimed they'd been roughed up by the LAPD.  On the wall of his office
hung larger-than-life blowups of the seven-figure settlement checks he'd
won for his clients.  Bill Hodgman had, in fact, tried an
attempted-murder case against Johnnie and lost.  To Bill's way of
thinking, Cochran was no legal scholar, nor was he a particularly clever
tactician.  But he was smooth and charismatic and judges seemed to love
him.  Bill warned me early on that Johnnie would play the race card.
Johnnie always played the race card.

I doubted that Cochran would risk his reputation as a pillar of the
community for the likes of O.  J.  Simpson.  The defendant was not some
brother who'd been shaken down by cops for driving in a white
neighborhood.  O.  J.  Simpson could have jogged nude through Bel Air
without being arrested.  He hobnobbed with white golfing buddies,
married a white woman, lived in a mansion, and had effectively turned
his back on the black community.  He had, moreover, committed two
murders of horrific savagery.

Johnnie certainly realized this.  At age fifty-six, Johnnie was one of
Strange Days the best-known and best-respected black men in the county.
He was in a position to be one of those conciliators to whom both blacks
and whites could turn in times of racial distress.  A word from him
could help calm the waters.  Why risk a city wide race riot to promote
O. J.  Simpson as a cause celebrant?

Shows you what I know.  On the morning of O.  J.  Simpson's arraignment,
I walked into court to find Johnnie Cochran sitting at the defense
table.

Johnnie, with his dark good looks and strange iridescent suits, was hard
to miss.  He was one of the most animated men in public life, and yet
the thing that struck me that morning in late July was how quiet he
seemed.  He was hunched in an upholstered armchair, his chin resting on
the tips of his index fingers, in a posture of deep thought.  He
appeared almost withdrawn.  Shapiro was clearly running the show, and
Johnnie wasn't used to being anyone's second chair.

From the moment he logged on as attorney of record, Johnnie was causing
mischief.  Word filtered back to me that he was telling reporters that
Fuhrman should be grilled on his racial attitudes.  "Give me one black
on that jury," he was reported to have said.  He didn't need to finish
the thought.  Clearly, Johnnie figured that even one African American
would be enough to hang a jury.

Not long afterward, Johnnie announced in open court that there was a
witness who purportedly would dear Simpson and provide an ''important
lead" on the "real killers." Johnnie said this evidence was "totally
inconsistent with the theory of a lone assailant.  And is entirely
inconsistent with the fact that Mr.  Simpson is that assailant."

He suggested that the LAPD had given this witness short shrift.  As it
happened, the "witness" to whom he was referring had already been
checked out by the police.  Frank Chinchiolo, a self-described prowler
who had called in shortly after the murders, said that he'd seen a pair
of heavyset white men running from the rear alley at Bundy.  Before the
police could even dispatch detectives to the guy's house, up north iin a
town called I just loved this Happy Camp, the media had sniffed him out
and exposed him as a chronic liar and publicity seeker.

This goon The Happy Camper, we called him had also surfaced in |"the
Polly Glass abduction-murder case, where he'd also tried to give the
cops phony information.  And yet here was Johnnie using this shaky lead,
proclaiming that the cops and the D.A."s office had over looked crucial
evidence in their "rush to judgment"!

You might chink that pulling a stunt like this would erode a lawyer's
credibility.  But Johnnie Cochran would make these far fetched or
unsupported allegations time and time again, and the media never really
held him accountable.  Johnnie realized that journalists, by and large,
have the attention span of gnats; the important thing was grabbing the
headline.  In the mad rush of events, he wagered that no one would
follow up.  And he won the bet, nearly every time.

Something more powerful than principle was operating here.

Attorneys who should have known better were being drawn to this case
like moths to a floodlight.  By the time Simpson was bound over for
trial, F.  Lee Bailey was being cited as a possible addition to the
defendant's all-star team.

Shortly after joining the team in late June, Bailey gave an interview to
NBC's Today show in which he made ridiculous assertions about what the
prosecution could and could not prove.  He quoted misinformation
inadvertency passed to the defense by Judidha Brown that Nicole had
spoken to her mother at eleven P.M.  Bailey proclaimed triumphantly that
dhis proved Simpson could not have committed the murders and that the
case would soon be thrown out.  It was a foolish, sloppy mistake. We'd
already gotten phone records that showed that the call had been made at
9:45 P.M., not eleven, which gave Simpson plenty of time to kill two
people and make the five-minute drive back to'Rockingham.  I don't know
what possessed Bailey to shoot his mouth off like that.  I just think
the guy could not resist an impulse to grab the limelight.

Neither, apparently, could others.

Early on, probably during the first or second week of the case, I'd seen
Alan Dershowitz do one of his talking-head numbers on national TV.  It
seemed to me, at least, that he was convinced of Simpson's guilt.  To
PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose, he professed indignation at the
"excuses" defendants use nowadays to absolve themselves of guilt.

He cited "cop-outs" such as the "battered-woman syndrome" and the
"abused-child syndrome." He predicted that the defense in the Simpson
case would most likely mount a mental defense.  "The Juice Excuse," he
would try it.  Then, the next thing I hear, he is being examined.

Do these guys think no one is listening?

People still ask me whether the sight of those big guns rolling onto the
field intimidated me.  "Didn't you dread coming to court every day to
face these guys down?" they say.  The answer is no.  Whenever we heard
the press referring to this crew as the Dream Team, Bill and I just
rolled our eyes.  The idea that these were special forces carefully
recruited by Commander Shapiro, a sort of Dirty Dozen of the bar, was
ludicrous.

Because what you had, basically, were a cat of incompatibly grandiose
ego slead horses who by definition could never putt easily in the same
harness.  As early as the week of the arraignment, Shapiro was already
looking worried that Johnnie would muscle him out of the limelight.  It
didn't take a psychic to predict procedural chaos if this bunch were not
held in check by a strong judge.  What we needed was someone who would
be temperate but decisive.  Someone who would be consistent.  Someone
who knew enough law and had enough confidence to rule from the bench. We
needed the jump of all umps.  A square-jawed, rock-ribbed referee with
huge arms of steel.

Instead, we got Lance Ito.

The announcement was almost anticlimactic after Simpson's "absolutely,
one hundred percent not guilty" performance.  When Judge Mills
announced, "I'm assigning the case to Judge Lance Ito," I cast a quick
glance at Bill.  He seemed as taken aback as I was.

Judge Mills had about six to nine names to choose from.  These were
drawn from a pool of judges who were Durable for so-called long-cause
cases, complex cases, usually murder trials, that were expected to go
longer than a month.  The lawyers on both sides get to look over the
list of judges to see if there's any candidate so objection able that
one side or the other might have to "paper" him.

"Papering" means filing an affidavit of protest.  It's a little like a
peremptory challenge; you can reject an appointment without offering a
reason. The |only problem is that you're obliged to take the next name
you're given.

Wethere were at least two candidates so awful they made the hair on my
neck stand on end.  I would definitely have papered them.  And then
there were three or four others who would have been terrific.  But ù
Lance Ito?  He'd never, ever occurred to me.

"You've gotta be kidding," I whispered to Bill.  Why, I wondered, does
the judiciary never pick its brightest stars for these cases?

Lance was certainly no bright star.  When he was chosen for the Simpson
case, he was presiding over the master calendar court, which sends cases
out to be tried.  It was a useful but mundane assignment.

The judge in calendar either tries to get the sides to plea-bargain or
sends the case out for trial.  It's strictly an administrative position,
and one that takes a judge out of the loop of trial work.  It's
certainly not the sort of assignment that would prepare one for dealing
with the pressures of the Simpson case.

Lance always struck me as an overgrown adolescent.  He was the only
judge I knew who wore running shoes under his robes.  I'd worked with
him briefly in the D.A."s office. he'd been a prosecutor during the
eighties.  His reputation as a gun enthusiast preceded him.

According to office lore, he'd been looking over a handgun with another
D.A.  when somehow the piece went off and fired a bullet into the
ceiling which happened to be the floor of the Public Defender's Office.

Lance was one of those guys who can sniff out a new source of power in
the office and always manage to attach themselves to the unit.
He got himself assigned to the Hard Core Gang Unit when it i, was a hot
political baby.  He prided himself on political correctness.

His wife, Captain Margaret York, was the highest-ranking female officer
on the LAPD.  I could never figure that pair out.  It became dearer and
clearer to me as the trial went on that when it came to gender equality,
Lance was stuck in a tar pit.

In his seven years on the bench, Ito had shown himself to be a typical
ax-prosecutor judge.  Don't get me wrong.  Some old prosecutors go on to
the bench and turn out to be terrific judges, fair and decisive.  A
number of them, however, treat the D.A.s who appear before them very
badly.  If the prosecutor is any good, the judge feels competitive. The
ax-prosecutor judge is usually so eager to show that he has no lingering
loyalties to the D.A."s office that he'll kiss the toes of the defense.

I hadn't argued a case before Ito, but Bill had: the Keating case.  I
could remember Bill grousing about Ito at the time.  He thought Ito had
bent over backward to accommodate the defense and dismissed a lot of
counts he shouldn't have.  But in the end, Bill and his team won a
guilty verdict.  It's not unusual for a D.A.  to be tweaked by a judge's
day-to-day rulings, only to recall him as a fine and thoughtful jurist
when the outcome is favorable.  Bill felt Ito had done a tolerably good
job on Keating, which was by anyone's reckoning a complicated long cause
trial.  Keating, however, was strictly white-collar crime; accordingly,
everyone kept his gloves on.  The Simpson case was shaping up to be a
sort of break-your-bottles-and-go-at-it street brawl.  We would need a
judge who could step in and keep the peace.  I didn't believe Lance had
the fortitude for that.

My first inclination was to refuse him.  But Judge Mills added a
complication.  He noted that Ito was married to a captain on the LAPD.

"In the event that either side desires him to do so," he explained, "no
affidavit will be required on the request of either side.  He will
recuse himself from handling this matter."

Thanks a lot.  Now, if we refused him on the grounds that his wife was a
cop, what kind of message would that send?  It would telegraph to our
prospective jury pool that we didn't think much of the LAPD, or that
Lance had some inside information about the LAPD that would hurt us. The
only politic option was to decline Judge Mills's offer, use our one
challenge to boot him, and hope for a better draw.

Of course, then we'd have to accept the next name to come up.  No
arguments; no appeals.

I'd have papered him in a hot second if I hadn't known there were a
couple of worse judges in the building.  (Although, looking back, it's
hard to see how they could have been much worse.)  Instead, I turned to
Bill, who knew Ito better than I did.

"What's your gut tell you?"

He sighed and gave me a thumbs-up.

I wish that one of us had been endowed with some mystical gift of
prescience that would have warned us off this train wreck.  But you make
your decision with the best information you have at the time.

Only four days after he took the case, Lance and I locked horns for the
first time.  It was bitter and it was public.  The defense had filed a
motion that would have required us to give them 10 percent of each of
our blood samples so that they could do their own testing.  I couldn't
their tests proved Simpson guilty, they could would hide the
information.  On the other hand, if our diminished sample failed to
yield a result, we'd wind up with nothing.  So if we gave the defense a
portion of bloodstains off the topa concession that was based on no
legal requirement we might well destroy crucial evidence.

I was almost certain that Ito would reject the defense's motion out of
hand.  Any reasonable judge would.  Just to be certain, I drafted a
proposal that would make it even easier for him: let the defense do all
the testing.  I was willing to go out on a limb like this because I knew
the defense's blood expert, Dr.  Edward Blake, and I both respected and
trusted him.

What I proposed was to give Dr.  Blake the entire sample.  Let him do
all the testing provided the defense would share his results with us.

If the Dream Team was sincere about getting an honest result, they'd go
for my compromise.  The only possible reason for turning me down was if
they knew the results would hang their client.  My counter motion, in
essence, would call their bluff.

Get it, judge?  They don't want the truth; they want to hide evidence.

Sure enough, the defense flatly rejected my proposal.  That figured.

What surprised the hell out of me was the subsequent ruling from Ito. He
granted the defense's ridiculous request: 10 percent, he decreed, would
be "available to the defense for their own testing."

I leaned over to Lisa Kahn, the deputy who was handling DNA for our
side, and whispered, "Did he say what I think he said?"

Lisa just shook her head in disbelief.

"Your Honor." I jumped up, interrupting Ito in mid-sentence.

"May I ask the court to take some further evidence?"

Ito fixed me with an icy glare.

"I think that perhaps defense counsel has misled the court as to the
nature of the testing that is going to be performed.  You're depriving
us

let that happen.  Some of the samples contained so little DNA that if we
gave up even 10 percent, we might not be left with enough blood to get a
test result.  This was particularly true for the more sophisticated
tests for instance, the one that utilizes the RFLP method is very
reliable but requires a fair amount of DNA.  Remember, by law - Manse is
not obligated to come forward with their results.

You are taking evidence out of our hands forever."

Ito seemed embarrassed and angry.  I'd put him on the spot.  On national
TV no less.  He must have realized that he could not safely ignore my
objection.  What if I was right?  What if this screwy order wound up
trashing all the blood evidence?  So he ordered a hearing during which
experts from both sides would testify as to how much evidence we had
arid what we could afford to give up.

I've wondered over and over again if I should have taken him on so
boldly so early in the game.  But every time I replay this scene in my
mind, I come to the same conclusion.  No good attorney would sit by and
watch a judge throw away evidence.  Meanwhile, the message was
clear Lance Ito lacked good judgment.  If he'd strayed afield on such an
obvious na-brainer, what could we expect on the complicated rulings?

We'd soon find out.

The defense had committed what I considered a serious tactical blunder
by challenging the warrantless search during the preliminary hearing.
Under California law, with rare exception, you are entitled to challenge
a search or warrant only once.  Shapiro and Gerald Uelmen had taken
their shot before Judge Kennedy-Powell during the prelim, and she'd
denied their motion.  But now the defense wanted to mount a new assault
upon that search in Superior Court.

Their grounds; "New evidence" had come to light involving police
misconduct.  They petitioned Ito to reopen debate on the warrantless
search.  He wasn't, apparently, impressed with their showing and denied
the motion.  The defense then attacked the warrant, saying it was faulty
and misleading.

In order to make any headway here, the defense would have to show that
the warrant misstated or omitted crucial facts and that an accurate
version, corrected, wouldn't have shown probable cause. And they must
file a declaration itemizing those things that they considered errors.

In anticipation of this motion, I had put fellow D.A.  Cheri Lewis to
work on a set of tight, logical arguments showing how anyone could have
made these mistakes under similar circumstances.  The mistakes were, in
legal terms, "mere!), negligent." This phrase sounds more ominous than
it is.  It's essentially an "cops": mistakes anyone could make.  They
were not ''reckless,,, which means the cop knew or should have known
what the truth was, but put down something else.

Cheri and I marched into court on September 21 loaded for bear To our
amazement we discovered that the defense team had not even produced a
declaration listing the errors.  Any judge with his eye on the ball
would have admonished them for this omission and then ordered them home
to write a proper motion.  But not Ito.

And so we listened to Gerald Uelmen, former dean at Santa Clara
University School of Law aloud one of the most boring speakers on earth,
drone on for hour upon excruciating hour, before he got to his point:
Phil's claim that there had been "human" blood on the Bronco door was so
devastatingly reckless that he'd misled a magistrate into granting the
warrant.

Huh?  You mean finding a bloody glove matching the one left at the crime
scene wouldn't be enough?

Uelmen concluded on bit of tortured logic: getting a search warrant must
have meant the cops considered Simpson a suspect, right?

So why didn't they arrest him when he got back to Rockingham on the
thirteenth?

I wanted to stand up and concede the point.  You know, Gerry' you're
right.  They should have arrested him right then and there, but those
pasts old conspirators let him walk right out the door. Yeah, I get it.

Far from making a Persuasive argument, Uelmen had only under scored the
cops' innocent intentioned In the end, Lance UPIleld the warrant.  He
really had no choice He, like Judge KennedYPowell before him, had seen
that the cops, acting under extreme stress in emergency circumstances'
had performed imperfectly but properly.  And yet Lance could not resist
a gratuitous slap.  He could not, he said, make a finding that Phil s
actions were "merely negligent." It stead he termed them "at least
reckless.

Even as I think back upon this now, it makes my blood boil. The episode
was, for me, an education in the ways of Lance Ito Lance, I was
beginning to see, was so indecisive, so fearful generally of the big
Strange Days guns" at the defense table, that he didn't dare give us a
decision without handing the defense something in return.  Split the
baby.

Apologies to Solomon, it was Ito's Law.  In this instance, the cost of
appeasement was high: a cop's good name.

Throughout August and September, and into the early part of October
1994, prosecution and defense continued to wrangle over blood evidence.
The defense claimed we'd intentionally delayed sending abou two dozen
blood samples from Simpson's home and Bronco off for DNA testing.  They
claimed we were trying to buy time.  That was ridiculous.  If you
measured our progress by any normal pretrial schedule, we were
proceeding at the goddamned speed of light.  The amount of evidence we'd
managed to pull together and submit to date was staggering.  But the
labs had their own backlogs to deal with.  Ito just didn't get this.  He
felt somehow that the world should shut down for the Simpson case.  The
defense had dropped its request for a portion of our samples.  This,
however, only complicated matters because we had been ordered by the
bench to have the testing conducted only at those times when the
defense's own expert, Dr.  Blake, could be present.  It had turned into
a scheduling nightmare.

It was D.A.  Lisa Kahn's job to explain this to Ito.  Unfortunately, she
and the defense's own DNA point man, a scrappy little New York import
named Barry Scheck, could scarcely conceal their contempt for each
other.  Day after day she and Scheck went at it, he accusing us of bad
faith, she accusing him of filing a flood of motions to confuse and
mislead the court.  The press dubbed these running hostilities "The Lisa
and Barry Show."

I could see that both of them irritated the hell out of Ito.  Under the
best of circumstances, Lisa wasn't inclined to suffer fools, and she'd
copped a snippy attitude with the judge.

One afternoon I was upstairs trying to get some of my own work done when
a law clerk came running into my office.

"Marcia, have you seen what's happening in court?" she gasped.

"You'd better get down there ASAP.  Ito's furious at Lisa!"

I grabbed a pad of paper and flew downstairs, but court had already
adjourned for the day.

Later, back in my office, Lisa gave me the unpleasant details.  Ito
seemed to be leaning toward keeping out blood samples, so she'd tapped,
"If the court wants to make such a ruling, the court is entitled to .  .
. although I don't believe there is truly any authority to report it."

This had infuriated Ito.

"Fuck him, if that's the way he wants to be," she said angrily.

"You're gonna have to do some begging and pleading to shore up our
position," I told her.

She wouldn't do it.  She wasn't going to kiss butt for a motion we
shouldn't have to argue in the first place.  I sympathized with her, but
I knew this intransigence would get us nowhere.

Ito was set to rule four days hence on whether our delays had been
elaborate.  If he found they were, he could impose sanctions that could
exclude as many as two dozen blood samples.  Among them was the blood of
Ron Goldman, which had been found in the Bronco.  It was a devastating
piece of evidence against the defendant.  And its loss could be terrible
for us.

I knew we had to do something to pull Ito back toward the center and
fast.

I sat Lisa down and we drafted a letter, calmly laying out our position.
I promised that I would take the letter in myself and spare her the
humiliation of bowing to Ito's wishes.

Friday morning, October 14, I took a deep breath, put my head down, and
marched into court.  I handed the letter to Ito's clerk, Deirdre
Robertson.  This was going to be ugly.

When Ito took the bench I asked permission to address the court.

He granted it curtly.

This is not the time to stand on your dignity, I told myself.  Fall on
your damned sword.

So, on behalf of the People, I apologized profusely for any slight His
Honor might have suffered during Tuesday's hearings, and I implored him
to consider the letter we'd submitted.  I begged him not to cripple the
People's case by keeping out evidence when the testing delays were
really no one's fault.

Ito was still petulant.  Why, he asked, couldn't Lisa have answered him
civilly and satisfactorily when he'd asked her for explanations?

"I don't know if I can telegraph this ...  more openly.  You're about to
lose," he warned me.

We all went home that weekend in very low spirits, thoroughly expecting
that next week, Ito was going to cut our legs right out from under us.

But then Lance did another of his classic turnarounds.  On the following
Tuesday morning, when we reconvened on the matter, he announced that
he'd found no deliberate attempt on our part to sandbag the defense or
the court.

Defense motion denied.

I glanced over at the defense table.  Johnnie looked stunned.  Barry
Scheck looked like somebody had killed his dog.  I was nearly weak with
relief.

It was only as we were basking in the afterglow of this victory that I
let myself reflect on the dynamic that had turned the situation around.
Lance Ito had really enjoyed watching me grovel.

I'm sure Gil thought twice before asking me to take a meeting with Don
Vinson.  He knew that I had very little patience with frivolous
interruptions.  Ever since this case had started I'd found that people
in high places would find any excuse to "meet" with me or Bill.  Often
these meetings came in the guise of some kind of help or favor they
wanted to offer, but what I suspected people really wanted was to pick
up insider gossip on the case and pass it along at cocktail parties.

Media biggies arranged for Suzanne Childs to bring them by my office in
hopes of getting an interview.  Under other circumstances I would have
gotten a kick out of that.  Some requests I could deflect with a polite
refusal; others required that I break from my work and that for a few
moments for the sake of diplomacy.  Each of these interruptions probably
took less than ten minutes.  But the minutes added up.

The meeting with Don Vinson was not so easily avoided.  Vinson was the
founder of DecisionQuest, a firm that specialized in jury consulting.
After the hung verdict in the Menendez case, Vinson had volunteered his
services to our office for the retrial.  Gil was touched by the gesture.
Apparently, both he and David Conn were impressed by Vinson's work, and
when Vinson offered to consult gratis on the Cimn.^n Coca (]il thought
we should go for it.

Now, I do not particularly like jury consultants.  As far as I'm
concerned they are creatures of the defense.  They charge a lot, so the
only people who can afford them are wealthy defendants in a criminal
trial or fat-cat corporations defending against class-action suits.  As
a matter of principle, I don't feel that the government should be in the
position of market-testing its arguments.

Not long after the preliminary hearings, however, we'd heard that.
Simpson had retained a topflight jury consultant named Jo-Ellan
Dimitrius.  Jo-Ellan was a heavy hitter who'd been used successfully by
the defendants in both the McMartin Preschool and Rodney King state and
federal trials.  The line on her was good; she was a decent person and a
hard worker who handled everything for her clients, from drawing up a
profile of the ideal juror, to writing the ideal juror's questionnaire,
to evaluating responses and rating prospective juror candidates.  No
doubt about it, the Dream Team had hired themselves a great big gun.

This had Gil very worried.  There were a number of tricky currents in
this case: race; public attitude toward the LAPD; the defendant's
celebrity.  If the defense was out there gathering intelligence to help
them navigate these waters, then, Gil's thinking went, so should we.  In
this case I agreed.  I wanted all the help I could get.

Vinson suggested that Bill and I meet him for lunch at the very
conservative, very exclusive California Club in downtown L.A. I balked.

"If they have ideas for us, let them come in here and hand them over," I
groused to Bill.  "I'm in no mood to clink glasses."

Bill, ever the voice of reason and conciliation, coaxed me out of my
lair with the promise that if Vinson didn't offer anything of substance,
I'd be off the hook for future invitations.

In a private dining room within that very private club, we found Vinson,
a heavy, florid man with huge jowls.  Thin wisps of white hair had been
combed into submission across his pate.

"Miss.  Clark," he greeted me, in a drawl that suggested an haut
bourgeois pedigree.  When he rose to shake my hand, I caught the flash
of gold cuff links.  Bill noticed them, too.  They became our private
joke. After that, any time we ran into something pretentious, we'd refer
to it as "very cuff link."

estrange Days Vinson was full of grand plans.  He urged us to let him
try out our case in front of a mock jury.  It would work this way: He'd
recruit a demographically diverse group of people to serve as jurors.
He'd make a videotape of me giving a final argument for the prosecution,
and Bill giving one for the defense.  The jurors would deliberate and
vote to convict or acquit.  We would be allowed to watch them through a
one way mirror.

