A Critique of the FX Mini-Series The People vs. O.J. Simpson

Jerry Eckert 2017 @All Rights Reserved

On February 26, 2016, I began posting weekly commentaries on the FX docudrama series The People vs. O.J. Simpson. They were originally posted to http://www.jerryeckert.blogspot.com/. This critique is based on those blog commentaries. I have given Mike Griffith permission to post this on his website.

O.J. didn’t do it.

Ten years ago, I undertook a careful study of the O.J. Simpson case. It became the backdrop of a novel I wrote at the time in which I solved the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman.

Hardly anyone believed me.

Now “American Crime Stories,” a fairly popular television show, is presenting a mini-series about O.J.'s case. Blurbs about the series say it does not attempt to give full evidence but seeks more to dramatize the dynamics surrounding the case, such as police-on-black violence, spousal abuse, and privilege of the wealthy. Even so, it still must offer evidence or it could not accurately portray the story. I will be looking to see if the evidence is adequately provided, if evidence is omitted, or if evidence is inaccurately presented.

You know I believe he was innocent. You must also know that the book on which the TV series is based, The Run of His Life, is written by someone who believes O.J. is guilty. The author, Jeffery Toobin, says as much in the book. Update: He reaffirmed his belief again on March 5 in a New Yorker magazine essay.

There are three other books that I found to be very helpful in terms of getting the facts presented as objectively as possible, and there is one book that really unintentionally pointed out how the police went after O.J..

In addition to the Toobin book, Lawrence Schiller’s American Tragedy, which is told from the perspective of Robert Kardashian, is a must read. The next book that deserves serious regard is Killing Time by Donald Freed and Raymond Briggs. Another book is Madam Foreman by Armanda Cooley, who chaired the jury for their trial deliberations. While Toobin and Schiller started out objective, they both turned against O.J. in their updated editions. Freed and Briggs do not commit to a solution to the murders but add new information, give critical data like the autopsies, present evidence that points away from O.J., and raise major questions about the prosecution's timeline of the murders. The Cooley book provides grounds for their “not guilty” verdict as well as an articulate statement about the jury members themselves.

Every other book I read was mostly self-serving. On O.J.’s side, the books by Cochran,

1 Shapiro, and Dershowitz were more about their own great careers and less about O.J.’s innocence, although they do contain some very good responses to the prosecution's claims. Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, Fred Goldman, and all the others on the prosecution side did what they could in their books to minimize anything that would have exonerated O.J. and chose only to include what would convict him.

The worst book I've read is Murder in Brentwood by Mark Fuhrman. Yet, ironically enough, his book showed some of how the framing of O.J. occurred. And Fuhrman didn’t even realize he was doing it!

I need to tell you that my work since 1980 as an advocate for ministers in trouble gave me a perspective. I helped with many cases of pastors accused of some nasty stuff and had to sort through everything to come up with a reasonable reconstruction of the actual events, if they even occurred. In those cases, people lied. Sometimes the accuser lied. Sometimes the accused lied. Sometimes both. And sometimes the church leaders handling the case lied.

There are several techniques that I learned to help me identify facts and misrepresentations in nearly all those cases. One is the development of timelines based on what was said by each person involved or who witnessed or handled the matter for the church. That gave me “what they knew and when they knew it.” Comparing timelines opened up each case to where gaps and inconsistencies existed and usually led to lines of investigation that found the crucial facts that resolved the case. The book that takes that approach is Killing Time. As you watch the series, you may want to take notes and put them into chronological order for yourself.

Finally, did the series leave out important information? Did it include things that were not in evidence or proved? As I have the chance over the course of the series, I will critique each episode and hopefully give you good reason to look again at your opinion about the crime, whether you agree with me or not.

Episode 1

Rather than begin with the trial or even the crime scene, the first episode begins with scenes of conflict between the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and young Africa-American men. Scenes from the riots surrounding the exoneration of the police in the beating of Rodney King show the depth of the racial tension at the time of the murders. The conversations shown between Johnny Cochran, whose law practice was built on representing some of those young people, and Chris Darden, a young member of the prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles, showed the stress that was going on within the African-American community.

2 Christopher Darden and Marcia Clark, lead prosecutors in the criminal trial

The Toobin book on which the series is based does not start there. Few of the other books about the Simpson case do so. They are all written to discuss the case without taking into account the social context of the case. Each writer has other purposes. Another social movement, however, was to take front and center: spousal abuse.

For the crime itself, what we are shown is the dog getting the attention of someone who then sees the blood and the bodies and calls the police.

For the investigation, the show portrays the police spotting blood drops from O.J.'s Bronco to his house in Brentwood, and Mark Fuhrman leading detectives Tom Lange and Phillip Vannatter along the fence on O.J.’s property and finding a glove. O.J. cooperates and talks to the detectives without a lawyer present. They find a cut on his finger and O.J. can’t explain it. The acting DA, Marcia Clark, is shown interviewing two people, one of whom found the victims and the other who claims to have seen O.J. driving away from the scene of the crime and nearly running into her car. That scene was then dramatized with the actor portraying O.J., Cuba Gooding Jr., shouting at the witness.

The defense also is shown in the first episode to be investigating their client. They have him physically examined. The doctors find no sign of any physical nature, not even a bruise. The sore finger is not mentioned in the scene. O.J. is shown to go through a lie detector test. It shows that O.J. gets a bad score on the test, showing the machine picked up physiological signs as he answered questions which were considered to be signs of being untruthful. The program does not explain that the polygraph that O.J. took could not yield reliable results, nor does it explain that later O.J. volunteered to take a polygraph if the prosecution would agree in advance to allow the results to be presented to the jury (the prosecution, by the way, rejected the offer).

Let me touch on eight things I am sure are not going to be dealt with:

One, when O.J. was interviewed by the police, he allowed them to take a substantial blood sample, only part of which was turned in as evidence for the case by the police. The amount

3 of blood that was missing from the O.J. blood sample was about the same amount of O.J. blood that the LAPD claimed to find at the crime scene and at O.J.'s house.

Two, while O.J. was with the police, they also gave him a physical. All they found were two cuts on his left hand, one on his left middle finger and the other on his left index finger, both of which happened in his Chicago hotel room after he smashed a glass when he was notified of his wife's death. And the police found no bruises, bumps, or scrapes, no sign that he had been punched several times or that he had slammed into an air conditioning unit.

Three, the episode would have been more adequate if it had not shown the scene where a witness, Jill Shively, claims O.J. nearly ran into her car with his Bronco near Nicole's house at 10:50 on the night of the crime. She says she left her house at 10:45 to go get some food at a restaurant that closed at 11:00, and that on the way there O.J. nearly ran into her with his Bronco at 10:50. Shively also claimed that O.J. yelled at her, that he was driving without his lights on, and that she got a look at his face. Although the prosecution claimed they did not use Shively's story because she sold it to a tabloid, the real reason they ignored her story was that it utterly destroyed their timeline of the crime, not to mention the fact that they received a credible report that Shively was a flake and a liar.

Yet, the FX episode dramatizes Shively's tale, ignores the severe problems with it, and makes the viewer feel as though it must be true. Episode Three shows a new report that Shively sold her story for $5,000 to a tabloid TV program, and then shows lead prosecutor Marcia Clark deciding to ignore Shively's account because of this, as if that was the only reason that Clark chose not to call her as a witness.

Four, the lie detector test scene from the first episode will be understood according to the individual viewer’s prejudice about the case. Lie detector tests are not admissible in a court of law for very good reasons. One is that false scores occur far too frequently. There are several techniques used by various experts and differing results can occur depending on the technique. The state of mind of the client and the approach of the tester can lead to very different results. I am asking viewers to take that scene with a grain of salt in terms of helping solve the murders.

In Killing Time (p. 243), Freed and Briggs write about a different technology called "voice stress analysis," or VSA. Even liars tend to be stressed when they are speaking their lies. VSA was used on tapes of a TV interview in which O.J. Stated that he did not kill his ex-wife and Ron Goldman. The VSA readings indicated his statement was truthful. This is especially impressive because, of course, he did not know the interview would be subjected to a VSA.

Five, the scene where Fuhrman took Vannatter and Lange back to find the glove was inaccurate. It occurred after sunrise, not before. Toobin took Fuhrman’s word that it occurred in the dark. Fuhrman writes fiction since he left the LAPD. But his police reports show signs he was already fabricating before he left. He included the time of day along with the dramatic moment in the dark in Brentwood when the glove was shown to the detectives, as he described it. The national observatory time for sunrise for that location occurred almost an hour before the time he gave.

4 Sixth, anyone who watches crime shows knows about the integrity of a crime scene.

According to Fuhrman, he found the glove earlier and led the detectives back to it. How did the glove get there? If O.J. had come that way and accidentally dropped it, any foot impressions he’d have left were messed up by Fuhrman and, a little later, by the three officers.

Seventh, the glove shown in the scene was the actual glove. It matched the other glove found at the murder scene on Bundy. They look like oak leaves that have fallen from the tree, crinkled and mostly flat. The picture was on a poster screen set up for showing evidence to the jury. Imagine sitting for eight months staring at such things as the lawyers on both sides went over and over things, especially the DNA arguments. I’ll leave that to your imagination for now.

Eighth, regarding the location of the white Bronco the night the limo driver, Allan Park, came to pick up O.J. (the night of the killings), as the camera panned away from the driver outside O.J.’s house, there was no Bronco there. That was loosely based on Park's testimony, but Park initially said that he simply did not notice the Bronco. Yet, somehow Park did not notice Kato Kaelin's car either. Nor did he notice the two bags that were on the grass where O.J. had been chipping golf balls. There were all kinds of things that Park did not notice. However, other witnesses indicated the Bronco was near the other gate during the whole time and Park somehow did not see it. The series showed the Bronco as not being there and that distorts the evidence on the matter.

Before I conclude, let me clarify the situation a bit. For at least two months, O.J. was scheduled by one of his sponsors to attend a golf outing in Chicago on June 13. He scheduled a limo to take him to the airport at 11 PM on the 12th. The murders took place sometime between 10:15 and 10:50, according to the prosecution in the criminal trial and the plaintiffs in the civil trial. The prosecution felt that O.J. had time between 10:00 and 11:00 PM to kill his wife and her friend, dispose of the weapon and bloody clothes, and still meet the limo. The Chicago trip was not a last-minute attempt to escape. In fact, it set a limit on the time during which O.J. could have done the crime and led the prosecution to have great difficulty establishing their own narrative of how O.J. could have done it.

It was hard to be accurate but the first episode gave it a good try. But was it adequate? Did it put critical things in proper perspective? Did it misrepresent something of importance? Did it leave out critical information?

Episode 2

The writers of the series for American Crime Story showed several important elements about the trial of O.J. Simpson. At the beginning of this episode, they showed how O.J. thought he transcended race. He was not Black or White. He was O.J.! That was not just arrogance on his part. Other athletes like Lebron James seem to have achieved non-racial status. But suddenly, knowing he was on the verge of being arrested, having been in the sites of snipers as he arrived home from Chicago, O.J. knew he was just another Black man, subject to the unwritten rules of the LAPD.

5 The second episode included reference to police officers being his guests to use his pool and tennis court for exercise. O.J. had made it a point to have great relations with the precinct nearest Rockingham. Other sources add that he was also generous with the things his sponsors gave him. Slacks, shoes and socks, shirts, underwear, gloves, jackets, whatever, all were sent by the dozen to him by sponsors and there was no way he could use them all. Many found their way to police guests, not as direct bribes, but as gifts to anyone who happened to be around. Other guests received the same treatment whenever O.J. wanted to pass along all the extras.

