Without a Doubt

by Marcia Clark

CAR TAPE. October 2, 1994. Everything’s coming back to him. He’s got her blood on his socks in the bedroom. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s blood in his Bronco. We’ve got her blood and Ron’s on that glove at Rockingham, and maybe Simpson’s blood 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 defendant’s 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, why frame him, of all people? Couldn’t you think of somebody less likable to frame? I mean, 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 whole 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—is this: “Why didn’t you go shopping 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.

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.

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 Cowlings’s Bronco. Proving that Simpson even knew about these items would be difficult. I was convinced he did, but demonstrating it was another matter.

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 is being 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 be 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.

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—what was it? Rage? Frustration? Disbelief? His lawyers had probably told him that he had a good shot at making bail. And here I’d gone bringing up all that Bronco business. Being at the mercy of a woman had to be O. J. Simpson’s personal idea of hell. That gave me at least a moment of satisfaction. But as so often happened in TFC, even my smallest triumphs were short-lived. Johnnie did an end run around me, announcing that his client wanted to “address the court.” If the defendant has counsel there to speak for him, he shouldn’t be allowed to speak directly to the court unless he’s prepared to take the witness stand. I started to object, but it was too late. Lance had granted the request. “How do you feel?” he inquired amiably of Simpson, who now stood, hands clasped in front of him, the very picture of wounded virtue. How did he feel? “Well,” he complained, “I feel I’ve been attacked here today.” Attacked? Does he not get it that he’s the defendant in a double homicide? “I’m an innocent man,” he continued. “I want to get to the 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 out there that don’t have a mother… .” It disgusted me to the point of nausea to hear this man use his children this way. And then Simpson turned toward me. I didn’t meet his eyes—not ...

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

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 ...

“Do you know that had something to do with the fact they were being tried… 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...

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. ...

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 of fair 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.

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.

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 ex-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 spare; 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, they were on the skids again. Nicole had bought her condo on Bundy. She seemed to be shuttling between Bundy and Rockingham, unsure of where to call home. OJ. was a chronic no-show as a father. 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 with [the 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 [sic] on me last nite, you’re gonna pay for this, bitch!” he s...

He continued his tirade even as Sydney’s little girlfriend arrived for a sleepover. “I’m not sure if they heard all or any of it,” Nicole agonized. “I just turned around & walked away.” As I picked my way through a spotty trail of journal entries and documents, I could see how, over the next five days, the hostilities escalated. Simpson’s letter threatening to report her to the IRS flung kerosene on the flames. That letter had apparently gone through a few drafts. When we subpoenaed it from O. J. Simpson’s divorce attorney, Skip Taft, we also recovered a note from the lawyer saying that he had made the changes O.J. wanted but did not get “revengeful.” Two days later, Simpson sent Nicole a nasty follow-up to the IRS letter, informing her that while he welcomed the children at Rockingham, “Gigi [...

I knew there had to be more to document this downward spiraling relationship. Correspondence, a daybook, photos. I wanted to find just one shot of the Simpsons standing side by side—one in which Nicole was not wearing heels—to show the disparity in their sizes. I was sure her family could give us what we needed, but every time we went to them with a request, we had to wheedle and beg, and often came away empty-handed. (For the time, when they were stalling on giving us the journals, Chris and I actually discussed the possibility of serving Lou with a search warrant. Talk about unprecedented. A search warrant on a victim’s family? Would we ever have looked like heartless bastards! Fortunately, the Browns turned them over before this became necessary.) Unlike most victims’ relatives, who desperately try to move your case forward—“What can we do? What information can we offer to put this animal behind bars?”—Lou Brown played things very close to the vest. Lou had cleaned out the condo after Nicole’s death and reportedly stored her belongings. Chris and I asked him repeatedly to produce those boxes; he kept dodging us. It was “I’ll get it for you… . I’ll look for it, I’ll look for i...

Early in December we got a call from Nicole’s bank. She’d been renting a safe-deposit box, bank officials told us. Her father was now trying to get into it. We knew that the box might contain crucial evidence. Given Lou’s prior recalcitrance, we thought it was better just to go and get it ourselves. So Chris sent a couple of D.A.‘s investigators down to the bank with a warrant and instructions to drill that box. The contents were more disturbing to me than anything I had seen to date. There were three Polaroid pictures of Nicole. The first looked like it was taken when she was very young, early in her relationship with Simpson, when she was still a teenager. Her hair was wrapped up in a towel. Her eye was blackened, her face puffed up and reddened. I studied the shot, looked at Chris, and just shook my head. The box also contained several letters, on...