Bill frowned.  I knew that he, like me, favored doing things simply,
without all the flash.  But I just sipped my Chardonnay and tried to
sort out my thoughts before speaking.  It was absolutely imperative that
the results be kept confidential.  Bill and I would have to lay our
evidence on the line.  We certainly didn't want that leaked to the
press.

"Oh, don't worry," Vinson told us confidently.  "We've never had a
problem before."

So, against my better judgment, and in deference to my boss, I gave my
okay to this plan.

This would require some work.  After all, pulling together a closing
argument was not easy to do.  At that point we did not have the DNA
evidence back, so I would have to cobble something together from the
prelims.  It took time we didn't have, but Bill and I completed our
respective arguments, and taped our presentations one evening down in
the conference room.  Then we sent them off to Vinson.

Several days later, Vinson called me to say that he could not use my
tape.  It was important that the mock jurors not know which side,
prosecution or defense, was sponsoring the testing.  I had become "too
famous," he said.  If he showed my tape, we'd give ourselves away.  He
now wanted to redo my argument, with one of his male associates
presenting it.

On Saturday, July 23, 1994, Gil, Bill, and I met Vinson at an office
building near the airport.  The consultant ushered the three of us into
a darkened room, where we got the first peek at our "jurors"

through a one-way glass.  There were ten.  Four black, two Hispanic, two
Asian, two white.  They'd been warned to base their decision solely on
the evidence, but they quickly tossed that admonishment to the wind and
began kicking around the question of whether Mark Fuhrman could have
planted the glove.  The battle lines were drawn.

Blacks were convinced he had; the others professed neutrality or
disbelief.  Then they moved on to the juicier, yet totally tangential
issue of whether Kato and Nicole had been lovers.  , "They were supposed
to be talking about our videos, not gossip from the six o'clock news," I
complained to Vinson.  >;

He stepped into the room to remind the group to confine its comments to
the evidence.

"Well, yeah," they argued.  "But everyone knows about all this stuff
anyway."

Reluctantly, they agreed to try again.  Within two minutes they were off
and gossiping on another subject not mentioned on the tape the Bronco
chase.  -Black jurors believed Simpson had only wanted to visit Nicole's
grave.  When one of the more neutral jurors suggested that it might just
might have been the escape attempt of a guilty man, one of the female
blacks shot back with a defense of Simpson, referring to him as "my man
O.J."

The racial divide did not come as any great shock to us.  As early as
the second week of the investigation our grand jury adviser, Terry
White, had come to us warning that a couple of black female jurors
seemed protective of Simpson.  They'd gone so far as to say that Nicole
"got what she'd deserved." What was disturbing to me was how the popular
media had permeated the thinking of the mock jury.  Not a soul among
them seemed capable of critical thinking.  If it was on TV, it must be
true.

Of course, many of the reports they'd seen were based upon nothing more
substantial than a loose comment dropped in the hallway outside of
court, but they had entered the canon as God's own truth.

The jury hung, five to five.

Naturally, we were deflated.  For my part, I was content to take what
lessons we could from the session specifically, the reaffirmation that
black females would be a hard sell and cut our losses.  Not so, Don
Vinson.  He insisted we try again.  This time, he wanted to go with a
full-blown facsimile of a trial.  We'd present more of the scientific
evidence and maybe get an idea of how to simplify it.  It was likely, he
said, that a more detailed presentation would elicit more specific
opinions than the knee-jerk loyalties we'd gotten in the first go-round.

I was uneasy about this.  It was August now, nearly two months before
the criminal trial, the media frenzy would have been slackening.  But
the madness was actually intensifying.  It was a miracle that the
results of the first mock jury had not gotten out.  How would we keep
the details of an even more elaborate dress rehearsal from leaking to
the press?

Vinson agreed that keeping the experiment under wraps would be
difficult..  But the jurors, he said, were required to sign an oath of
confidentiality.

"And what do we do if they violate this agreement?" I asked him.

Well, there was really nothing anyone could do, he conceded.  But no one
in his experience had ever breached an agreement of this kind.

To assure secrecy, he proposed doing it out of state specifically, in
Phoenix, Arizona.  No one would follow us there, he assured me.

People weren't as hot on this case outside Los Angeles.

So, on August 18, Bill and I met at the airport to catch a flight to
Phoenix.  When the idea of this trip first came up, Vinson had talked
about flying us out on a private jet.  He never came through with that.

Instead, we were booked on a commercial flight.  This should have been
our first tip-off to the troubles afoot.

Bill and I hid out in the terminal bar, the only dark, quiet corner that
would afford us some privacy while we waited for our flight.

Immersed in reviewing our notes, we lost track of the time.  Bill looked
at his watch and yelped, "We'd better hustle." We gathered our bags and
sprinted to the metal detectors that separated us from the jetway.  Just
as I was about to send my purse through the metal detector, it hit me:

"Shit, I've got my gun in there."

I'd forgotten to get clearance to carry it on board.  Bill and I looked
at each other, neither of us quite knowing what to do.

"Keep it for me," I begged the security guard at the station.  "I'll get
it on my way back."

"No can do," she told me.  "You've got to fill out the paperwork."

One look at her face told me she would not be moved.

"Go without me!" I shouted to Bill.  Then I raced back to the ticket
counter to find someone who could help me.  One agent, a sweet and
sympathetic woman, agreed to hold the gun for me.  I thanked her
breathlessly and was headed for the metal detector when I saw Bill
walking toward me, forlorn, his suit bag over one shoulder.

"Stand down, partner," he said.  "We missed our flight."

Man, did I feel stupid.

The airline gave us its conference room, where we spent a little time
going over prospective presentations.  Then we napped.  The pace of this
thing was sapping both of us.

When at last they called our flight, we were making our way wearily to
the gate when I heard someone call my name.

"Do you ever read the National Enquirer?" the disembodied voice asked. I
was about to say, "Are you crazy?" when I saw a guy with cameras slung
around his neck.  The tabloids!  Somebody had dropped a dime on us. Bill
and I turned and ran all the way to the gate.

"It's over," I told him.  "News'll be all over the place in about five
minutes.  They couldn't have sent us on a private plane?"

"Stupid," Bill muttered.  "Just plain stupid."

When we landed in Phoenix, I spotted the burly bearlike form of Frank
Sundstedt, who'd arrived in Phoenix early and was now waiting for us at
the gate.  We told him about the reporters.

"How about a disguise?" he asked, only partly in jest.

"Hell," I told him, "I'll wear dreadlocks if you think it will help."

On the way to the hotel, we nipped into a drugstore and I picked out a
pair of clunky reading glasses.  I looked at myself in the little round
mirrors clipped to the top of the rack.  Great!  Pistol-packing nerd.  I
kept my head down as we entered the hotel where Vinson had booked our
rooms.  Frank went to check on our reservations.  They'd been booked
under our real names.  Swell.  Reporters had been calling the hotel
asking about us.  Once again, we'd been made.

That was it.  There would be no mock jury.  The only thing we could do
was to turn around and go home.

God damn this case, I thought.  I'd missed a night at home for this?  I
would have loved to be singing lullabies right now.  You wouldn't catch
me humming Brahms.  It would probably be something more like "Angel
Baby."

Bill, Frank, and I met Vinson for dinner at a restaurant near the hotel.

"It's over, Don," I said.  "Call it off.  The press is all over us."

"No, no, no," he protested.  Vinson, I suspected, could see his claim to
glory as guru to the Simpson prosecutors slipping through his fingers.
He argued.  He cajoled.  He begged us to reconsider.  I cast a Strange
Days glance Frank's way.  I could see that he, too, was hoping to
salvage something from this debacle.  After all, seventeen recruits were
due to arrive tomorrow morning at a conference room in the hotel.  I
suggested a compromise.

Why don't you just go in and ask them what they think of the case so
far?  Ask them what they think of the witnesses' the evidence Maybe even
what they think about the lawyers.  But no mock trial.  No ballots.  No
verdicts."

Vinson entertained this proposal.  I could see the': Frank and Bill were
warming to it.  Finally, we all agreed that Don would chair a discussion
by a panel that had now been officially downgraded from "jury" to "focus
group." Bill, Frank, and I would watch on a TV monitor in an adjoining
room.

I crawled back to my room that night, already feeling the strain of
battle fatigue.  I looked at the clock.  Four A.M.  I'd get only about
four hours of sleep before I had to be up and going again.  I turned out
the light and was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

The phone was ringing.  I reached blindly for the receiver.

" 'Lo," I croaked.

"Marcia, you're late." It was Frank speaking in soft, urgent tones.

"They've already started you'd better get down here."

I squinted at the digital radio by my bed.  Nine A.M.  I'd forgotten to
set the damned alarm!

I pulled on a pair of leggings and boots, threw on a shirt, and,
grabbing a legal pad and a few binders with case reports, ran out the
door.  I quietly let myself into the viewing room and found a seat next
to Bill.  Vinson was on the monitor.  He sat at the mouth of a U formed
by conference tables.  The seventeen panelists were seated around it.

The breakdown, as I recall it, was about nine blacks Or Hispanics and
eight whites.  Most of the blacks were women.

"What did I miss?" I whispered to Bill.

"Not much," he whispered back.  "They're still getting acquainted."

I remember one of the men saying something like "It don't make no sense.
Why would someone who had it all just throw it away over a woman?"

I'd heard that one before.  To a guy who punches a time clock it
probably seems incomprehensible to risk a fortune because you've been
jilted.  But that didn't take into account the fact that even a guy who
had everything could flip out in the throes of sexual obsession.

I made a note to confer with our domestic violence people about this
one.

As I wrote, Vinson's voice penetrated my concentration.  He was , asking
our focus group what they felt about the death penalty.

I stiffened with alarm.  We'd given him a list of topics, and that most
certainly wasn't on it.  They were not supposed to talk about sentencing
issues.  I looked over to Frank, who was already on the case. He
whispered something to one of Vinson's assistants, who promptly entered
the conference room and in turn whispered to the boss.

Vinson excused himself and came in to see us, chastened.

Vinson apologized, saying he did not know it would be a problem.

"There's been no decision on whether we'll seek death or not,"

Frank told him.  "That subject is strictly off limits." r By this time,
all of us in the D.A."s office knew that we wouldn't be seeking the
death penalty.  It just wasn't an option.  No jury not even one composed
of white, middle-aged Republican males was going to sentence O.  J.
Simpson to death.

Now, I know there is a school of thought that in a capital case, the
district attorney should ask for the death penalty as a tactical ploy.

If you have asked for the death penalty, every juror empaneled must be
"death certified"in other words, willing in principle to vote for death.
And so, the reasoning goes, if you can pack a jury with law-and order
types, they will be more willing to convict.

I never believed that.  What you're likely to get, in my view, is a
panel of tough talkers who, when push comes to verdict, can't bring
themselves to convict.  Why?  Because it has only just dawned on them
that their actions may result in a person's death.

There was an even more compelling reason for not asking for the death
penalty in this case.  I didn't feel and I don't believe that any of my
colleagues from the brass on down felt that it was warranted.

Apart from the incidents of battery, Simpson did not have a prior
criminal history.  Over the course of his life he had not shown the kind
of callous disregard for society's rules that you look for in a hardened
criminal.  O.  J.  Simpson was not an incorrigible, nor was he a danger
to society at large.  Under those circumstances it would have been
immoral to seek his death.

Chastened, Vinson now steered the conversation onto another course.

"What do you think of the lawyers on the case?"' he asked them.

Of Robert ShapiroOily, insincere, said the nonblack jurors;

Smooth, smart, said the black ones.

Bill Hodgman?  A couple of jurors thought he was "smart" or "nice." But
the majority didn't seem to recognize the name.

What do you think of Marcia Clark?

I found myself pulling my knees up to my chest to shield myself from the
blows.

"Bitch!" two black women answered almost in unison.

I'll make no bones about it.  That stung.

Let me pause for a moment.  I don't want to make myself out to be some
hothouse petunia who withers in the face of criticism.  God knows I'd
been called "bitch" before.  But it was usually during the
rough-and-tumble of trial work.  And the taunts came from men, usually
behind my back.  They're livin' in a dream world if they think the stuff
doesn't reach my ears.  Being called a bitch by some old-time gender
bigot doesn't bother me.  In context, it's a compliment.  It means I've
stood up to him, I haven't let him have his way, and now he's throwing a
little tantrum.

But from women?

We all knew virtually from day one that a racial divide existed in this
case, but I figured I could talk to women.  In cases past, I'd always
been able to reach them somehow.  White, Hispanic, Asian, black.  It
didn't matter.  Even when they had failed to convict, I didn't feel that
they had it in for me personally.  But these gals were ready to eat
their own.

Interestingly, none of the men used such slurs in describing me.

Most of them, including one black man, found me strong, smart, and
tough.  That didn't count, somehow.  It was the "bitch" remark that
sailed right through the walls of the conference room and reverberated
over the wires.  So much for confidentiality.  The story was out before
we even made it back to L.A.  The headlines all read that a Phoenix
"jury" had voted to "acquit." Of course, it was complete nonsense, since
no vote was ever taken.  But one thing that was true the "bitch" business
was reported with rabid glee.

On the flight home, I gave serious thought to withdrawing from the case.
I am not a quitter by nature, but, I thought, if my style, my gender, or
my race could actually subvert the process of justice, I should offer
Gil the chance to dump me gracefully.  So I asked for a meeting with Gil
and Don Vinson.

Now, I should say here that in the months since the verdict, Don Vinson
has been quoted more than once as saying that his research showed that
black women would be too turned off by me to render a ' fair and
impartial verdict.  He's claimed to have counseled our office to
downplay the domestic violence issue on the grounds that black women
didn't consider it any big dealand that I resisted him, clinging to the
delusion that I could make them care.

Reality check.  By the time I returned from Phoenix, I knew perfectly
well what I was up against.  And if reaching jurors meant emphasizing
physical evidence over DV, I was perfectly willing to do it.  The
domestic violence aspect of the case had gone largely undeveloped.  It
wasn't that we'd neglected investigating the essential leads.  Early on,
we'd been in touch with the City Attorney's office, which had handled
the 1989 battery incident.  We'd collected files of documents generated
by that case as well as those from the 911 call from 1983.  Throughout
the fall I would conduct extensive interviews with prosecutors and cops
who had spoken to Nicole on both occasions.  But I hadn't been able to
get beyond the basic facts or to talk to domestic violence experts who
might help us to interpret those facts.

I hadn't a spare moment to deal with it.  My concentration and energy
had been centered upon blood and other physical evidence.  I was also
experiencing some emotional resistance within myself which I was
hard-pressed to explain, though the reasons for it would become plainer
to me as time wore on.  The idea that I was on some wild-eyed feminist
jag is one of Vinson's self-serving fantasies.

Vinson's misrepresentations of me, when I later read them in print,
seemed all the more fantastic in light of the little speech he actually
delivered to me in the very presence of Gil Garcetti.

"Marcia," he assured me unctuously, "those responses are nothing to
worry about.  When you're in the courtroom, they'll get to know and like
you.  I know they will.  No question about it."

I looked to Gil.  He paused for a moment, then said, "I agree with Don."

Gil Garcetti could have bailed on me, and he didn't.  I will always be
grateful to him for acting so honorably.  I think he wanted to send a
message that neither race nor gender should disqualify a good prosecutor
.  Gil also realized, as a purely practical matter, that anyone he chose
was likely to meet resistance from jurors like those who'd branded me a
bitch.  A white man would be written off as a representative of the
power establishment.  A black man would be reviled as an Uncle Tom. A
black woman?  Black female jurors would Sucking lynch her.  Bottom line,
if we drew a panel of jurors who were determined to acquit O.  J.
Simpson, they were going to kill the messenger.

For several weeks, the mock-jury results were a hot topic of gossip.

The "bitch" comment took on a life of its own.  I could hear tongues
wagging: Clark's a bitch.  Clark's a hothead.  Is it any wonder she
doesn't get along with the judge?

By now the Barry and Lisa Show had given way to the Lance and Marcia
Show.  Lance and I probably didn't do nearly as much wrangling as it
seemed from the headlines.  But whenever there was a flare up, the five
scrappiest seconds would make the ten o'clock news.  In fact, Ito and I
spent a lot of calm, normal moments together doing business-as-usual
courtroom stuff.  Sometimes we got along well; other times, not.  We
didn't have great chemistry, but if we'd been left alone we probably
could have arrived at a wobbly truce.

But that was never going to happen.  Lance was just too sensitive to his
own press notices.  He saw that the media had set up the two of us as
sparring partners and he wanted to make damned sure the public knew, the
reporters knew, and I knew who was running the court room.

Whenever I raised my voice to make a point, he scowled or dressed me
down.  While he always spoke respectfully to the defense, referring to
them as "Mr.  Cochran" and "Mr.  Shapiro," I was usually

"Marcia." I felt that I had to draw the line early and break him of the
habit of condescending to me before this case came to trial.  If a jury
picked up his cues, they'd tune me out before I could finish my opening
statement.

Gil had been watching all this from the sidelines.  A week or two after
the "bitch" episode, he called me into his office for a heart-to heart.

"Why don't you try laying back?" he suggested.  "Don't be so tough."

I was flabbergasted.  What the hell did he want me to do?  Go in there
with a pinafore and pigtails and threaten to hold my breath if Lance
didn't treat me better?  I had a job to do, and if I was to represent
the People properly, I had to show a little strength.  Either that or be
an empty chaur.

I was tempted to say all this, but I held my peace.

Gil smiled.  "Just try lightening up a little."

I left Gil's office pretty hot under the collar.  The thing I found
galling about the "lighten up" business was my suspicion that these
suggestions had probably come straight from Don Vinson.  By this point,
Vinson had zero credibility in my book.  If he'd offered his etiquette
tips directly to me, I would have told him to go fuck himself.

But they didn't come from him; they came from my boss.  I had a lot of
respect for Gil Garcetti.  He seemed to have faith in Vinson, and once
I'd had a chance to calm down, I realized it was probably not a good
idea to blow him off.

There were slight alterations I could make in my approach.  I could
couch my objections more deferentially.  I could smile more.  That
wouldn't be insincere, would it?  In my private life, I am warm and
gentle.  At least, I can be.  But being made to display, on command, a
side of my nature that I normally don't bring to the counsel table
seemed awkward.

I went over and over this in my mind, trying to figure out what was
right.  Vinson told Gil that the people he'd polled perceived me as
"hard." I should speak more softly.  I should get a softer hairdo.  I
should lose the business suits in favor of get this dresses.  Just think
about the logic here.  Vinson claimed that black middle-aged women were
carrying a grudge against me.  And so the way to defuse them was to
gussy myself up like Vanna White?  Vinson's line of reasoning was
unapologetically sexist.  It was demeaning to me personally.  And in the
Strange Days end it was meaningless psychobabble.  But we were spooked
by a set of odds that were definitely not in our favor.

So I got a goddamned haircut.  It was not a make over.  The style I'd
been wearing to date was frankly unflattering.  My hair had always
tended to be thin, so I'd had it permed.  Suzanne Childs took me to her
own hairdresser, Allen Edwards in Studio City.  He specialized in soft,
natural styles.  Allen saw exactly what had to be done.  He pulled my
fuzzy hair back to the nape of my neck and declared with a flourish,
"This must go."

The transformation was not, in my opinion, miraculous.  In fact, it took
several visits to Studio City to get it right.  But even I had to admit
that it was an improvement.  My features appeared softer, less matronly.
And let's face it who's going to complain about being made to look
younger?  According to the wisdom of consultancy, these changes should
have had a subliminal effect.  I would come across as fresher, younger,
and, as a consequence, less annoying to middle-aged black women.  Go
figure.

The "make over" was big news.  A week or so after the cut I drove into a
car wash.  The radio was on and I heard Howard Stern and Robin Quivers
discussing my new 'do.  Howard thought it looked like I'd had
chemotherapy.  I have to say, I found it amusing.  Some of the best
commentary to come out of this trial actually came from those guys.  But
the point is, the buzz would not die.  Every time I went in for another
trim, or made the slightest alteration, there was another flurry of
public commentary about my hair.

Several months down the line, I got my perm straightened.  (I'd actually
wanted to let it grow back to its natural straightness, but I'd put it
off, fearful of calling attention to myself.)  The next day, when I got
off the elevator at the ninth floor, reporters gave me a standing
ovation.

Look pleasant, I told myself.  They mean well.  At least they're on your
side.

When I walked into court, Lance did a double-take.  He noticed the stir
my altered appearance was causing.

"Miss Clark .  .  .  I think," he quipped.

There was laughter in the courtroom.  I joined in, although later I felt
uncomfortable about it.  The experience produced in me that awful naked
feeling of being a teenager changing her hairdo to please the popular
crowd.  And the irony of it was that this beauty offensive left me
feeling more vulnerable than ever before.

A UPI reporter whom I've known for years pulled me aside in the hall and
said, "Marcia, let me give you one piece of unsolicited advice.

Don't change.  You know what you're doing, just do your thing."

Do your thing.  I used to have a pretty good idea of what my thing was.
Even when my private life was a mess, I could come into the courthouse
of a morning and count on doing my thing.  And I did it pretty damned
well.  Now my thing had turned into this weird and seedy game show.  And
when you're standing confused and blinking in the klieg lights, it's
easy to lose sight of yourself altogether.

But of one thing I was certain.  I couldn't undo four hundred years of
social injustice with a pretty dress and a soft voice.

I don t mean to sound like a whiner.  I know there are lots of people
who would trade a kidney for a few seconds of celebrity.  In fairness,
I'm willing to concede that under some very special circumstances it can
be flattering to be the center of attention.  It's a nice little
perk."You feel important for a moment; then you go back to work.

But the escalating media frenzy in the Simpson case filled me with a
sense of foreboding.  The attention didn't stop at my work, or even at
the length of my skirts.  The reporters who besieged Suzanne Childs and
her overworked public relations people were interested in "Marcia
Clark,, up close and personal." Read: What gives with Marcia's personal
life?  I told Suzanne to hold them off.  I did whatever I could to
discourage them.  When I heard that the L.A.  Times was looking to
profile me, I kept ducking the reporter.  Poor guy finally threw in the
towel and ran something called "The Reluctant Headliner," which was a
piece about how I avoided publicity.  Whenever reporters asked Gil about
my personal life, he'd say, "I don't even know if she has a family."
Most of my friends and colleagues were similarly discreet.

Around the middle of July, the National Enquirer published its first
piece about me.  It was a sweetly inaccurate story about how, in my
private life, I was a homebody in the June Cleaver mold.  They'd found
some eight-year-old neighbor girl who was supposed to have said, "What I
love best is when Mrs.  Clark lets me make cookies with her....  She
says little girls are the best helpers when it comes to making cookies
and that makes me feel special."

That one had the guys in my office absolutely howling.  For the record,
I bake cookies about once a year.  As for the kid, I wouldn't know her
to pick her out of a lineup.

All in all, it was pretty harmless fluff.  But what worried me was the
fact that they would be out there talking to my neighbors at all!  Was
it because I was going through a divorce?  The Enquirer had already
gotten hold of it.  A divorce filing must send out some kind of
subliminal alert to those dissolute Brits who run the American tabloids.

Under ordinary circumstances I would not even consider talking about my
private life.  In fact, when I sat down to write this book, I didn't
intend to touch upon anything personal at all.  I've had second thoughts
about that.  So many absurd things have been published about me that I
feel I owe you an honest accounting of myself.  By "honest," I do not
mean exhaustive.  But there are some things about me that I can and
should discuss.  Things it's important for you to know. And when you
read on, I think you'll understand why.

Marcia was a very reserved person who came from a very orthodox Jewish
family.  She would sometimes have her face covered with a veil and
before ...  marriage was even chaperoned by another woman who spoke no
English.

National Enquirer, August 2, 1994.

I was born Marcia Rachel Kleks, daughter of an Israeli immigrant.  We
were most emphatically not Orthodox.  We rarely went to temple.  I spent
my babyhood in the Bay Area.  At the age of three or four I decided to
become an actress.

It was more than some preschooler's daydream.  Joel Grey was a distant
cousin on my mother's side though I only met him once, when I was eight.
My mother herself was a classical pianist.  By the time she was
eighteen, she'd made a recording.  She never went on to American Tabloid
perform professionally.  She married.  All the time my brother, Jon, and
I were young, she kept that recording locked away somewhere like an old
love letter.  I never heard it.