With the murders, O.J.’s world collapsed. This episode showed just how upsetting that was. Cuba Gooding, Jr., has observed that O.J. may have been showing symptoms of head trauma from football, something he had not considered while making the series. Either way, the O.J. portrayed was what I saw in the combined readings about him as he left with his friend Al Cowlings before his lawyers could turn him in.

The letters he wrote to his family and friends before he slipped away from his lawyers with Cowlings proclaimed his innocence and sought forgiveness for what he had done. The episode left it up to us to decide if he was referring to the murders or to what he believed was his imminent suicide at his wife's grave.

And why would he be quoted as saying he felt like an abused husband? Is there a possibility that one of Nicole’s qualities that he really loved was that she had the strength of mind and body to compete with him? Was she really terrified of him, as the Faye Resnick character says at the funeral? Was there something else Nicole may have been worried about, such as having O.J. stop alimony because of her friendship with Resnick who had a major drug problem?

I liked the second episode very much. It was accurate as far as it went and showed vividly the way things were that day, snipers, police cars, fans cheering him on, the embarrassment for both prosecution and defense lawyers, the pain of his friend Al Cowlings trying to keep O.J. alive as long as possible considering how fragile O.J.’s state of mind was.

Watchers might have understood that the sincerity of O.J.’s apology, as he arrived at home to be arrested, was for causing the officers all this trouble, officers who he thought of as friends that had been to his house and received gifts because of his sponsors’ over-enthusiastic generosity.

Episode 3

This episode of American Crime Story opens with the touching scene of Robert Kardashian talking about O.J.'s arrest with the kids who would later become the subject of the contemporary reality show about them. They asked if O.J. did it. That's the question this episode addresses.

Who actually believed O.J. was innocent? Robert Kardashian, his close friend who asked him to be godfather of his children, believed it. So did a lot of the fans who cheered O.J. on during

6 the slow Bronco/police chase.

It was clear the police did not think he was, even those who had accepted his hospitality. It was clear that no one in the DA’s office did. In fact, they released anything they could ahead of the trial to the public in a serious effort to taint public opinion against O.J.. The media was a mixed bag, leaning toward guilty. They published what the DA leaked. But the media also noted TIME magazine’s intentional darkening of O.J.’s mugshot.

What of his lawyer, Robert Shapiro? His expertise was plea bargaining. It made no difference whether O.J. was guilty or innocent. Shapiro wanted the best deal he could get. The only problem was that O.J. would not deal He asserted his innocence from the beginning. If O.J. had been poor, especially a poor Black, the court would have appointed a public defender to be his counsel. There would have been no outside experts because there was no money. There would have been no outside investigators or extra lawyers. There would have been no “Dream Team.”

Imagine being in that position, poor, under-represented, with the DA’s office releasing evidence against you, and threatening the death penalty.

Criminal jurisprudence in America values a competent defense for any accused person. That’s why some cases get re-tried when it can be shown the defendant had incompetent counsel.

Fortunately for O.J., he had wealth and could hire good lawyers. So when O.J. refused to let Shapiro do a plea bargain, which would have meant O.J. admitting to some measure of guilt, a defense attorney with court smarts was needed. Nearing the end of his illustrious career, F. Lee Bailey was asked to help. When Alan Dershowitz, a nationally famous Harvard law professor, was on TV pontificating that O.J. was probably guilty, Shapiro hired him in anticipation of having an appeal. That took him off TV and into the dream team. When it was clear to Shapiro that there were no African Americans on the team, he had to add Johnny Cochran.

While the episode brought up how the team would deal with the DNA evidence that the police were so proud of gathering and which carried much of the DA’s case, we were not told that other lawyers were working on two things: child custody, and the potential of future civil lawsuits against O.J., protecting as much of his wealth as possible for the future support of his children and himself.

Shapiro shrewdly invited in a reporter from New Yorker magazine, Jeffrey Toobin, to counter the DA’s publicity. The thrust of the defense would be that O.J. was the subject of racial prejudice, of which Detective Mark Fuhrman was the foremost example.

The DA’s office beefed up its team by adding Chris Darden, a Black staff member. Darden trusted Marcia Clark and the police evidence, even though just a few years earlier he had claimed that the LAPD's “code of silence” had prevented him from prosecuting corrupt police officers. Despite what he was hearing in the Black community, he stepped up to the task as an honor. Did he believe O.J. was guilty? He was a lawyer and did not have to believe it. His

7 job was to help present the evidence, counter the defense’s arguments to the best of his ability, and let the jury decide. Those he was working with, however, were convinced the murders had been solved by the arrest of O.J., and they did not encourage the police to investigate any other possibility.

Did Shapiro, Bailey, Dershowitz, et al, believe O.J. was innocent? Johnny Cochran did. The others? It seems, according to the episode, that they may have been in it for the money and the fame. That’s the common misconception of the part of the public that believed O.J. was guilty. After reading all I could, I concluded that there was not complete agreement on the guilt/innocence matter. But, like Darden, they had a job to do: present all the facts that raised doubt or proved innocence, argue against what was presented by the prosecution to the best of their ability, and let the jury decide. The money and fame were nothing new to them. They already had that.

The “bloody glove” that Detective Fuhrman said he found behind O.J.'s house. Among other problems with this supposed evidence, Fuhrman said the blood on it was still moist when he found it seven hours after the murders. Numerous tests have established that after lying on the ground for seven hours that night, the blood would have been bone dry by the time Fuhrman said he found it.

O.J. was fortunate. Not only was his wealth enough to afford a skilled defense, he had the good fortune of having people on his team that could argue both sides and then settle on what to do in court. The DA’s office was so invested in believing O.J. was guilty that they could not deal with anything that did not support their narrative. As a consequence, they were unwilling and unable to counter Simpson's defense team.

This third episode showed that the Simpson case occurred when Marcia Clark was in the process of divorce. It is no wonder she made public an incident between O.J. and Nicole from some years earlier where one of their domestic fights was called in on 9-1-1.

In my experience as an advocate, I saw many times the anger of women, earned from bitter experience, which led most people to presume that a woman’s accusation was always true. In some cases, a woman used a situation by misrepresenting it and destroying a minister’s career. But I found practically no one willing to look closely enough to see the evidence I found.

There is so little about Nicole shown in the episodes so far that it becomes easy to see her as a helpless female victim.

8 The episode concludes with Johnny Cochran telling O.J. that all he needs is one Black juror and he can get a hung jury.

Spoiler alert: Cochran got his Black juror but not a jury that could not persuade one recalcitrant to join the majority for a guilty verdict. The jury was not only unanimous that O.J. was not guilty, but reported it out within four hours of deliberation!

Episode 4

The opening exchange between Johnny Cochran and O.J. gave Jeffrey Toobin the title of his book, The Run of His Life. Cochran found O.J. to be desperately depressed and did what he could to boost his morale. Cochran had already told him he believed in his innocence. Cochran then told of his own experience with depression. Some years before, his work was going badly. He was in divorce. And he only had a football game against the Packers to watch. The Packers were in steep decline at the time. But they played a great game that day, winning and keeping O.J. to only one touchdown. Cochran said that what helped him overcome his own depression was that despite how that game was going, O.J. had gotten up after every tackle and went back at it again the next play. Thanking O.J., he described this trial as the run of his life and challenged him to get up and get after it every time he was knocked down.

This episode offered some information about Ron and Nicole. The Goldmans described to Marcia Clark what a good guy Ron was and how he had been stabbed so terribly. (More on the stabbing another time.) I waited to see if the series writers would include Ron’s excellent athleticism. But instead of saying Ron was helping coach his brother’s high school tennis team, they only touched on Ron’s volunteering for some children’s program. That implied that Ron was a weak and helpless victim, a very inaccurate impression to give. As a matter of fact, Ron was a black belt in karate.

Nicole’s character got no specific information from the writers but they brought up how Black women tended to perceive her as a gold-digger. And they had the Resnick character talk about cocaine parties and fights with O.J. as signs of Nicole’s strength. But Resnick herself was portrayed as a flake hooked on cocaine.

From my reading on the case, I learned that Faye Resnick indeed was a coke-head. She stayed at Bundy in Nicole’s condo until a few days before the murders. The only reason Resnick was not at the condo was that she finally took her friends’ advice and went into rehab treatment at a secure facility. There was a possibility that Resnick had a stash of cocaine for which she had not paid her drug dealers, and it may have been at Bundy the night of the murders.

Nicole and Ron Goldman were considering opening a restaurant together with Resnick. Many Brentwood area restaurants were financially viable because they were selling cocaine on the side. But Resnick had to clean up her act or there could have been no deal.

9 This episode portrays the conflict within the dream team. Egos were involved. Shapiro was sometimes condescending as was shown in the scene with F. Lee Bailey. But probably the telling moment in the conflict was when Shapiro made up a scenario where O.J. would admit guilt and plea bargain. When Cochran and Bailey pushed back, Shapiro asked who believed O.J. was guilty. No one raised a hand, not even Alan Derschowitz.

By this time, the defense had a pretty good idea about the quality of the evidence against O.J. and what they could do to show its inadequacy. They also had something else: a timeline that they felt proved O.J. could not have done the murders. The series writers did not want to share that information or they did not know of it. But the fact that the dream team showed unanimous disagreement with Shapiro said a lot.

In a recent article in the papers, family members of the victims complained that no one talked with them before the series was televised. But no one from the series consulted with anyone but the writer of the book on which the series is based. O.J. was not consulted. I doubt Shapiro was either!

The writers of the series are writing for drama and not a documentary. They are taking some license with the story and there seems to be a bias toward the side of the victims’ families and the LAPD. The closing moments of this episode point to a conflict between Cochran and Chris Darden.

Episode 5

This episode sets the two main themes--battered women and racism--into juxtaposition. For Jeffrey Toobin, from whose book this series was adapted, and practically all of those who believe O.J. was guilty, the presumption that a spouse abuser can take the step up to murder settled the question of guilt, and the "race card" was a strategy to blind the jury to the "mountain of evidence" against O.J.

Is it possible that racism was the actual dynamic for the arrest of O.J. and evidence manufactured to point at him and that the spouse abuse issue was used to blind the jury to the facts and in the process justify the racism? My unsolicited opinion is that both are heinous and need to be set aside as we try to find the evidence that leads us to what really happened. Unfortunately, drama lends itself to bringing in emotion and this series is good drama, no matter what the truth of the case was. Also unfortunately, this episode makes the defense look like the racism defense was contrived simply for the sake of winning.

Fortunately, this episode also shows some sensitivity to just how scary it is to be a black man in a white society. Johnny Cochran was harassed by the police when he was an Assistant DA early in his career. Chris Darden saw he was being used because he was African American. It was quite a moment when he persuaded Marcia Clark to take over questioning of Mark Fuhrman. The drama of that moment was right on: she really had no clue what putting Fuhrman on the stand would do to her case.

The view of the series' writers is that every move by the defense was contrived. That was illustrated in three ways. First, it showed the way Cochran staged O.J.'s large home. That was

10 really driven home by the fact that the condo was left unfurnished while O.J.'s house was gussied up. I want to remind you that the condo was an empty commercial property, was on the market not long after the murders in June of 1994, and the jurors did not get to see the two sites until nearly a year later. The prosecution had not anticipated that the condo would be empty and made no effort to bring in the very things that would have shown Nicole being a mother and a human being with a life.

