Following cameo appearances by Simpson’s daughter, sister, and aged mother, the defense presented a series of witnesses whose job it was to push the murders later and later toward the hour of eleven. They started with Ellen Aaronson and Danny Mandel.
This couple had been on a blind date the night of the murders. On the surface, they seemed benign enough. Mandel was a junior executive at Sony Pictures. Aaronson worked in toy licensing. (She apologized to the court for her part in the proliferation of Power Rangers.) They testified that on the way back from dinner at Mezzaluna, they’d passed Nicole’s condo around 10:26 P.M. They’d seen nothing. No bodies, no bloody pawprints, no signs of mayhem.
On the stand, I blasted the lights out of Aaronson. The reason wasn’t, as pundits later suggested, that her recollection of 10:26 played havoc with my time line. This murder could have occurred as late as 10:40, and O. J. Simpson would still have gotten home in time to be seen skulking in through his front door.
It was simply that, when Ellen and Danny had first been interviewed by the LAPD, Mandel wasn’t even sure what time they’d left the restaurant. Aaronson remembered looking at her watch on the way home and seeing that it was eleven o’clock. Not 10:26 P.M., as she later testified. During that first interview, they’d described taking an entirely different route to Aaronson’s apartment. On the stand I pointed out these inconsistencies with a vigor that was, I have to admit, excessive. Particularly when I asked Aaronson whether she’d been drinking at dinner. (Turns out she hadn’t.)
Critics have taken me to task for my aggressive cross of this pair. But try to put yourself in my position. For a year now, I’d been coping with publicity seekers and showboats willing to say just about anything to get themselves on the witness stand. Aaronson and Mandel had given inconsistent statements. If the defense team was not going to give its own witnesses a rigorous screening before throwing them up there, then it fell to Chris and me to expose their flaws.
Maybe I’ll go to hell for it. But I had no patience with Hansel and Gretel.
Denise Pilnak’s assertions were flat-out comical. She was a Bundy neighbor who professed with certainty that she’d looked at a clock at 10:18, and had heard no barking. She’d glanced out her window. It was quiet on the street.
Denise staked her claim to credibility on the fact that she was a fanatic about time. On the witness stand, she’d rolled up the sleeve of her blazer to show that she wore not one but two watches. She’d spun out this elaborate story about having been with her girlfriend that night and having looked at the clock every ten seconds. She’d even gone so far as to type out a time line of the evening, including where she and her friend had had dinner. When we checked out this document, we found that she’d actually gotten the restaurant wrong.
On cross-examination I asked her, “Do you recall how long you’ve been here today?”
Denise Pilnak, clockophile, couldn’t remember what time she’d arrived at court.
My favorite was Mark Partridge, a lawyer who sat next to Simpson on the airplane home from Chicago.
Partridge, who seemed sympathetic to the defendant, apparently decided that his seating assignment was a potential gold mine. He handwrote eight pages of memories from the flight. On cross, I made a point of putting part of this valuable intellectual property on the overhead projector-specifically the notice he affixed to each page that read “©1994 PARTRIDGE, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED” and had him explain, as an attorney, why he had affixed a copyright notice to each page.
“In an effort to prevent people from distributing them without my consent,” he said.
“Doesn’t it also mean you have a financial interest in the privacy of that matter you copyright?” I continued.
He professed not to understand. I found this an unusual response, considering he was an attorney specializing in trademark and copyright law. Finally, I managed to wheedle from him the admission that, yes, copyrights are sometimes used by authors to ensure they profit from the work.
With that out of the way, I asked him to describe the nature of the phone calls his seatmate had placed during the flight. Partridge provided a bit of information that somewhat contradicted the image of a distraught mourner headed home to console the children of their dead mother: Simpson was repeatedly calling his lawyer.
By this time the law clerks watching all this on TV upstairs in our offices were rolling on the floor with laughter. And it was all Chris and I could do to keep a straight face.
The next performance was perhaps the weirdest of all. Robert Heidstra, a wizened little Frenchman who lived in a converted garage and earned his living detailing luxury cars, claimed to have been walking his dog near Nicole’s condo at 10:30 P.M. when he heard a young man shout, “Hey, hey, hey,” followed by the screaming of an older man who sounded black. Heidstra’s testimony was fully consistent with our time line. We had, in fact, considered calling him as a prosecution witness. But after I’d spent about five minutes with him, I decided he was not credible. People who lived right next door to Nicole heard nothing but a dog barking, and he heard all that? No way. If I needed further corroboration for my skepticism, it came when I learned he’d been boasting to people that he was going to make some money from being a witness. We declined to put him on. Instead, the defense did.
After testifying that he could have heard the shouts as late as 10:40, Heidstra went on to say that “a white car came out of the darkness into the light.” On cross, Chris asked him if he had not told a friend of his that the vehicle looked like a Ford Bronco.
“Might have said maybe a Bronco…” the Frenchman admitted nervously.
On the other side of the room, the Dream Team had sunk low into their chairs. The guy couldn’t have done a better job for us if we had called him.
But the jewel in the crown was Robert Huizenga, who came at the end of the defense’s first week of testimony. I’m sure the Dream Team thought he would play splendidly. A former doctor for the NFL, Huizenga, at forty-two, was one of those archetypal Southern Californians who, even into middle age, retain an unnatural, almost creepy youthfulness. Shapiro had called him into the case two days after the murders. He’d examined the defendant at Kardashian’s house and was there, in fact, when Simpson and Cowlings split in the Bronco.
The defense called Huizenga to establish that Simpson didn’t have the physical strength to commit a double murder. Under Shapiro’s friendly questioning, Huizenga started out smiling and confident. His bias was unbelievable: he compared the suffering of O. J. Simpson to the biblical trials of Job.
Shapiro called the doctor’s attention to a photo of Simpson in his underwear. “This appears to me as a layperson to be a man in pretty good shape,” Shapiro lobbed. “Would that be your evaluation?”
“Although he looked like Tarzan,” Huizenga joked, “he walked like Tarzan’s grandfather.”
Brian Kelberg, who took Huizenga on cross, quickly wiped the smarmy smile off the witness’s lips.
For the benefit of the court, Brian ran the raw footage of Simpson’s exercise video. It had been shot only two weeks before Nicole’s and Ron’s deaths, and our man was leaping around like, well, Tarzan. Brian then screened a video of Simpson doing a product endorsement for some elixir that he claimed had ended his arthritis problems and had him “immediately feeling better.” It had even added ten yards to his golf drive.