When I was six my mother started me on piano lessons.  I was a nervous,
fidgety kid and had a hard time sitting still long enough to practice.
Unfortunately, I was blessed with a good ear, which allowed me to be
lazy.  I would listen to my teacher play a piece, and then I'd learn it
by ear so I wouldn't have to be bothered figuring out how to read music.
I took lessons off and on until I was nine years old, when both my
mother and I conceded defeat.  But then, I'd discovered dance, a passion
that would last a lifetime.

I have a faint recollection of practicing ballet in the living room
while my mother played the piano.  Unfortunately, I don't have many of
those mental snapshots.  For the most part, the memories of my early
years are chaotic and incomplete.  My father was a chemist with the FDA,
and his job required us to move at least ten times while I was growing
up.  I'd just get settled into a place then, wham, uprooted again.  I
could never afford to let myself get too attached to anyone or anything.
There's a lot, I'm sure, I've never let myself remember.

When I was ten or eleven we moved back to the Bay Area into a new
development called Foster City.  It was touted by its developers as a
sort of Shangri-la laid out along a string of lagoons.  The showcase
homes had their own boat docks.  Ours didn't.  It sat across the street
from a beach.  We did get a Sunfish, and I learned how to sail.  The
area was raw and undeveloped in those days.  My mother would send me to
the store in my sailboat to pick up milk and other small items.  As I
look back on those days, I realize that I enjoyed a remarkable amount of
freedom.  And when it wasn't given to me, I went to great lengths to
steal it.

Foster City didn't have its own school system, so in seventh grade I was
bused to a junior high in a very rough neighborhood.  I wasn't exactly
born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I'd never seen any thing like
this.  These kids were all wise in the ways of the streets.

Here I was in knee socks and pleated skirts, with long, straight brown
hair, sitting next to babes wearing ass-hugging skirts, black fishnets,
a pound of makeup, and hair teased into humongous lacquered swells.

They smoked in the bathroom, swore like sailors, and didn't give a damn
about their grades or what their parents would say.  Tres cool.  I
wanted some of that.

I knew my parents would throw a fit if they saw me in fishnets, so I
came up with a plan to get around them.  I went shopping with a school
friend who helped me pick out a low-cut V-necked sweater that exposed my
nonexistent cleavage.  I borrowed a tight black skirt that was way too
long for me.  I think it was something my friend's older sister had
outgrown.  I fixed the hemline problem by rolling up the waistband, then
hid the bulge under the bulky sweater.  I scored a pair of black hose
and doctored the runs with pale pink nail polish.  And I bought a pair
of cool black pumps.  This became my uniform.  My secret uniform.

I'd leave the house every morning in normal clothes.  Then, when I got
to school, I'd duck into the girls' bathroom, dig into my knapsack, and
pull out my finery.  There were usually several friends willing to help
me tease my long, straight hair to an acceptable height.  The black
eyeliner, applied with a canoe paddle, and pale pink lipstick completed
the transformation.  I was ready for class.

Back then the student population was divided into two groups:

"surfers" and "greasers." I liked the greasers, car-addicted, chain
smoking tough guys who swore at the slightest provocation, wore tight
jeans, pointed boots, and leather jackets, and poured more oil on their
hair than in their engines.  I attracted the attention of the leader of
the pack.  Tom was fifteen an older man by the standards of a twelve ,
year-old.  He wore his hair slicked back with a ton of lubricant and
sported a black leather jacket, his trademark.  He was reputed to be
epileptic; this somehow only added to his mystique.  He had a pair of
deep brown eyes, full sensuous lips, and a sexy macho attitude that made
him the premier catch of the school.  Shortly after my own
transformation, he decided we had to go steady.

This seemed a very cool thing to do.  It was a sure way of getting
accepted by the fast crowd and proving how tough I was to boot.  So I
took Tom's ring, a heavy metal number that was way too big for me.  I
tried the prescribed remedy of wrapping yarn around it to improve the
fit, but that made it so bulky, I ended up wearing it on a chain around
my neck.  My steady didn't mind.  He considered it proof of his
manliness that his ring hung loose on his woman's skinny finger.

At recess he'd let me wear his leather jacket, which hit me at the
knees.  We'd stand together, his arm around me. Periodically, he'd plant
an ostentatious kiss on my lips.  He'd linger long enough so that
everyone could see we were a couple.  What they couldn't know was that
he'd repeatedly invited me to go out on dates usually to Saturday
matinees and that I kept finding ever more creative excuses to decline.
Quite apart from the fact that I'd never be able to carry off an actual
date under my parents' noses, I learned that I could expect to be "felt
up" and "felt down." That prospect terrified me.  I knew that eventually
I'd have to put out or get out.  I wasn't quite sure how to do either.

It was one of my steady's jealous ax-girlfriends, Linda, who settled the
matter once and for all.  She sent out the word that she was going to
knock out my lights.  Tom told me he'd "take care" of her.  One day, at
noon recess, I went into the girls' restroom.  I'd just finished patting
my hair into place when Linda burst through the door, cornered me, and
threw a punch.  I was agile enough to duck, or she would have knocked me
out cold.

"You little bitch," she growled.  "You can't have Tom; he's mine.

Get it?" She was leaning forward with clenched fists.  It would have
been funny, it was so trite except I was scared to death.  What had
happened to Tom's promise to "take care" of her?  It was clearly up to
me.

"Take him, he's yours," I told her, in as rational and assertive a tone
as I could muster.  She seemed surprised, but she backed off.  And so I
slipped out of a rumble and a sticky romantic entanglement within the
space of a minute.

My career as a greaser was cut short by my family's next move, this one
to Michigan.  I had just turned thirteen.  I found to my dismay that the
quiet suburb we now called home had no great appreciation for fishnet
stockings.  The kids in my new high school worshiped all things
Californian.  They wanted to be surfers.  There was only one real "in"
crowd.  All the rest were wannabes.  By my third day, the popular -
cliqueoperating upon the mistaken assumption that because I was from San
Francisco I must be a surfer girl took me under its wing.  I was
ceremoniously escorted to their table in the lunchroom and introduced
all around.  The girls were all dyed-in-the-wool Heathers.  You know the
type.

Before lunch was over, they'd set me up to join them for Cokes at a
local hangout on Friday, go shopping with them on Saturday, and visit
someone's house on Sunday.  The kicker came when one of the girls called
me at home that night to announce that I would be going steady with one
of the freckle-faced rich guys I'd met at lunch.  I was stunned.  I'd
heard of arranged marriages, but this was ridiculous.

The next day at lunch, I deliberately chose to sit at a table of out
casts those who'd either abandoned all hope of ever being popular or had
never cared much to begin with.  One girl leaned over to me and asked,
"Do you realize how pissed off they're going to be if you sit with us?"
Of course I did.  I actually enjoyed watching the Heathers glower at me
from their privileged position.  They didn't like the idea of being
rejected.  Serves you damned right, I thought.

I did okay on my own terms.  That year I got into gymnastics.  I would
have liked to try out for the women's gymnastics team, except there
wasn't one.  Instead, I became a cheerleader.  Co-captain of the squad,
in fact.  Before I could really get into the season, however, we moved
again.  This time to Maryland.

I was prepared to hate the place, but I ended up loving it.  The
apartment complex we moved to was populated largely by families as
transient as my own.  They came from all over the world.  In the after
noons and on weekends I'd play soccer in the central courtyard with kids
from India, Chile, Argentina, and England.  They were kindred spirits.
Most of them had lived lives as unsettled as my own, and they had no
trouble welcoming a newcomer whose tenure was uncertain.  I faced the
usual trauma of having to make new friends, but the transition was
easier than ever before.  Within two months I'd become part of a
congenial crowd, with a few close friends among them.

That interlude of contentment, however, ended abruptly with yet another
move, this time to New York.  The announcement devastated me.  I'd been
so happy in Maryland.  For the first time in my life I hadn't felt like
a freak.  Maybe it was the feeling of having no control over my life, or
maybe it was just the prospect of having to start all over again, but
when I got news of our impending departure, I marched upstairs to my
room, closed the door, and ripped up every book I could lay my hands on.
Then I threw every fragile object I owned against the wall.  When my
belongings lay in ruins around me, I dropped onto my bed in a fit of
sobbing.

We moved to a development on Staten Island, where we bought a large
house.  That, at least, made me happy.  I had the whole downstairs floor
to myself.  It had its own entrance, which gave me more freedom than
ever.  The bad news was that the kids in my new high school regarded me
with outright hostility.  The California mystique didn't mean spit here.
The only group that would accept me were the hippies.

They were not junkies or hypes or anything, just basically good kids
who, like me, didn't fit in anywhere else.  I helped them organize the
distribution of the High School Free Press and agitated for the
abolition of the school dress code.  And I smoked a little dope,
something I admit without a twinge of regret or guilt.  When I see a
politician squirming when asked to admit he sneaked a toke as a kid, I
just want to shake him and say, "Grow up, Junior." The way I look at it,
toking was just one more rite of passage.

One night my friends and I met at a local park that was one of our
favorite hangouts.  We were just sitting around acting cool.  One guy
brought his guitar and we were singing Dylan songs badly.  Suddenly a
crew-cut man wearing a Ban-Lon shirt, cutoffs, and a peace symbol
approached us and flicked on a flashlight.

"This is a bust, everybody," he barked.  "Stand up."

I thought it was a joke.  I mean, he had to be kidding, especially in
that getup.

"I mean it," he repeated.  "I'm a cop."

"Oh, yeah?  Well then, where's your badge?" I taunted him.  I was
perfectly sober but high on attitude.

He produced a badge.  We promptly stood.

The cop marched us out to where several other officers had stationed
themselves in the middle of the park.  Another girl and I were handed
over to an older cop who questioned us apart from the others.

I was scared.  I was enough of a middle-class Jewish girl to know that
an arrest would be terrible for me in every way.  But I also knew that
I'd done nothing wrong.

"Why are we getting busted?" I asked him.  "We were just singing."

"Don't give me that," he sneered at me.  "We found a bunch of hype kits
and Baggies of heroin right over there." He pointed to some bushes.

Heroin!  The thought of pushing a needle into my arm made me physically
ill.

"You must be kidding," I said in complete amazement.  "We don't do
heroin!"

"Oh, yeah?" he said right into my face.  "Well, let's see your arms."

I was wearing a sleeveless top, which, as I think back on it, should
have told the cops right off the bat that I was no junkie.  But I
stretched out my arms obediently.  The officer examined them and pointed
to a small scratch on my right bicep.  "You see," he said triumphantly,
"that could be a skin pop."

Skin pop?  What the hell was that?

The sickening realization swept over me that this guy could say anything
he wanted.  He could manufacture any evidence he wanted.

No matter how innocent I was, he could send me to jail if he wanted to.
To him I was just a scruffy piece of shit.

I don't want to sound melodramatic, but that sense of total helplessness
stayed with me long after I became an officer of the court. For a
prosecutor, it's easy to become annoyed at a criminal justice system
that seems to be stacked so ridiculously in favor of defendants. But you
have to have been on the downside looking up at the face of the law
before you realize how thin those defenses really are.  Once you've been
there, you can't honestly begrudge a defendant any help he can muster.

That night in the park, I had no cards to play.  So I did the only thing
I could.  I begged.  I pleaded.  And as fear and frustration over came
me, I began to cry.  The other girl watched this performance in silence,
but when I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye, I saw she looked
as terrified as I felt.  When I'd run out of words and courage, I
stopped.

The officer stood looking at us for a moment, confused.  Then he said,
"All right, you two, get out of here, and fast.  I don't want to see you
anywhere around here ever again.  You hear me?  Now beat it!"

I looked at him for a moment, unsure of what I'd just heard.  I looked
at my friend.  She nodded, and together we turned and began to walk
away, expecting to be stopped at any moment.  After the first few steps,
we broke into a sprint that had our hearts pumping.  We didn't stop
running until we got to a bus stop about a mile from the park.  And
there we parted ways.  Neither of us said a thing to the other.  And
after that evening, I never saw her again.

I never figured out what happened that night.  How the hero inif it
really was heroing got there.  Whose it really was.  The word around
school was that the cops had planted the drugs as an excuse to bust us
because neighbors had complained about noise in the park.  The boys were
booked and charged.  No one got any jail time, but after that we all
pretty much lost touch with each other.

My life was already drifting in another direction.

Shortly after we'd moved to New York, I'd started taking weekly acting
classes at a small repertory theater in Greenwich Village, Circle in the
Square.  I absolutely lived for those classes, especially during the
first six months of the school year while I was still battling the
stigma of being the "new girl." The acting teachers at Circle in the
Square were terrific; they gave me the opportunity to cut my teeth on
Shakespeare.  When we worked on readings from Othello, I chose to play
the maid rather than Desdemona.  No mystery as to why Desdemona was an
ingenue, a sheltered little girl.  Emilia, the maid, was an older woman,
wise in the ways of the world and the streets.

My teachers seemed to think I was pretty good.  At the end of the
course, we put on a showcase and I was given the female lead, Emily, in
a short segment from Our Town.  I also had two roles in Dylan Thomas's
Under Milk Wood, which was more than anyone else got to play.  While
waiting to go on, I was paralyzed with stage fright.  It was like being
underwater, that queer sense of dissociation from the physical world.  I
would suffer that same crisis of nerves many times in years to come- in
fact, any time I had to deliver an opening statement.

But the resolution was always the same.  Once I actually set foot on
stage, the fear drained away.  I became totally immersed in the moment.
On stage the imaginary characters overtook me and I felt the rush of
bringing them alive for a few moments.  Heady stuff for a fifteen
year-old.

From my first trip into the Village, I felt at home.  It was exciting.
Exotic.  I just couldn't get enough of it.  During the summer between my
sophomore and junior years, I found a way to spend more time there: I
got a job.  Well, sort of.

One afternoon after school, I wandered into a leather shop. I'd always
loved the smell and feel of leather and struck up a conversation with a
man who turned out to be the manager.  He asked me if I'd like to make a
little extra money.  I was wary.  "Like to make some money?" sounded
like a preamble to "Take off your clothes." The manager saw my reaction
and laughed.  He was looking for someone to distribute advertising
flyers.  He'd pay me five bucks an hour to walk up and down the street
and hand them out to passersby.

It was too perfect.  I'd be right in the middle of the action, and
making money at that.  I accepted on the spot.  He handed me a stack and
I hit the pavement with a big grin on my face.  for about two months
until I got a job as a salesgirl at a low-end fashion boutique.  I was
really good at it.  I could talk to people, size up types, and put
together great outfits.  Low-riding, hip-hugger bell bottoms, tight
T-shirts and halter tops.

For the next two years I worked at several shops on the Lower East Side.
Artists and entrepreneurs had moved in and begun transforming what was
basically a slum into another hip venue.  It would come to be called the
East Village, but in those days it was still a pretty raunchy part of
town.  The boutiques where I worked stayed open until one or two A.M. on
Fridays and Saturdays, which meant that I was out on the streets in the
small hours of the morning.  On the way home I had to run a gauntlet of
wings, junkies, and speed freaks, all looking for a handout.  I knew
better than to stop and reach into my purse on those dark streets.  I
decided I'd better get myself some protection.  Not a gun camouflage.  I
bought the scruffiest leather air force jacket I could find, as well as
a pair of funky, threadbare jeans.  Add to that a really beat-up suede
saddlebag.  I'd change into my grungy getup. Worked like a charm.  Even
the wings gave me a wide berth.

By now, my old school chums were history.  I wouldn't date high school
boys.  I didn't have to.  Village dudes were invariably more attractive
to me than high school geeks.  I'd finally found someplace here I
belonged.  Then, once again, the ax fell.  We had to move I had to go
with my parents.

That next fall, when I started college at U.C.  Riverside, I was
suffering from depression.  I hated the place.  I hated life in a girls'
dorm.

You can understand why.  I'd just come from the Village, which was on
the cutting edge of everything from street fashion to politics.  Now all
of a sudden, here I was, stuck in a dormitory where my floormates wore
curlers and fuzzy slippers and agonized over whether boys should be
allowed to use the girls' bathrooms during Sunday visits.

I had fun shocking people.  I still dressed in my Village clothes, which
consisted mostly of velvet and leather.  The only thing I would consider
wearing to bed was an ivory satin gown, Jean Harlow-style, fitted to the
hips and flaring out into a swirl around the ankles.  I'd found it in a
thrift shop.  The Sandra Dee types viewed me with suspicion, and I
avoided them like the plague.  After two weeks I transferred to a coed
dorm where I had a much better time.

The coursework was easy and I found a terrific jazz dance class.  It was
taught by Joe Tremaine, a slender redhead who had an impressive list of
professional credits as bodh a dancer and a choreographer.  It was just
dumb luck to have run into someone that good.  Joe gave me religion. One
day the class was doing a combination he'd just demonstrated when he
suddenly stopped the music and glared at us.

"You all think you can just get out there and wiggle your fannies and
have a good time, don't you?  Well, you look sloppy and amateurish.
Anyone can see it.  I can tell who's had ballet.  I can tell who's
trained and worked, and who hasn't.  There's no substitute for real
work.  If you're not working, you're not fooling anyone but yourselves."

I knew he was right.  Whedler I ever danced professionally or not, I
knew I wanted to do it right or not at all.  The next day I got myself
into a ballet class and continued to study ballet for the next twelve
years.  I danced until the rigors of trial work, and later, motherhood,
made it impossible for me to keep up.

The following year I transferred to UCLA.  I cut classes as often as I
could get away with it.  I don't mean to leave the impression that I was
a slacker.  Far from it.  I just preferred to study on my own.  In fact,
I took a heavy load each semester so I could graduate as soon as
possible.  I hardly dated at all.  To make up for the absence of a
social life, I started folk dancing, which was a real craze back then. I
made a few good friends, mostly women, and we started going out together
on the nights when there was no good place to dance.  Our favorite
watering hole was on Fairfax Avenue.

This was the early seventies; the Six-Day War, which had ended in a huge
victory for Israel, was still fresh in the minds of American Jews.

Israeli males who streamed to the States in its aftermath carried with
them not only the aura of foreignness but the macho allure of the
conqueror.  Most of these hotshots found their way to Jewish
communities, where they felt most at home.  In Los Angeles, that was the
Fairfax district.

Fairfax Avenue was jammed with small restaurants that served falafel and
shuwarma.  They were in constant and largely unsuccessful competition
with Cantor's Delicatessen, the flagship anchored on the busiest part of
the thoroughfare.  Cantor's was the premier hangout for newly arrived
Israelis, as well as for Americans who wanted to meet them.  Young
Jewish girls who were bored by the nice Jewish boys they'd grown up with
were thrilled by the prospect of these exotic specimens.  (How
strenuously, after all, could one's parents object?

These Israelis were Jewish and war heroes to boot.)

The Israelis were perfectly well aware of their allure, and took full
advantage of the many romantic opportunities it afforded them.  Some
were honorable; some weren't.  The rogues among them left a trail of
broken hearts and bitter stories that eventually saddled the whole lot
with reputations as womanizing bastards.  When I came on the scene, that
rep hadn't yet evolved; we still had reason to believe that they could
be okay guys.

My girlfriends and I tended to congregate at a joint across the street
from Cantor's.  It had only about ten glass-topped tables, seating forty
at most.  On the walls hung posters of Israel.  A tape of popular
Israeli music played nonstop.  The owners didn't object to patrons
nursing cups of coffee for hours rather than spending money on dinner.
This made it a great favorite of the Israelis, and of the girls looking
for Israelis.

It was there I met my first husband.

I wasn't looking for a husband, or even a boyfriend.  I had no desire to
be added to anyone's list of conquests.  My friends and I had finished
eating when I was aware that one of the sharks was cruising our way.  I
was about to warn my friends to ignore him when he pulled up a chair and
sat down next to me.

It was one of those heavy-handed advances so typical of Israeli men.  I
signaled to my group to ignore him, but he'd already started chatting up
one of the girls.  She was getting all shiny-eyed and breath less and
had taken it upon herself to make introductions.  I half-turned to say
hello and sitting next to me was the most incredibly handsome man I had
ever seen.

He had glossy dark curls and enormous green eyes.  His features were
angelic and yet strongly masculine.  Gabythat's what his friends called
him was doubtless a womanizing cad.  But he was very charming.  And he
was incredibly funny.  Gaby's wit was never self deprecating; the joke
was always at someone else's expense.  But it was always right on the
mark.  I was charmed by him despite myself.  He spoke to me only in
Hebrew, which seemed more intimate than English. About a hour after we'd
met he told me, "I'll take you home."

It was not an offer.  It was an order.

All my life I've had this thing for bad boys.  I'm embarrassed even
having to think about this, let alone talk about it.  But I got turned
on by that tired old macho come-on.  Worldly as I considered myself, I
was still a kid.  I was wildly confident one moment, withdrawn the next.
And so when I ran smack into this handsome, assertive man who seemed to
know exactly what he wanted, I saw in him only what I wanted to see:
real strength.

I let him take me home to the studio apartment I was sharing with a
friend near campus.  We began seeing each other.  In less than a month I
was living with him.

Gaby and I made an odd pair.  Here I was, a grubby college student in
jeans, whose idea of high fashion was the latest shipment at the
army-navy surplus store.  I studied all day and ventured out at night
only for folk dancing.  Gaby was flashy, always dressed to the nines in
body-hugging suits.  He seemed to have plenty of money.  He slept all -
day and went nightclubbing all night.  I found his lifestyle very
glamorous , and allowed myself to be swept along by it.

Gaby played backgammon for a living.  I'd never even heard of the game
before I met him, but Gaby took great pains to teach it to me.

He instructed me not only in the basic rules, but in theory and strategy
as well.  He spent hours explaining the various plays and how to size up
your chances of winning at any given point.  The sizing-up business was
important, because the stakes of the game could be raised over and over
again by "doubling." One player could challenge by offering to double
the stakes.  If the other player refused, the game ended and the
challenger scored a point.  The stakes could range from a quarter a
point to hundreds or even thousands of dollars a point.  When you
consider that fifty or sixty points can be easily racked up in one
sitting, you can see how some heavy coin could change hands, fast.

I soon learned that backgammon was a real hot pastime with the rich. The
craze was in its infancy when Gaby and I first met.  Two years later,
when I started law school, it had become a full-tilt mania.

Bars and clubs everywhere had at least one or two tables.  Some clubs
devoted themselves exclusively to it.  The most popular of these was
Pips, in Beverly Hills.  Pips catered to the rich and famous.  The name
of the club was inlaid discreetly in brass to the right of the large
double-doored entrance.  Muted lighting, thick carpets, and dark,
paneled walls lent the place an air of understated opulence.  The room
devoted to backgammon was right off the foyer.  It had ten tables and
its own bar.  I liked Pips more than other places on the back gammon
circuit because it was relatively quiet and had cushiony, well
upholstered chairs.  There, I could park myself and study while Gaby
played.

Gaby and I would drop into Pips every other night or so while he tried
to hustle up a "pigeon," the pros term for a novice who played for high
stakes.  It wasn't easy to get a game at Pips.  The fashionable set
usually played with their friends and were understandably leery of a
flashy stranger with an Israeli accent.  So if he failed to score, we'd
move along to the Cavendish.

The Cavendish, located on the border between West Hollywood and Beverly
Hills, was a private club that had been devoted largely to bridge and
gin rummy.  Gambling, of course, was illegal, and I'd heard that the
Cavendish had been raided a couple of times but as far as I could tell
that hadn't slowed down the action.  During the early seventies, the
entire back room was given over to backgammon. Cavendish was not the
plush playground that Pips was.  It was located in an office building,
two flights up.  There was no elevator that serviced the club.  Nor was
there any sign visible from the street to announce its existence.

The first thing you saw when you came in was a long counter where club
personnel would check to make sure you were a member in good standing.
To the left of that counter was a lounge with a couple of sofas and
coffee tables.  If you passed through the lounge, you'd walk into a
large room filled with bridge tables.  To the back was a partition of
wood and glass; beyond that, backgammon.