Did you notice that there were no scenes of the outside where the murders occurred? Neither was there an effort to show the walkway at Rockingham where the bloody glove was found and how it related to the entrance to O.J.'s house.

The second effort to show Cochran contrived the defense was in the conversation between Cochran and Darden about Darden's concern to show respect to one another. Cochran looked bad in the scene because he said respect didn't matter. Winning was all that mattered. That conversation was not shown to be nuanced. All lawyers by the nature of our adversarial trial processes are out to win. And respect does not require one side to agree with the other. Disagreeing cannot always be agreeable in the courtroom.

I liked how the argument between Darden and Cochran about the use of the "N" word was shown. Don't forget the argument occurred before the jury was brought in. Darden urged Judge Ito to prohibit the use the racial epithets on the grounds that they would inflame the jury and blind them to the evidence. Cochran forcefully countered that the African American members of the jury heard that word and worse every day and were grown up enough to look past them in considering the evidence.

The third effort to show Cochran as a manipulator was the discussion about how juries accepted the best story and that the defense would just have to tell a better one. One key line may have gone unnoticed because it was set amid the emotional discussion: "They will accept the story that covers the facts best." In my experience working on defense of accused pastors, I saw how the prosecution's narrative, especially when it could use a very emotionally loaded cause to enrich its telling, like victimizing women, became very hard to overcome with a narrative that better accounted for the facts. Cochran must have been very good at neutralizing the prosecution's story in the other cases he won fighting for justice for African-American victims of police brutality.

This episode brings up several other interesting things but let me touch on only one more: the dinner party of Judge Ito's friend, Dominic Dunn, at which the battered woman issue is brought up. The host said that Nicole's parents were the ones who insisted that Nicole stay with O.J. after the incidents of alleged abuse occurred. Earlier in this episode, Marcia Clark had said there were 62 such incidents. Somehow I find it hard to believe that even the loving parents would force her back into a violent relationship 62 times. In the reading that I did, I saw only five. One is too many, of course, but what actually happened in each and why are important. While most battered women are victims of bad men and a few are killed upon separation from those men, there are rare situations where the woman is the violent one. There are also instances where the woman contrives or makes up situations as a way of setting up a very lucrative divorce. Being O.J.'s spouse was a very lucrative spot to be in. To be divorced from him could also be very lucrative.

11 We can examine that possibility just like we can the possibility that Cochran was only using the race card to manipulate the jury. But neither will lead us to a meaningful conclusion about O.J.'s guilt or innocence. Only legitimate evidence will do that.

The White Bronco

You probably caught the detail in Episode Two that there were actually two white Broncos. O.J. got his as a perk from Hertz, for whom he did TV ads, and his friend Al Cowlings bought one because he liked O.J.'s. The slow chase on June 17 was in Cowlings' while O.J.'s was sitting in a police lot. If Marcia Clark was concerned about evidence in the Bronco, it is very odd that O.J.'s Bronco sat unlocked and vulnerable to theft and contamination.

O.J. Simpson's Ford Bronco

Each of the two Broncos had what the prosecution considered important evidence. Cowlings' Bronco contained a number of things that were considered proof that O.J. was really trying to flee the country: nearly a thousand dollars in cash, passports, and a fake beard. The prosecution did not explain why Cowlings made no effort to head for LAX or for Mexico. The defense's view was that O.J. faced possible death at the hands of snipers that had been in the trees around his home when he arrived back from Chicago and took along those items as an alternative to his suicide gun, probably at Cowlings' urging. Whatever else we can understand about this evidence, O.J. was upset, depressed, and not thinking clearly. But finally he turned himself in.

O.J.'s Bronco has a more extensive story. There are four things to note.

One, as we saw in Episode One, the limo driver who came to take O.J. to LAX for his flight to Chicago on the night of the murders did not notice the Bronco at the Rockingham gate to O.J.'s house. If it wasn't there at the time that O.J. was seen by the driver going into the house, 10:54 PM, where was it? And who moved it to where it was found the next morning when the detectives arrived around 5 AM? But what if it was there and the limo driver just did not notice, as the defense claimed and had a witness who saw it parked by the curb at the time the limo arrived?

12 And if the Bronco came up to the Rockingham gate, about 60 feet from where the driver was, a moment before he saw the "large Black man" go into the main entrance of the house, how is it that the driver did not hear that noisy engine on that quiet street that late evening, noisy enough to have been heard from a block away under that circumstance? (Broncos were built as competition with the Jeep and was intentionally noisy.)

Two, O.J. left some blood in his kitchen the night of the 12th. He said he was rushing around at the last minute and discovered he did not have his cell phone. He had left it in the Bronco so around five to 11, he rushed out to the Bronco, unlocked it, reached hastily for the cell and jammed his finger, pulled it out, closed and locked the Bronco, and rushed back inside only to discover his left hand was bleeding profusely. Having taken Nsaids for his arthritis, his blood was thinner and he bled a lot. He tried to clean the blood up the best he could and stop the bleeding. He had Kato Kaelin and the driver load his two bags into the limo, and he was still fifteen minutes late leaving for the airport. He left the blood in the kitchen for his maid to clean the next day. But he was unaware that he had left a trail of blood drops from the Rockingham gate through the front door.

Three, on the 13th, when the detectives were trying to get someone in the house to open the gate for them, Detective Fuhrman examined the Bronco. He noticed some drops of blood on the door. Under the guise of fearing that there might be more victims inside the house, and without a search warrant, Vannatter authorized Fuhrman to climb the wall and let them inside the estate to search for victims.

Fuhrman had been to Rockingham officially at least one time some years earlier in response to a domestic dispute. Unofficially, he might have been among the officers who took advantage of the pool and tennis courts and maybe O.J.'s largesse.

Because Vannatter knew Fuhrman was familiar with Rockingham, he had invited him to lead the way from Bundy. While Vannatter and Lange went to find and talk with O.J.'s daughter Arnelle, Fuhrman explored the grounds, interrogated Kato Kaelin, found the glove on the walkway, and then returned to the Bronco. Since the vehicle was supposedly locked, he looked inside the Bronco using his flashlight and claimed he thought he saw more blood inside. He then went and got the other detectives to tell them about the glove and the Bronco. For some reason a little later, Fuhrman wanted to have the hood popped. Unlocking the door, he asked his friend who had been holding and petting the bloody Akita at the Bundy crime scene to climb in and pull the hood latch.

Four, O.J.'s Bronco was finally impounded two days later. Two days after that, while sitting in the police lot, several items were stolen from it. The Bronco was finally examined for evidence two months after the impounding. Interestingly, after the Bronco arrived at the impound lot, two non-police persons got inside it and looked for blood—and saw no blood. One of those persons was the tow-truck driver who took the Bronco to the lot; the other person was a car- parts salesman who frequented the lot. Based on news reports, both men were expecting to see blood inside the vehicle and were surprised when they saw none.

Too bad the Broncos can't talk either.

13 The Autopsies I

The autopsies where done on June 14, Nicole at 7:30 AM and Ron Goldman at 10:30 AM, with Detectives Vannater and Lange present, roughly 36 hours after the murders. Dr. Irwin Golden conducted both. He was not called to testify by the prosecution. His supervisor testified in his place.

Before I try to describe any of the wounds the victims received, I need to clarify two things: the shapes of the stab wounds and the difference between a bruise and an abrasion. The latter is easy in that abrasions have a break in the skin such as a scrape and a bruise does not. I will deal with them in my next posting. For this one, I will focus on the stab wounds.

The stab wound shapes are much more subtle. For example, a standard kitchen knife having a six inch blade has a stabbing shape of a long, narrow triangle. One end of the stab is tapered and the other end had a flat edge about one sixteenth of an inch wide. A sword or its dagger-sized cousin the stiletto leaves a stab wound that has two tapered edges and no flat edges.

Dr. Golden identified stab wounds of at least three kinds: stiletto, standard blade with 1/32 inch flat edge, and standard blade with 1/16 inch flat edge.

When Detective Fuhrman tried to reconcile the three different shapes of stab wounds, he suggested a field knife that was tapered from the point to two inches in where the flat edge began relatively thin and widened as it got farther from the point. Below, let me address the stab wounds each received under the three shapes Dr. Golden identified with each victim. First will be the length of the wound, then the size of the edge, and finally the depth of the wound which he was able to determine by using a probe into the wound.

Nicole Brown Simpson's stab wounds:

To the left side of the neck: (1) 5/8" wide, 1/32" edge, 1-1/2" deep (2) 1/2" wide, 1/32" edge, 2" deep (3) 7/8" wide, 1/32" edge, 1" deep

To the left hand: (1) 1/4" wide, 1/16" edge, 1/4" deep (2) 1/2" wide, 1/16" edge, 1/4" deep

To the scalp: 3/16" wide. tapered edges, 1/8" deep

This kind of detail suggests that there were at least three knives (or even two or more attackers with the same kind of knife) involved, since the respective depths preclude the kind of knife Fuhrman envisioned.

14 How about what the autopsy reports on Ronald Goldman?

To the left side of neck: 6" wide, 1/16" edge, 2" deep

To the right side of the neck: 5/8th" wide, 1/16" edge, 2" deep (additional tapered stab mark was there too)

To the right ear: 1-1/4" wide, 1/16" edge, 1/4" deep

To the right cheek: 5/8" wide, 1/32" edge, 1/4" deep

To the scalp: (1) 5/8" wide, 1/16" edge, 3/8" deep (2) 1/4" wide, 1/16" edge, 1/4" deep

To the chest: (1) Right side, 5/8" wide, 1/32" edge, 4" deep (2) Right side, 1-1/2" wide, 1/32" edge, 2" deep (3) Right side below ribs, 3/8" wide, tapered edges, 1" deep (4) Left abdomen, 3/4" wide, 1/16" edge, 5-1/2" deep

To left thigh: 2-1/8" wide, 1/32" edge, 3-1/2" deep

To the right clavicle border: 1/2" wide, 1/16" edge, 1/4" deep

To the hands: (1) Right hand, 3/4" wide, tapered edge, 1/2" deep (2) Right hand, 1/2" wide, 1/16" edge, 1/4" deep (3) Left hand thumb web, tapered edge, 1/4" deep

Note that all but one of the major wounds is a stab wound and not a slash.

Again, it has to be concluded that there were at least three knives used. Given the amount of time it took for the two victims to bleed to death, I have chosen not to add all of the knife- related injuries, nor have I indicated which were fatal. Each victim was left unconscious. Ron's wounds led to fatal internal bleeding as well as some external, while Nicole's were external. It is highly unlikely that O.J. would have carried three knives and took turns using them. Look at the stab wounds to Ron's chest. All three kinds of blades are indicated and they went into Ron from different directions.

Freed and Briggs report in their book that witnesses saw three or four men fleeing the scene. A key and very credible witness who was never used was prepared to testify that he saw

15 Nicole having an argument with two men in front of her house shortly after 10:00 that night, and that one of the man looked especially menacing. This witness was named Tom Lang (not to be confused with Detective Tom Lange). The defense decided not to call him because at that point in the trial they were afraid that doing so would lead to a court battle that would drag out the trial and lead to the dismissal of more jurors, which in turn would have caused a mistrial. Lang's story was entirely credible and was backed by Lang's employer, with whom Lang had discussed his story just days after the murders.

The Autopsies II

The focus of this episode is threefold: Detective Fuhrman’s racism, the competence of the detectives in the case, and the stresses on Marcia Clark. First, let me respond to what was shown as Clark’s experiences as a woman prosecutor in a high-profile case.