Implicitly acknowledged in one of those letters is the fact that he beat her because she refused to have sex with him. Why would a woman keep those things in a lockbox? There was only one explanation. Even as she was trying to break free of O.J., part of Nicole accepted that she would never really escape, that O. J. Simpson might murder her. The message in the box was clear: in the event of my death, look for this guy. I kept coming back to her eyes. She was so young at the time those pictures were taken that her eyes still reflected authentic emotion. I compared the photos mentally to those hanging by the stairs at Rockingham. A decade or more had passed between those two sho...

Nicole had the right instincts. She knew the way to save herself was to find a career. She just couldn’t connect, somehow. Lack of talent? Lack of drive? I don’t know. When all is said and done, not enough of Nicole was revealed in these documents to answer those questions. Whenever I was tempted to fault her for having stayed in that awful relationship for fifteen years—seventeen if you count the fitful two years after the divorce—I took stock and realized that my own first marriage had lasted for five, eight if you count the time Gaby and I lived together. What tricks do we play on ourselves, to linger so long in hell?

These were not thoughts I shared with anyone at the office. At least not directly. Whenever I met with our domestic violence experts, Lydia Bodin and Scott Gordon, I’d ply them with questions. “Why the hell didn’t she cut and run?” I’d ask Scott. “Minimizing” was what he called it. He told me, “Women who are in abusive relationships downplay the seriousness of their own circumstances. They deny it to themselves. They present a brave front to others, trying to hold things together. It’s a coping mechanism.” Minimizing. That certainly hit me where I lived. Nothings wrong here. I can get this thing back under control. Just don’t admit that there’s a problem.

Scott, of course, was delighted by my newfound interest in DV. Since the beginning, he’d been arguing to me and anyone else who’d listen that domestic violence was the cornerstone of this case. I’d remained aloof, but through sheer persistence, he’d picked up advocates. When, in early October, I finally assigned Chris Darden to t...

Chris, Scott, Lydia, and Hank Goldberg, a fellow D.A. who was terrific at writing motions, worked like Trojans to document incidences of O. J. Simpson’s brutality toward Nicole. This was not easy to do. As I’ve said, an abuser does not normally hit his victim in the presence of others. So, as a starting point, they turned to an inventory Nicole had compiled at the suggestion of her divorce lawyers. According to this document, she’d gotten her first beating right after she started to live with O. J. Simpson. A year or so later, while they were staying at the Sherry Netherland in New York City, Simpson beat Nicole for hours as she crawled for the door. From her d...

Chris, it turned out, had an excellent way with the domestic violence witnesses. He was calm, reassuring, patient. He managed to get Denise Brown to recall an upsetting episode. The scene was Rockingham, where Denise and her date were hanging out after an evening with O.J. and Nicole. Everybody was drunk. Denise blurted that she thought O.J. took Nicole for granted—and Simpson blew. He grabbed his guests and his wife and flung them, one by one, onto the lawn. Chris also turned up a woman named Connie Good, whose boyfriend had lived next door to Nicole’s apartment in 1977 or 1978. She told how on one evening in particular, while she was visiting, she’d heard screaming from Nicole’s apartment. She’d also heard thuds. “So...

The DV dragnet turned up something else especially heartbreaking. Sojourn, a battered-women’s hotline out of Santa Monica, reported taking a call five days before the murder from a woman in West L.A. Her name was Nicole. She had two children and she was frightened because her ex-husband was stalking her. She’...

As the evidence mounted, Chris and Scott put more pressure on me to give domestic violence a bigger role in the case. “This is not some murder that incidentally involved domestic violence,” Scott would tell me. “It’s a domestic violence case that ended in murder.” I had to admit that this approach afforded us a solid legal advantage. If we identified this as a domestic violence case that ended in murder, we could argue that the incidents of abuse that led up to the crime should be admissible. Being able to present those attacks in open court might have two beneficial eff...