Gaby never had trouble finding a game here.  In fact, he made a lot of
money.  The tabloids later portrayed Gaby as a chronic cheat.  I should
tell you that backgammon is a game of cutthroats, and it was very common
for players to accuse one another of cheating.  So you have to take
those stories with a grain of salt.  All I can say is, I never saw him
cheat.

At the beginning, I loved doing the clubs with Gaby.  The nightlife
reminded me a little of my time in Greenwich Village which I still think
of as the happiest, most carefree part of my life.  But looking back on
it, I can see that my life with Gaby was a weird existence by any
standard.  Gaby would play all night; then we'd hit a twenty-four hour
diner.  By the time we got home, it would be four in the morning.

We'd be too keyed up to sleep, so we'd watch TV until at least five or
six A.M.  Of course, then we slept until one or two in the afternoon.

We'd start out again at seven or eight.  It was common for us to see the
sun only as it was setting or rising.

I skipped classes.  Actually, I'd never gone much, to begin with.  I'd
check in for a few sessions at the beginning of the semester and then
spend the rest of the term reading on my own.  That suited me better.

My grades stayed high.  Everything worked OUt fine.

After the first year, however, I found the charm of the nightclub
circuit wearing a little thin.  Nocturnal living left me isolated,
dependent almost solely upon Gaby for love and companionship.  That
wouldn't have been so bad, except that he and I fought a lot.  Some
times the conflicts were subtle. he'd get sarcastic over something as
small as my not making dinner the way he liked it.  But that was usually
a pretext for deeper irritation, like the fact that I'd come home from
dance class later than I was supposed to.  He didn't like being alone.
He couldn't stain not knowing where I was.  He'd say he was afraid that
whenever I Wasn't with him, I was seeing other men.

We'd scream at each other in Hebrew.  Once he barricaded the front door
with chairs and sat down on one of them, arms folded, refusing to let me
out.  I'd lock myself in the bathroom to get away from him; once, he
literally kicked the door in.  I tried to leave him so many times.  One
time in particular, we'd been fighting about God knows what, and I
decided I'd had enough.  I threw some clothes in my dance bag and ran
out of the apartment.  Gaby ran after me and caught me just as I reached
my car.  He grabbed me by the arm and tried to pull me back with him
across the street.  He yanked me so hard he knocked me off my feet. As
he dragged me over the ground, I screamed "Let me go!" ever and over.
Finally, a neighbor opened a window and shouted, If you don't knock it
off, I'm calling the police!" That sobered us up real fast.

But the brawls continued.  I'd try to leave; he'd try to stop me.

Once as I was headed for the door, he pushed me onto the bed.  I got up
and pushed him back.  As I tried to make for the door again, he grabbed
hold of me.  The next thing I knew I was flat on my back on the floor
and he was standing behind me.  I wasn't thinking.  I was just reacting.
I swung my font up behind me to ward him off and I felt it connect with
his body for one startled second I waited in dread for the retaliation.
It didn't come.  I leaped to my feet and, without so much as looking at
him, I ran to the balcony, climbed over the railing, jumped, and hit the
ground running.  Thank God, we lived on the first floor.  I ran hard,
convinced I'd hear him gaining on me.  After about five minutes, I
realized that he wasn't following.  Winded, chest heaving, I stopped and
looked back.  He wasn't there.

I was puzzled.  This was a first.  I'd never run out the door without
Gaby hot on my heels.  Maybe I was mistaken.  Maybe I hadn't kicked him.
After about an hour, I figured it would be safe to test the waters.  I
entered the apartment Warily and found Gaby sitting in a chair in the
bedroom, slumped over, ashen-faced.  What had I done?

"Are you okay?" I asked him timidly.

"You kicked me in the balls, damn you," he managed weakly.

I started to apologize, but he waved me away and limped over to the bed.

"Just leave me alone."

I felt so guilty that I stayed.  Things went back to our peculiar idea
of normal.  That meant rolling from the heat of battle to the unnatural
quiet that settled over us after we'd wrung ourselves dry.  Then we'd
drift for a while into a loving period when we'd actually laugh and have
fun together.  And then it would all start up again.

Gaby never slapped or punched me.  Things never escalated past the
shoving stage, which was almost always the result of my trying to leave
and his trying to restrain me.  Once, during an argument, he pushed me
against the wall, pinned my shoulder back with one hand, and tapped my
cheek in a mock slap.  Then he grabbed my chin.  I asked him tearfully
to let me go.  He looked in my eyes and said, "I hold you like this
because I love you.  You make me act this way.  I'd never get this way
if I didn't love you so much."

And I accepted that.  Somehow, we'd both come to equate a display of
physical aggression with a demonstration of love.  When our fights
escalated to the point that I tried to walk out the door, his efforts to
restrain me were actually a form of reassurance for us both.

It was the way we proved to each other that we were still in love.

I spent half the time wishing I could get away from him; the other half
of the time I felt that all I wanted to do was be with him.  I hated
myself for being so weak.  I seemed to have no real personality of my
own.  Gaby was the mirror in which I saw myself.  I'd changed my habits
to fit his convenience.  I'd pegged my expectations to his.  I had never
had a job other than waitressing or salesclerking.  I knew that those
menial jobs paid barely enough to live.  I felt like a hamster on a
wheel, unable to see a route out.

I had a vague, unformed, yet undeniable realization that having a job
was where it was at.  If you had well-paid work, you had some power in a
relationship.  You could be independent.  And if you had a well-paid job
that was interesting and satisfying?  That almost took the place of a
relationship.  But how the hell did you get a gig like that?

By now, I'd realized I would never make it as an actor or a dancer.  I
had some talent, but not the insane drive you need to make it to the
top.  I had enough sense at the time to realize that I needed a
profession.  But I didn't have any clear idea what that was.  I was so
clueless that I actually applied to United Airlines for a position as a
flight attendant.  (In those days we were still calling them
stewardesses.)  The airline called me back for a second interview.  I'll
never forget it about ten of us sitting around the table.  They started
asking us our political views.  Everybody's sitting there simpering, "I
don't know, I mean, I don't really care." Then I weighed in with a few
strong opinions.  I never heard from United again.

I fell back to reconsider.  I could be a diplomat.  Sure.  Why not?

This was admittedly an odd choice for someone as impulsive and
confrontational as I am, but I already had a couple of languages under
my belt.  I could speak French and Hebrew.  I applied to work in the
Foreign Office in the State Department.  During my first interview some
functionary informed me that I would have to take an entry-level post as
a secretary.  I thought, I don't see how that works.  Secretary to
diplomat?  No.  I don't think so.

In the spring of 1973, after graduating from UCLA, I took a job with a
law firm that specialized in estate planning.  My God, was that dense. I
did accounts receivable and reception work.  Basically, I was a girl
Friday.  At the outset, I approached the job rather too casually for my
employers' taste.  I came in late, showed up when I felt like it.

Before long, my supervisor called me in and warned me that I was about
to be fired.

That brought me up short.  "Man," I thought, "I don't mind getting fired
from a good job, but I can't get fired from a job this tacky."

So I cleaned up my act, became prompt, innovative, a real dynamo.

They came to love me.  I started thinking, Maybe there's some place for
me in the law.

It was not such a leap.  An actor seeks validation from his audience.

An attorney gets his validation from judge and jury.  (Many trial
lawyers, I've concluded in the years since, are frustrated actors.)  I
took stock of my abilities.  I had a good memory.  I could write well. I
could think on my feet.  So I got a book from UCLA Law School that was
supposed to help you prepare for the LSATs.  On the night before the
test I looked through it.  Then I went out and got drunk.  Maybe I
wanted to sabotage myself, or perhaps I wanted to give myself an excuse
if I failed.  Anyway, they give that test early in the morning.  I
stumbled in, three sheets to the wind, barely able to pencil in a
blurred succession of circles.  Somehow I did well enough to be accepted
by Loyola and Southwestern in Los Angeles and Hastings in San Francisco.

Gaby was threatened by the whole idea of my going into law.  He refused
even to consider the prospect of my moving, or our moving, to San
Francisco, so Hastings was out of the question.  His objections were
just enough to undermine my confidence.  I put off sending in my
applications until it was too late for Loyola.  Southwestern accepted me
for the fall of 1973.

I grabbed onto law school like a drowning woman clings to flotsam.  It
was to become my salvation.  Law school took more effort than
undergraduate work.  I had to study.  I had to memorize.  I actually had
to attend classes.  I found that I was well suited to analytical
thinking.  Briefing cases came easily to me.  You take a case decision
of fifty pages written in the densest legalese and have to figure out:
What's the issue?  What's the rule?  What's the conclusion?  I enjoyed
the intellectual exercise of taking something very complicated and
breaking It to Its essence.

I cannot say that the law loomed before me as some mystical, meaningful
vocation.  A sense of principle did not kick in until a few years down
the line, when I realized my real calling lay in the D.A."s office.  But
from the start, studying law served as an absorbing and invigorating
counterpoint to my life with Gaby.

The deeper I got into law, the more I withdrew from him.  We continued
living together we were going on five years.  But the screaming matches
and the physical skirmishes ended.  The reason was simple.  I was no
longer really there.

Sensing that I was distracted for long periods, Gaby'd ask me, "Where's
your mind?  Where are you?"

I'd always had the ability to distance myself at will from reality.

During our first year together, I recall, I had an unwholesome pen chant
for romance novels, real bodice-rippers like Lust in the Weeds.  I read
them voraciously.  And I lived in a dream world.

But now, my emotional disengagement from Gaby took on a different
quality.  It was convenient, in a way.  He liked me best when I was
docile and submissive.  I'd made that discovery the first year of our
relationship, when I'd gotten a terrible cold.  I was weak and exhausted
and Gaby couldn't have been sweeter to me.  He was at my side almost
constantly.  He tended to my every need and even carried me to the
bathroom.  My dependence galvanized him into chivalry.  Subconsciously,
I dragged out my illness to extend that peaceful interlude as long as I
could.  The problem was, I couldn't stay sick forever.

I remember so many nights I'd come home from a study session or the
library and peek into the bedroom to see if he was there.  If he wasn't,
I'd hop into bed as fast as I could in hopes that I'd be asleep before
he got home.

As I look back on it all now, I realize that I was suffering from a true
depression.  I was unhappy with Gaby, but my perspective was so
distorted that I couldn't imagine being happy with anyone else.  I
repeated to myself all those bromides that I'm sure a lot of couples
repeat to convince themselves that they should stay together rather than
get out and look for something better.  Like: "There's no such thing as
the perfect mate."

"You can't find it all in one person."

"You always have to compromise." What I didn't understand at the time
was that in order for compromise to work, both parties have to be
essentially compatible.  They shouldn't be spending 90 percent of their
time together brawling.  There should be something in each that enhances
the other.

Still, whatever it was that Gaby and I had, I thought it was the best I
deserved, the best I could hope to get from life.

Even now, I'm hard put to explain why I married him.  I'll be the first
to admit that a lot of what I've done in my personal life has been
impulsive, has seemed to run counter to the dictates of common sense.

But in its own weird way, getting married made sense at the time.  If we
were having trouble, the thing to do was to bind ourselves closer to
each other so we'd have to get along.  Right?

Well, no, actually.

Still, Gaby was a pragmatist.  He needed a green card and he'd get one
if he married me.  Since we were obviously going to stay together,
didn't it make sense to do it in a way that would give him citizenship?

I saw the logic of that, though Gaby knew how down I was on marriage in
general.  I agreed on one condition that no one but the government would
know about it.  We'd run out to Las Vegas and get a piece of paper and
keep our lips buttoned.  He agreed.  And that's how we got married the
first time.  It was just a formality.

Gaby kept his end of the bargain.  Our secret never leaked.  I never
told anyone, and no one ever knew not even my brother, who was my
closest confidant.

A year or so passed this way and Gaby started to talk about doing it
properly.  The idea of a wedding seemed to make him happy, so I gave in.
On November 6, 1976, we were married again.  My father's father, a very
devout Jew, came over from Israel, and for his benefit we had an
Orthodox wedding in my parents' home.  I remember standing at the altar,
nearly delirious with a 102-degree fever, telling myself, "This is not
happening." The rabbi's words washed over me.  I was barely conscious.

We spent our three-day honeymoon in where else?Las Vegas.

On our first night, we went out to dinner at a swanky restaurant.  It
dawned upon me that we were alone.  Really alone.  There were no
distractions.  No backgammon cronies.  No games to jump into as soon as
dinner was over.  We gave the waiter our order, and when he walked away
I looked across the table at Gaby.  I experienced a moment of absolute
emptiness, realizing that I had nothing to say to him.  My God, I
thought.  What have I done?  This man, whom I had publicly vowed to
cherish, etc., till death do us part .  .  .  this man felt no closer to
me than the waiter who'd just taken our order.

I wandered through casinos on Gaby's arm.  I laughed too loudly, played
the part of the happy newlywed.  When the strain became too much, I laid
claim to a chaise tongue by our hotel pool and drank pifia coladas until
I was stuporous.

I continued to be the dutiful camp follower.  Whenever Gaby had an
out-of-town tournament, I'd bring my law books and study while he
played.  One week before my final exams, he had a big tournament in Las
Vegas.  Again, I brought my books and spent all day alone in our hotel
room studying before I went out at night and joined him for the
tournament.  You would hardly think that those conditions would have
made for distinguished academic achievement.  But I made the dean's list
that year.  On the surface, everything seemed to be working out fine.

It's just that our marriage was hollow at the core.  I didn't care if
Gaby saw other women, as long as he left me alone.  I got a clue to the
depth of my own disengagement when a woman called the house one day
asking for him.  The tone of her voice made it clear that she was no
business associate.  I asked her if she wanted to leave her name, and
she hung up.  I had every right to be angry.  Not only was he cheating
on me, but he'd had the gall to give his girlfriend his home number. But
I didn't care.  I truly did not care.

We had some good times left.  After I took the bar exam, we treated
ourselves to a trip to Europe.  I'd been studying nonstop for two months
and during that time we hadn't even gone to see a movie together.  Gaby
wanted us to take a real vacation, as opposed to the usual backgammon
jaunt.  I'd been going to law school on a federally insured student loan
and I had some of that money left over.  We splurged on a week-long trip
to Italy and France.

After those two months of sensory deprivation studying for the bar, I
was exhausted and ready for a blowout.  The sights and smells of
southern Europe were intoxicating.  I couldn't do or see enough.

Gaby had a way of going up and talking to people.  He could speak a
little Italian, a little French.  He regaled strangers with his back
gammon exploits until they were eating out of his hand.  Anyway, he
struck up a conversation with the conductor of the sleeping car we took
from France to Italy.  He was a young guy widh a sweet face and large
warm brown eyes.  When we arrived in Rome, the conductor took us home to
have dinner with his mother.  And he offered to act as our unofficial
tour guide.  On one outing he took us to a topless beach.

I Thought it was an absolute riot.  I've never been the inhibited type.

In fact, shordy after we got there, I shed my own bikini top.  Gaby put
his arm around my waist, and our Italian friend snapped the picture.  I
was happy and smiling in that shot.

When we returned from Europe, I withdrew into myself again.

Gaby and I lived more or less separate lives.  I got a job as an
associate lawyer with the firm I'd been clerking for.  And there I
discovered the healing powers of work.

I like to think that having a real career awakened some semblance of
self-esteem and an independent identity that gave me the strength to
confront the truth.  Perhaps I'm wrong.  Maybe it was just the growing
up process, which would have happened regardless of whether I'd found a
profession.  Whatever the reason, I grew stronger.  More confident.  I
liked myself a lot better.  And I realized then that my days with Gaby
were numbered.

I agonized about leaving him.  I knew I should just pick up and go, but
I was hamstrung by guilt.  Just as my career was taking off, his were
taking a downturn.  The backgammon mania was sub siding.  It became
clear that gambling would not provide him with an ideal even a living
very much longer.  All he'd ever been was a backgammon pro a teacher at
best; a hustler at worst.  His entire image of himself was built around
being pretty and having a fast, flashy lifestyle.  His looks were going.
His money was going.  He was depressed.  We spent long nights discussing
his childhood, his past, and his uncertain future.  I knew that if I was
ever going to find it in my heart to leave him, I was going to have to
get him back on his feet.

But I'd suffered from bouts of depression myself.  And trying to deal
widh Gaby's problems left me feeling overwhelmed.

Gaby needed professional help.  I begged him to see a psychiatrist, but
he wouldn't hear of it.  Then I remembered something from my days in
Greenwich Village.  The managers of the leacher shop I'd worked for had
been Scientologists.  They'd talk to me now and then about their
beliefs.  The church gave them very specific suggestions for learning to
be assertive and confident.  A lot of that teaching struck me as pure
common sense, but it seemed to provide them with a source of strength.

As it happened, one of Gaby's star pupils was into Scientology in a big
way.  His name was Bruce Roman and he was one of the few genuinely good
guys I met on the backgammon circuit.  Bruce was a tall man whose
athletic build and curly blond hair contrasted strikingly with Gaby's
dark good looks.  When they went out together, women would stop dead in
their tracks and stare.

Bruce was passionate about backgammon.  He just couldn't get enough.  He
initially gravitated toward Gaby in order to learn the game, but over
time the teaching relationship grew into a close friend ship.  When Gaby
refused therapy, I turned to Bruce for help.  He'd already noticed the
change in Gaby, Though he didn't realize the extent of his distress.  At
my urging, Bruce suggested to Gaby that he might look into Scientology.

At first, Gaby was reluctant.  His attitude was basically "What can they
tell me that I don't already know?" I knew that he didn't like the idea
of being treated like someone's crazy aunt.  So I offered to go check it
out with him.  That idea appealed.  He agreed to enroll in a few courses
and we went together to sign up for the first class.

At first Gaby was gung-hoWe'd go a few nights a week, although I we
ended up taking different classes.  For me the experience was
interesting , though not earthshaking.  Scientology, as I saw it, was
really kind of a ragbag of truisms from the world's great religions. But
Gaby's spirits seemed to be improving.  After only three or four weeks,
however, I heard that he was close to getting thrown out.  Apparently, )
he'd been hitting on the women in his classes and they didn't appreciate
it.  They complained to the supervisors, and Gaby was put on notice that
he'd have to clean up his act or get out.

That did- it for me.  I realized right then and there that I couldn't
waste my life if he wasn't going to get serious about his.

It was around that time that I met the man who would become my second
husband.

I'd gone down to the church's administrative offices to sign up for a
new set of courses.  A pleasant young man was assigned to help me.  His
name was Gordon Clark.

"What's your job?" he asked me.

I told him I was a lawyer.  I wanted courses that would stress inter
personal relations.  I was looking for something that would help me to
size people up and evaluate them from an attorney's point of view.

Gordon cracked a joke or two about lawyers, something I'd gotten used to
during the year since I'd passed the bar.  The conversation wound its
way around to ourselves.  I learned that Gordon was an officer in the
church.  He lived right in church housing and worked twelve- to
fourteen-hour days.  He lived, breathed, and ate Scientology.

He also seemed very upbeat, not just about Scientology, but about life
in general.  I responded to his energy and enthusiasm and to what I took
at the time to be spirituality.  I came away from our first meeting
feeling lighter than I had in years.  It was just the way a person
should feel, I told myself.  Happier, lighter, focused upon the
betterment of the self instead of on an unending quest for big scores
and fast times.

I knew that I was attracted to Gordon Clark.  And I could tell he was
attracted to me.  I suppose anyone looking at us from the sidelines
could tell what a mismatch this was.  For one thing, I was a twenty-six
year-old attorney.  He was a twenty-two-year-old without a college

"It's all planned."

degree.  But he seemed to hold out the promise of happiness.  I looked
at him and I saw, or thought I saw, stability.

I knew what I had to do and I steeled myself to do it.  One evening, I
waited for Gaby to come home.  I wasn't nervous or frightened.

I was sitting on the stairs and he was in the living room below me.  He
started to discuss a trip we'd been planning to take to Monte Carlo,
where he was to play in a backgammon tournament.

"Gaby, I'm not going to Monte Carlo with you," I told him.

"What are you talking about?" he asked me, mildly exasperated.

"I'm not going," I told him in a voice so calm it surprised even me.

"Gaby, I want to get a divorce."

He stared at me in silence for a few seconds.  Ordinarily there would
have been blame-swapping, finger-pointing intended to intimidate me.
Instead, I found calm acceptance.

"Can't you give me another chance?" he asked.

"No, Gaby.  It's too late.  I just want a divorce."

It was over.  We both knew it.

There was one small problem.  I had no place to go.  I had no money.  I
could have gone after community property, but all I wanted was out.  The
sentiment was noble but hardly practical, given my current
circumstances.

I was in between jobs and on unemployment.  And the nine month grace
period on my student loan repayment had expired several months before.
I'd thought Gaby was making those payments, but shortly after I moved
out, I learned that he hadn't paid a dime; I was several months in
arrears.  That nonpayment had been reported to all the credit agencies,
so I had no credit cards and no way to get one.  I couldn't have passed
a credit check even if I'd been able to afford an apartment.  How could
a woman with a law degree be so helpless?

Luckily, friends of mine knew a man who was converting some apartments
into condominiums.  He agreed to let me stay in one rent free for a
month or two until I could get on my feet.  I packed up my clothes. Gaby
gave me an old TV and I moved out.  I wrote the bank a letter explaining
that I was going through a rough period and that I had no intention of
defaulting on my student loan.  I assured some faceless bank official
that as soon as I was employed I would catch up on the delinquent
payments and make all future ones on time.  I made good on that promise.
After a year of timely payments, I wrote another letter to the bank
asking them to clear my credit rating.  And to my surprise, they did.
(If whoever was responsible for that act of kindness is reading this,
I'd like to say thank you.  That gesture meant more to me than I can
properly express.  It didn't just boost my credit rating, it was a vote
of confidence.)  Someone had cared enough to look past the data sheet
and see that I might actually shape up to be a responsible member of
society.

When I left Gaby, however, I was destitute.  In spite of that, I was
happy.  I felt I might actually be able to make it out on my own.  Not
long after moving out I landed a job with the law firm of Brody and
Price doing defense work.  I loved my colleagues.  They were wonderful,
ethical people.  I was well on my way to making it on my own.

And yet within three months, I was married to Gordon Clark.  How did
that happen?

Why didn't I take some time to enjoy my newfound freedom and experience
life as a single, independent adult for a while?  What the hell was the
rush?

The relationship with Gordon had taken off like lightning, but marriage
was definitely not on the agenda as far as I was concerned.

The Church of Scientology, however, didn't allow romantic liaisons
between its officers and members of the public.  If Gordon wanted to
stay on the staff and keep seeing me, we'd have to get married.  The
problem was that I was still legally married to Gaby.  One of Gordon's
fellow Scientologists told us how to get a quickie divorce in Tijuana.

It was supposed to be perfectly legal, but I wasn't so sure.  On the
other hand, so what if my marriage to Gordon wasn't strictly kosher?  We
were only going through this charade to appease the church hierarchy.

And so I made the trip to Tijuana.  My brother came along to keep me
company.  Two weeks later Gordon and I got married in a friend's
apartment.  The Scientology minister who married us was Bruce Roman,
who, strangely enough, managed to remain friends with Gaby.  Having a
friend do the honors made it seem less frightening.  It was quick and
casual.  Gordon immediately went back to work.

Thinking back on it all, I can see both the pattern and the reasons for
the facade weddings, the race from one marriage to the next.  The truth
was, I didn't know how to be alone.  I didn't have a self to be alone
with.  As long as there was a man in my life, there was someone to cater
to and mold myself around.  As long as I had a man to define me, I
didn't have to confront the uncomfortable issue of discovering my own
identity.  It's funny.  People used to tell me how they never really felt
they knew me; that I was mysterious to them.  If I'd been a little more
in touch with myself, I would have looked inward to see what the hell
they were talking about.  But I never got beyond being puzzled by my own
actions.

I look back on those days of obscurity with great sadness.  If only I'd
found the strength to stand on my own for a while, to endure the
loneliness, to handle the challenges of daily living as a single adult!

I might have learned, among other things, to enjoy my own company.

I might have discovered a real person who didn't need another to find
definition.  That must be what happiness is all about.  It's not a life
without problems.  It's the ability to handle those problems.  It took
me two marriages and two divorces to figure this out.