The producers of the series were offering that as one of the reasons the DA’s office failed to get a conviction. They even made up the dance scene and apparent serious relationship that they presumed grew up between Clark and Chris Darden. I saw none of that in the books about the case. But the writers of this series were going for drama and the touch of romance suited their purposes.

However, the stresses were very real. Tough as Clark was, she still changed her hair style and clothes in response to media criticism. And her divorce situation was used against her in the media.

Crime-scene photo of Nicole's dead body

The jury saw none of that, though of course they noticed changes in her hair and clothes. They were almost as much in prison as O.J. was during the trial, with little contact with the

16 rest of the world and no contact with newspapers, radio, or television at the time. I have yet to see anyone from the jury remark about Marcia Clark’s appearance or stress.

The series writers did an interesting juxtaposition on Clark and Detective Fuhrman. Near the episode’s beginning, Clark was stopped by security, despite her notoriety as the lead DA on the trial. She was made to go back through the metal detector with the rest of the folks trying to get a seat in the court room. Near the end of the episode, Fuhrman and two aides were ignored by security as they marched past the metal detector and into the court room. I do not recall that ever in any of the books but it sure was dramatic. I don’t think the writers liked Fuhrman.

Second, the writers did show some flaws in the approach of the detectives to the case. In Vannatter’s book about the trial, he said he connected O.J. to the crime the moment he saw the drops of blood on the drive from the Bronco to O.J.’s house. But at trial, he finally admitted O.J. was the chief suspect from the beginning after having testified in court that at the beginning he was still reserving judgment on whom the killer might be. Lange, upon cross examination by Johnny Cochran, admitted that he took O.J.’s shoes home overnight before turning them in as evidence, something he admitted he had never done in any other case.

The defense took a similar hit when Rosa Lopez, the maid of the home next door to Rockingham, did not appear to be free of Cochran’s direct influence in discussing when she saw the Bronco at the Rockingham gate. In my reading, I found that Lopez was the second person Fuhrman spoke with at Rockingham the morning after the murders. After Vannatter and Lange went to find O.J.’s older daughter and then make the call to Chicago, Fuhrman listened to Kato Kaelin’s rendition of the three thumps against his room’s back wall. Fuhrman went next door and spoke at length with Lopez. Then he went through her back yard to where he could see the air conditioner on Kaelin’s back wall. She told him that she had heard men’s voices coming from O.J.’s property. They were in a heated argument for a few minutes. She thought it was around two or three in the morning. None of that got into the series’ telling of the trial so far. I add it because her testimony, manipulated by Cochran or not, may have had an impact on the jury as they sought to figure out what happened at Rockingham that night.

Third, this episode brings a crucial point according to the writers of the series. The “N…” word is spoken in court and the defense gets Fuhrman to claim he never used that word, ever. The writers see the line of questioning by lawyer F. Lee Bailey, as a “dog whistle.” African Americans on the jury would see Fuhrman as a liar if he said he never used it or as a condemnation of him if he admitted using it. It was a tactic with no real substance, as the writers seem to presume. What they forgot is the very point that Cochran made in his argument with Darden during the pre-trial phase: African Americans have heard that word so many times they were mature enough to look past it to see if its user is honest about it or not.

Most of you will remember where that all went and we can look forward to it in a future episode. I’m guessing it will be in the last episode because it seems to be the linchpin to the myth of why the mostly African American jury exonerated O.J.. – As you watch the remaining episodes, check out that jury. There are three Anglos and one Hispanic. May I suggest that at least the one white man was not likely to be affected by Fuhrman’s racism. “So what else is new?” he would likely tell you and say it was other things, evidence, that led him to decide

17 “not guilty.”

Finally, you noticed that Clark brought out a poster with several pictures on it, including the bloody gloves. She had Fuhrman point to the picture of the glove as the one he found at Rockingham. For cinematic reasons, you will not see that poster again. But in the trial, that poster and all the others that Clark felt told her story best were set up in front of the jury to ponder for most of the eight months of the trial. The evidence for O.J.’s innocence or guilt were right in front of their noses that whole time. Unfortunately, you probably won’t get to see the posters again in this series. So we will have to see what else the writers say that the jury heard that led them to free O.J.. Good drama ends with a surprise, a plausible surprise. It will be interesting how the writers pull that off, given everyone knows how the trial ended.

Timeline So Far

When the series on the case of O.J. Simpson began, I urged you to keep a time line of the events as they unfolded. I suspect you did not because except for a few dates, there were few specific times given for anything by the writers of the series.

There is a progression of the story that we can list and at least are pretty sure what the date was for several things. Forget the times I have been indicating for now and concentrate on the times we have from the TV program. Episode Six adds some times and information that help us.

TIMELINE

Sometime O.J. was very hospitable to local police officers (LAPD) at Rockingham.

Sometime Nicole had pictures taken of her bruised face and O.J. pleaded no contest in a court action to hitting her.

June 12, ’94

10:00 pm Rosa Lopez said she saw O.J.’s Bronco at the Rockingham gate.

10:15 pm Prosecution said the murders occurred because of the wailing dog.

10:45 pm Kaelin says he heard bumps against his outside back wall.

Sometime O.J. left for Chicago in the limo

Sometime A barking dog led someone to the crime scene at Bundy.

June 13, ’94

Sometime Detectives arrive at Rockingham. They see a blood drop on the Bronco door and send Fuhrman over the wall to get in to the estate. The officers suspect O.J. but they use the blood drop on the Bronco as their excuse to enter the property without a warrant, saying they

18 feared for the life of people inside. They awaken Kaelin. Vannatter and Lange find O.J.’s daughter and call O.J. in Chicago. Fuhrman finds a bloody glove behind Kaelin’s guest house on the walkway. He shows it to the other detectives. Vannatter spots the trail of blood drops from the Bronco into the mansion.

Sometime O.J. returns from Chicago, goes to the police station without a lawyer, and talks with detectives. He is released.

Sometime Detective Lange takes O.J.’s shoes home with him overnight, something he never did with evidence otherwise.

Sometime O.J.’s Bronco is impounded by LAPD.

June 17, ‘94

Sometime O.J. did not turn himself in as promised and is declared a fugitive by the DA.

Sometime O.J., holding a gun to his head, rides at slow speeds on the expressway in Al Cowlings’ white Bronco, followed by many police cars.

Sometime upon arriving at Rockingham, after being given time with his family, O.J. is arrested.

January, ’95 Trial begins.

Probable Cause

Legal processes are not always easy to understand. They seem to be governed by weird rules most people have no idea exist.

For example, why wasn’t O.J. arrested when he got back from Chicago? The police suspected he did it because murders are usually done by someone close to the victims. They knew about O.J.’s no contest plea in the beating of his wife several years before. There was blood on his Bronco and on his drive way. Wasn’t all that enough?

In fact, as Episode One showed, police officers at Rockingham immediately put handcuffs on O.J. the minute he was inside the estate walls. The series showed O.J.’s lawyers present. Upon their insistence, the cuffs were removed and no arrest made. At that moment, except in the eyes of the young officers on the scene, O.J. was not declared a suspect by anyone (Detectives Vannatter, Lange, and Fuhrman had not said so though they believed it to be true).

A warrant for O.J.’s arrest was not authorized by a judge until four days later. The common notion is that O.J. was a wealthy and popular figure and so the police held back. It is usually seen as a matter of the privilege enjoyed by celebrities.

In fact, the LAPD was under fire for all kinds of bad actions toward minority persons, false

19 arrests being one of those bad actions. While a police officer is allowed to arrest someone on his/her own if the circumstances appear to be serious enough, most arrests are based on “probable cause” determined by a judge. Such a warrant was finally issued the night before the slow Bronco chase.

Black’s Law Dictionary lists several rulings made by various courts about probable cause. The most helpful for this case is this:

“Probable cause is the existence of circumstances which would lead a reasonably prudent man to believe in guilt of the arrested party; mere suspicion or belief, unsupported by facts or circumstances is insufficient.”

The “circumstances” missing were any direct evidence tying O.J. to the scene of the crime, namely the weapon and the bloody clothes worn by the killer. Despite huge efforts in Chicago and LAX as well as in Brentwood, none was found after days of searching. The definitive DNA evidence would not be determined until weeks after it had been gathered from Bundy and Rockingham. After four days, a judge was willing to issue an arrest warrant. The prosecution had determined a possible motive (O.J.’s domestic abuse). A preliminary blood test showed O.J. might have been involved. Finally, O.J. lacked an alibi for the hour during which the prosecution said the crime occurred. These things were taken as reasonable grounds for “probable cause.” Without something plausible, LAPD could be accused of prejudice, something they could ill afford at the time.

Time of Death

One of the problems of the prosecution that may have caused reasonable doubt was that it never had a clear time of death for the murders. The police missed multiple opportunities to determine it with any degree of accuracy.

The prosecution took one point in time brought forward by a neighbor near Bundy, the wailing dog heard by one witness (but not by others) at 10:15 pm. That time was never corroborated by any other witness or forensic evidence.

It was chosen to support the theory that O.J. came to Bundy shortly after 10 pm, completed the crime, left the scene, changed clothes, got rid of the knife, shoes, and bloody clothes on the way to Rockingham, accidentally dropped the bloody glove behind Kato Kaelin’s guest apartment at 10:45, went back around to the front of the mansion where the limo driver saw him entering the mansion at 10:55 pm.

However, Nicole’s body was not found until 11:55 pm and Ron’s at 12:17 am when the police arrived in response to a 9-1-1 call.

The coroner was not called in until 9 am. So he was not in a good position to be able to determine when the deaths occurred and could only estimate they happened somewhere between 9 and 12 the night before.

Phone records in police custody showed that Nicole was talking to her mother about lost eye

20 glasses at 9:40 pm and that Nicole then called Mezzaluna at 9:42 and asked Ron to see if he could find them.

According to friends, Ron had already clocked out for the day and was having a drink in the bar. After getting Nicole’s call, he left at 9:50, went home to change, which his friends said would take about a half hour. He borrowed a car, drove to Bundy, and probably arrived about 10:30. His timeline might not run so late if he rushed and did not take time to do his normal careful grooming. He could have shown up as early as a little after 10. No one who knew him actually saw him after he left Mezzaluna. A defense witness heard someone yelling “Hey, Hey, Hey!” at Bundy around 10:35. That might have been Ron intervening in whatever was happening with Nicole about then.

Experts testifying for the defense estimated that, based on the wounds, it would have taken 8 to 15 minutes for the victims to lose enough blood to expire, though they would have been unconscious before that. Other experts, looking at the defensive wounds noted in the autopsies, estimated that the fight lasted as much as ten minutes.

Based on the defense’s best estimate, the start of the fight would have been about 10:35, proceeded violently based on the defensive wounds, bruises, and abrasions until the two victims collapsed somewhere between 10:42 and 10:50. If Ron was fastidious before going to see his friend Nicole, he would not have arrived before 10:30 when a defense witness heard arguing and shouting from Bundy and then about 10:47 pm saw a white SUV racing away from there.

That car was going south and not north so getting back to Rockingham would have taken longer. That means the bumps heard by Kaelin occurred before the crime ended and O.J., were he the driver, would have had no time to change out of the bloody clothes and into what the limo driver saw entering the mansion at 10:54. In any case, O.J. would have had to change, shower, and get down to the limo by 11:02. And O.J. was considered as careful about his appearance as anyone in the narcissistic milieu of Los Angeles.

The police came upon the scene at Bundy at 12:17. Inside they saw bathwater that had been drawn and was cooling, candles lit in the bathroom around the tub, and a melting dish of ice cream. None of these was examined and tested for rate of change, something that might have helped the police determine an estimated time of death.

