For the first time during the trial, we’d brought out the photos taken at Bundy by the coroner’s investigators. The heads of the victims had been pulled back, exposing their neck wounds. In their own way, these photos were even more awful, more affecting than the autopsy photos. The jurors were clearly moved. Even the elderly black man from Mississippi, certainly no fan of the prosecution, wept openly. For the first time, it seemed it was getting through to the jury that this was a murder case. Two people had died.
And I thought I saw them opening their minds to the possibility that the defendant could have done this terrible thing.
It was Chris’s turn up. With the gloves.
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.
Phil Vannatter had lined up Richard Rubin, a former executive of Aris Isotoner, the company that manufactured the gloves, to establish that the pair we had in evidence were exactly the same model as those purchased by Nicole in 1990. He would testify that they were sold at only one store in the country. Bloomingdale’s.
I found this whole business incredibly sad. It was clear to me that Nicole had bought those gloves as a Christmas gift for her husband. And he’d used them to murder her? Oh, man, what a world.
I fully intended that Simpson would put on the gloves: not the actual evidence gloves, but a duplicate pair. Since the AIDS crisis, anything bloodstained required protection. I figured the court would never let anyone try on the bloody gloves without wearing latex beneath them. Latex would screw up the fit. So we’d asked the glove manufacturer to send us duplicates of their Aris Leather Lights, extra large, just like the ones found at the crime scene, to try on Simpson when the time was right.
On June 15, however, the time was definitely not right.
Richard Rubin had flown in the night before his testimony was to begin. We needed some time to work out the logistics of how and when to perform the glove demonstration. Now, Simpson was not likely to cooperate with this experiment. From ongoing interviews with my FBI shoe expert, Bill Bodziak, I’d learned that a subject could contort his feet, or in this case, his hands, to make the fit appear too tight. I didn’t need Bodziak to tell me this: I’d spent enough time struggling to get shoes on reluctant little boys to know it from experience.
I knew we needed to talk about laying the legal foundation for this demonstration, to plot it as carefully as the Normandy invasion. But Chris was pumped up. The accolades Brian got for his handling of Dr. Lucky irked the hell out of Chris. He’d never liked Brian much, but now that Kelberg was being hailed as a returning hero, Chris’s competitive instincts were aroused. He wanted to score a coup of his own. He wanted to do the glove demonstration at what he thought would be the most dramatic possible moment. During Rubin’s testimony. Problem was, we hadn’t received the duplicate gloves.
I didn’t know this until the morning Rubin was scheduled to testify. This was Chris’s baby, so I asked him where the duplicate gloves were. He didn’t know. I called Bill to ask him if he knew.
“I’ll check with Phil,” he told me. “I believe he has them.”
“Okay,” I replied. “Have him bring them down.”
I didn’t want to be late to court. Chris was on a testosterone high-I didn’t know exactly where that might take him. I didn’t want to leave him alone too long.
When I got to the counsel table, I whispered to Chris that the duplicates were on their way.
“Cool,” he said as Ito came out. We’d just taken our seats when Phil showed up with the evidence box. He passed it over to us from behind the rail. Chris peered into the box. Then he asked to approach the bench.
“I would like to lay the foundation,” he told Ito, “to show that they [the reputed duplicates] are the exact same size, similar make and model, so that perhaps we can have Mr. Simpson try them on at some point.”
Whoa, Chris, I thought, a little alarmed. We needed to talk to Rubin about how to make sure Simpson couldn’t screw this up.
At that moment, Johnnie cut in, “We object to this, Your Honor… We’ve had no time to deal with this. At some point, if Mr. Simpson testifies and we want to have him try the gloves on in evidence, that is one thing… Are you going to allow them to have the defendant try [the duplicates] on?”
“I think it would be more appropriate for him to try the other gloves on,” Ito put in. He meant, of course, the bloody gloves.
I did not like the way this was going. We had to steer the discussion back to the duplicates.
When Richard Rubin took the stand, Ito allowed Chris to question him, outside the presence of the jury, about the duplicate gloves he’d brought.
Chris reached into a cardboard box and withdrew the duplicate gloves. He strolled back up to the witness stand and placed them in front of Rubin.
“Showing you the gloves that have been marked 372-C,” he said to Rubin. “Are those Aris Isotoner gloves?”
Rubin studied the flawless brown leather gloves resting on the edge of the witness stand.
“They’re Aris gloves, but these are not Aris Light gloves that were like the ones we’re talking about…”
What was going on here? Hadn’t Chris checked these out when they first came in? We should have learned of this discrepancy-and gotten replacements-months ago.
Chris looked embarrassed. And disappointed. Very disappointed. His moment of glory was slipping away.
I pulled him aside for a private conference.
“What is the fucking deal here?”
“I don’t know,” he told me. He was shifting nervously from foot to foot. “We’ve got to have him put on the gloves.”
“The crime-scene gloves?”
“Shapiro asked to see the [bloody] gloves this morning,” Chris said urgently. “They’ve been practicing with them. If we don’t do it, they will.”
“Who cares?” I said. “Let them. The latex will fuck up the fit and we can tell the jury so. We can’t do this, Chris. Let’s wait and re-call Rubin when we get the right gloves.”
“I’m telling you,” he insisted, “we’ve got to do it now!”
“Let’s let Phil try them on first,” I urged him. Phil’s hands were at least at big as Simpson’s. Maybe if Chris saw the difficulty Phil was having in pulling the gloves over latex, he’d back down. Chris agreed.
Phil put on latex gloves, then pulled the crime-scene gloves over them. It wasn’t easy, but he got them on. They were tight, which in and of itself was not bad. A witness named Brenda Vemich, a Bloomingdale’s buyer who’d authenticated the receipt, had testified that the gloves were supposed to fit “tight and snug.” Like racing gloves.
The problem, of course, was that Phil was a willing subject. He hadn’t splayed his hands like a two-year-old to keep the gloves from being pulled down over his fingers. No one had come up with a way to keep Simpson from pulling those shenanigans.
I turned to Chris. “Don’t do it. I’m warning you.”
“We’ve got to do it,” he insisted.
“Why won’t you fucking listen to me. This is a trap!” My voice was hoarse with tension and anger.
“This is my witness,” he snapped. “And I say we have to put those gloves on him now, before they do!”