Four or five months after I'd left Gaby I was driving through Beverly
Hills when I saw him walking somewhere.  His expression was so sad.  I'd
heard that he'd gotten into a fight with someone who accused him of
cheating at backgammon.  Gaby had been punched in the face.

It was the only time I'd ever heard of a backgammon row ending in real
violence.  Gaby was apparently sinking deeper.

I didn't hear anything about him for another seven years or so.

One morning I saw a small article in the L.A.  Times.  A man named
Gabriel Horowitz had suffered a gunshot wound to the head.  I sat
stunned, reading and rereading the lines of print, not quite
comprehending.  Gabriel Horowitz?  My Gaby?  It had to be.

I knew that for my own peace of mind I had to get the whole story, so I
asked a detective I was friendly with to check it out for me.

A few days later he reported back.  Gaby'd been visiting Bruce Roman and
the two of them were looking at guns they were both collectors when the
gun Bruce was holding went off and the wild shot found its way into
Gaby's head.  It had been a freak accident.  The shot had ricocheted off
the ceiling and hit Gaby on the rebound.  It left him paralyzed.

Such a bizarre twist of fate.  For weeks, I walked around in a daze,
barely able to concentrate.  The guy had put me through a lot of pain,
but when I thought of him confined to a wheelchair for life all I could
think was "Poor Gaby." I never thought I'd say that.

My sadness was so deep, it was inexpressible.

Admittedly, my private life has taken some unusual turns.  And when ever
I can manage to climb onto a plane of semidetachment, I see why the
tabloid press ended up pursuing me with such cruel enthusiasm.  I hadno
defenses.  All I could do was steel myself for the worst-case senario.
In late July 1994, just as we were gearing up for the harrowing business
of jury selection in the Simpson case, I got word from Suzanne Childs
that the tabs were rooting around my marriage certificates and divorce
papers.  A couple of weeks later, the Enquirer published an opus
entitled "O.J.  Prosecutor's Tragic Secret Life," which alleged, among
other things, that I had "dumped" Gaby after receiving my law degree. It
also detailed the shooting incident at Bruce Roman's, leaving the casual
reader to imagine that I was somehow involved.

The stories presented me in absurd caricature, but anyone could see that
they contained nuggets of truth.  I was so humiliated.  I'd never
confided the details of my first marriage to anyone at the D.A."s office
except my friend Lynn.  My "past," as I saw it, was not an opportunist's
upward scramble, but a painful, private struggle.  As far as I was
concerned, I was a survivor.  I had surmounted my personal difficulties
through acts that took considerable initiative and will. In the summer
of 1994, I was not Marcia Kleks, the gambler's girlfriend. I was a
lawyer, intelligent and accomplished one at that.  I was a damned good
mother.  And everything admirable that I'd accomplished seemed
threatened by this disturbing and unsolicited celebrity.

I knew that the only chance I had of coming off with any dignity was to
stay calm and keep silent.  I thought, If I just concentrate on my job,
I can get through this.  They'll get tired of me.  I can ride this out.

But the tabs didn't get tired of me.  In September I picked up new
rumblings: the National Enquirer was working on a story that I had been
a battered wife.  They'd apparently turned up a pair of backgammon
promoters who were claiming that once, during an argument Gabi threw a
chair at me.

They'd also found some dingbat who'd once been a neighbor of Gaby's and
mine.  She was saying that I walked around in long sleeved dresses all
the time so that no one would see the bruises from Gaby's beatings.

The news threw me into a State of near panic.  Of course, I Knew what
the truth was.  Gaby never threw anything at me in public His pride
would never have allowed him to let people see that we fought.

We did all that in private.  But even during those arguments behind
closed doors he never beat me.  Never.  He pushed I shoved' we wrestled.
That's as far as it ever went.

Don't misunderstand me.  The pushing and the shoving were bad enough.
But I always gave as good as I got.  It wasn't right to let Gaby take
the rap when I'd done so much provoking.  I was not a battered woman!  I
was not a victim!

I have always hated the culture of victimization.  It asserts that
everyone nowadays has some personal trauma to explain away their own
character failings.  It's something I can't tolerate.  I believe people
have to take responsibility for themselves and their actions.  This
seems a reasonable position for a prosecutor to take an matters of human
conduct.

My approach to domestic violence cases over the years was One of extreme
caution.  I've never gotten up on a pulpit to Rout a feminist line.  I
never rushed in and charged spousal battery without a fill! ùet of facts
in hand.  The Simpson case was no exception.  From the beginning I'd
hung back on the DV.  I felt there was too much we didn't know. From a
strictly legal standpoint, we would never have needed to address their
history of marital violence.  Tru, the fact hat a man has beaten his
wife over the years may go to motive if he is accused of murdering her.
But the state isn't required to establish why one person killed another,
only that he intended to do it.  It is possible to get a Conviction
strictly on the physical evidence. In the Simpson case, the physical
evidence was so amazingly strong' I felt that we could probably put him
away relying on that alone.

The domestic violence aspect of the case, by contrast, left me deeply
conflicted.  The photos OF Nicole, her voice on the 911 calls these
produced in me sensations of dread.  When the police and City attorney's
reports in my in box, I scanned them hurriedly, professionally, then
pushed them to one side.  Later, when Scott Gordon would collar me in
the hall, as he did at least seven times a day, with, "Marcia, we've got
to get to work on DV," I'd say "Yeah, yeah, Scott.

Why don't you write me up a memo on that?"

Every time a reminder of Nicole's physical suffering came up, I felt
headachy.  Sometimes a little sweaty.  I'd knock the feelings away and
keep pushing on.  There were so many brushfires burning around me that
it was easy to postpone dealing with the issue indefinitely.  I'm sure I
knew that, when the time came, I'd have to confront my personal history
as well.  Which gave me added incentive for not facing the demon down.

By late September 1994, this new threat from the tabloids to invade my
personal life left me feeling desperate.  If things proceeded on a crash
course and the Enquirer was allowed to publish such a wildly distorted
account of my troubled marriage to Gaby, the fallout could be
disastrous.  O.  J.  Simpson's defense would charge that I had some
political agenda for going after their client.  This was not a time to
work through my personal mishegoss.  I had to take some kind of action.
But what, I didn't know.

My good friend and fellow D.A.  Lynn Reed came to my rescue.

"You have to go and see my friend Mark," she instructed me firmly. "He's
an entertainment lawyer.  He helped out a friend of mine who's been
chased around by the press, and he really knows what he's doing. If the
tabs start hearing from your lawyer, they might decide it's not worth
it.  Trust me on this one, kiddo."

She gave me his number.

This whole thing seemed so weird to me.  How does it happen that a D.A.
in the course of prosecuting a class-one felony comes to need an
entertainment lawyer?  Come to think of it, have you ever heard of a
prosecutor whose private life has made it into a tabloid banner?  I
haven't.

Anyway, I gave Mark Fleischer a call and we agreed to meet at a downtown
restaurant called Checkers.

I arrived at six o'clock.  The place was almost empty.  Businessmen and
bureaucrats had already decamped for home after downing their "freeway
flyers." I lurked apprehensively in the foyer until the maitre d'
directed me to a table in the farthest corner of the room.  Mark rose to
greet me.  He was a slender, dapper man reminiscent of Fred Astaire.

He had twinkling blue eyes and a firm yet gentle handshake.  I liked him
on sight.

"I'm the one who bakes cookies and collects husbands," I told him.

Mark laughed.  "I'm aware of your financial situation," he said.

"One of my dearest friends works in your office.  Scott Gordon."

Scott!  I felt a pang of guilt for having ducked him every time he tried
to get me moving on the domestic violence issue.  My neglect of the
issue was, of course, all the more ironic in light of my current
predicament.  I was about to become poster girl for the battered women's
movement, for no good reason.

"I'm going to help you out as a favor to the D.A."s office," Mark told
me.  "I've always admired you guys and I'm going to take this
opportunity to put my money where my mouth is.  There will be no fee for
my services."

Had I heard correctly?  A lawyer was going to take on a client who might
give him nights and weekends of grief absolutely gratis?  The man was a
freaking saint.

"We're probably not going to persuade them to leave you alone," he
warned.  "Only time and some new scandal will do that.  But we can
discuss the possibility of a lawsuit.  We don't want to come at them
unless we feel fairly sure of winning.  That means I'll need you to do
some homework."

Homework.  Exactly what I did not need at this moment.  The Simpson case
was already threatening to bury me under an avalanche of paperwork.
Every night I'd carry home a couple of satchels of documents.  Then,
after the usual bedtime routine, I'd spread my papers out on my bed and
work into the early hours of the morning.

"I want you to get one of those little pocket recorders and document
each article and how it affected you," Mark continued.  "It would be
best if you could manage to do that every day.  The more detail the
better.  Spare yourself nothing.  This will describe the emotional
distress and the damages we ask for."

He told me to keep the tapes in a secure place.  And if I didn't have
one, I should give them to him to put in his office safe.

"When am I going to do all that?" I asked him.

"You spend a lot of time in your car, don't you?"

I did as Mark asked.  I bought myself a microcassette recorder.  It sat
for a few days on the dashboard of my Maxima.  Finally I picked it Up
and made my first faltering attempts.

"Well, Mark," I began, "here goes.  It is .  .  .  what is today?
September thirtieth, and I'm leaving the courthouse.  It's about ten
after nine and I'm exhausted....

"The stress has been building and building and building .  .  .  the
stress of this trial ...  and, of course, going through a divorce and
everything .  .  .  I always feel like I'm being pounded.  And it's real
hard to focus because when I'm at work during the week there's always
people coming in my door and calling on the phone, just one after
another....  I feel like I've been beaten to a pulp....  The only time
it really feels good to go to work is on a Saturday or Sunday when
there's no one there to bother me and I can focus on my job....

"There's so much to organize.  I just wish I could stop the clock for
about three weeks and put everything together in a nice, neat, tidy
order.  Do all the things that I usually do to prepare for a trial.  I
am beginning to [be] very pessimistic about my ability to put it
together the way I ordinarily would.  And in this, of all cases, where I
need to do more than I usually would it's frightening....  Ah, God.  I
don't know how I'm gonna survive this...."

When I replayed the tape, the distress in my own voice took me aback.  I
was also surprised by the relief it gave me to vent my frustrations.  I
continued to record, not every day, but every few days.  I found that
getting into my car was like entering a confessional.  I talked, and
talked, and kept on talking to that mute, whirring confidant.  I
reflected and I flamed.

A tape recorder is a patient listener.  It passes no judgments.

Double sided CAR TAPE.  October 2, 1994.  Everything's coming back to
him.  He's got her 6100d on his socks in the bedroom.  We've got her
Mood and Ron's

6100d in his Bronco.  Wewe got her 6100d and Ron's on that glove at Rock
Rockingham, and maybe Simpson's Hood too.  After we finish the testing
we'll know more.  Now it seems we've even pinned down the shoe print to
a style of Bruno Magli shoe....  The same size as the defendants shoe! I
mean, it's just unbelievable!

The defense is gonna come up with their space invader theories.  It's
gonna be like something out of the National Enquirer.  You know, police
bungled and fumbled and goofed everything up.  And so, right, that's how
the evidence all came back to him.  If it's a frame-up, frame him,

Of all people?  Couldn't you think of somebody less likable than that?
who wants to try a case against Yogi Bear?

You shoulda tried this case in Santa Monica.

Gimme a break.

Ever since the verdict in the criminal trial, TV and radio commentators
, print pundits, old armchair warriors with a vacuole lot more ego than
common sense have weighed in with their theories about what went wrong.
First off, they would have you believe that we blew it by not taking
this case to the suburbs.  What they mean but never have the guts to
come right out and say this: "Why didn't you go shop ping around for a
congenial, white jury who'd convict the son of a bitch?"

The grumblers are usually people who should know better former
prosecutors like Vincent Bugliosi, who actually faulted us for moving
the trial from Santa Monica.  Gil Garcetti filed this case exactly where
he should have filed it: downtown L.A. Regardless of where a crime
occurs, because cases, as they're called, virtually always end up
downtown.  In June of 1994, when the Bundy murders took place, this was
not even discretionary; it was policy.  Set by the Superior Court.
Several years earlier, a panel of assignment judges put their heads
together to try to figure out how to clear the backlog in the branch
courts.  One of the tougher measures the judges took to rectify this
problem was to require that any case that stood to go on for longer than
four weeks be filed Downtown, where the D.A.  has deputies, clerks, and
support services to handle it.

(People have asked me why the civil trial was tried in Santa Monica. The
answer is simple: Civil litigants get to pick their forum.

They don't get directed to a particular venue at the command of the
bench the way criminal cases do.)

Only by a fluke does a long-cause criminal case ever end up in one of
the branch courts.  The trial judge in the Rodney King case, for
instance, was downtown but transferred to Simi Valley and dragged the
case along with him.  The results were disastrous.  An all-white jury
acquitted four white LAPD officers of beating King even though the crime
was immortalized on videotape.  Los Angeles erupted into a race riot.

Every time I hear about Bugliosi or some other clown mouthing off to the
press, I have to grit my teeth and count to ten.  You should tried this
case in Santa Monica.  Do they realize what they're saying?

To suggest that the D.A."s office should have ignored standard procedure
and filed this case elsewhere for purely tactical advantage is, in my
opinion, a shameless and inexcusable display of racism.  It precludes
scale, West Side jury can deliver justice Double Solitaire Wrong.  Dead
wrong.  I've seen Downtown juries made up of poor blacks and Hispanics
do justice time and time again.

By the time the Simpson case landed on my desk, I'd been trying cases
Downtown for more than ten years.  I'd had defendants and juries of all
races.  I'd tried twenty homicides and won nineteen of them.  I'd tried
scores of lesser felonies.  Won most, lost some.  None of the verdicts
seemed completely off the wall to me.  Whenever I'd gotten to talk to
jurors who'd delivered unfavorable verdicts, I found they'd had their
reasons, usually good ones.

To Vincent Bugliosi and those who share his worldview, a good prosecutor
is apparently a slick operator who works the angles.  And the prescribed
angle in this case would have been to steer clear of dark skins,
particularly those belonging to middle-aged black women.

Sounds ugly because it is ugly.  As well as impractical, unethical, and
unconscionable.

One of the proponents of this embarrassing thesis seems to have been
none other than our own jury consultant, Don Vinson.  After the trial,
he apparently met Bugliosi for lunch at where else the California Club.
Like Cassandra spurned, Vinson wailed that he'd warned the D.A."s office
of the dangers of picking middle-aged black women as jurors.  When word
of this got back to me, I just shook my head.  I would like to take this
opportunity to ask Don Vinson, "Exactly what would you have had me do?"

It must have been apparent even to someone as stubbornly ignorant of the
law as Vinson that you cannot mount a campaign to target black women.
It's illegal, for God's sake.  And assuming for the moment that it was
not illegal, excluding them would be an impossibility.  Blacks accounted
for over half of our eventual jury pool.  A full three quarters of those
blacks were women.  Like it or not, black women were going to be a
powerful presence on this jury.

I didn't need Vinson to tell me that black women or at least certain
black woman would be a tough sell.  As I mentioned earlier, our grand
jury adviser, Terry White, had let me know that a couple of middle-aged
women among the grand jurors had seemed maternally inclined toward
Simpson.  Terry is a black man and had been one of the prosecutors on
the Rodney King trial.  He is infinitely better informed on issues of
race and the law than Don Vinson.  The fact is, Terry thought we could
bring them around.  We'd both seen many juries of black women who were
more than willing to convict black men.

For my part, I was perfectly confident that if O.  J.  Simpson had been
some black sanitation worker who had killed his white wife in a fit of
rage, a jury of twelve middle-aged black women would have convicted the
jerk in a heartbeat.  The bedrock issue here was not race but race
coupled with celebrity.  It was not so much that Simp son was a black
man; he was a famous black man.  And a well-loved famous black man.
Black jurors of either sex were going to feel reluctant to knock an
African-American icon off his pedestal.  And in combination with race,
celebrity complicated this case in ways that none of us had ever before
had to consider.

That's why so much was riding on the jury questionnaire.

Jury selection in the Simpson case was set to begin on September 26.

Ito had ordered up an unusually large pool, one thousand candidates.

He dearly foresaw a long, drawn-out contest and wanted to make sure we
had the bodies to cover it.  The first step was elementary triage: he
would call in the whole bunch and hand out a one-page screening
questionnaire to determine it serving on a long case would cause them
hardship.

I always hated this phase.  It was during hardship questioning that a
lot of the better-educated, solid-citizen types would find a way to get
themselves excused from service.  People with steady jobs and career
commitments can't afford to take time off, because employers won't cover
their salary for more than ten days of jury service.  Once they heard
the estimated trial time for a long-cause case, as many as 70 percent of
them would walk right out the door.  These people, the ones with with
steady jobs and career commitments, are usually pro prosecution jurors.
It was so ironic.  The lengthy cases were by and large the most serious
ones, often death-penalty cases where you want the most intelligent
jurors possible.  And yet if one candidate with a college degree ever
made it through hardship and the gauntlet of defense challenges, we
always regarded it as a miracle.

The survivors of hardship questioning in this case a pool of three Double
Solitaire hundred would receive the full-blown questionnaire containing
questions submitted by both the prosecution and the defense.  The
questions themselves had to survive a rigorous weeding-out process:

both sides would submit questions and, after a lot of angry rhetoric and
head-banging, the judge would decide which ones made the cut.

By the time we got to drafting questions, Bill and I had already given
the questionnaire a lot of thought.  Our questions had to be blunt
enough to hit the hot-button issues head-on: "Have you ever been beaten
by a spouse?"

"Have you ever been arrested by the LAPD?"

"Do you fantasize about being O.  J.  Simpson's date at the Rose Bowl?"
That sort of thing.  They had to be tactful enough to avoid offending
anyone we might have hoped to win over.  They had to be sly enough to
trip up anyone who was lying.  Usually you'll find people who'll lie
like crazy to avoid serving.  But here we had to entertain the
possibility that the opposite would occur; at least some opportunists
out there might be looking to cash in on their stint in the jury box at
the Trial of the Century.

After we'd spent God knows how many hours clinking glasses with Don
Vinson, I expected that he would at least send us a list of questions,
if not a completed questionnaire, for our review.  Jo-Ellan Dimitrius,
after all, did the entire thing for the Simpson team.  But the deadline
for submitting our draft to the court was approaching, and Vinson had
sent us nothing.

"What's he waiting for," I groused to Bill, "an engraved invitation?"

Bill promised he'd give Vinson a nudge; I assumed he did.  But days
passed.  Nothing came by winged messenger from DecisionQuest.

What Bill finally received was one question scribbled on a piece of
legal paper.  I don't even recall what it was.  I do recall it was not
even remotely useful.

In the end, Bill and I just had to knuckle down and do the thing the way
we normally did it: by ourselves.  We recruited our DV experts, Scott
Gordon and Lydia Bodin, to work on domestic violence.

Our DNA expert, Lisa Kahn, oversaw the science part.  Everyone pitched
in on the celebrity issue.  Question on the table: How do you get at the
issue of fame?  It's one thing to prosecute a defendant who's notorious
someone who's well known but not particularly well liked, like Charles
Keating, or the prosecutor's dream defendant, Charles Manson. With a
flaming psychopath in the dock, all you have to do is get up and recite
your Social Security number to win a conviction.

This was not the case with a sympathetic figure, one idolized the way O.
J.  Simpson was.  I didn't know of anyone who'd ever tackled a problem
of this magnitude.  Somehow we'd have to get the jurors past the
defendant's public image and get them to acknowledge that all they knew
about O.  J.  Simpson was a slick facade.

We all agreed that we should seed the questionnaire throughout with
celebrity questions, some direct, others indirect.  First we'd ask
jurors where they got their news: TV, radio, print?  A juror who got
most of his news from tabloids and watching evening news magazines like
Hard Copy would obviously be a problem for us.  Not only would he have
been fed a steady diet of misinformation, but his viewing preference
might show that he had a more than average interest in the cult of
celebrity itself Some celebrity questions suggested themselves.

"Have you ever asked a celebrity for an autograph?"

"Have you ever written to a celebrity?"

Certain questions taken together provided internal checks.  If, for
instance, a juror wrote that he watched news on three channels daily,
and yet insisted that he had no knowledge of the Simpson case, we'd have
some reason to believe that he was being less than truthful.

I have to say that in this instance Lance Ito really came through for
us.

He gave us almost every question we asked for.  Of course, he gave the
defense almost everything they asked for, as well.  The result was a
document at least an inch thick.  It was the longest questionnaire that
either Bill or I had ever seen.  Seventy-five pages each!  I heard that
when prospective jurors first saw it, they groaned.  And I thought, What
are you complaining about?  You're not gonna have to go through each and
every one of these suckers by fudging.

One afternoon during the last week in September, a law clerk wheeled a
steel cart into my office and unloaded four cardboard boxes of completed
questionnaires.  Three hundred of them.  Bill and I just looked at each
other.  It was a look that said, The journey of a thousand miles begins
with the first step.  He took half.  I took half.
The job wasn't as simple as reading through the questionnaire
once and jotting down notes.  I had to flag key responses and then
summarize them on a separate ten-page form that Bill and I had devised
for the purpose.  We'd also come up with a system for grading each juror
on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best.  It was incredibly clumsy, but
we had no precedent for a job this large.

I lost track of the time.  When I finally put my pen down and looked up,
it was dark outside.  My God, I thought.  I'd started at three o'clock
in the afternoon and it was already past seven.  And I'd only gotten
through three of these monsters!

I walked down the empty halls to Bill's office.  To tell you the truth,
I liked this place a whole lot better when it was deserted.  The feeling
of being alone in the office gave me a sense of freedom that I found
invigorating and at the same time peaceful.  But right now I was feeling
low and needed bucking up.

Bill's door was open.  I could see him hunched over his desk, poring
over a document tidily flagged with Post-its.

"How many have you gotten through?" I asked him dourly.

"Only two.  I can't believe it."

"We've gotta find a better system," I told him.

We heard a rustle in the hall, and just then Jonathan Fairtlough stuck
his head in the door.  Jonathan, a freckled young Irishman with an
unruly shock of brown hair, had been one of our first picks for the
team.  He was full of energy, optimism, and expansive ideas for graphic
presentations.  Jonathan was also an electronics genius, whom we called
in whenever the computers or even the copiers went on the blink.  He
never seemed to get tired.  At least not at that point.

"Hey, boss," he said.  It was directed at both of us.  "Anything I can
do for you?"

"As a matter of fact," I told him, "we're trying to come up with a way
to streamline the summaries.  Any ideas?"

Jonathan thought for a moment.

`'Why don't you just dictate the important stuff into a mini cassette?
Then get the secretaries to type them up for you."

Bill and I looked at each other.  Out of the mouths of babes!

After that, we picked up our speed a couple of knots, but we still
remained in danger of drowning beneath swells of detail.  We needed some
way to make the task more concrete, more visual.  I recalled a system
I'd had picked up from another D.A.  named Pat Dixon.  He'd tried a lot
of long-cause cases, and he'd devised a system for jury selection.
Before voir dire, he would make up a pack of yellow cardboard cards,
about three inches by three, one for each juror in the pool.  He'd jot
down pertinent information about each one on the front.  Then he'd deal
the cards.  Twelve of them arranged in two rows of six, a simulated jury
box.  This helped him to visualize what those twelve people, each with
his own history and set of prejudices, might look sitting next to the
others.  He'd take one candidate maybe a crotchety contrarianand try to
figure out the rating each side would give him.

Then he'd try to figure out which side was likely to get him struck for
cause and which would have to use a peremptory challenge.  The
contrarian would stay, or he'd go.  Pat would do this until he had
combined the cards in all their plausible permutations.  Whenever I went
past his office, I'd see him sitting, staring hour after hour at the
cards before him, playing this game of lawyer's solitaire.

So I made up a pack for Bill and me.  Three hundred yellow cardboard
cards.  In the late afternoon, or whenever we had a few moments, Bill
and I would meet in one of our offices and pull out the pack and start
dealing.  We'd add a juror to the rotation to see how he or she fit into
the mix.  We'd rotate the least desirable candidate out.  We kept
looking for the perfect ensemble.  Or at least an accepttable one.