The prosecution was stuck having to build its case on less than circumstantial evidence related to the time of death. Their choice of time had to do more with what they felt fit in Kaelin’s thumps on the wall (backed up by the bloody glove found there by Detective Fuhrman) and with O.J.’s leaving for Chicago rather than any direct witnesses’ testimony or scientific evidence.

The jury had no clear narrative about the actual time of death from the prosecution. The defense's narrative was stronger to explain what happened.

It’s the details that can lead to reasonable doubt or to conviction. And this one detail was never nailed down by Marcia Clark or Chris Darden.

21 Episode 7

When I was reading about the case ten years ago, I was looking at the books in terms of evidence and timelines. If there was by-play among the lawyers on either side or even between O.J. and his friends, I did not pay much attention to them. So I either missed a budding affair between Chris Darden and Marcia Clark or it is the figment of the series writers’ imaginations. Likewise with Shapiro’s relationship with the dream team. I knew him to be a deal-maker but I do not recall the kind of undermining that seemed to be going on as shown in this series.

I do not recall any reference to a “Colombian Necktie,” the nickname for a throat slashing intended to be a warning to others about messing with the Colombian drug cartel. At the time I read about the case, there was only one comparative reference to the terrible wound to Nicole that was the fatal blow. Prior to her murder, over the previous several years there had been a serial killer who chose blond women to be victims of similar throat slashing. That murderer was still on the loose and could have been a suspect.

However, due to the number of different knives used in this case and witnesses speaking of a group of men fleeing the scene, the theory of a cartel killing is more plausible.

Marcia Clark was shown to be astounded that a seasoned detective like Phil Vannatter did not know of the cartel’s assassination tactic. She knew about it. And she was aware, according to the series’ writers, of the reputation of the Mezzaluna Restaurant (frequented by Nicole and where Ron worked as a waiter) as a cocaine hotspot where major dealers met. That alternative was never brought forward by the LAPD for whatever reason. As noted earlier, they had their man already and they had the blood evidence.

I do not remember the books describing either that moment in the trial nor the awareness Clark had of the drug scene in Brentwood. I also do not remember any vacation where Darden invited Clark to attend a birthday party of one of his friends. The scene gave the series writers a place to present two important things: O.J.’s TV pilot about navy frogmen (precursor of their famed Seal teams) and the prosecution arguments against police framing of O.J..

About the frogmen show which was never completed or shown, there were scenes where O.J. performed some techniques for using a knife in hand-to-hand combat. It was brought up in the trial to show he knew how to use a knife and to show his agility for a big man. O.J.’s arthritic knees were not subject to testimony until the defense brought its case but the prosecution knew it had to counter that argument and chose the frogman TV pilot to do it.

About the problem Clark faced over police collusion to frame O.J., she said that with Fuhrman and the other detectives going back and forth so many times between Bundy and Rockingham, surely the press would have seen something because they were all over the place. I will address that in another posting.

There were two other themes dramatized in this episode. Robert Kardashian’s growing

22 doubts about O.J.’s innocence and the glove demonstration in court.

Kardashian was one of O.J.’s staunchest supporters in the beginning. As I recall from my original reading, he began to see O.J.’s narcissistic, irrational side which he found offensive. However, the series writers suggest he was doubting because of the blood evidence and the fact that no other leads were considered by the police. “There are no other suspects,” he bemoans, according to the script.

Al Cowlings and he are shown opening the suitcase Kardashian was seen removing from O.J.’s estate on the 13th. They did not know if it was full of the clothes O.J. needed when he moved to the Kardashian residence to get away from the press or if it actually contained the missing bloody clothes. They found nothing incriminating in the bag. As I recall, the clothesbag used on O.J.’s trip to Chicago was that same bag and neither it nor the golf bag had any signs of blood in or on them despite all the press speculation about them.

The showing of the gloves in court was most dramatic. I do not remember Shapiro checking the gloves nor the by-play between the defense and Darden. I do remember Clark being against a demonstration when there was no assurance of what the results would be. The gloves did not fit.

Not shown were two important facts, one from the prosecution and one from the defense. Expert witness told Clark and the jury that the gloves fit snuggly. That is one of their best features and why they are so popular. They were like a second skin. Expert witness brought by defense pointed out that these particular gloves do not shrink when dried after being wet.

There are two common theories about why the gloves did not fit. One, O.J. manipulated his hand to be stiff fingered and hence appeared hard to put on. The jury had a much better view of that than any media or book writers and they apparently took Johnny Cochran’s words seriously: “If they do not fit, you must acquit.” Two, the bloody gloves must have skrunk as they dried. But that was shown not to be so with those very specially-made gloves. If those were the gloves used by the murderer, they did not fit O.J..

(Update: An upcoming ESPN special on O.J.'s life quotes someone as saying O.J. stopped taking his meds so that his hands would swell, hence the gloves would not fit. However, to get that result, O.J. would have had to know two weeks in advance that Darden was going to try the gloves on him. Darden did not even know that far ahead that he would do it. Also, swollen hands would have made it hard for O.J. to move his fingers well enough to remove the gloves but films from the actual trial showed he had no such difficulty with his hands.)

So far, there are really only two serious points and one speculation made by the series writers that might lead to reasonable doubt: The speculation about the way Nicole was murdered being a drug cartel warning was not followed up on by either side. Detective Lange’s admission about taking evidence to his home overnight before turning them in, something he never did otherwise was damaging. Finally was the fact that the gloves did not fit. Are those enough to counter the spousal abuse motive, the blood evidence, and the lack of an alibi on which the original probable cause had been adjudged?

23 Three more episodes may contain more grounds for reasonable doubt . . . or not.

The Detectives’ Actions

As was described in an earlier posting, the activities of the detectives related to the case can be drawn with some accuracy, showing some gaps that should concern us. Some of the details are from the book Killing Time by Freed and Briggs. The outline and familiar details come from the series.

As Episode Six showed us, Detective Lange admitted to holding evidence overnight, something he never did otherwise, opening the door to seriously doubting how scrupulous he and the others were.

Vannatter’s ignorance of a common Colombian cartel killing technique intended to intimidate anyone crossing them, as shown in Episode Seven, also was a chink in the prosecution’s belief the officers were competent.

Detective Vannatter testifying during the criminal trial

Let’s review the detective’s actions to see where they say they were, when they did what they did, and see if they showed sound police skills or something else. The detectives involved testified to the actions below. I will try to add when the press became involved, since Marcia Clark was shown to argue in Episode Seven that their presence would have spotted police shenanigans. Where I can, I will also add police photographers and other specialists as they became involved.

1985 Fuhrman responded to a domestic dispute call between O.J. and Nicole at Rockingham. No arrest was made at the time.

Sometime Fuhrman, along with other LAPD officers, may have availed himself of the

24 hospitality of the Simpsons.

Sometime Fuhrman bragged around the LAPD of knowing about Nicole’s breast augmentation “up close and personal.” (This is from Killing Time but may come up in the last episode of the series.)

Based on these, Fuhrman was known in the department as knowledgeable about Rockingham and the Simpsons.

June 13, 1994

12:17 am Police respond to a 9-1-1 call at Bundy.

2:10 am Over a dozen officers are already at the crime scene when Fuhrman and his partner sign in at Bundy. One of the officers is a friend of his and is playing with Nicole’s dog, Kato, which is still covered with blood from the crime scene. Fuhrman is shown around and then goes inside Nicole’s condo and makes notes about the crime scene he has just toured.

2:30 am Fuhrman’s boss arrives and tours the site. Fuhrman’s partner comes in and lets Fuhrman know that downtown is sending two homicide detectives to take over the case. He is officially being dropped from handling it.

2:50 am Fuhrman ceases “detecting” and waits with the other officers on the corner near Bundy for the two detectives.

3:25 am Police photographer arrives, gets pictures of Fuhrman and others around the crime scene. (Pictures are from Fuhrman's book Murder in Brentwood.)

4:05 am Detective Vannatter arrives, views crime scene, and then joins the other officers on the corner.

Sometime Fuhrman is photographed again at Bundy only without his jacket on. (This is from Fuhrman's book.)

4:25 am Lange arrives, tours the crime scene, joins the others at the corner, and learns the captain wants them to contact O.J. about the crime and to come get the two children. Lange and Vannatter ask Fuhrman and his partner to lead the way to Rockingham but Fuhrman pauses to get directions from one of the other police.

Sometime The press may have already arrived at Bundy before detectives leave for Rockingham. But they would have been subject to restriction of their movements to protect the crime scene’s integrity and they would have seen a dozen or more police coming and going around the site.

5:05 am The four detectives and another car with four officers arrive at Rockingham. They try for 10 to 15 minutes to get someone inside to answer the gate phone to let them in. They contact the mansion’s security company seeking help.

25 5:20 am Fuhrman checks out the Bronco to see if an owner can be determined. He sees a package with O.J.’s company name on it and some other stuff. He learns it belongs to Hertz and is available to O.J. because of his doing ads for them..

5:30 am Vannatter joins him and they find what looks like a blood spot on the driver’s side door. They take that as a sign that more victims may be inside the estate.

5:45 am After discussing the matter and trying to call the phone inside (a number they got from the security company) with no luck, Fuhrman is sent over the wall to open the gate. O.J.’s watchdog, Chachi, offers friendly greetings. The detectives go to the front door, ring the bell, and get no response. They walk around to the left and follow the walkway to the guesthouses behind the mansion.

6:00 am They find Kato in one. He refers them to O.J.’s daughter Arnelle who is asleep in the other guesthouse. While Vannatter and Lange go to wake her and contact O.J., Fuhrman questions Kato alone. Kaelin tells of the bumps on his wall at 10:40 or so the night before.

6:05 am (The sun has been up about an hour but) Fuhrman testifies he took his flashlight and worked his way back along the walkway next to the garage on the other side of the mansion to behind Kaelin’s apartment. (In his book, Fuhrman is even more graphic, saying the walkway was dense with cobwebs and that he made his way to the backyard through cobwebs all the way before turning back and finding the bloody glove near Kaelin’s AC). He checks further, he testified, for bodies or something to go with the glove he found there.

6:30 am Fuhrman shows the other detectives the glove, which he left in place.

6:45 am Vannatter sends Fuhrman and his partner back to Bundy to see if the glove matches the one at Bundy. He sends Lange back to take charge at Bundy. Vannatter stays at Rockingham. (In his book, Vannatter wrote that he saw the blood drops up the driveway to the front door – though not to the walkway where the glove lay – and connects the blood trail at Bundy to Rockingham).

7:00 am Fuhrman and the police photographer return to Rockingham to photograph the glove there for comparison with the one at Bundy.

7:10 am Criminalist Fung arrives at Rockingham to gather blood evidence off the driveway and in the kitchen. There is so much blood he is busy there for three hours.

Sometime The following was not testified to at the trial: Fuhrman’s police officer friend who had played with Nicole’s bloody dog at Bundy was asked by Fuhrman to help check the Bronco by sliding in and popping the hood. (This is from Killing Time.)

9:00 am The coroner arrives at Bundy. Massive searches are underway in Chicago at the hotel where O.J. stayed, at Ohare Airport, at LAX, and in the neighborhood around Rockingham for the bloody clothes, shoes, and knife.

26 10:10 am The criminalist arrives at Bundy.

Sometime A photograph is taken of O.J.’s bedroom and shows nothing out of place. (This is from Killing Time.)

