“Marcia Clark for the People,” I began.
It’s hard to believe that my first act that day was arguing about the hairs on O. J. Simpson’s head. But it’s true.
we’d requested hair samples from Simpson, so we could determine whether his matched several found at the crime scene. Shapiro had offered us a ludicrously insufficient number: three. It was up to me to argue first.
Oblivious to the hype and cameras, I launched right into my reasoning. This was my job; I had been doing it for years. Carefully, I explained how we needed samples from various parts of the head; the usual quantity is a hundred hairs. But only the criminalist taking the samples could determine how many were needed.
“Mr. Shapiro?” asked Judge Kennedy-Powell.
“Your Honor,” he said soberly, “according to Dr. Henry Lee, our chief criminalist, who is the head of the Department of Criminology in Connecticut, he tells us one to three hairs are sufficient.”
Judge Kennedy-Powell mused aloud that she had never seen a case where the prosecution was limited to a sample of three hairs. But then she faltered. She would not let us take more than ten hairs unless we could present expert witnesses who could establish how many hairs were required for a valid sample.
I was ready. Our expert was Michele Kestler, director of the SID crime lab. She backed me up in saying that a case like this commonly required seventy-five to one hundred strands.
On cross-examination, Shapiro immediately assumed the glacial pace that would become his trademark. He insisted upon a detailed recitation of Kestler’s credentials, her résumé, her experience-everything but what she ate for breakfast. He had her recite all sorts of minutiae about her profession and the specific samples of blood and hair she had received from our searches. Shapiro again cited the source for his contention that only a single hair was required.
“Are you familiar with a gentleman by the name of Dr. Henry Lee?” he asked her.
She was.
“Have you seen his fifty-page curriculum vitae lately?” he asked. Give me a break. And then Shapiro asked Kestler what sources she had relied upon for her opinion that seventy-five to one hundred hairs were required.
Michele produced a book co-authored and edited by none other than Dr. Henry Lee.
Judge Kennedy-Powell gave us our hundred hairs.
I savored that small victory even as I realized what this skirmish meant: nothing in this case would be conceded without interminable bickering.
Bill, bless his heart, had agreed to put on the knife salesman, Jose Camacho. It was predictably painful. Bill walked Camacho through a straightforward account of selling the stiletto to Simpson the morning of May 9. Then Bill fronted the Enquirer business. The clerk seemed like a harmless little man. I don’t think he was a liar, just a sellout. How he would have looked in the eyes of a jury, I don’t know. That question was rendered academic by the advent of a mysterious manila envelope.
It seemingly materialized from thin air. One minute, in the middle of Camacho’s testimony, Judge Kennedy-Powell left the courtroom, and the next minute she was back, producing with a flourish a yellow manila envelope containing some sort of solid object. She’d received, she said, an envelope containing evidence collected by a special court master at the defense’s request. She intended to open it. Shapiro shot out of his seat with an objection. I chimed in with one of my own. You didn’t have to be Hercule Poirot to guess what was sealed inside: a knife. But I couldn’t be sure. And for months down the road I wouldn’t be sure. Periodically, we would file motions to compel the defense to reveal the contents. The defense would object and our motion would be tabled. This happened time and again.
We were well into the criminal trial by the time we were allowed to learn that the envelope did indeed contain a stiletto. The report said that it had been discovered by Jason Simpson in the medicine cabinet of Simpson’s bathroom. Then it had been turned over by Shapiro to a special court master, who gave it to Judge Kennedy-Powell. (Shapiro was unhappy that she introduced it at the prelim-apparently he’d been hoping to blindside us with this evidence during the trial.) The knife’s discovery was supposedly made after our second search of June 28.
I never believed the medicine cabinet story. I’d been at Rockingham all through the second search, and the rooms had been taken to pieces by officers looking specifically for that knife. But the question was largely academic. The knife didn’t matter. It is too easy to boil a knife to destroy traces of blood and tissue. It is not difficult to go out and buy a duplicate. No coroner could say with certainty that it was the murder weapon. Knives, unlike guns, do not smoke: they do not leave proof-positive evidentiary calling cards. If I’d really pressed to get it into evidence, however, I’m sure that all I would have gotten was a spanking-clean knife, property of a known collector of weapons. In the end, we let the stiletto rest in its eight-by-eleven manila envelope-where, I believe, it remains today.
Eventually, I imagine, O. J. Simpson will reclaim it and auction it off on Larry King Live.
After the knife interlude, we were finally able to begin proving that there was sufficient cause to charge our defendant. We clicked through the civilian witnesses briskly. Shapiro’s cross-examination was uniformly ineffective, so there was little or no cleanup needed on redirect. Every single witness helped our presentation.
One key witness was Steven Schwab, the dog walker who had first encountered Nicole’s Akita running loose in the neighborhood. We hadn’t been able to get him up before the grand jury, but his testimony was crucial to our time line. If the murders were committed after eleven o’clock, Simpson would be home free: he couldn’t possibly have done the killing and hooked up with the limo driver in time. The problem was that the first time Schwab talked to police, he said that he believed he’d first seen the Akita around 11:15 P.M. This statement was made to the cops at about five on the morning after the murders; Schwab had been awakened from a deep sleep and was slightly confused about times. Upon more clear-minded reflection, however, he realized he’d actually seen the dog at about 10:45.
Usually a prior inconsistent statement by a witness is a credibility killer. At best, you’re left doubting the witness’s memory; at worst, his honesty. But Schwab was so sturdily forthright you just knew he’d made an honest mistake. He endeared himself to the spectators in court by recounting the process by which he had verified in his own mind the Akita encounter. He had an unvarying nightly routine, centered on old reruns. A cable network showed his favorites and he always watched the Dick Van Dyke Show, which ended at 10:30. Then he would take his dog for a half-hour walk, returning in time to catch the opening minutes of the eleven P.M. showing of Mary Tyler Moore.
Such banal details mark all of our daily lives and give our days some predictability. Schwab’s recitation drew laughter, but no one could doubt the truth of his testimony. He had seen the dog at 10:45, not 11:15. Our time line was secure.
Pablo Fenjves was my essential “dog bark” witness, the neighbor who heard the Akita’s “plaintive wail” starting at 10:15 P.M. His description of that sound lodged in the memories of reporters and public alike. Taken in tandem with Sukru Boztepe and Bettina Rasmussen’s solemn, emotional account of finding Nicole’s body, it seemed to cast an eerie spell over the gallery. We were still in that state of morbid dislocation when Judge Kennedy-Powell dismissed us for the Fourth of July weekend.
I spent very little of that weekend at home. I worked all day Saturday. And on Sunday morning I drove out to Bundy, to the little condominium on the downscale side of Sunset.