It was dismal going.  Any way you shuffled the deck, this was far and
away the worst pool of jurors either of us had ever seen.  Few of these
people had ever taken college courses, let alone gotten a degree.  Many
were out of work.  No one had anything good to say about the LAPD.

An uncomfortably large percentage of them either knew someone who had
been arrested or had been arrested themselves.  The Bronco chase seemed
to arouse in them nothing but regret for the sufferings of the
defendant.  "Poor guy, gone to visit his wife's grave and all he gets is
grief from the law." At the very worst, Simpson's actions were seen as
"bizarre." Almost no one believed that he had been trying to escape.

Before the questionnaires came in, Bill and I had been going back and
forth on whether we should introduce the Bronco chase as evidence.

Do we offer up the eight thousand bucks, the passport, the fake mustache
and beard?  To us, of course, these items seemed very incriminating. But
in light of the responses we were getting on the questionnaire,
introducing them carried substantial risks.  First of all, the money had
been found on Cowlings, not Simpson. The goatee, mustache, and passport
were found in Collings's Bronco. Proving that Simpson even knew about
these items would be difficult..  I was convinced he did, but
demonstrating it was another matter.

Worse, if we introduced the Bronco evidence, it would give the defense
an opening to slip in the records of the calls Simpson had made from his
cell phone while motoring up the 405.  We'd get the tape of Tom Lange
talking him in off the freeway, telling him what a wonderful guy he was,
how his children needed him; in the back ground, we'd hear Simpson's
groans of anguish.  We'd get a parade of witnesses who would recall the
tearful protestations of innocence and grief.  All the defendant's
denials would come in through the back door of these phone-call
witnesses.  O.  J.  Simpson would be allowed, in effect, to offer
emotional testimony on his own behalf without ever having to take the
witness stand.  (In a criminal trial, only the defense can call the
defendant to the stand.)  Whatever hope we had of getting to
cross-examine Simpson would wash right out the courtroom door in a river
of crocodile tears.

To make the risk worthwhile, we'd needed to offer proof of flight so
unequivocal that it would expose the phone calls to family and friends
as the shams they were.  Now, I might hear one of these tapes and think,
You sniveling bastard; what about the pair you murdered?  But to our
prospective juror sat least the ones who revealed themselves in these
questionnaires as an unchartered chapter of the Juice Fan Clubhe would
appear nothing but sympathetic.

During the months since the verdict, I've gotten hammered repeatedly for
"failing" to introduce evidence from that chase.  Certain old armchair
warriors have gone so far as to call it a breach of prosecutorial
responsibility.  Let me set the record straight.  No prosecutor is
compelled to produce evidence that he feels might work to his detriment.
There is no right or wrong in this matter.  It's a judgment call.

I decided to keep it out; another prosecutor might have decided
differently.  But once he'd made that call, he'd better have been
prepared to take the consequences should the thing jump back and bite
him in the ass.

If I had it to do again, with the jury God saw fit to grant us, I'd make
exactly the same call.

CAR TAPE.  October 1994 .  .  .  Constant anxiety .  .  .  I feel like I
can't breathe thinking about all the work I have to do, and I don't have
the time for it.  I'm tired.  Tired of seeing my face in the magazines
and .  .  . tired of everything.  Just plain tired.

By the time I'd read through eighty of the questionnaires, I was so
depressed I could hardly speak.  On our scale of 1 to 5, only ten ranked
as high as a 4.  The rest of the pool was grouped down around 2 or 11/2.

But the worst of it was the lying.

An anthropologist reading through these questionnaires would probably
conclude that he'd stumbled upon the remnants of some lost civilization.
In the midst of the most media-saturated city in the world, we'd somehow
managed to find three hundred human beings who claimed never to watch
television, listen to the radio, or read newspapers.  These pristine
souls insisted that they didn't know any thing about a case that
permeated every streetcorner conversation between East L.A.  and Santa
Monica.  Under questioning, however, this astounding phenomenon would
prove illusory.  When we pressed the jurors for specifics about the
Bronco chase, it would come out that they'd read and seen a great deal.
But on the questionnaires, they told us anything they thought we wanted
to hear, just to get on the jury.

My head ached.  My eyes were burning.  Why, on this of all cases, did we
wind up with the fucking jury pool from hell?

For the three weeks it took to collate those questionnaires, I dragged
myself home each night in a stupor of fatigue, bowed under the weight of
the knowledge that I'd have to go in there and fight every day in a
battle that might already be lost.

There seemed to be no safe corner.  During my waking hours the phone was
constantly ringing, or my beeper was going off.  Every ten seconds
someone was knocking on the door of my office saying, "Got a minute? Got
a minute?" Patti Jo Fairbanks, our senior legal assistant, did her best
to run interference for me.  She screened my phone messages, handing
over only the ones with top priority.  She posted signs on my door that
read, "Don't Knock.  Keep Out!"

At the end of three mind-numbing weeks, I completed my summaries of all
three hundred questionnaires.  I picked up Bill's to compare our
observations and was stunned.  Bill had uniformly rated all the jurors
much higher than I had.  In one instance he had given a 5 to a juror I'd
rated a 0!  Was I losing my mind?

That night I went down to his office..  "Bill," I asked, "have you
noticed a discrepancy in our grading?"

"'Yeah." He looked glum.  "Let's talk."

I pulled the problem juror his 5, my 0.

"What about this one?"

He glanced over the summary.  His face fell even further.  "I don't know
what I was thinking," he said.  "Maybe I'm just trying to convince
myself that we've got a chance."

I knew exactly what Bill was feeling.  He was in denial.  I think we
both were.  The prospect of a bitterly fought trial we knew we could
never win was just too much to bear.

You can't acknowledge that a situation is hopeless.  It destroys your
will to fight.  And so Bill and I reached a tacit arrangement in which
we ended up supporting each other's delusions about the candidates
filling out those questionnaires.

Yeah, maybe this one isn't so good.  Maybe we can get her to listen,
even though she considers the defendant a "hunk" and named her first
child Orenthal.  Yeah, yeah.  It might happen.

Something might happen.  There might be a miracle.

Meanwhile, Bill and I racked our brains trying to come up with ways to
keep the jury pool from being contaminated by the avalanche of
misinformation issuing from the press daily.  Normally, it's the judge's
job to protect the jury pool from such pollution, but Lance didn't seem
to have a clue.  We begged Ito to put off jury selection until after we
finished arguments on admissibility of DNA, something that stood to be a
long and complicated public brawl.  Why pick a jury and then send them
home, where they could listen to the defense belittle the science of DNA
testing?  But Lance didn't see the problem.

Ito set voir dire for October 12.  At the very least we pleaded with him
"bring the jurors into the courtroom" we told him, you are going to have
jurors discussing .  .  Simpson and hollow truths right in front of the
whole pool.

When we started volt dire I had arrived early and locked myself m my
office to Practice my questions.

,when finally I looked at my watch, It was half an hour to show time.

Odd, I thought, I haven't heard from Bill.  Pa all Jo knocked on my
door.  She looked worried.

"Bill's sick," she told me.  "He can't make it ."

"You're kidding, right?  Tell me it's a joke.

We are supposed to start volt dire m about twenty-seven minutes!

It was no joke.  Bill had been looking haggard and and drawn lately.  I
knew he hadn't been sleeping well.  The stress was taking its toll on
him. Come to think of It, It had kept harry r. tootle on the first day
or hardship question, too.  Now this! If Ito din't grant me a
continuance, I was screwed.

,when I got to court, with my heart in m my throat, I asked to post pone
the proceedings.  Shapiro objected but to my utter amazement, Lance
backed me up.  He pointed out that If Mr.  Cochran [were] similarly
afflicted .  .  .  I would exercise, .  .   the same discretion and
allow you to continue it another day.

Lance caught me totally off guard.

I was so grateful and relieved that I couldn't even manage a gracious
reply.  Maybe Ito wasn't such a bad fool anyway- Just in a little over
his head.

Bill returned the following morning Othing to get alarmed about, he told
us.  Just a touch of the flu.  He looked pale, but reason ably fit.
Ready to kick ass.

The rail is the three-foot-high wooden fence . that separates the
lawyers and parties to the action from the spectators .  But its
importance far transcends that of a physical barrier The rail is an
unofficial the of demarcation separating the players. The last thing we
needed, in my opinion, was our jury most of whom perceived their
fortunes as blighted by accidents or crimes of social in justice
associating us with this well-fed, monogrammed, cuff-linked fat cat.

Vinson's gall seemed all the more amazing in light of his record of
broken promises.  He'd assured us that he would come up with a way to
give us a computerized profile of each juror.  But when we'd sent him
the questionnaires, he couldn't deliver.  The format, he said, didn't
lend itself to that kind of analysis.  And Vinson apparently didn't have
time to read through them all himself, so he sent a kid fresh out of
college to help us.

"How many jury trials have you observed?" I'd asked the kid.

"None," he replied.

Bill and I looked at one another.

"Let him do his thing," Bill whispered to me.

So we listened as this boy read dutifully through his notes.  His
efforts were well intentioned, but there was nothing there that two
seasoned prosecutors could not have done on their own.

I thanked him for his efforts and sent him home.

As for Vinson, we didn't hear from him again until a few days before
jury selection.  He'd called to say that he wanted to present the
results of his "findings." This time I demanded that he come to our
office.  We met in the room we used for press conferences.  Vinson
spread out a set of elaborate pie charts and graphs on the table in
front of us.

His staff, he explained, had conducted phone surveys in which they had
compiled demographic and personal data on those who refused to believe
Simpson was guilty, those who were undecided, and those who were leaning
toward guilt.  His findings showed a wide racial divide.  Caucasians
tended to feel Simpson was guilty; African Americans tended to think he
was not.

I waited for some fresh insights, the flashes of revelation that would
cause the scales to fall from our eyes.  The most original of the lot?

"We found that people involved in bowling leagues tend to be
anti-prosecutive," Vinson announced.

IT was all I could do to restrain myself.  I burst out laughing.  Even
Bill was having a hard time maintaining his respectful poker face.
Bowlers!

That's what we'd been waiting for?

The real shame of it all was that Don Vinson probably could have
contributed something of value, if he'd had a clue.  Instead of warning
us off black women as a class an utterly pointless exercise since we
were going to have black females on that jury no matter what he should
have helped us fine-tune our questions in such a way as to identify the
most reasonable and reachable African Americans, male and female, in our
jury pool.  Then, he could have offered some advice on how to reach
them. Our biggest frustration stemmed from the fact that our repeated
entreaties for that kind of help fell on deaf ears.

Now this guy was angling to sit in front of the rail!  He wanted to be
on national TV!

"No," I said.  "Absolutely and unequivocally no!"

But Garcetti reminded me that Vinson's company had provided us with a
terrific set of graphics.  Which was true.  And now wasn't the time to
alienate him, Gil insisted.  So Bill and I packed up our note books and
trekked down to court, followed by two law clerks, Vinson, and a parade
of others from our office, all of whom wanted a front-row seat on the
action.

By the time we got there, the cramped, plywood-paneled court room of
Department 103 was packed to capacity with the jurors who had made it
past hardship screening.  The bailiff called the court to order.  Ito's
clerk, Deirdre Robertson, pulled eighteen names at a time.

The candidates took their place in the jury box.  First the judge would
question them.  Then the defense.  Then we would.

In California, it's routine to have a judge ask jurors the tough
questions, which in this case meant those concerning police credibility,
domestic violence, and race.  Conventional wisdom holds that jurors are
more likely to be candid with a judge than with the lawyers.  Jurors are
generally impressed with the power the judge wields and will think twice
before lying.  Some of the questions, like "Have you or any family
member been arrested?" could arouse personal resentments.

Better they resent the judge than the attorneys.

Ito, however, seemed reluctant to assume the role of the heavy.  He
couldn't bring himself to ask the tough questions.  If, for example, he
asked a juror, "Have you or anyone in your family been the victim of
domestic violence?" and the answer was yes, he should have been prepared
to press: "Who was involved?"

"My father hit my mother."

"Were the police called?"

"Yes."

"How did that make you feel?"

"Pretty terrible .  .  ."

And so on.

But Lance was too delicate, too fearful of offending, to probe.

He floundered politely for a while, then finally said, "Miss.  Clark?"

He was turning the questioning over to me.

And so I stood to face the twelve in the box.  No surprises here.

The first batch was largely black, largely female.  I had no illusions
about this group.  Their questionnaires indicated that they believed
overwhelmingly that Simpson was innocent.  But they'd be damned if
they'd say that to me.  I tried to get one young black guy to admit that
seeing a celebrity on camera didn't mean that one actually knew him. the
point being that someone who seemed to be a real nice guy on the tube
could still be capable of drawing a knife across a woman's throat.

You've seen the defendant on television, according to your questionnaire
, right?  I asked him.

I could see from the look on his face that he regretted admitting even
that much.

A couple of times, he replied.

Do you feel that you know him?

I don't know.

Well, has he ever invited you over to dinner?

No.

Have you ever gone out to the movies with him?

No.

have you ever met his family?  Ever talked about the weather, politics,
or religion?

Of course, this elicited a litany of nos.

So, do you think you know him?

I guess not, came the reluctant reply.

Jurors begrudged me even the most obvious answers for fear they'd say
something that might get them dismissed.  Bill seemed to fare no better.
I was so frustrated that I even turned to Vinson to see if he had any
suggestions.  He was slouched in his chair, twirling his glasses,
wearing a detached, supercilious expression.  He looked to me like some
indolent white plantation owner.  I was astounded to see that he'd taken
no notes.  On the other side of the room, perky little Jo Ellan
Dimitrius, jury consultant to the stars, was busy scribbling on Post-its
and passing them to Shapiro and Cochran.

When it came the defense's turn at the plate, I was curious to see who'd
lead off.  Officially, Shapiro was still at the helm, although rumors
reached me daily about the internal conflicts on the Dream Team.
Cochran, I heard, would call for a meeting, and Shapiro would refuse to
go.  Or Shapiro'd insist on meeting at his offices, and Cochran would
refuse to attend.  This struggle carried over into the court room.

Every time it was the defense's turn to do something, you'd see Cochran
and Shapiro muttering to one another about who would take it.

This time Shapiro must have won the flip.  It was clear that Bob had
gotten some heavy coaching.  His style was still phony and self
important, but he handled himself surprisingly well.  He zeroed right in
on the sensitive topics and hit them head-on.

Of one well-educated and fairly conservative white woman he asked, "You
also saw the freeway incident?"

"Yes .  .  ."

"And your conclusion was that O.  J.  Simpson was fleeing?"

"Yeah.  I think he was.  Yeah."

"And then, after all of this was done, your opinion that he was probably
guilty was made even stronger, was it not?"

"From what?  I am sorry."

In three more questions, he had her admitting that she did indeed think
it made Simpson look guilty.

She was excused for cause.

Perhaps I should take a moment to explain this business of excusing
jurors Each side gets a certain number of peremptory challenges.  In
this case, we got twenty.  These allow you to excuse a juror without
giving a reason.  If you don't like the way he parts his hair or don't
approve of the books he reads, you can exercise one of these strikes, as
they are also called, to send him packing.  Once your allotment is used
up, however, you can't go to the cashier and get more.

That's why we guard our peremptories like thousand-dollar chips in a
poker game.

What we prefer to do is challenge for cause.  But for that you need
grounds for example, the fact that a juror has already formed such a
strong opinion about the case that he or she can't promise to render an
unbiased decision.  It's important to note here that the law does not
require that a juror be excused simply because he's got an opinion about
some part of the caseor even because he's got an opinion about the
defendant's guilt or innocence.  The question is whether or not the
juror can set that opinion aside and entertain the evidence with an open
mind.  If he says he can, and you can't prove otherwise, there is no
basis for cause.

The number of challenges for cause is unlimited.  Naturally, it's better
to get a juror booted for cause than to use up a valuable peremptory. So
even when the grounds seem shaky, attorneys for both sides will pop up
with "Excuse for cause, Your Honor." It's then up to the judge to decide
whether to allow it.

Here Ito gave the defense wide latitude.  He gave us virtually none.

If, for instance, a juror had written that he found Shapiro "slick," he
was-gone in a heartbeat, kicked for cause.  If, on the other hand, a
juror found me "pushy, too aggressive, too strident," Ito refused to
dismiss him.  If-we wanted that juror out of there badly enough, we'd
have to use a peremptory.

If a juror uttered a remark that was even remotely pro-prosecution, that
was grounds for excusal.  I'm thinking of one young black man who
theorized that Kato would probably be loyal to Simpson because he'd
given him a place to live rent-free.  I thought this guy would make a
great juror.  The defense moved to excuse him for cause, and Ito granted
the motion.  I objected that his opinion was a matter of logic, not
bias.  But it didn't matter; he was gone.

The defense didn't want anyone with an IQ above room temperature.  They
were kicking jurors simply for being too smart.  This happened to one of
the alternates, a chemistry student from UCLA.  This guy was absolutely
brilliant.  I knew that he sure as hell was going to understand our
scientific evidence, and you could see that he gave the Dream Team
agita.  Sure enough, they struck him with a peremptory.

The UCLA student had another drawback from the defense's perspective: he
was Japanese.  People from Asian backgrounds, courtroom wisdom goes, are
law-and-order types.  Naturally, we try to get them on juries, and the
defense always tries to keep them off.  Defense lawyers have to be savvy
about this, because if they appear to be targeting jurors on the basis
of race, we can file what's called a Wheeler motion.  If it's
successful, the entire jury panel may be dismissed and jury selection
will begin all over again.  It doesn't stop there.  If a judge grants
such a motion, he's required to inform the state bar, and the offending
lawyer-can be reprimanded or fined, or both.  It's a real bad mark on
your record.  But it didn't keep Shapiro from going after Asians.

There was one elderly Filipino man whose questionnaire indicated a
law-abiding attitude.  Bill and I knew the defense would find some way
to get him off.  Since there was nothing in his background that gave
grounds for cause, they'd have to use a peremptory.  Shapiro should have
just struck the guy and moved on.  Instead, he went out of his way to
humiliate the man.

"Give us your definition of reasonable doubt," Shapiro commanded
imperiously.

It was an obvious attempt to demonstrate the man's supposed language
deficiencies.  But asking him to define reasonable doubt?  Not even
legal scholars can agree what it is.  The poor juror blushed, stammered
, and asked Shapiro to repeat the question, which he did in an even more
challenging tone.

I was absolutely furious.  How could Lance, whose own ancestry was
Asian, allow minority jurors to be treated like this?  In fact Shapiro
treated all nonblack jurors with this same sneering contempt.  If either
Bill or I had tried a stunt like that, we would have been called up to
the bench so fast it would have taken your breath away.

Johnnie's approach was entirely different.  He was warm and smooth with
every juror.  He came from the "call and response" school of voir dire.
Johnnie was stupid like a fox.  His questions were general,
nonconfrontational ones that required only a yes or a no.  He made no
attempt to draw out a juror's real thinking.  If you're sure you have a
jury pool stacked in your favor, the last thing you want to do is let
them talk enough to let slip a basis for cause.  Judging from the
answers I'd seen on those questionnaires, the pool was packed with O. J.
Simpson fans.  Why expose them by probing too deeply?

Still, I liked Johnnie, if only because he gave me somebody on the
defense side that I could talk to.  By that I mean someone who could
tack through the choppy swells of a criminal case without losing his
sense of humor.  Squaring off against Johnnie was fun at least in the
beginning.

He'd come into court and greet me with that big, easy smile.

"You're looking very lovely today, counselor," he'd say.  And I'd reply,
"No lovelier than yourself, Mr.  Cochran."

Once, at a sidebar, I grumbled about "this fucking case"; TFC

Johnnie thought that was hilarious.  He picked it up from me.  His
colleagues picked it up from him.  By the end of the trial everyone was
referring to this case as TFC.

The press caught on gradually to the realignment in our respective
camps.  At first, the talking heads tended to see this contest as Clark
versus Shapiro: Bob and I were the combatants who scrapped with each
other in court while our more levelheaded counterparts, Bill and
Johnnie, sat back and steered the steady course.  As we got further into
voir dire, however, that perception changed.  My office was still
billing Clark and Hodgman as co-counsel, but that didn't fool anyone.
The press could see that I was too aggressive and loud to be anybody's
second chair, or even co-chair.  I was the de facto lead on my side. And
Cocran was the one .^on his side. He'd pulled away, leaving Shapiro in
his dust.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the easy give-and-take I enjoyed with
Johnnie should be misinterpreted as a flirtation.  There was one very
amusing incident that occurred a few weeks after the trial started in
earnest.  One of the tabloids published a sequence of still photos of
Johnnie and me at a public hearing.  The jury wasn't present and I'd
been at the podium arguing to introduce some evidence that might have
established Ron Goldman's time of death.  This caught Johnnie ok and he
rushed to argue against in.  In the process he put his hands on my
elbows and gently moved me away from the microphone.

The gesture took all of three seconds.  The camera caught me looking
surprised, which I was.  It is unusual for lawyers particularly men and
women to touch each other in court.  My guess, if I know Johnnie, is
that he did it solely to throw me off my game.  Good lawyers sometimes
use guerrilla tactics.  Okay, fair enough.  I can roll with it.

CAR TAPE.  October 1994.  I don't see how we can ever get a decent jury
on this case.  Every misstep in the world that could be made has been
made, because all the judge and the defense attorneys care about is
looking good in the press.

I'm really appalled at what's going on, at the deepest level.  I really
fear for our system of justice.  I don t know how the jury system can
continue without some serious revamping.  It's hopeless we cannot rest
easy with the knowledge that a jury will use its common sense and follow
the law and the evidence to come to the right verdict.  If popular
opinion and celebrity and fame and the politically correct view is going
to tell what really sways the jury, if the jury will disregard the law,
disregard the evidence, and everyone expects it to happen, then why
bother?

Have you ever had a dream where you try to run but your feet are
weights?  That was what voir dire was like.  Jogging through molasses.

Lance had hoped to get through twenty jurors on the first day.  We
managed only four.  We tried to move faster, but Lance, Johnnie, me,
everybody seemed to have fallen under some kind of malaise.

On October 18, we were jolted out of our dream state by a bulletin from
the real world.  That morning on my way into court, I bumped into Ito's
clerk.  Deirdre Robertson, a tall, stylish black woman in her thirties,
was a classy lady.  She had a young daughter and we used to talk about
our kids a lot.  Deirdre thought that O.  J.  Simp son was guilty and
told me so.  She was somebody I'd end up going to a lot for
encouragement and solace during the trial.

"You put on the evidence," she'd tell me.  "All you can do is put it in
front of them."

I could tell by her face this morning that something ominous was afoot.
We'd be starting late, she told me.  Something had come up.

When I asked her what, she just shrugged.  A few minutes later, Ito
huffed in, looking very agitated.

A tell-all had just hit the newsstands.  The author, a friend of
Nicole's named Faye Resnick, had written some very damaging things about
O.  J.  Simpson.  Ito had worked himself into a lather over the
possibility that our jurors might have seen the book.  He sent Deirdre
out to buy copies for each of us.  Then he suspended the voir dire until
we could all read it and assess the damage.

I'd already talked to Fayeor at least I'd tried.  Early on in the case
I'd hooked up with some of Nicole's buddies, notably Kris Jenner, the
former wife of Robert Kardashian, who had since married Olympic
decathlon champion Bruce Jenner.  Kris was an absolute gem, and she
didn't seem to care much for her ex.  She had the strange habit of
referring to him as "Kardashian." I got the feeling they stayed on
speaking terms only because they had four children in common.  Kris and
her friend Candace Garvey put me in touch with several of the Brentwood
crowd.  Among these was Cynthia "Cici" Shahian, who, coincidentally, was
a cousin of Kardashian's.  She'd been elusive at first: I'd leave
messages that were never returned.  But after a couple of months, she
showed up in my office, flanked by Kris and Candace.  Cici was extremely
valuable.  She'd been standing next to Nicole when Nicole got Simpson's
letter threatening to turn her in to the IRS.  Cici had been able not
only to identify the letter, but to describe Nicole's r tunous reaction
to It.