Sometime The press would probably not have come to Rockingham prior to setting up for O.J.’s return and would not at that time have known Rockingham was a LAPD-designated crime scene like Bundy. Again, they would have seen many police officers coming and going and would have had their own movements restricted.

Noon O.J. returns from Chicago.

!:30 pm Fuhrman remains at Rockingham while Vannatter and Lange meet with O.J. downtown at the LAPD center. O.J. volunteers blood which Vannatter keeps. (The series does not mention this but it is in Killing Time.)

2:20 pm The interview ends.

4:00 pm Vannatter and Lange takes over the investigation at Rockingham from Fuhrman.

5:30 pm The criminalist returns to Rockingham and begins going over the house. A picture taken in O.J.’s bedroom shows a pair of socks on the floor, later identified as the bloody socks O.J. allegedly wore during the crime. Lange takes a pair of O.J.’s shoes and takes them home with him.

6:30 pm Fuhrman leaves Rockingham, his responsibility of keeping the site secure having ended.

Sometime Several hours later, Vannatter turns (what is left of) O.J.’s blood sample over to the criminalist (Killing Time).

June 14 Vannater and Lange observe the autopsies of Nicole and Ron, perhaps taking blood samples of each with them (Killing Time). Sometime, Lange turns over the shoes he kept overnight to the criminalist.

June 15 O.J.’s Bronco is taken to a police parking area and left unsecured.

June 17 O.J. is arrested after the slow Bronco chase

July 5 Blood evidence is gathered from the Bundy back gate (KILLING TIME, but may be shown in the series).

August 26 Criminalist Fung begins examining the Bronco for evidence, checking the blood on the door and inside (Killing Time, but may be shown in the series).

Those accustomed to the precise and prompt investigative techniques of contemporary crime shows will shudder at the loose way things happened in 1994. And there were few if any of

27 the press able to be close enough to the investigation at this point to know whether or not the four detectives handling things were acting properly.

The defense offered a scenario that had Fuhrman manipulating the evidence by planting the glove at Rockingham. That will be handled in another posting summarized from this timeline. There is a chance that will be shown during the ninth or tenth episodes of “The People V. O. J. Simpson.”

Fuhrman’s Timeline

The series about the Simpson case has shown the kind of self-centeredness of Detective Fuhrman that makes him an unlikeable character. Narcissism is not just a problem for O.J..

Fuhrman talks a lot about the case in his book Murder In Brentwood. His book is so full of himself it is almost laughable. His arrogance and lack of professionalism are obvious in his description of what he did that early morning. First, he makes himself at home on the couch in the Bundy condo after he has toured the crime scene. Second, his critique of Vannatter and Lange for their failures to do their duties is gratuitous, because third, Fuhrman’s description of his own actions which show he was as inept as they had been when he was left in charge for periods of time at Rockingham and Bundy.

He is just the kind of person who would find a way to become the center of attention in any circumstance. So he was in his element when the call came that the ex-wife of O.J. Simpson had just been murdered.

The moment he learned that he was being replaced as lead detective, he looked for a way to be so important to the case that he would be in the middle of it anyway. Here is what I think he did, based on his own book, which Jeffery Toobin accepted as fact for The Run of His Life.

The following was also how the defense understood Detective Fuhrman’s role.

I am following the LAPD timeline from the previous blog posting, put together in the order gleaned from the series writers of the TV show and the specific times provided from the book Killing Time by Freed and Briggs.

Because Rockingham and Bundy were five minutes apart, Fuhrman would be able to leave and return with hardly anyone noticing. With so many officers around, he would not be missed, especially if he usually operated in seclusion, like the inside of the condo to make notes. He figured that by taking one of the pieces of evidence from Bundy and depositing it somewhere else, and then being the one to find it, he could take back the attention he enjoyed. Before joining his partner and his captain on the corner, he picked up one of the gloves and put it into an evidence bag. The glove would still be wet with blood two or three hours after the likely time of death. He figured that O.J. would be the prime suspect. “Significant others,” even divorced ones like O.J., usually did it.

As they stood there waiting for Vannatter and Lange, about 3:30 or so, he probably excused himself to go to the bathroom, climbed into his car and drove over to Rockingham. He may

28 even have taken his partner. Chachi, the watchdog, would be no bother. He and the dog were buddies from many previous visits. Parking further down Rockingham, walking up to the estate, and then climbing the wall, he would check out likely spots to put the glove. The foot traffic around these mansions at 3:30 in the morning would be less than around the Bundy site with all its condos. According to his book, Fuhrman went along the unused walkway next to the garage. He ran into a problem, he wrote: cobwebs. He turned that into a verbal drama in his book, making it scary because he could not see that far in front of him, and making it brave, because he soldiered through it with his gun at the ready and the flashlight showing the way. He went the length of the walkway and got no brilliant ideas about where to plant the glove.

When he returned to where a street light shown on Rockingham, he realized his jacket was full of cobwebs and that he’d have a devil of a time explaining them. Still hanging on to the evidence bag with the glove in it, he knew he had to somehow get back to Rockingham and see if anyone there could say something that would give him an idea where to plant it.

Rosa Lopez testified to hearing a loud argument somewhere around 3 am and it could have been Fuhrman and his partner arguing over the cobwebs on the jacket, not leaving the evidence, and how to get back to drop it later.

Fuhrman could also have had along his dog-handling friend who still had blood on his uniform from the dog at Bundy. He might have had him climb into the Bronco at this point. Or the friend may have been among the officers who followed the four detectives when they came to Rockingham around sunrise.

Upon returning to Bundy by 4 am, Fuhrman left the jacket in the car and rejoined the captain at the corner to wait for the detectives from downtown. Vannatter showed up just after that and Lange arrived about 4:30. It is unlikely Fuhrman told them of his plan. Really all he had to do was have his partner tell them that he was familiar with O.J.’s home and they’d likely let him lead them there. To show his humility, he pretended to need to be reminded and got directions from another officer. He and his partner then led the way, arriving a little after 5 am. The two lead detectives, like Fuhrman, believed in the theory about estranged partners usually being the killers so they were ready to presume O.J. was guilty and would be looking for any sign that pointed in his direction.

When they arrived at the estate, Fuhrman struck gold. Kato Kaelin had this weird story about bumps on his back wall at about 10:40 or so. That left Fuhrman with the problem of how to get the glove back there. He decided to see if anyone was awake next door, since it was daylight. The housekeeper, Rosa Lopez, talked about hearing the argument around 3 am. He asked if he could check the back yard that abutted the Simpson estate and got permission. In his book, he spoke about going into the yard to have a look.

I think it was then that he took the still wet glove from the plastic evidence bad and slipped it over the fence just below Kaelin’s air conditioner.

He then was in a position to get the other detectives and lead them to the glove.

29 That confirmed Vannatter’s belief that O.J. was the culprit. But he knew it would take more evidence than just that so he got extra blood from O.J. when he interviewed him that afternoon. Vannatter would have had plenty of time to leaves drops of O.J.'s blood at the Bundy crime scene before returning to Rockingham by 4 pm. And he probably did take samples of blood from the autopsies of Nicole and Ron, which he and Lange witnessed the next morning. With the three vials of blood, Vannatter was in a position to spread it wherever it would do the investigation the most good, mainly the Bronco and the back gate at Bundy which were not examined until weeks after the crime.

Fuhrman wasn’t finished. While Vannatter and Lange were interviewing O.J. downtown, Fuhrman was in charge at Rockingham. He had plenty of time to hunt up something innocuous like socks. So he drives back to Bundy, looks around as if he is “detecting,” dips the two socks into a bloody spot and returns to Rockingham, plants the socks on the floor of O.J.’s bedroom where the photographer later photographs them.

This narrative of how things could have happened explains how it is that the glove got where it did, how the socks were not in the first photo of O.J.’s bedroom and were there on the floor late that afternoon when another photo was taken, and how the socks had parallel blood spots, as if they had been side-by-side and flat when the blood soaked into them. The press would not have understood any of Fuhrman’s coming and going, if he were even noticed, as part of the framing of O.J..

After all, it was not the press who noticed Lange’s keeping O.J.’s shoes overnight nor Vannatter’s ignorance of the street lingo surrounding the Colombian cartel. It was the defense’s investigators.

Please understand that this telling does not prove O.J. was innocent. It just shows how the LAPD could have easily “enhanced” their case against their chief suspect. We have yet to explore O.J.’s alibi and the actual murders themselves.

The Glove Demonstration

Let me begin by offering a disclaimer and an observation on memory.

My disclaimer is that I read the books about O.J.'s case ten years ago. While I have scanned most of and read a little of Killing Time since watching the American Crime Story series, I have largely gone on the basis of memory and lack thereof in my preparing this blog. I have already stated that my focus was on evidence and timelines in order to sort out this particular crime and paid little attention to the dynamics that have largely occupied the writers of this series. The writers have played up or even made up elements for the story to make it more interesting. But I have usually had no recollection about just how far the writers wandered from what actually happened in and around the trial.

My observation on memory is that I discovered in reviewing the details that my memory has been a little off. I used to think there were four different knife shapes involved in the autopsies. But in studying them for the blog a couple weeks ago, I saw there were only three different shaped blades identified by Dr. Golden. I must then point out that this kind of slight

30 discrepancy happens all the time, and not just with me. The two main books covering the narrative of the whole event, Jeffery Toobin's The Run of His Life and Lawrence Schiller's American Tragedy that I now have in my personal library are second editions and are actually different than the first editions I read ten years ago. So details that may not have been in the earlier editions have slipped into the second. Which details differ is hard to know because I do not have either first edition available as I write this. Let me just say that because memories change over time for a wide range of reasons, we run into some questions that are hard to clear up.

I bring up the disclaimer and observation because the trailer for Episode Eight indicated there would be a lot about the "jury rebellion" that occurred not long after the glove demonstration. I remembered so little about that I decided to read Toobin's take on the jury's behavior and how suddenly several members were removed. I happened upon his telling of the glove demonstration. He seemed to be remembering things I did not recall seeing in his first edition, mainly about the latex gloves O.J. wore when he put on the bloody gloves in the court room.

In the second edition, he said he saw that the latex gloves themselves were not all the way on and that O.J. ignored Chris Darden's request that he straighten his fingers in order to get the gloves on properly.

O.J. trying on the alleged murder gloves during the criminal trial

There are two reasons I think that Toobin may have unintentionally enhanced his memory. One, Schiller made no such claims about the demonstration even though he, like Toobin, went from being impartial in the first edition of his book to believing O.J. was guilty in the second edition. Two, in Episodes Seven and Eight both Marcia Clark and DA Gil Garcetti responded to the demonstration that it was obvious to them the gloves did not fit.

Let me give a little more information on the gloves, based on the testimony of the executive of the glove company that made them. The gloves were designed to fit snuggly and smoothly over the hands. For O.J.'s purposes, such a glove was perfect for holding a microphone on the sidelines during TV broadcasts of football games on cold days.

31 According to Toobin, all of the defense lawyers checked the gloves and tried them on one day and were convinced that they were too small to fit O.J.. They knew his hand size because when they left their visits with O.J., some put their hands on the glass window of the visitor's booth (all the visits were not in a spare room where they could be face to face) and O.J. would put his hand up against theirs from the other side of the security glass.

If by chance those gloves were the ones purchased originally by Nicole at Bloomingdales in New York five years before, what other explanation could there be? I suggest they were too small and O.J. never wore them. He could have gotten a larger size than XL that he could wear. No one investigated that possibility but it could easily have happened.

