Without a Doubt

by Marcia Clark

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 Cellmark for more sophisticated testing.

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.”

Here’s the bottom line: Fung and his colleague, Andrea Mazzola, a trainee with only four months’ experience, 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 t...

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. T...

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 e...

Lange: “What time did you last park the Bronco?” “Eight something,” replied the suspect. “Maybe seven, eight o’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 Vannatter and Lan...

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 “Mmnh-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 ...

“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 everything. 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 thoughts? 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...

But the O. J. Simpson who emerged from that police interview struck me as cold and detached—fundamentally unaffected by...

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...

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 everyw...

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. “Do you have any idea?” 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 in a bit…”

“Did you ever hit her, O.J.?” “Uh, we had—that one night we had a fight.” “Mmnh-mmph.” “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. And I—I didn’t punch her or anything, but I—I—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...

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 t...

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 ...

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...

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 a...

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 flashpoint 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 thirtysomething 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 t...

So I wound up listening with innocent fascination—along with everyone else in the courtroom—as Keith told how he had met Nicole in 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 Mezzaluna in Beverly Hills, where ZIomsowitch 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 ZIomsowitch, 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 of—yes, we were very intimidated.” ZIomsowitch 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 ZIomsowitch 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 t...

had to tell the jury to disregard the statement attributed to Nicole. At that point, though, they seemed to be hanging on Zlomsowitch’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, ZIomsowitch 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 began to give her a neck massage. After about five minutes, Zlomsowitch 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 y...

At Nicole’s urging, Keith left her alone to talk to her estranged husband. Several minutes later, O. J. Simpson emerged from the bedroom. Keith said he was frightened, but then, to his surprise, Simpson stuck out his hand. “No hard feelings, right?” he said, shaking Zlomsowitch’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 me...

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 there… .” “What the hell is this?” I asked Suzanne. “Nicole,” she replied without taking her eyes from the screen. “A 911 tape.” “What 911 tape?”

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.

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 ex-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 roommate 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...

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 anything that might affect their judgment. He concluded that they had, and granted Gil’s request to recuse the jury. It was over.

“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 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 door? How could Kato not have seen him, too?

We had to make a decision. What precise crime would we charge O. J. Simpson with? Three options were open to us: murder one, 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.

“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 cap—in 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 houseguest cum lackey. “Remember,” I told my colleagues, recalling what Kato had said about that night, “Simpson had never done that before. The whole thi...

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 ...

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....

“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.

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.

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 circumstances, justified, the omission of it on the affidavit could serve to seriously undermine his credibility.

We did, however, seize some additional pieces of evidence, among them a single leather glove, this one black, which I’d seen lying on a table in the living room during the first search. It had a different lining from the pair found at Bundy and in the south walkway, but both the single glove and the bloody pair in evidence had been manufactured by Aris. I thought this would tend to suggest that Simpson favored the brand.

When I reached the foyer, a cop called out to me, “I found his divorce file.” He handed me a letter typed on the letterhead of “O. J. Simpson Enterprises.” It was from Simpson to Nicole and was dated June 6, 1994. It put her on written notice that she did not have permission or authority to use his permanent home address at 360 North Rockingham as her residence or mailing address for any purpose, including tax returns. “I cannot take part in any course of action by you that might intentionally or unintentionally be misleading to the Internal Revenue or California Franchise Tax Board,” he wrote. It was signed “O.J.” and cc’ed to his attorney, LeRoy Taft. Until now Simpson had been claiming that at the time of Nicole’s murder, his relationship with her had been amicable. But in this typed sheet I was holding, he was ordering her in icy legalese to steer clear of Rockingham. This pair had been divorced for two years, and they were still arguing over assets. When I saw the letters “IRS,” I knew we had our flashpoint. I took the letter outside to show David. His eyes widened as he read it. “See the date?” I asked him.

“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.

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 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 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?”