During the first few weeks of the case, Kris and Candace had been
working on my behalf to reel in Resnick.  Faye, a wealthy divorcee and,
as she was most often described, a "West Side socialite," was a friend
of the Jenners.  Kris had introduced her to Nicole about two years
earlier.

Faye, too, was elusive, but Kris managed to coax her into my office late
one night in July.

During that first encounter Faye Resnick came across as childlike and
wary.  She was a thin, waifish woman with an enormous mane of dark-blond
hair.  There was certainly nothing about her to prefigure the
self-possessed siren who would eventually hit the talk-show circuit, to
say nothing of the cover of Plavlov.  In fact, she sat almost curled up
in a ball, staring at the floor.

"If it's Simpson you're afraid of," I told her, `'the best thing to do
is come forward." Even as I said it I was aware of the half-truths I am
often forced to tell.  Sure, she might be safer physically But I had a
feeling that if the defense got her on the stand, they'd cut her up
pretty good.  Clearly, this had occurred to Faye as well.

"You don't want me for a witness," she told me.  "The defense will Trash
me for my drug habit.  They'll make me out to be so bad it will ruin
your case.

Faye's "drug habit" was supposedly a thing of the past, but Simpson's
attorneys were already floating stories, claiming that she and Nicole
had borrowed money from Colombian drug lords to open a coffee bar.
Supposedly, that led to Nicole's being murdered.

"Let me worry about that," I told her.

If all she had to offer was hearsay, she'd never make it to the stand
anyway.  But any information at all was helpful.

"Faye, if you have anything that could help our case, please share it
with us," I said.  "Do it for Nicole's sake."

Faye said she'd think about it.  I didn't put too much pressure on her
that night.  Kris had warned me that it would probably take at least one
more meeting to draw her out.  This meeting, at least, had served as an
icebreaker.  Before she left, I gave her a Supportive embrace.

But now this!  Deirdre handed me my own personal copy of Nicole Brown
Simpson: The Private Life of a Life Interrupted.

I took the slender volume back to my office and began to read.  To my
surprise, Faye devoted her first chapter to our interview.  Her version
wasn't exactly as I remembered it, but was impressively accurate.

She even described how I'd hugged her "warmly" before she left.

I read on, intending to underline and annotate the book for future
reference, and as I did, my eyes grew wide.  Faye asserted (as the
defense team would later) that Nicole had been carrying on a secret
affair with football star Marcus Allen, who was O.  J.  Simpson's best
friend.  (Allen denied any romantic connection with Nicole.)  This was
not, strictly speaking, news.  The rumors about Marcus Allen were out
there from day one.  I was just shocked that she came out and said it.

Faye wrote that she'd begged Nicole to cut off the affair with Marcus
and warned her, "You may be signing your death warrant."

During the weeks before her death, Nicole apparently told her about
beatings and abuse that had never come to the attention of our
investigators.  Once while they were staying at a Las Vegas hotel,
Simpson allegedly flipped out, grabbed Nicole by the hair, and flung her
into a corridor.  She lay in the hallway sobbing, mostly naked, until a
security guard found and rescued her.  But the worst beating, Faye
claimed, occurred about a year before their son, Justin, was born.
Nicole had found a jewelry box in one of her husband's drawers.  It
contained a pair of diamond stud earrings.  Assuming he had bought them
for her birthday, she put the box back.  But the birthday came and went;
no diamonds.  Later, according to Faye, Nicole learned that one of
Simpson's steady mistresses, a former Miss New York named Tawny Kitacn,
had been wearing them around town.  When she confronted him about it, he
punched and kicked her, and then locked her in a closet.  For hours
after that, she lay quivering.  And what was O.  J. Simpson, American
hero, doing?  Lounging in the other room, watching some sports special.
Every so often he would come back to the closet, open it, and kick her
some more.

I thought Faye's book would be tabloid nonsense Life and Times in the
Brentwood Fast Lanebut it wasn't.  It impressed me.  I believed she was
speaking honestly; the book had the ring of truth.  From a prosecutorial
point of view, however, it was frustrating.  Much of the information it
contained, unfortunately, was hearsay.  We'd have trouble getting it
admitted at trial unless we could get independent corroboration.  I
began to focus my reading, trying to find isolate things that could be
introduced as evidence.  And about three-quarters of the way through the
book, I found something.  Around April 1994, Simpson and Nicole were on
the rocks again.  He'd extracted some bizarre promise from her that she
wouldn't see other men until August, when he was due to leave for New
York to start a new sports casting contract with NBC.  Even though
they'd broken up, he simply couldn't bear the humiliation of seeing her,
or others seeing her, with other men, at least when they were on the
same side of the Mississippi Simpson had called Faye in a fit of
distraction.  "If .  .  .  I find out she's with any other man before
August," he allegedly told Faye, "I'll kill her."

If Faye herself had indeed heard Simpson make this explicit death
threat, it would be admissible.  I believed she had.  I just didn't know
whether Faye Resnick had sufficient credibility to testify for the
People.

The drug problem that Faye had alluded to during our first inter view
was only the first of several difficulties a jury would have with her.

I could work with the drug history, maybe even turn it to our advantage
by pointing out that it was Nicole who arranged for the intervention
that finally got Faye into a rehab clinic.  Our victim was a
compassionate woman.  A caring and responsible friend.  The fact that
she had intervened to stop Faye's downward spiral also seemed to
indicate that Nicole was not some wild-eyed cocaine freak.

But Faye gave the defense more ammunition as well.  I knew they would
zero in on chapter 18, where Resnick wrote, "How can I describe the
intensity of my relationship with Nicole, particularly toward the end?
We had become more than friends.  Call it what you will, bonded sisters,
soulmates, confidantes .  .  ." Yes, they were lovers, if Faye was to be
believed.  Resnick laid out a fairly graphic and, she claimed, one-time
episode in which she and Nicole made love while listening to Madonna's
Erotica.

Airing this stuff in court would be disastrous the defense would use it
not only to attack Resnick's credibility, but to damage Nicole Brown
Simpson's own image in the eyes of the jury.  By the time the defense
was through with Resnick, the jury would be writing off Nicole as one of
those West L.A.  cocaine bitches, who probably got what was coming to
her.

Still, that was no excuse for Faye's not telling us what she knew.  It
could have put us way ahead on the domestic violence part of the
investigation.  But what did she do?  She squirreled away her nuts to
sell in a confessional memoir.  Didn't she feel some kind of real duty
to Nicole?  Didn't anyone in this case feel a duty to justice?

While the Resnick shock waves reverberated through the media, the Dream
Team was going through the motions of a serious freak out.

Shapiro sputtered to the court that he'd been blindsided.  He wanted the
trial postponed for a year to let some of the frenzy around Blindsided,
my ass.  I learned from a conversation with Resnick's own publisher,
Michael Viner of Dove Books, that Viner had run into Shapiro at a party
over a month earlier.  Viner claimed to have told Shapiro that the book
was coming out the week of October 17; he told me the lawyer had not
appeared particularly concerned.  Now that the book was out, however,
Shapiro was weeping and moaning that his client couldn't get a fair
trial.  He not only wanted the case held over for a year, but he wanted
Simpson to spend that time free on bail, his activities monitored by
"private security" that Mr.  Simpson himself would provide.

Not a chance, Bobby.  A defendant charged with a capital crime is
ineligible for bail under state law even if the D.A.  has decided not to
ask for the death penalty.

But we couldn't look to Lance Ito for decisive action on such an obvious
ruling.  Resnick's Private Diary had knocked the judge off his moorings.
He called in the jurors one by one to ask what, if anything, they knew
about the book.  Nearly every one of them admitted, either voluntarily
or after some strenuous questioning, to having some knowledge of it. Ito
sent the jury pool home for two days a particularly boneheaded move
under the circumstances, since it sent the message that the book was a
very big deal.  Any of them who hadn't read it, of course, were headed
straight for Barnes and Noble.

The next day, Ito held the bail hearing, closed to the public and press.
I got up and argued that the option put forward by defense counsel was
"unacceptable to the People," since what the defendant was asking for
was impossible under state law.  Even if it that hadn't been so, O.  J.
Simpson had already demonstrated before about 95 million fellow citizens
that he had a propensity to flee.  I reminded the court about the
pursuit up the 405.  I reminded Ito about the cash, the passport, the
disguise.  This defendant had made one obvious attempt at flight. It
showed his consciousness of guilt.  What would stop him from making
another one?

"If the defendant wants a continuance," I said, "he should remain in
custody as would any other defendant charged with a double homicide and
special circumstances."

As I turned to leave the podium, I caught Simpson out of the .corner of
my eye.  He was shifting in his seat, his face contorted with rage and
Disbelief?  His lawyers had probably told him that he had a good shot at
making bail. He was at the mercy of a woman.

Johnnie did an end run around announcing that his client wanted to
"address the court." I sure didn't want Simpson's self-serving spiel
reaching the ears of the jurors.

He shouldn't be allowed to speak directly to the court unless he's
prepared to take the witness stand. There was a curious atmosphere in
the courtroom that day.  It was actually pretty relaxed.  The cameras
were gone.

Everyone loosened up I started to object, but it was too late.  Lance
had granted the a little.  Both Shapiro and I let down our guards and
vented our frustration   " about the jury pool.

Simpson, who now stood, hands clasped in front of him, the very picture
of wounded virtue.  When asked, "How do you feel today?"

He answered, "Well,"  "I feel I've been attacked here today."

Does he not get it that he's the defendant in a homicide?

"I'm an innocent man," he continued.  "I want to get to the the People
because they are sitting there as the fans of this defendant jury I want
to get it over with as soon as I can.  I have two young
...........................kids out there.  That's my only concern I've
got two young kids that matter."

It disgusted me to the point of nausea to hear this man use his children
this way.

Finally Simpson said, "Thank you," and sat down.  |

I was mortified.  How could he be allowed to make a statement without
being called as a witness?

As I look back upon this episode, I still can't figure out what
possessed Lance.  I know he was coming under a lot of pressure from the
media, but that's not enough to have caused him to act so unwisely.

CAR TAPE.  October 1994.  I'd like to see us abolish the jury system.

Why leave the fate of our nation in the hands of these moon rocks?

After the Resnick fiasco, a lightbulb popped on in Lance's brain.  He
realized, finally, that he had to do something to protect the jury pool
from taint.  So he started bringing jurors in one at a time.

And for the rest of the voir dire he limited the press to one pool
reporter in the courtroom.  The pool arrangement, however, only served
to make the reporters now milling outside the locked doors more
desperate for news from the inside.  Johnnie and Bob took full advantage
of this situation. Each convened his own daily press conference to
fulminate over some new out rage.  And on October 27, they dealt Bill
Hodgman an ugly, low blow.

Bill had been questioning an elderly black man from South Central L.A.
He'd asked the guy, "Do you know what a polygraph is?"

What he was trying to get at, of course, was whether the fellow had read
my jurors-are-lying-their-heads-off comment and whether he had been
offended by it.

The man shot back, "You're pumping me as if I'm on trial or something.
So I don't like that.  You are sort of riling me."

Bill ended the questioning as gracefully as possible and sat down.

He was stunned.  So was I.  Bob and Johnnie saw their opening.  During
the next break, they ran out and held a pair of press conferences.

Bill, Shapiro charged, was trying to get jurors removed for cause
"because they are black, because they have black heroes and because O.
J.  Simpson is one of them.  There is no other reason."

On another floor of the courthouse, Johnnie was busy making the same
baseless charge.  "We're really concerned about the tenor of the
questions and the way they go after certain jurors," he said.  "If there
is a pattern, we'll be asking the judge to look into it."

I couldn't believe it.  They harass Asians, and they accuse us of
targeting minorities?  Blacks made up nearly 50percent of the initial
jury pool.  We couldn't have gotten rid of them if we'd wanted to.  The
defense ended up bringing a raft of Wheeler motions against us, but we
came prepared with a list of reasons for every black juror we excused.
And they couldn't make a dent in us.

It was clear that Johnnie and Bob's intent was to poison the jury pool
with insinuations of racism.  And they succeeded.  Several days later,
Bill drew a black woman to question.  We really had high hopes for her.
She wore a smart, tailored business suit and had smiled at me warmly
during the hardship questioning.  Bill had just begun his very gentle
questioning when she fixed him with an angry glare.  "I don't know.  You
make me feel like I'm on trial here, really."

She'd obviously read the news accounts about the juror who'd felt
"riled" and decided that she, too, would jump on the race bandwagon.

A look of shock and panic passed over Bill's face.  He struggled to find
words to reassure her and then defuse the situation.  But he was
mortified.

I could see that this process was just tearing him to pieces.  After
that, we agreed that I would question nearly all the remaining black
jurors.

We finished the formal voirdire early in November.  By now the jury pool
had been winnowed down to under fifty bodies.  We had one last shot at
them.  Each lawyer was allowed seventy-five minutes to make an
eleventh-hour pitch, hoping to evoke a reaction that might help us in
the final selection.  I decided to throw away the rule book and shake
these people up a little.  Somehow, I had to get them to confront their
own racial anger.  I needed them to consider how hero worship might
distort their judgment.  But how could I get them to admit to me things
they might not even have admitted to themselves?

When it came my turn to speak, I hesitated a bit.  I looked at the
faces.  Again, mostly black, overwhelmingly female.  It was important to
start off on the right foot.  Whatever happened, I didn't want these
people thinking that I was condescending to them because they felt some
sentimental fondness for the defendant.

"We've all seen Naked Gun," I told them.  "He made us laugh....

We've had him referred to as the all-American hero....  And that's why
it's so very difficult to have to present to you that someone of this
image can do a crime so terrible."

They were looking at me as if to say, We can't believe she's saying
this.

He's such a famous guy, I continued.  He's such a popular guy that
there's going to be a real temptation to do something different than
what the law requires.  This is a horrible situation, none of us like
it, but that doesn't mean we suspend the rules of evidence.  Just like
in a football game it's always a hundred-yard game no matter who's
playing it.  It doesn't matter if Mr.  Simpson's on the team, it's still
a hundred-yard game.  It doesn't become an eighty-yard game, and it
doesn't become a hundred-and-twenty-yard game, either. Rules are rules.

I reminded them that there were a whole lot of angles to this case:

interracial marriage, a black defendant, white victims, spousal abuse.

Which one of these do I have to worry about with you?  I asked.  Are you
guys going to vote on the basis of one of these agendas?  Are you going
to try and even some score you've got in mind?  You all agree with me
that that would be wrong?  That the place to even the score is the
ballot box, not in this courtroom?

A few of them nodded yes.

"Is there anyone here .  .  .  rooting for one side or the other?"

No nods this time.  I continued:

"I don't care which side it is.  If you are sitting there rooting for
'guilty' right now, I want you to get up and have the honor and the
decency to excuse yourself from this panel." Same thing, I told them,
went for those who were sitting there rooting for a verdict of "not
guilty."

"If you've decided how this case should end, then you cannot be fair."

And how about all these conspiracy theories?  I continued.  The Mafia
did it.  A Colombian cartel did it.  A crew of white burglars did it.
Are you going to make me convene the trial of the People versus the
Mafia?  Are you going to make me shoot down all these screwball
theories before you listen to the evidence?  How many trials do I have
to do here?  You could make the evidence fit anything, but that's not
justice.  I reminded them of Rodney King.

That case was in trouble from the very start, wasn't it?  Because it had
an all-white jury in a police community.  And with a videotape, the most
slam-dunk case you could possibly imagine.  Our office lost that case,
and we all know why.

"Do you know that had something to do with the fact they were being
tried .  .  ù by a jury that was all white?  That it was tried in a
community where a lot of police officers lived?"

Murmurs of "Probably .  .  ."

"Yes .  .  ."

That's what happens when you don't listen to the evidence, when you vote
on the basis of some private agenda.

Bob Shapiro objected to what he called my "unprofessional conduct." It
is against the canon of ethics for a prosecutor to criticize or comment
on a verdict to a potential juror.  My comments, he said, were deserving
of "severe sanctions."

That was technically true.  So I apologized to the court.  Then I looked
at the jurors point-blank.  "I hope I did not offend you with any of the
comments I made concerning the Rodney King verdict....

Have I?"

The whole bunch of them smiled and gave me a rousing "No."

Shot yourself in the foot, Bobby.

For a moment there, I felt those jurors were with me.  I'd gotten right
up there in their faces, but they didn't seem to hold it against me.

They seemed galvanized.  I really felt that some current was flowing
between us.  Bill leaned over.

"Little white girl up there talking about race issues," he said.  "One
of the most dramatic moments I've ever seen in a courtroom."

The following day, we went in ready to kick and pick.  That's the term
we use for the last volley of the twenty peremptory challenges to get
the pool down to twelve.  So Bill and I got right in there and mixed it
up.  We kicked and we picked with a vengeance.  And what we ended up
with was one white woman, one man who described himself as "half
American Indian," two Hispanics, and eight blacks.  Six of those blacks
were females.

By the end, we still had four of our twenty peremptory challenges
remaining.  That's right: we didn't use every single one that we were
entitled to exercise.  I can understand why a casual observer could
assume that we missed an opportunity because of this.  And, in fact, our
detractors seized upon those four unused challenges, claiming that we
could have kicked some of the clinkers and fill the slots with better
prospects.

No, we couldn't.  Let me explain.

During our nightly bouts of solitaire, Bill and I had kept precise tabs
on the rotation of candidates within the pool.  As days passed, the
rating of the average juror in our pool going by that 1-to-5 scale we'd
developed kept getting lower.  Originally, our population had a very
strong contingent of middle-class, educated citizens.  But remember: the
first round of elimination the "hardship" phase drastically changed
that.  The solidly employed middle class had no appetite to serve on
this case, and Judge Ito let them off without looking back.

There went most of our potential 5s and 4s.  Then the defense began
their attacks on two categories of jurors: those who were educated and
those who were weren't black.  Ito let them strike many without using
their peremptory challenges.  We were left with virtually no 4s and 5s,
and only a few 3s.

By the time the defense's peremptory challenges had been exercised, we
were down to our 2s.  We were playing a defensive game, and we played it
as cunningly as we could.  The best we could do was make sure that the
very worst jurors didn't find their way into the box.  And the way the
numbers broke down, if we used even one more challenge we would have
called up a batch of even sorrier prospects who would outnumber the
peremptories we had left.  What would be the sense of knocking off one
of our 3s or even 2s if most of the bodies who would take their place
were Is, people who wouldn't have voted to convict if O.  J.  Simpson
stood in front of them with a knife in his hand and shouted, "I did it"?

The process of picking a jury had been so exhausting that when we
finally got the twelfth juror, both sides of the room broke into cheers.

We were kissing, shaking hands, hugging each other.  It was unbelievable
.  Especially when you consider that only one side really had any thing
to celebrate.

Bob Shapiro ambled over to our table for some that.  He and Bill and I
laughed and joked about the questionnaires.  As I suspected, none of the
Simpson team had ever had to soil his fingers flipping through those
things.  Their consultant had done it all for them.

"Gil made you read your own questionnaires!" Shapiro declared, astounded
and amused.  "He should give you hardship pay!"

Tell me about it.

Then Shapiro gave me a cartoon he'd drawn of me.  There were two stick
figures: "Marcia Before the Trial," showing me with long hair and a
short skirt.  Then, "Marcia After the Trial," where I had short hair and
a long skirt.  It was pretty funny.  I kept it.

On balance, I'd never expended so much of myself picking a jury.

The exhilaration that came from completing that phase, along with the
positive feedback I'd gotten from my speech the previous day, led me to
a false optimism.  That night, on the way home, I spoke into my little
tape recorder:

We knew we'd wind up with an almost all-black jury....  We were
guaranteed to have basically a female black jury and we do.  But I think
overall, we're not unhappy with the jury.  I think there's enough
strong, fair ones that we'll get some kind affair shake.  I mean, it's
certainly not the best panel I've ever seen, but maybe they'll rise to
the occasion.

I know I was livin' in a dream world.  But you have to leave yourself a
little hope.

There were times I could have drowned Suzanne Childs in a gunnysack.
This was usually when the D.A."s media relations adviser ignored the
signs on my door reading "Leave Me Alone!" and "Go See Patti Jo" and
bustled in with her handful of message slips.

"Well, CBS wants .  .  ."

"Suzanne!" I cut her off.  "I don't have time for this."

I didn't mean to give her a hard time.  It wasn't her fault that she was
the bearer of unwelcome tidings.

Actually, I depended on Suzanne a lot, and considered her a great
friend.  She's a beauty tall, thin, and laced with nervous energy.

During the seventies she had been a weekend anchorwoman on the local CBS
affiliate.  She'd also been married to Michael Crichton.  That was
before he was such a big deal.  Their marriage ended in a rather public
divorce.  As a result, Suzanne knew what it was like to be a
much-stared-at single woman in L A.  I think that's why she took pity on
me.

I had no personal life to speak of.  Except for the nights when there
were other arrangements at home, I usually left the office in time for
dinner.  Then, after the house was quiet and the toys all put away, I'd
burrow in to the makeshift office in my bedroom.  We'd started this case
off-balance, and because of the defendant's insistence upon a speedy
trial, we never really had a chance to take a breather.  We were like
greyhounds chasing a mechanical rabbit.

Beaten down though I was by my workload, I felt I should take at least a
baby step toward an actual life.  I'd spread the word among my friends
and associates that I wouldn't mind going out on a date, if anyone knew
of a moderately intelligent, heterosexual male.  In other words, I was
available.

One day, when I came back from court feeling whipped, Suzanne met me in
the hall and gave me the once-over.  (After two months, the "make over"
she had supervised was already beginning to fade.)

"You should get out a little," she told me.

"Great idea, Suzanne.  Could you get me a life, maybe a few extra hours
in a day?"

"I could get you invited to a party," she told me.  It was at the home
of some directorI didn't recognize the name.  "It's a little get
together.  About ten people.  You could go right from work."

Suzanne gave me the address, which was in Beverly Hills.  I found myself
driving north of Sunset, deeper and deeper into the heart of mansion
country.  I was about to run into some serious glitter.  Me, in my
believe-me suit, driving a Nissan.  The window on the driver's side
still wouldn't work and it looked like it was going to rain.  I pulled
my little Maxima into a huge open drive and parked it next to a
Mercedes.

The only other car as crappy as mine was a county-issue Ford Taurus.

I knew that Suzanne had arrived.

My God, what a place!  A white-pillared entryway framed a pair of huge
double oak doors.  I'd barely rung the bell when it was answered by a
butler in full lively.  Behind him stood the host, who pumped my hand
warmly and introduced himself as Ray Stark.  Over the course of the
evening, I came to realize that he was a big-deal producer, some thing I
probably would have known right away if I hadn't had my head stuck
inside of law books and autopsy reports for the past ten years.  This
little dinner party was also a private screening of Legends of the Fall.

Suzanne took me by the elbow for a quick turn around the place, past a
wall of windows that looked out onto a yard of marble statues Never and
topiary.  Then, into the screening room.  At the rear was a wet bar with
all kinds of fancy chocolates set out in silver serving dishes.  As we
moved, Suzanne made easy introductions to some celebs and semi celebs.

God, I couldn't believe it there was Kirk Douglas.  To my amazement,
Kirk (May I call you Kirk?) turned to me and said, "I'm such a big fan
of yours." And I'm like, "I've been watching your movies since I was a
kid."

The irony did not escape me.  Suppose I'd stuck to acting.  About now
I'd be an aging bit player, who would have given up what was left of her
virtue to be invited to a party like this.  But here I was.  And Kirk
Douglas was angling to meet me!  I felt like I'd been dropped onto
another planet.  There was David Geffen on my left, Kirk D.  on my
right, Ron Meyer on one end of the table, and Betsy Bloomingdale on the
other.

The best part of it was thee someone, probably Suzanne, had spread the
word that the Case was off-limits for cocktail that.  An O.J. free zone!
Everyone was very cool about it.  I've discovered since that the one
advantage of mingling with the glitter ati is that they've all had to
wage their own battles against tabloid headlines.  They observe a sort
of gentlemen's agreement with respect to one another's privacy.