If O.J. had other gloves that were larger and did fit, how did these smaller ones get involved in the murders? As came out in the trial, O.J.'s mansion had many guests and something as small as a pair of nice gloves could easily have been taken by almost anyone who came as a guest and no one would have noticed, particularly if they were unused.

Such forethought implies someone setting up O.J. before the crimes. The coincidence is too strong to be chance.

We've already seen that the police, Fuhrman in particular, may have scrounged things like the gloves just in case. As we'll see in one or both concluding episodes, Fuhrman could have conceived doing something like that or even actually would do it.

The other group mentioned in passing, the Colombian cartel, may already have had in the works for some weeks the prospect of a murder of Faye Resnick, the cocaine junkie who lived with Nicole at that time, or even Nicole herself.

In the deep racist mindset of people like Fuhrman, O.J. had stepped over the line by marrying a white woman. To Fuhrman, O.J. was uppity and not supposed to be rich and famous so he had to be brought down on few notches. Gathering things that could be used as evidence in the future would be the smart thing to do.

And if you want back $25 K of cocaine that you think is stored at Bundy, you'd take advantage of gathering things that could be left at the scene if you thought you'd have any problems, things that would incriminate someone else.

Are either of these narratives more believable than the prosecution's story of an enraged 46 year old guy with bad knees who used three different knives to kill two younger and athletic people in that small space and come out with only a nick on the finger?

Reasonable doubt is what the defense needs. When speculation provides a better explanation than the description provided by the prosecution, the jury has reasonable doubt.

On top of the demonstration that the gloves did not fit, most of the jury probably already had their minds made up.

32 Episode 8

This episode attempts to show the difficulties that occurred between jurors, Judge Ito, the lawyers on the respective sides, and even the public. For the drama to work, the story had to be simplified. The writers gave the impression that when there was a complaint against a juror, Judge Ito called in the suspect juror to discuss it. The reality was that each complaint meant that the judge had to bring in someone from each legal team to be present as he questioned each juror (all twelve) so that no one juror would appear to be targeted. Each juror had to be asked the same questions and then the judge would determine if the one who was complained about had done anything outside the rules and thus become disqualified and dropped from the jury.

In addition to the dozen who were originally named to the jury, there were an additional twelve alternates who sat in from the beginning of the trial as if they too were members. The judge determined that the trial would be a long one and there would be attrition to the jury by health and possible behavior violations. No one anticipated that the trial would last nine months and no one anticipated the kind of interactions that would arise when twenty four strangers would face a prison-like context as jurors. The eighth episode attempted to dramatize that stress.

There were five major issues that caused stress, beyond the interpersonal issues that can arise when any people are stuck together and can't really get away from each other for a length of time: one, competition between the prosecution and defense to remove jurors they did not want; two, "Stockholm Syndrome;"; three, actual violations of the rules; four, the nice hotel became prison-like because of the lack of ways to be in touch with the outside world; and five, the cultural values that differed between the Anglo group and the minorities, mainly the African American group.

One, the series writers made a great deal of the competition between defense and prosecution when the jury went through its turmoil. In Jeffery Toobin's book, that competition was strongest during the jury selection. While it may have been a concern in mid-trial, Toobin wrote that it appeared Judge Ito made a compensatory removal on behalf of the other side after having to remove someone who had violated the rules and was clearly partisan acted out in court room behaviors. Toobin, when he did the second edition, was not concerned about Clark and Cochran competing. The series writers turned it into a gripping story, though.

Two, the "Stockholm Syndrome" refers to how much friendships developed between the jurors and some of the deputies. The series writers tried to show that. There was real grief for some of the jurors when the deputies they had become friends with were pulled off duty without any warning or explanation. The black outfits vs. the colorful ones that the jury wore into the trial one day was a demonstration against Judge Ito's changing of the deputies. Those in black were showing their anger about the change and those in bright colors showed acceptance, probably because they thought the others had gotten special consideration from the previous group of deputies. It probably would not have been an issue if one of the jurors had not complained several times that she was being sexually harassed (looked at) by one of the deputies. Judge Ito took her at her word, having put her off twice, and then finally decided new guards might solve the problem. As the episode showed, she was a troubled person and finally behaved in a bizarre way in order to finally get relieved of jury duty.

33 Three, there were complaints of getting news during conjugal visits, taking notes in order to write a book later, talking about the case instead of waiting until deliberations, and such violations. There were several legitimate ones that led to removal of jurors. The rest of the jury never was told why a particular juror was removed. Each came as a shock because after they had all gone through the questioning in the judge's office, someone did not come back.

Four, the jury was intimidated not only by the isolation but by the deputies who controlled their lives day to day. For two dozen people who were mostly minorities, it was scary to see a phalanx of Anglo sheriff's deputies telling them what to do. Despite the circumstances, nearly everyone accepted their fate and cooperated because there wasn't a better option. Besides, the rules made some sense in order for them to be effective as jurors.

Five, the initial problem of the whites vs. minorities on the jury was clearly shown by the series writers in the scene about the choice of what VHS movie take to watch during breaks. Toobin reported that the stress was eased by having a second TV in another room. Not shown as well was the fact that the jury group overcame their differences once the crisis over the change of the deputies passed. The series writers apparently wanted to leave the impression that the split between the jurors along ethnic lines was relevant to the verdict of the jury.

Blood Evidence

For all the drama about the jury, the eighth episode had significant references to the evidence. What was offered in the show by Criminalist Dennis Fung in three minutes of scientific jargon was actually spread out over weeks of expert testimony. The prosecution tried its best to "educate" the jury about DNA; how it was determined; how the crime scene, Bronco, and Rockingham all had the blood of O.J., Nicole, and Ron. The series writers emphasized that they thought the jury could never understand the DNA by having the District Attorney say it loud and clear. In her book MADAM FOREMAN, Armanda Cooley reported that the jury did understand but that the prosecution and the experts mistook their boredom over the repetitious presentations as ignorance.

The prosecution had also used hair evidence and some other minor evidence they felt backed up their narrative that O.J. did it alone and then trailed blood all the way back to Rockingham.

The hair and other minor evidence tended to be related to what was found on Nicole's body. You may not have realized what Barry Scheck was talking about when he spoke of the blanket. When the police first arrived on the scene, one officer found a blanket inside the condo at Bundy and brought it out to cover Nicole's body. It was a nice gesture, of course, but with that blanket came months if not years of use by the whole Simpson family, meaning hair and other evidence could have come off the blanket and not from O.J. at the time of the crime. If you've followed this blog, you will remember that Vannatter took blood from O.J. the day he got back from Chicago. In this episode, Fung admitted that Vannatter turned it in many hours after taking it and that 1.9 ml. were not turned over. What happened to that blood between 2:20 pm and about 8 pm that night? Vannatter never provided an explanation and neither

34 could Fung.

On the basis of the tainted evidence and the serious questions about how it had been handled by the police, the jury had ample grounds for reasonable doubt. The "mountain of DNA evidence" against O.J. may literally have disappeared during Criminalist Fung's responses to cross examination as shown in this episode.

One odd thing occurred at the conclusion of Fung's testimony: Criminalist Fung shaking all the lawyers' hands, both prosecution and defense. That was unprecedented. I would like to think he wanted to thank the defense for showing all the flaws in the blood evidence gathered by the police, flaws he saw and was honor-bound to present despite his own misgivings. More likely, he was simply showing his cultural background of respect for the officers of the court.

The episode also brought up the "rehearsal" of what O.J. might say if he were put on the stand. It showed he would have been a terrible witness if Marcia Clark had a chance to challenge him on what she saw as motive, domestic violence. While the impression is left that O.J. was guilty of hitting his wife in the January 1, 1989 episode for which he pleaded "no contest" in court and even more guilty of lying about it, something that the series writers felt changed Robert Kardashian's view of O.J.'s guilt, there are a number of issues O.J. faced in talking about Nicole. For one, he did not want to say anything bad about her. For another, he wanted to protect his kids from anything negative about her. For a third, he did not want his and her privacy violated in front of anyone, especially his best friend, Kardashian.

O.J. never was completely negative in talking about her. That she was robust in her dealings with him when she was drunk or especially angry he admitted but always with the caveat that she loved the kids and was a great mother. As a man, he was big and could take her physical outbursts. He knew better than to hit a woman. The only one who ever complained about his being violent with her body was Nicole and she had a vested interest if she had plans to divorce him at some point. Did she actually fall and get bruised after drinking that New Year's of 1989? If that is what really happened, O.J. was willing to accept responsibility for her bruises in court.

Nicole's friends and sister reported that she had complained to them, even saying that O.J. was going to kill her. Those women could have been used by Nicole to build a case for divorce. The court could not really accept such testimony because it was third hand, and inadmissible as hearsay under law.

The only other event of consequence was in 1985 when Detective Fuhrman responded to a domestic dispute and saw O.J. with a baseball bat hitting Nicole's car, something Fuhrman calmed and ended up not taking any legal action against O.J.. There were other calls to 9-1-1 by Nicole but the judgment of either the 9-1-1 responder or officers dispatched to the scene led to no legal action against O.J.. There is no evidence the officers were star struck by O.J. nor that they saw Nicole as a drama queen. We do not know.

While O.J. would have looked bad on the stand, his relationship with Nicole would not be easily understood by anyone.

35 In the series, the defense had already let Nicole's sister be the spokesperson for the prosecution's attempt to show motive of extending domestic violence to killing. And the jury had not bought it. They understood domestic violence, spousal abuse, and being a sexist jerk but did not buy that any of those led to the crime. In the real trial, the defense was able to bring videos from earlier in the evening of the murders where the Browns hugged a smiling O.J. as he left them after a dance recital of his daughter. Testimony had been made that he "glared" and left "furious." The videos showed otherwise. Marcia Clark's motive for the crimes had not been demonstrated.

But the series writers show Robert Kardashian deepened his growing doubt O.J. because of the "rehearsal." And that was to be of great influence to both Jeffery Toobin and to Lawrence Schiller by the time they revised their respective books and put out their second editions.

Please understand that O.J. may have been an abusive husband and caused the bruises and abrasions shown in the pictures. I am trying to show that just maybe things were not what Nicole said they were, that there is reasonable doubt. I have many dear friends who cannot accept that reasonable doubt exists when a woman accuses a man of such misconduct. The series writers believe that the Browns, O.J.'s inlaws, would have known Nicole better than anyone and would have taken great care in considering the safety of the children as well as her. They did not take Nicole seriously with regard to the alleged abuse and did not encourage Nicole's leaving O.J. during their marriage. I doubt that will persuade my friends. I think I am a reasonable person and my friends happen to be unreasonable about this point. That leaves my reader to have to decide between us.

No matter what the evidence showed and failed to show, the die was caste for the public myth that O.J. was guilty.

How They Died

According to Marcia Clark's opening statement, Nicole and Ron were slashed to death by a raging O.J. in a matter of minutes. Larger than either of his victims, he dominated them with his knife and made swift, bloody work of them.

If that were so, the autopsies would show deep, arbitrary slashes and deft killing cuts. There would be no defensive wounds because his rage would have overcome them rapidly, leaving no time to attempt defensive postures or responses from the victims. A slashing attack would have left deep cuts on the arms and upper body. There would be one blade shape in both bodies but that would hardly be an issue because of the speed of slashing and little time for stabbing and pulling out the weapon.

There was one deft slashing cut, the one that crossed Nicole's throat. And, as you may recall, there were many shallow stab marks, bruises, and abrasions. In addition, both victims had several parallel skin deep cuts at their throats. The deep stabs near the throat down between the neck and clavical on Nicole cut an artery. There was a similar stab attempted on Ron. There were two stabs to his right side that caused the most damage, one that cut the aorta and the other that entered his right lung causing bleeding that flooded it.