Months later, of course, this hunch would prove correct. In a deposition given at the civil trial, Paula would testify that she had left a “Dear John” message on Simpson’s machine the afternoon before the murders. It was clearly the emotional trigger. We certainly could have used it at the criminal trial. Thanks loads, Paula. After that night of conversation, the domestic violence advocates finally won me over. I felt they should be allowed to take their best shot. So I gave them my blessing to draft a motion asking the court to allow into evidence all the incidents of domestic violence they had worked so hard to unearth. The Dream Team, of course, fought tooth and nail to keep that motion under seal. Up to that point, they’d more or less succeeded in advancing the fiction that Simpson was a decent guy who had just hit a rough patch in his marriage. Now, he was about to be unmasked as a sadist. The defense managed to get the hearing delayed for a month, until the jurors were safely sequestered at the Inter-Continental Hotel. For now, domestic violence was temporarily on hold.

As I look back on it, I can see that others about me were doing the same thing. What I had seen in the Browns as disengagement was, I realize now, an attempt to protect themselves from the ravages of memory. Not that I wasn’t angered by their stonewalling, but as the New Year dawned, I felt infinitely more compassion for their plight. Denial is sometimes the only comfort you can offer yourself. Because once you let yourself feel, the misery is endless.

Simpson was terrified that bad publicity from the New Year’s battering would ruin his career. Ron suggested that he make a bold move. Simpson should go public with his problem. If he did that, Shipp predicted, women’s groups would rally behind him.

During the months after the trial a bleating throng of pundits would try to suggest that I declined to put on certain witnesses because they didn’t fit into my “time line.” That is absolute rubbish. At no time did I or any other member of the prosecution team lock ourselves in to 10:15 as the time of the murder. From the very start of this case, the window of opportunity we were looking at was 10:15 to 10:40. Even the later time would have given O. J. Simpson twelve to fourteen minutes to dash back to Rockingham in time to be seen by Allan Park.

Simpsons study, where the divorce file and the letter threatening Nicole with an IRS investigation were found on June 28.

The trophy room. Jurors gaped in awe during the walk-through.

When the Bronco was reexamined at the defense’s request, we found blood that had earlier gone uncollected by the criminalist Dennis Fung.

Blood on the rear gate at Bundy, left uncollected for nearly three weeks. Thank you, Dennis Fung.

We’d unearthed evidence that in December 1990 Nicole had bought gloves exactly like those found at Bundy and Rockingham. She’d picked them up at Bloomingdale’s in New York—one of the couple’s favorite shopping grounds, we’d learned. The receipt showed that she’d purchased two pairs of gloves and a muffler at the same time. The gloves were cashmere-lined and cost $55. The style and price alone dramatically narrowed the pool of suspects. At least in California.

Simpson smiled broadly and displayed his mitts to the jury—and to the camera—as though he were holding up the ball at the goal line. Can you believe this? Here is Simpson wearing gloves splattered with his murdered ex-wife’s blood and he’s grinning ear to ear. Any normal person in these circumstances would cringe. I felt like dying. But the last thing I wanted was for the jury to see my distress. There was a rule I’d learned as a baby prosecutor: when they’re sticking it to you, act like you couldn’t care less. I felt my expression harden into a mask of indifference.

When the demonstration was finally over, Simpson casually snapped the gloves off. And I thought to myself, If they were so hard to get on, why are they so easy to get off, Sparky? At that point, he looked directly at me, as though he expected me to take them from him. I didn’t move a muscle. I met his gaze without blinking. After a few seconds, he dropped the gloves on the table in front of me and moved on.

I looked down at the bloody, weathered leather, and I said to myself, That’s it. We just lost the case.

Richard testified that the gloves in their original condition would “easily” go over hands the size of Mr. Simpson’s. When gloves have been exposed to repeated dampness and extremes of heat and cold, however, they can shrink as much as 15 percent. While Chris continued his questioning, I went over to the phone on the bailiff’s desk to call Brian. “It looks like a ‘go’ to me,” I told him. “Tell him to do it,” Brian said. I passed a note to Chris, who stalled. I could see his confidence faltering. “Come on, Chris. Do it,” I whispered. “It’s going to work this time.” And it did. This time, when Simpson tried on the gloves, they fit, you should pardon the expression, like a glove.

In the days and weeks that followed, we got literally thousands of faxes, phone calls, and letters with explanations of why the gloves hadn’t fit. We also received a dozen photographs of Simpson wearing Aris Leather Lights. Not just the brown ones, like the ones we had in evidence, but a photo of Simpson wearing a pair of black Aris Lights that, I surmised, was the second pair that Nicole had purchased at Bloomingdale’s. One photo showed Simpson wearing both the brown gloves and a muffler, which I also suspected—but could not prove—was the one Nicole had bought him for Christmas 1990. I wanted these pictures entered into the record during our rebuttal case. But that meant that we had to check out each one of them.

