This one was my call. The way to go out, I decided, was on hard, irrefutable physical evidence. I wanted the one-two punch of our footprint and hair experts, who came packing dynamite.
Investigators at the Bundy crime scene, of course, had found a set of bloody footprints leading away from the bodies toward the back alley. The pattern left by the killer’s sole was a waffle of “S”-shaped squiggles. We sent photos of the prints to the FBI lab, where they landed on the desk of Special Agent Bill Bodziak, the Bureau’s footwear and tread expert. Bodziak couldn’t locate the pattern in his computerized files of prints, so he went, quite literally, to the ends of the earth to identify them. He traveled to a little factory town in Italy, where he found the very mold that had made the so-called Silga sole. The Silgas had been used in a limited-edition Bruno Magli loafer. It was those rare Silgas that left the bloody prints at Bundy.
We found no Bruno Maglis among the shoes seized at Rockingham. We could never find a receipt for the purchase of any, either. And, of course, we had no photographs. It’s worth mentioning here that shortly after the verdict, the first of many photos would surface showing Simpson wearing the very shoes Bodziak had identified. Later, during depositions at his civil trial, Simpson would deny ever owning a pair of those “ugly-ass shoes”-a line that summoned up an assortment of shoeshine men and sports photographers offering shots of Simpson wearing these very shoes.
Permit me one question. Where were all these civic-minded photographers with their glossies of the Juice sporting Bruno Maglis when the criminal trial was going on? Watching the Weather Channel?
We may not have had photos of the defendant in his Bruno Mags, but we did have strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that he’d owned the pair that made the bloody prints. For one thing, they were a size 12, the size that Simpson wore. This was significant, Bodziak told us, because only 9 percent of the men in North America wear a size 12. Most of them are between six feet and six feet four inches tall. Simpson was six feet two. Moreover, the shoes cost $160 a pair. Your average burglar wouldn’t be wearing them to pull a caper. The price alone spoke volumes about the suspect. He’s the same type of guy who wears cashmere-lined gloves. And of those, we had pictures.
Bodziak explained to the court how he’d examined Nicole’s black dress and found an “impression” on the “center front.” Then Hank directed his attention to an autopsy photo showing what appeared to be a heel print on Nicole’s back. Although Bodziak couldn’t positively identify the prints, he said neither was inconsistent with the Silga soles. His testimony conjured up a chilling image: Simpson planting his foot on Nicole’s chest to make the first cut, then stepping on her back and pulling her head back by the hair to deliver the cut that nearly decapitated her.
Equally damning, Bodziak had determined that the bloody shoe print on the driver’s side of the Bronco showed what looked like “S”-shaped squiggles-a particular characteristic of the Bruno Maglis.
We had suspicions that the defense team was scouring crime-scene photos to come up with something-anything-that could be construed as the footprint of a second killer.
“Mr. Bodziak,” Hank asked, “based upon your analysis of all of the items that we’ve discussed today, was there any indication that more than one pair of shoes were involved in this crime?”
“No,” the witness answered, “there was not.”
It fell to Lee Bailey to try and rattle Bodziak on cross. But Bailey, whose abilities served him so well in cross-examining cops and law enforcement personnel, was woefully out of his depth when it came to the scientific evidence.
First, he tried to suggest that if Simpson had really dropped the glove on the south pathway at Rockingham, there should have been shoe prints in the leaves. Bill explained patiently that in all his years, at hundreds of crime scenes, he’d never been able to detect shoe prints in leaves.
Undeterred, Bailey went on to probe the outer limits of absurdity, suggesting that someone had either stolen Simpson’s shoes or two killers had worn identical pairs of shoes to the crime scene.
The premise was preposterous. First of all, Bodziak pointed out, criminals simply don’t think of their shoes as a possible source of incriminating evidence. That’s what makes shoe-print identification so useful. Beyond that, it was unlikely that two criminals would be wearing identical pairs even of common shoes like Reeboks, let alone Bruno Maglis.
“To conjecture… that two people independently bought size-twelve Bruno Magli shoes… and just happened to come to this crime scene together is impossible for me to believe,” Bodziak said firmly.
“Would it be possible,” Bailey persisted, “for two people to arrange… to arrive at a crime scene in the same footwear…?”
“… I don’t believe it happens, intentionally or otherwise.”
Bailey wouldn’t let it go.
“But it’s possible?”
“In my opinion,” Bodziak replied, “it’s not even possible because it’s so ridiculous.”
Bailey had wanted to end with a flourish. Instead, he’d succeeded only in casting the two-killer theory in the silliest possible light.
I was madly putting the finishing touches on hair and trace. “Trace” refers to clothing fibers, carpet fibers, dandruff-in short, anything microscopic that a criminal might track onto or take away from a crime scene.
Prosecutors love trace evidence. It’s almost as compelling as DNA in its ability to link a defendant to a crime scene. In some respects, it’s even better than DNA because it’s jury-friendly. You can blow up photomicrographs to eight-by-tens so that jurors can actually see the similarities between the defendant’s head hair, for example, and what the killer left behind.
For about three months now, I’d remained in close telephone contact with Doug Deedrick, director of the FBI’s hair and trace unit. Doug had a fantastic sense of humor and a gift for making the complex seem simple. He flew in four days before he was scheduled to begin testimony, bringing with him his blowups of the evidence.
One large poster-board display showed photos of the hairs removed from Simpson’s head by the LAPD. The row above it showed several eight-by-tens of hairs removed from the blue knit cap found at Ron Goldman’s feet. Doug had also prepared a board of Negroid hair samples, chosen at random from FBI files. The samples all looked very different from each other. It was obvious at first glance how Simpson’s hair matched the hair from the cap.
One thing troubled me slightly. One of the file samples appeared, at least to my untutored eye, to look a lot like Simpson’s. Maybe Doug could see the difference, but I sure couldn’t.
“This is truly beautiful stuff,” I told him. “But-this one down here…” I pointed to the hair. “It looks just like Simpson’s. I’m just a lay person, what do I know. But don’t you think the jury will think so, too?”
“Yes, I do.” Doug grinned. “And there’s a very good reason for that. Because that is his hair.”
Gotcha! I burst out laughing. We could go through the same shtick in front of the jury.
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.
Things got even more interesting when we moved into the area of fibers. LAPD investigators had found beige fibers at both Bundy and Rockingham. They appeared to match the carpet in O. J. Simpson’s Bronco. According to Doug, carpeting of that sort had been used only in Ford Broncos manufactured between June 1993 and June 1994. Simpson’s, of course, was a 1994 model.