Without a Doubt

by Marcia Clark

There was a certain irony to the notion that the police would frame Simpson. Black men had undeniably been mistreated in the criminal justice system. But Simpson was not one of them. Over the years, when Nicole Brown called 9-1-1 to report that Simpson had beaten her, police officers frequently washed out the charges. Simpson would sign a football for them, and the officers, his adoring fans, would walk away. Even Mark Fuhrman had declined to arrest Simpson for bashing in the windshield of Nicole’s car—while she was sitting in the driver’s seat.

Despite these reservations, I’ve come to believe that people should be able to see our justice system at work, not least because individual cases can bring to light widespread social problems.

Media coverage of the Simpson case laid bare and even had a measurable impact on one such issue: the pervasive and deadly nature of spousal abuse.

Nicole’s prophetic words haunted me throughout the trial. She had said to friends and family, “He’s going to kill me, and he’ll get away with it, because he’s O. J. Simpson.” It bre...

Prior to the trial, people still largely viewed violence between partners as a “family matter,” not really even a crime. More often than not, it was swept under the rug—along with the women’s shattered lives. And few ...

Even now, the statistics are chilling. Every year, 4,744,000 women in the United States are physically assaulted by their partners. Every day, three women are murdered by their male partners. Twice as many women were murdered by current or former male partners betw...

Domestic violence support groups and hotlines have multiplied since the Simpson case. There are now over fifty shelters in Los Angeles County alone. This is a very real step forward because without such resources victims often have nowhere to turn. I want to take this opportunity to applaud all the workers whose tireless efforts help the survivors of domestic violence. You save lives every day.

But what can we ordinary citizens do? We’ve learned the right words to say. We now know better than to blame the victim. We no longer pretend it’s just a family concern or a normal part of relationships, but we clearly have a long way to go.

I’m glad that the Simpson trial continues to provoke debate about these critical issues, but we should also not forget that two innocent people were brutally murdered. So I want to end this foreword by honoring Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman. We owe them a great debt.

By documenting the years of torture she suffered at Simpson’s hands, Nicole helped pave the way for new laws and organizations that aid the victims of spousal abuse. And because Ron Goldman surprised Simpson that night and fought so valiantly, we wound up with much of the evidence that proves Simpson’s guilt. This edition is dedicated to you, Nicole and Ron. —Marcia Clark, February 2016

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 loafer—size 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 whe...

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.

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.

The Robbery/Homicide Division bullpen was a large room with about twenty desks facing each other in two rows. Consequently, the homicide team 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.

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.

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 in 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?

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, clearly 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 Rang...

Sydney knew something was terribly wrong. At one point, she turned to her brother and said, “Justin, you know something happened to Mommy,...

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!”

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.)

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 filable. 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 Polanski—allowed 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.

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.

“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 have 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.

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...

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 wore no belt or shoelaces. His features were slack, his manner distracted. I suspected he was tranked. He looked half-angry, half-scared, utterly deflated. In the coming months I would watch an alert, carefully coached 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.

Still, 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.

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.)

“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 cut 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 remained open. The killer had waged a merciless assault against an unarmed, unsuspecting victim, a victim who was rapidly trapped in a 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 Goldman’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.

had looked on literally thousands of coroner’s photographs over the years. None were worse than the last pictures taken of Nicole Brown. Her face 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. 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 in death, I...

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 Ms. 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 and watching her credibility crumble. Then I took a deep breath.

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, marking where the limo was, and his line of sight, at every moment. He 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. K...

On the way to the airport, Park testified, Simpson kept 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 wonderin...

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 envel...

“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 1...

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 seen the body, his voice broke and he covered his eyes with one hand. Taking the witness stand somehow seemed to calm him. He told how he’d come home to his apartment on Montana Avenue—only about six hundred feet from the crime scene—at around 11:40 P.M. He found his upstairs neighbor sitting with a big white A...

“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 tu...

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 Kat...

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—a window of perhaps an hour. That dog, it seemed, had a better handle on time of death ...

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 Collin’s report: in this case, the results were perfectly consistent. Every blood drop on the trail at Bundy displayed O. J. Simpson’s genetic markers, and only his genetic markers. Bull’s-eye.