Ray Stark made sure I was introduced to Alan Greisman, who, I learned,
had been head of Savoy Pictures and was the former husband of Sally
Field.  He was also handsome, and apparently available.  He asked me
out, which probably took some guts considering all this bull shit
mystique that now surrounded me.  Now, I still thought I could date
like- any other soon-to-be-divorced mother of two.  Obviously clueless.
The following item appeared a few weeks down the line in a New York
tabloid:

Transformed by her new hair-do, Marcia Clark at 41 has finally emerged
outside the O.J.  courtroom as a veritable siren, and with her new
softer, prettier looks, the prosecutor in the Trial of the Century has
even managed to find romance amid her grinding schedule.

According to sources, Clark has recently linked up with actress Sally
Field's ex-hubby, Alan Greisman, through mutual friends....  "They have
been lovey-dovey all over Los Angeles,"

says a source.  "I don't think they even attempt to keep their
relationship a secret; they are dining out most nights."

In fact, Alan and I had only one date.  I met him for dinner at a little
Italian place in Beverly Hills.  We talked for most of the evening about
divorce.  And by the dessert course I knew that nothing could come of
it.  Alan was intelligent and charming, but he ran with a flashier crowd
than I thought I could handle, at least with the Simpson case on my
hands.  We parted amiably, without having managed to see any pare of Los
Angeles together beyond the inside of a restaurant.

I made a couple of other stabs at dating.  A friend of a friend
introduced me to a single guy she knew.  He turned out to know Fred
Goldman, but he seemed to enjoy no other claim to fame.  Hmmm, I'm
thinking. This one's a good bet, not a fast-learner, not wired to the
media.  I think I saw him twice; it was barely a friendship.  But then
one of the tabs found out that we knew each other and asked him if there
was a romantic relationship there.  He didn't confirm it; but he didn't
deny it, which seemed dishonest to me.

After that I pulled in my antennae.  I was safer with my own kind.

From November until the verdict came in twelve months later, I limited
my social life to late nights with my coworkers.

CAR TAPE.  November 17.  I don't feel like I ever get more than four
hours' sleep, constantly fighting this cough and this cold.  I have not
a minute to myself If I m not working, I'm with the kids.  If I'm not
with the kids, I'm working....

I don't really feel very good about our-chances in this case, I just
don't think we can get the jury to get over their emotional response to
seeing their hero being taken down for this, and the evidence is so
compelling.  I don't feel like it's gonna matter.  I feel like I'm going
to be standing up there talking to myself you know?  .  .  .

But Chris Darden, troy.  I pat myself on the back all day long for
putting him on the case.  What a gem.  What a gem!  The guy is smart'

resourceful, creative, got lots of energy because he hasn't been beat up
like we have all this time.  I'll give him a little time in front of
this twelve-headed monster, and he'll get tired and heat up too.

Never Thank God for Chris Darden.

As far as the public and the press knew, Chris Darden joined the team in
early November.  In fact, he'd been working with us behind rho ceenes
for more than three months.

As I look back on it, I find it amazing that I didn't think of Chris
when I was first drawing up that short list of D.A.s to partner with. He
hadn't even occurred to me.  That's because you tend to think of the
people right under your nose.  Chris was down on the seventeenth floor
in SID.

Eight years earlier, he and I had worked together in calendar court.

We had a lot in common.  Like me, he was a hard charger, ambitious,
tenacious.  Back then, after work, Chris and I and a handful of other
deputies would all take out the bottles from our respective desk
drawers, down a couple of shots, and swap war stories into the night.

Then we'd be up early the next morning, ready to charge all over again.
During the years since calendar court, Chris and I had gone our separate
ways: I to Special Trials; he to the SID, where he handled complaints
against cops.  We'd see each other from time to time in the courthouse
and we'd laugh and joke and talk about the old days.


One summer morning soon after the preliminary hearings, he stuck his
head into my office unannounced.

"Hey, Clark," he hailed me.  "Any time for the working class?"

It took me a minute to focus.  Cool shaved head.  Malcolm X fuzz.

"Chris!  C'mon in, man!"

He seemed relieved that I'd recognized him.  By the time he took the
chair he was having trouble making eye contact.  Chris always did have
trouble making eye contact.  Not just with me, but with judges and
juries.  Down deep, he is a very shy guy.

Chris gave a detailed account of our reunion in his excellent memoir, In
Contempt.  He recalled me in a dense cloud of my own cigarette smoke, at
a desk fit for a CEO.  "She leaned back in her huge brown leather
executive chair with the diamond tuck in the back, a chair twice her
size, clearly not standard county-issue."

When I read this, I nearly doubled over laughing.  You'd think he was
talking about some spike-heeled dame from a film noir.  That <'brown
leather executive chair," as a matter of fact, was just a tatty old
armchair that I'd found some years earlier sitting in a hallway. Some
departing Grade 3 had apparently discarded it.  It was huge.  It was so
huge, in fact, that I could actually curl up in it and catch a few winks
Unfortunately, it was infested with termites, and every time I shifted
my weight, it emitted a cloud of sawdust which probably accounts for the
haze Chris saw hanging over me that morning in July.

Finally he looked at me.

"I thought you should know the L.A.  Times has filed a public records
request on Fuhrman." He slid a file across my desk.

The case was old, 1987.  It involved a robbery suspect named Joseph
Britton who was fleeing an automated teller machine when he was shot by
a couple of police officers.  One of them was Mark Fuhrman.  Britton
sued the city, claiming that one of the two officers had called him a
"nigger" and then planted evidence on him.

The problems with Fuhrman just kept on coming.  I'd gotten the documents
from that disability case Mark had filed against the city in August
1983.  It appeared to me that he'd put on quite a show for his
psychiatrists.  He'd claimed to be suffering from stress growing out of
his service in Vietnam (though he hadn't seen any action), as well as
his years going head-to-head with gang bangers.  All of this, it
appeared, was exacerbated by the strains of his divorce.  Yet his job
ratings were generally high.  No way, I thought, was any judge going to
let a cop's psychiatric reports into the record.  But we'd surely have
to litigate it.  I knew the defense would pull out all the stops trying
to get them in.

Now a lawsuit?

"We checked it out," Chris reassured me.  "Rejected for prosecution."

That was acceptable damage.  Every officer has complaints in his file.
If he's out there in the neighborhood making arrests, somebody's going
to try and sue to get the city to fork over a few bucks in a settlement.
If SID had investigated and rejected the complaint, that was good enough
for me.

"And the public records request?" I asked him.

"The L.A.  Times has a right to get the file in ten days.  I'll probably
give it to them on day nine and a half."

Totally on top of things.  I really liked this guy.

I knew that Chris had solid ties to the 'hood.  He also knew Down town
juries.  I wanted his opinion on Fuhrman.

"Everybody's going nuts on this planting thing," I told him.

"What do you think?"

Chris was silent for a moment.

"Well, people in the 'hood think he [Simpson] was framed," he said
finally.

"Well, what do you think?"

"I doubt it," came his reply.

Chris knew cops.  He investigated them on a regular basis.  He could
tell a legitimate complaint from a fairy tale.  The kind of elaborate
evidence-planting and conspiracy that the defense was suggesting just
didn't ring true.

"Black people won't want to convict Simpson," Chris warned me.  "But if
you've got the evidence, you can overcome that.  You'll make It.

I found that reassuring.

After he'd left my office, it dawned on me.  "My God .  .  .  Chris! Why
didn't I think of it before?  He'd be perfect to handle Cowlings."

Since the day after the Bronco chase, we'd had A.  C.  Cowlings under
charges for aiding and abetting a fugitive.  Gil and the brass had
talked it over and decided the best way to investigate him would be
through a separate grand jury.  This would have to be handled with great
sensitivity because the law strictly prohibits the district attorney
from using evidence gathered from one grand jury to assist in the
investigation of a case already filed.  It's called "commingling."

There were other complications.  Whoever took the assignment would have
to be prepared to subpoena Simpson's own attorneys, at least two of whom
had been present in the house from which he'd escaped.  It meant we had
to give Cowlings to someone who was strong enough to push through an
investigation in the face of monumental stonewalling.

Chris would be perfect.  He was tough and tenacious and he seemed eager
for the action.  We knew, even at this point, that the Simpson case was
shaping up to be the biggest one ever tried by our office.  You couldn't
blame a deputy for wanting to be part of it.  The beauty of Cowlings,
from Chris's perspective, was that it was a limited engagement.  He
could be a member of the teams in an important but low-profile part of
the case And as won as it was over, he'd get his life back.

And so, in late July 1994, Chris took over thee Cowlings investigation,
which, as I had predicted, turned out to be the ultimate dead end.
Cooperative witnesses were almost impossible to find.  Simpson's
personal assistant, Cathy Randa, had shredded documents pertaining to
domestic violence.  She sure as hell wasn't talking..  Paula Barbieri
appeared before the grand jury wearing a pairs, high-buttoned shirt with
a cross dangling from her neck, and wouldn't even own up to being
Simpson's girlfriend Robert Kardashian, Simpson's wealthy pal, who
hadn't practiced law for years' ducked each of Chris's queries about
Simpson's departure from his Louse with a smug "That's privileged." O.
J. Simpson's cadre of loyalists had closed ranks tightly around him.

When it became clear that we weren't going to have enough evidence to
indict, we thanked the jury and sent them home.  I was left with a dear
conscience.  Chris and the D.A.  investigators had gone to extraordinary
lengths pursuing leads Later, Chris regaled us with tales of these
exploits.  His favorite concerned a trip he and two investigators had
made to the Bahamas in search of the M'ss Turnbuy.  She was a yacht that
supposedly figured in one of the Simpson escape scenarios.

What Chris had hoped would be an exotic trip to paradise turned into the
junket from hell.  Mosquitoes the size of bats, inflated tourist prices,
five bucks for a bottle of beer, a hundred bucks for dinner.

And, of course, nothing but dead ends Ott the investigation.  Each time
he told that story it got funnier: the mosquitoes got larger, the price
of beer rose to ten dollars a bottle.  Chris made me laugh until the
tears ran down my cheeks.  I hated the idea of letting him go.

Bill and I had been talking about bringing an another attorney as a
special "case manager." Someone to coordinate the work of the law clerks
and junior deputies who were being assigned to do research for us.  Even
before we dismissed the charges against Cowlings in early November, I
called Chris into my office to make him a proposition

"Bill and I are so balled up arguing these stupid motions that we don't
have any time to do any of the organization' I told him.

"We don't have the time to do any creative thinking.  I guess what I'm
saying is that I'd like you to be part of the first string."

He looked down.  Then he looked away.  There were a few beats.  I knew
or at least I thought I knew what he was thinking: They need some color
at that Clorox-white counsel table.

"I'd be honored," he told me.  It was a strangely formal reply.  But
Chris had a chivalrous streak, and I found that endearing.

It's been said that we recruited Chris because he was black.  But that
isn't true.  At the time he popped his head in my door, we had no scouts
out beating the bushes for minority talent.  A good lawyer presented
himself.  I knew him.  I trusted him.  He happened to be black.

Now, did I think his race would help us with a predominantly black jury?
Possibly.  But there was also a risk that those jurors might reject him
as an Uncle Tom.  At the very least, the D.A."s office would almost
certainly be charged with race pandering.  Sure enough, a day or so
after Chris's appointment was made public, Johnnie Cochran went around
telling reporters that we'd hired ourselves a token black man.

Even after the dirty tricks I'd seen him pull during the voir dire, I
would still have believed Johnnie had more class than that.

To me, Chris's race was a wash.  My only thought was He's strong.

He's smart.  Can he handle the beating we're gonna take?  And I knew the
answer: Yeah, he can.

I found Chris a cubicle in the middle of the Planning and Training Unit.
I also handed him a big chunk of the case, a part that needed a lot of
catch-up work.

Nicole and O.  J.  Simpson's private life was still a mystery to me.  We
had police reports, but these were encoded in cop-speak, a militaristic
argot that imparts no warmth, no human dimension to the events
recounted.  It seemed that no one could supply the key to the code.

That is, until the publication of Faye Resnick's book.  I had let Faye
slip through my fingers in the first go-round.  Not this time.  I told
Chris to reel her in.  No excuses.  The evidence she'd been withholding
was motive for murder.

I'm not sure what kind of tactics Chris used to flush Faye out of hiding
in Vermont or wherever the hell she was holed up.  I know he talked to
her lawyer, who claimed that she was spooked over the sensation the book
had caused.  If we wanted her to come in to see us, he said, we'd have
to assign her a security detail.  I found this a little dra matic. Nicole
organized an intervention to get her into a rehab clinic in Marina del
Rey.  Faye checked in on June 9.  Three days later, at nine o'clock on
June 12, she called Nicole from a pay phone at the clinic, asking her
how the recital had gone.

"That was the best mood I have ever heard her in.  She sounded so
resolved and so clear and so strong, felt so good about what she had
done.  She felt good about the fact that her family was behind her at
this time."

Her parents' support meant a lot to Nicole, Faye said.  Nicole confided
in her that "the only reason she stayed with O.J.  after that [the New
Year's Eve incident] was because of her family.  They needed his support
financially.  And when she told them that she wanted to leave him, they
made her feel so so bad about it, and they basically did not accept her
leaving him.  And to me that was one of the biggest secrets of all.  I
mean, I was devastated by that.  It's like their daughter is a throwaway
daughter."

Chris and I both believed that Faye was telling the truth about
Simpson's abuse of Nicole.  He hit the trail and checked out various
sources, all of whom ended up confirming her accounts.  A nurse at the
rehab clinic confirmed that Faye really had called Nicole the night of
the murders.  Various members of the Brentwood crowdCandace Garvey,
Bruce and Kris Jenneralso verified Faye's account of O.  J.  Simpson's
obsessive, abusive relationship with his wife.

Chris had several follow-up interviews with Faye.  She flirted
outrageously with him.  Her pet name for him was "D'Artagnan." A
Musketeer? Go figure.  She would leave throaty messages on his answering
machine: "D'Artagnan, I need to speak with you." He'd play them for me
when he got to work.

Anyway, Chris liked her.  He was all for putting her on the witness
stand.  But I held back.  As I've said before, Faye had a very serious
downside.  There was her drug problem, for starters.  On top of that
we'd heard that Robert Shapiro professed to have witnesses to an ongoing
lesbian relationship between Faye and Nicole.  These "witnesses" could
supposedly describe the lovemaking positions both women had assumed
during these encounters.  Moreover, while on her book tour, Faye had
drawn fire from black women in the audience of a national talk show.  To
them, she was just one more white bitch trying to bring down O.  J.
Simpson.  If the jury had it in for me, you can imagine how'd they'd
respond to her.

In the end, I prevailed.  We didn't call Faye, and I'm sure that it
didn't break her heart.  Faye's information supplied the connective
material to turn our collection of isolated police reports about
Nicole's deeply troubled marriage into a coherent history.  It gave us a
badly needed boost.

And now, I thought, if we could just reach the Browns.

This is the part that gets weird for me.  It wasn't for lack of desire,
but I was never able to get as close to the victim)' families in this
case as I would have liked.  I felt enormous sympathy for the Browns and
the Goldmans.  And I felt a special rapport with Kim Goldman.  Her
grief, never far from the surface, simply broke my heart.  A brother
murdered!  I thought of my own brother, Jon, the person closest in the
world to me.  I couldn't imagine what it would be like to lose him.

Whenever I called the Goldmans' house, whoever answered the phone,
usually Fred or Patti, would tell the other to pick up the extension and
we'd all talk.  I'd fill them in on the latest news and check to see how
they were holding up.  Patti never failed to ask about my health and my
children.  Same for Fred.  I found that remarkable, especially in light
of the loss of their own child.  Such incredibly wonderful people.

But the awkward fact remained, the victims' families and I enjoyed
nothing approaching the close, comfortable relationship I'd had with
Rebecca Schaeffer's mother.  Danna and I had exchanged notes and phone
calls during a whole year of pretrial motions.  But once Simpson had
invoked his right to a speedy trial, the accelerated schedule, along
with the unbelievable pressures of TFC, made the kind of relationships
that mature and deepen with time close to impossible.

Whenever we seemed to be on the point of establishing a closer rapport,
the media pulled the families in another direction.  As a practical
matter, I couldn't order them not to talk to reporters.  But in the
past, I had found that victims' families Revere usually willing to be
guided by me.  After all, the articles and television segments could
affect the prosecution, and our shared goal was presumably to see
justice done.  Danna Schaeffer had been conscientious about consulting
me each time she was called by a reporter.  Her cooperation helped me
exert some kind of damage control over publicity the defense would claim
was prejudicial to their client.  In the Simpson case, all bets were
off.

I liked Fred Goldman a lot, and I know he did his best to help us.

But he really felt he had to be out there, making statements and
expressing his outrage, to make sure that a media obsessed with the
melodrama of Nicole and O.J.  didn't neglect his own son's memory.

(Privately I applauded him.  Fred and his family, I felt, served as the
very conscience of this case.)  Fred, at least, would give me a heads-up
before he gave an interview to Geraldo.  Not so, the Browns.  I wouldn't
hear of their forays until I picked up the paper or passed a television
set.

Early on, Denise and Dominique Brown had appeared on Good Morning
America, where they'd seemed to me neutral, almost supportive of their
brother-in-law.  This was especially strange, I remember thinking, in
light of Denise's comment to Tom Lange the morning he called to tell her
of her sister's murder: "I knew the son of a bitch was going to do it,"
she'd told him.  Nothing equivocal about that.  And then, in November,
for reasons unknown to me (she certainly didn't consult me about it),
Denise Brown came out swinging.

She announced publicly that she'd known O.J, was the killer from the
moment she heard about Nicole's death.  She also claimed that Nicole had
predicted Simpson would kill her and get away with it.

The defense team went absolutely crazy over this.  Johnnie Cochran got
up in court and fulminated about how awful it was for the Browns and
Goldmans to be doing this to the defendant before trial.  Denise's
television appearances also prompted a sanctimonious announcement from
Shapiro that he "forgives" the family.  When I heard that, I just
thought, Fuck you, you patronizing asshole.

The absurd thing about it all was that the defense, the press, and
perhaps the public all assumed that the District Attorney's office had
sent the victims' families out on a campaign to spin public opinion But
nothing could have been further from the truth.  The Goldmans and the
Browns were simply beyond our control.

Never Of all the families of victims I've had contact with over the
years, the Browns were by far the strangest.  I'd known families who
were indifferent and others who were overinvolved.  This was something
else.

On the surface they appeared warm enough.  Lou Brown would come into
court saying, "Where's my hug?" and then hug me.  I let him hug me
because I couldn't think of any tactful way to deflect it.

But I wasn't comfortable with it, in part because of something I saw
during one of my visits to the Browns' home at Dana Point.  Lou had
shown me into his study.  On a table covered with photos almost none of
Nicole there was a picture of Dominiquethe family called her Minidressed
in a teensy-weensy bikini, in what struck me as a provocative pose.
There was also a shot of some magazine pinup, totally nude.

It was also clear to me early on that Lou Brown was a patriarch of the
old order.  According to Tanya, Lou had been delighted with his famous
son-in-law and he'd been completely opposed to his daughter's divorce.
When Nicole first walked out on O.  J.  Simpson, her father would not
speak to her or even help her move.

Juditha was a handsome, middle-aged woman of German birth; to me, she
seemed sweet and well-meaning but utterly passive.  She was well aware
of Nicole's domestic problems.  Every time Nicole and O.J.
fought, she told us, O.J.  would take Juditha's picture off the wall and
throw-it out a window.  It became a running joke: "Oh, am I on the front
lawn again?" Juditha seemed to have down played in her own mind what
should have been a red flag, not I believe because she didn't care about
Nicole, but because she just couldn't bring herself to deal with the
trauma that would have resulted from confronting her own husband and her
own emotions.  Juditha was mildly supportive when Nicole left O.J., but
was all too willing to let her go back on the occasions when she tried
to reconcile.  It must have been difficult for Juditha to look back on
those events and reckon with them.  But she
never talked to me about that.

The Brown sisters all seemed clued into O.  J.  Simpson's true nature.
Denise had taken photos to document Nicole's injuries after the New
Year's Eve incident.  Dominique, who seemed to me the coolest of the lot
and a real straight shooter, also seemed to have the most pent-up rage.
She told me how, when Nicole was pregnant, Simpson called her sister a
"fat pig," and about how uncaring he was as a father.  How he liked to
show the kids off, but he really wasn't around for them.

The Browns gave me a document, written by Nicole, dated Sunday, January
10, 1988.  I found this particularly harrowing.  Nicole had taken
Sydney, along with her mother and Mini, to see "Disney on Ice." When
they all got back to Rockingham, Simpson was there with Al Cowlings.

Nicole could tell something was wrong.  A.C.  looked tense.

[O.J.] followed Mini and Mom out to the car, rattling 100 mph about what
a liar I am.  He never stopped.  He followed Sydney and I around the
house.  "Please don't yell and scream in front of Sydney." So A.C.
grabbed her.  And I tried to net away from her so she wouldn't have to
hear it.

Here was Nicole, two months pregnant at the time.  He tells her he wants
her to get an abortion.  He orders her out of the house, saying, "I have
a gun in my hand right now.  Get the fuck out of here."

She grabbed her baby, the cats, the diaper bag, and a bottle.  Then she
"got the heck" outta there.

Given the circumstances, I found Nicole's account strangely
dispassionate, as if she were separated by habit from her own feelings.

And yet as I read between the lines, I could sense her mounting panic as
she tried to protect her child.  I could just imagine what Sydney must
have seen and heard.  That poor little girl.  Forced to watch and listen
as her father humiliated her mother.  Kicked out onto the street.

And I'm thinking, This guy abuses his pregnant wife, demanding she abort
their /baby, and now he moans to the world that the worst part of being
incarcerated is the separation from his children?

The Browns also gave us a journal in which Nicole had chronicled more of
her husband's systematic neglect of his children.  When I first glanced
through it, I did not recognize it for what it really was.

Nicole's lawyers would later explain to me what these notations meant.

They'd instructed her to write everything down in case of future
litigation on custody or child support.  When the father failed to show,
missed days, came late, she was to document it in writing.  And she had
done as they'd instructed.

Never As I read through those entries, I saw and heard a Nicole who was
becoming increasingly agitated.  The angrier she got, the more she
wrote.  Beyond the simple recording of dates, she had started describing
how her ax-husband acted, what he'd said to the kids.  In the strictest
sense, what we had from Nicole was not really a diary.

And yet it was the essential diary.

Nicole began making entries in early 1992, after leaving her husband for
the first time to set up housekeeping at her new condo on Gretna Green
in Brentwood.  "Home," she wrote on Sunday, February
23.  "Moving in." Most of her entries were sparse; one of the longest was
for Monday, June 29, 1992.

O.J.  called about 7:00 or 7:30.  Justin kept wanting to talk.  Asked if
he can sleep there.  Such a need for Daddy .  .  .  Sad!!  So he came at
about 8:15.  Justin is in heaven.  I stayed home w/Sydney.  It's been 2
weeks since Justin spent the nite & saw OJ.  3 weeks since Sydney spent
the nite and saw OJ....

During the early part of 1993, Nicole was clearly considering
reconciliation.  "O.J.  & I got back together April 12 93," she wrote.
By spring of the following year, however, dhey were on the skids again.
Nicole had bought her condo on Bundy.  She seemed to be shunting between
Bundy and Rockingham, unsure of where to call home.  O.J.  was a chronic
no-show as a Ladler.  By May 1994, Nicole had apparently had enough.
"We've officially split," she announced to her journal.  "I told OJ
we're going back to
every other weekend....  I need the rest & O.J."s gone so much he needs
time alone widh [dine kids] 'til he leaves again."

On June 3, when she had little more than a week to live, Nicole
documented another violent outburst.  O.J.  had come by the condo to
pick up the kids; when he discovered they'd made other plans, he lit
into Nicole for some perceived slight of the day before.

"You hang up [-on me last nite, you're gonna pay for this, bitch!"
he shouted at her.  "You're holding money from the IRS

you're going to jail you fucking cunt!.  .  .  I've already talked to my
lawyers about this," he continued.  "They'll get you for tax evasion,
bitch....  You're not gonna have a fucking dime left."

He continued his tirade even as Sydney's little girlfriend arrived.