I’d always considered Weitzman a decent guy and a good attorney. I could never figure out why he didn’t insist upon being at his client’s interview with Vannatter and Lange. (Much later in the case, I found myself talking to Howard at a dinner party in West L.A. He told me that he’d cut out because the cops threatened not to talk to Simpson if he had an attorney present. That made no sense to me. What really happened, I suspect, is that Simpson’s colossal ego, combined with his confidence in his ability to sweet-talk and manipulate cops, had led him to dismiss his own attorney from the interview. Weitzman, or course, would have had no choice but to comply.)
When Weitzman dropped out of the picture, Robert Shapiro stepped right in. I was flabbergasted. O. J. Simpson’s got bucks coming out the wazoo, and this is the best he can do? Weitzman, at least, had credibility. Shapiro, to my way of thinking, wasn’t even a serious trial attorney. He had a stable of celebrity clients, Tina Sinatra, Christian Brando, and Erik Menendez among them. Still, he had a reputation around the Criminal Courts Building as a deal-maker, not a litigator. A lightweight.
One of Shapiro’s first moves was to write a letter to Vannatter and Lange saying that his client “would be willing to consider” taking a lie-detector test. The cops faxed me a copy and asked for my opinion.
Polygraphs are risky. A subject can dope himself up to pass, which is why cops don’t like to administer the test unless they’ve had the suspect in custody for a while. (Unbeknownst to me or the cops, Simpson had already taken a polygraph and scored a minus 22, meaning he failed every single question about the murder. I did not learn this until well after the verdict. Then I shook my head in amazement. It’s hard to imagine that a lawyer would be stupid enough to offer his client up for a second poly after he’d failed the first time.)
The offer seemed fishy. My advice: “Stay away from it.”
Shapiro also offered the services of his own experts-Dr. Michael Baden, director of forensic sciences for the New York State Police, and Dr. Henry Lee, director of the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory-to “aid in the investigation.” Specifically, he was asking permission for Baden to reautopsy the bodies. “We… would like you to contact the next of kin for permission in this regard,” he wrote, “since I feel it would be inappropriate for me to contact them directly during this period of grief.”
I never answered him. But Nicole’s mother, Juditha, would later tell me that during the funeral Shapiro came up and flat-out asked her for permission to exhume the body. She was too taken aback to reply. Shapiro, no doubt realizing how unsympathetically this request would be viewed by the public, wisely let the matter drop.
After the funeral, Simpson dropped off the screen. He’d apparently attended a gathering at Nicole’s parents’ home down at Dana Point before returning to “seclusion” at Rockingham. By Thursday evening, I was climbing the walls. I called the cops to check up on him. That’s when I learned, to my amazement, that they did not have him under surveillance.
“Lack of manpower,” they said. “Besides, where’s he gonna go?”
This was too much even for Gil. He called us all into his office that evening and put the question to us: “Do we go to the grand jury or wait for the police to file?”
We all agreed the case was well past the stage of being filable. The cops were playing strictly cover-your-ass politics, which might have been fine if they’d had the luxury of working without the constant scrutiny of the press. But that wasn’t the situation we had here. The media was broadcasting every tidbit it could get its hands on, and a lot of that information was amazingly on target. Some creep with access to documents was leaking like a rusty tub.
As the evidence piled up, so did O. J. Simpson’s incentive to flee.
“What if Simpson pulls a Polanski?” I asked Gil.
Film director Roman Polanski-allowed to remain at large while under investigation on charges of statutory rape-had fled to France. Why couldn’t it happen here? The clock was ticking, and we didn’t want to be the saps who failed to move because the cops didn’t give us permission.
There were other concerns as well.
“I’m worried about losing that guy Kaelin,” I told the others. “He’s very shaky. We need his testimony-now.”
“David,” Gil said at last, “tell Terry White [our office’s grand jury adviser] to arrange to convene the jurors for Friday afternoon. We’ll hear Kaelin’s testimony.”
Finally, we were moving. It wasn’t until everyone stood up and began to leave the conference room that Frank Sundstedt finally asked the question that was uppermost in my mind.
“So, does Marcia have the case?”
I held my breath. Suddenly it felt very important to me. While part of me-probably the rational part-recognized that this would not be a smooth prosecution, I wanted to hear that Gil had the confidence to let me handle a big one.
“Marcia has the case,” he said finally, catching my eye. “But not alone. She’s going to do it with someone else.”
There was a nervous shuffling in the room. Someone cleared his throat. Truth is, if you really trust a prosecutor, you make her the lead chair. No doubt what he intended was to pair me with another strong personality who would keep me in check. My pride wouldn’t let me show my disappointment.
But as David walked me back to my office, I fumed sotto voce.
“Why does he think I need someone else?”
David urged me to calm down. Think of it from Gil’s point of view, he said. The guy’s under a lot of pressure and he’s probably just hedging his bets. Your feelings are the least of his problems right now.
He was right, of course. For Gil, this wasn’t personal. If I had to pair up with someone, maybe Gil would let me have David?
“How about you?” I asked him. He shot back a look as if to say, “In your dreams, babe.” David was up to his ears in Menendez. He had all the alligators he could handle in that swamp.
Even before I left the office that night, I was hearing rumors that the LAPD brass were in negotiations with Robert Shapiro to allow O. J. Simpson to surrender voluntarily. Our threat to go grand jury must have lit a fire under them. But the news was a mixed bag. On one hand, the idea of a negotiated arrest made me nuts. Once again, O. J. Simpson’s celebrity status had gained him a legal advantage. A negotiated voluntary surrender signals to the public and potential jury pool that the suspect is someone who deserves special privileges. I’d much rather see a righteously arrested suspect step out of a squad car in handcuffs. Still, my annoyance was all relative. Compared to the act of cutting him loose in the first place, a negotiated surrender was a minor outrage. If it worked, we’d all be happy. But what if the negotiations failed? Would the police back down and delay the arrest again? Would they give Simpson a deadline? We wanted to keep our options open-and that meant proceeding full speed ahead with the grand jury.
First order of business: reel in Kato Kaelin. O. J. Simpson was clearly Kato’s benefactor. I could just about bet that had Kato known Simpson was a suspect, he would not have spoken so freely about the thump, for instance, and risk dumping his meal ticket. On the other hand, however, I’d had a chance to study his witness statement pretty thoroughly by now. I felt he had to know a lot more about the Simpsons’ private lives than he’d told the cops.
Early Friday morning I dispatched a couple of detectives to West L.A. to serve Kato with a subpoena. David and I were in conference with Gil when I got a call from one of the cops on the detail.
“Kaelin’s here with us,” he said. “But he says he won’t talk unless his lawyer’s with him.”
“Bring him in anyway,” I told him.
This was extremely unusual. Witnesses don’t arrive in the company of lawyers unless they’re worried about being charged with a crime. From what I could see, Brian Kaelin had no criminal liability. The events he’d witnessed on the night of June 12 had clearly occurred after the murders. I was afraid that his request for an attorney meant that Simpson had gotten to him.