Just as there had been blood where blood shouldn’t be, there was hair where hair shouldn’t be. •Simpson’s hair on the knit cap, Ron’s shirt, the Rockingham glove.

•Nicole’s hair—“forcibly removed hairs”—on the Rockingham glove. •Ron’s hair on the Rockingham glove.

Ito was irritated. But for once, his irritation didn’t seem to be directed my way. He apparently realized—even Johnnie seemed to realize—that this report business had caught me by surprise. Besides, Ito seemed honestly fascinated by the hair and trace evidence and annoyed by having to exclude it. Once again, we got half a loaf. He would allow us to introduce the fibers. We could tell the jury that Simpson’s Bronco fibers were “consistent” with those found on the Bundy cap and the Bundy glove, but not that they were so incredibly rare.

Only one more Fuhrman issue was left outstanding: what, if anything, would the jury be allowed to learn officially about his failure to reappear as a witness? Ito correctly ruled that the jury would not be informed that Fuhrman had invoked the Fifth. But the defense was asking that he instruct the jury, when evaluating Fuhrman’s integrity, to consider his unavailability for future questioning. And Ito allowed it! For me, this was the final straw. Ito’s ruling was a direct violation of the Constitution, which states you can’t sanction anyone for taking the Fifth. If the ruling stood, the jury could reasonably assume that all of Mark’s testimony was bogus—and more easily accept the conspiracy theory the defense thrust in their faces day after day. I was prepared to fight like an alley cat for this one. I told Ito that I would be taking the matter over his head. I was going to file a writ with the Court of Appeals and try to get him overruled.

Ito was livid with anger. Whatever fragile truce had existed between us after the recusal incident was now broken. But I really didn’t care. Seven months earlier, when he issued his disastrous ruling on allowing the N-word in, I’d agonized over whether to try and get him overruled on appeal. I’d decided against it, so as not to prejudice him hopelessly against our side. I’d been wrong. He’d shafted us anyway.

The waiver should have been a simple matter. All it required was for Simpson to affirm, with a simple yes, that he understood he was waiving his right. End of story. Instead Johnnie pops up with, “Mr. Simpson would like to make a brief statement regarding that waiver, if the court pleases.”

The elements of that argument were threefold: opportunity; identity; motive. Opportunity presented no problem. Here was O. J. Simpson, a man whose face was recognized everywhere he went, who had no one to document his whereabouts for what we now computed as seventy-seven minutes, the exact period during which Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman were murdered. Identity was also a lock. We had identified O. J. Simpson six ways from Sunday as the man whose blood was at the murder scene—and in the Bronco and on the bloody Rockingham glove, where it was mixed with the blood of his victims.

As I’ve said, the prosecution never needs to prove that the defendant had motive, only intent. It is usually useful, however, to suggest to a jury why the defendant might have gone so far as to slit another human being’s throat. The motive for this particular murder was sexual rage. And I felt that now, in our final moments, we were compelled to pull this jury’s nose flat up against the truth. O. J. Simpson was a sadist who’d terrorized his wife for years—until she’d finally stood up to him and paid for it with her life.

By the end, we had over 150 entries pointing to guilt. It was too much for a summation, so we boiled it down to eight key pieces of evidence—each of which had an irrefutable connection to O. J. Simpson: The knit cap. Ron Goldman’s shirt. The shoe prints up the Bundy walk. The droplets of blood leading from Bundy. The blood in the Bronco. The Rockingham blood trail. The Rockingham glove. The socks found at the foot of Simpson’s bed. We’d originally included the Bundy glove as well, but it had less significant blood, hair, and fibers. Ultimately, we left it out. It didn’t add to proof of guilt.

“The killing was personal,” he told the jury. “You look at the domestic violence, the manner of the killing, the physical evidence, the history of abuse and their relationship, the intimidation, the stalking. You look at it and it all points to him. It all points to him.” Once again, he traced the violence between the Simpsons from 1985 through 1989, and likened it to a burning fuse. “We submit to you that the hand that left [an] imprint [on Nicole’s] neck five years ago is the same hand that cut that same throat… on June twelfth, 1994. It was the defendant. It was the defendant then. It’s the defendant now.”