36 Now let me set the stage for the murders. Based on information available that the prosecution could have had and may have used in the trial, here is what happened prior to the actual murders:

Nicole had been on the phone with Faye Resnick who called her from the rehab center sometime before ten pm. The children heard their mother sounding very upset during the call. After she hung up, Nicole went into the kitchen to get out a butcher knife. She set it next to the kitchen door which was the main entrance to the condo. She had soft music playing and had lit a number of candles for her bath. Those may have just been for her or they may have been set up for a romantic date. She got out some ice cream to calm herself down and relax when the phone rang again. This time it was her mother who had left her eyeglasses at the restaurant and asked for help to find them. Nicole called Mezzaluna and caught Ron just before he left work. He said he'd look for them and bring them over.

Here's how I reconstruct the murders:

When someone knocked on her door, distracted from whatever Resnick had said to frighten her enough to get out the knife, she opened it and before she could react, she was grabbed by a large man and dragged out the door onto the stoop. He put a knife to her throat from behind and demanded where the cocaine was. She probably stomped on his foot and gave him a head butt that broke his nose. What she hadn't anticipated was another man who came up in front of her with another knife, also threatening her that she needed to turn over the cocaine or else.

She was not held as tightly from behind by the one who'd first grabbed her, but was not focussed too well because of his bleeding nose. When she refused to respond, the second man tried to stab her but using her head and hands to parry the knife thrusts, she became a difficult target for the stabbing. A third man stepped up and stabbed her between the neck and clavicle, seeking to cut a major artery. It took three tries before he hit it.

Just then, Ron came onto the scene and challenged the three men attacking Nicole, yelling "Hey, Hey, Hey." As he attempted to protect Nicole, a fourth man grabbed him from behind and held a knife to his throat, nicking him as he struggled. He was able to do some damage with his feet so one of the men struck Nicole in the head and she collapsed. Ron found a way to break free. Except for the one with the broken nose, the rest then turned on Ron forcing him into the small yard. He got a few blows in with his hands and also protected himself from their knife thrusts with his hands and head as Nicole had. But with the three encircled around him, thrusting, he no longer had a chance. Stabbed from both sides and in the front, especially in the right side, he was losing blood mostly from internal bleeding, weakened, and fell. As a warning to others who would hold back from the cartel, the leader of the group left Nicole with the "Colombian necktie."

With both victims collapsed, one of the men opened the condo door to go in to search for the cocaine, only he was met by a snarling Akita who charged out the door at him. At that point, the men decided to leave. noticing pedestrians were on Bundy and might realize what was going on. They ran out the back gate with the dog biting at them, jumped into a white van/SUV, and drove south.

37 In my novel, the leader of the cartel murderers came back after the dog was gone, tracked blood in a pair of Bruno Magli shoes stolen from O.J.'s house, smeared blood on the stolen gloves, and left them near the bodies.

The reason I felt that could have happened was because the barking dog was taken from the scene of the crime by a couple who found him on the sidewalk at 10:55 pm. They did not notice the blood on the dog until they got him to their nearby apartment. They called a friend who was willing to take the dog back to take a closer look. The friend was the one who was able to see Nicole's body. So there was about an hour between when the dog was taken away and the friend returned with him, found a body at 11:55, and called the police.

As I recall, Professor Briggs, co-author of Killing Time, was interested in trying to do a computer simulation of how the crime could occur, given the information from the autopsies. He was unable to reproduce the crime with only one person. It took no less than three and the limited space of the tiny yard held no more than four assailants.

The prosecution said the defense bruises and abrasions on Ron were damage caused by bumping into the walls of the yard and then the fall to the ground during the attack. I don't think so.

One final note, I am still operating on memory from reading ten years ago. If anyone takes this blog seriously, they can do what I plan to do, look up the trial transcript which is on line, and also reread the key books.

O.J.’s Alibi

Marcia Clark presented the narrative that O.J., after he left his daughter's recital around 6:30 pm on the 12th of June, 1994, went home angry and fuming, building a rage in him that around 10 pm took him in his Bronco to the condo of his wife Nicole. Using a key not found by the police, he got into the condo's gated area, lured Nicole out of the condo, and was cutting and slashing at her when Ron came by with her mother's glasses. In his rage, by 10:15, he had dispatched the two, was chased by the Akita, got back to Rockingham after changing out of the bloody clothes and disposing of them by 10:54 pm when the limo driver saw him entering the mansion.

In the book Killing Time, one can find both the transcript of the interview of O.J. and Vannatter and a summary of his deposition for the civil trial that later found him financially liable for the deaths of Nicole and Ron.

The interview shed little light on what he was doing because the questioning detectives failed to press him for details. He spoke about the recital, about his relationship with Nicole and how they had tried but decided the decision to divorce was the right thing for them, and that he was very careful with his clothes, hanging them up for reuse if they did not need to be cleaned. Perhaps the most important thing that came out of the interview, however, was an explanation for the drops of blood seen in the Rockingham driveway and inside in the kitchen. O.J. said that in his rushing around as he got ready to leave for Chicago, he went to the

38 Bronco, reached for his cell phone which he had left in there, and jammed his finger. He discovered it was bleeding when he went back in the house to help Kato find a flashlight for checking about those odd bumps on his back wall.

The deposition provided many more details. After the recital, he headed home hoping to contact his girl friend with whom he'd had a date the night before. He phoned her but got no answer. He was hungry, not having accepted the invitation of Nicole's parents to go out with them after the recital. So he and Kato went and got McDonalds, getting home about 9:35. He went outside to his car where he kept his golf bag, checked his golf clubs for the Chicago trip, practiced a little with one of the clubs, quit when he thought he might dent his Bentley, and went back inside. He killed time petting his dog, watching a little TV, and then going to the toilet. While he was in there, someone called from the gate but only let it ring four times. At 10:36, he realized his ride was coming soon and he better shower. While he was in the shower, he again heard the phone but had no chance of answering because it only rang a few times. When he went out to find his golf shoes, he saw the limo, and back inside he answered the gate phone to let the limo in. He finished packing, leaving everything in the bedroom in order, asked Kato and the driver to put his golf clubs and suitcase in the limo because his finger might start bleeding again, and left about 11:15 for LAX.

O.J. Simpson's house

The title of the Freed and Briggs book Killing Time is most fitting. Both narratives, the prosecution's and the defense's, describe the time between 10 and 11 pm and depending on how the words are defined, covers both. The jury decided O.J.'s description of killing time fit the facts best.

The Other Trial

Those who are firm believers in O.J.'s guilt argue that he was found guilty in that "other" trial. So let me offer some information and insight about that other trial.

Actually, there were three, the criminal trial, the civil ("other") trial, and the child custody

39 hearings. Let me speak about each of the three so that we can put the "other" trial into perspective.

The criminal trial began at the end of January, 1995, seven months after the murders. The "Not guilty" verdict was read on Oct. 3, 1995. The trial took place in the city of Los Angeles downtown mainly because the DA's office, resources, and staff were there. That meant the jury pool was mixed racial, reflecting to some extent the population of that city which was some miles north west of where the murders took place.

The "third" trial was the custody hearing for O.J.'s and Nicole's two children. I'm not sure yet where that was held but I presume in some location where the hearing judge had Brentwood within her jurisdiction. That concluded December 20, 1996. There was no jury since it was a custody hearing to determine if the children should be in the custody of O.J. or of Nicole's parents who had them while O.J. was in jail. Recall he was arrested June 17, 1994. On October 3, 1995 he was freed by the criminal jury's verdict. The Browns appealed the hearing judge's decision favoring O.J. and on Nov. 10, 1998, the case was remanded back for rehearing by an appeals court with O.J. retaining custody until the case was resolved. - One recent source indicated the Browns and O.J. reached an agreement out of court.

The "other" trial, the civil case brought by the Goldmans (Ron's parents) and the Browns (Nicole's parents), began October 26, 1996, and ended January 17, 1997, with the verdict coming down on February 5, 1997. It was held in Santa Monica, the nearest large city to Brentwood, because it was a location handier to those bringing the lawsuit against O.J.. The jury was consistent with the population of Santa Monica, 9 whites, 2 blacks, and 1 Asian American.

Notice that both the child custody hearing and the civil trial occurred at the same time. O.J. won the custody hearing, for which his children were glad, according to a news report quoting the children's lawyer. - In child custody hearings, the court appoints a lawyer to protect the interests of the children. They were eight and eleven at the time.

Remember that O.J.'s lawyers were looking ahead from the moment O.J. was arrested to not only handle the criminal trial but to protect as much of his income and resources as possible against wrongful death lawsuits and child custody suits. The first wrongful death suit was brought six weeks after the murders! O.J. needed to have the means to support his family whether or not he won the criminal trial. The "other" trial had as its main purpose stripping O.J. of any wealth he had as punishment for the deaths of Nicole and Ron. The law provided some protection against complete financial ruin in such cases: money in certain trusts, pension, and residence are usually untouchable so that the one who is sued can survive. State laws vary and can be changed but usually the one sued is not left completely destitute.

Everyone recalls that there was a great divide in the country over the criminal jury's "Not Guilty" verdict. The mixed racial jury was called too stupid to understand the DNA evidence, too racially oriented to allow another of their kind to be convicted, too insensitive to spousal abuse, and too attuned to the allegations of police brutality against ethnics to be objective. The white community believed that with eight African Americans, two Hispanics, and only two white persons on the jury, the prosecution didn't have a chance.

40 But for now, needless to say, the "other" trial was set up in a place where the outcome was far more likely to be what the white community wanted. It was far more supportive of the police than any in the city of Los Angeles would have been at the time. (Detective Fuhrman was not a witness and was not even mentioned during the civil trial!). The level of proof needed was not "beyond a reasonable doubt" but "preponderance of evidence," which is closer to the level of proof needed for "probable cause." Because the civil case did not involve a possible death penalty or incarceration, the level of proof did not need to be very high. It was only to settle financial responsibility and provide the respective families for the loss of their loved ones.

Civil action also did not require a unanimous verdict, just 9 of 12 jurors had to agree. Remember the jury in the civil case consisted of 9 whites, two blacks, and 1 Asian American.

The Santa Monica civil trial became far more, however. For the white community, it became a setting in which to overturn the criminal trial verdict. And it succeeded. The only thing it failed to do was put O.J. behind bars. That would occur another ten years later when O.J. was convicted of some nasty stuff related to an ill-conceived effort to retrieve some of his own memorabilia. He is in jail as of this writing and may be released as early as next year.

How is it that despite being judged not guilty in Los Angeles and getting custody of his children, the Santa Monica trial went against him. I think there were three things: prejudice, O.J.'s "issues," and his real goal of keeping his children. The prejudice was evident on the Judge Fujisaki's part when he allowed the seating of people as jurors who had admitted during the vetting process that they believed O.J. was guilty. Fujaski also allowed numerous hearsay exceptions for the plaintiffs but not for the defense. He also refused to enforce the subpoena for Mark Fuhrman to testify, and the jury never heard about Fuhrman's taped admission that he had planted evidence to frame minorities. When the defense asked for just two weeks to study a batch of photos that appeared to show O.J. wearing Bruno Magli shoes, the judge refused. Truth be told, it was a mockery of justice.

I contend that America's racism, noted by foreign scholars every generation since the mid- nineteenth century, was the dominant reason. The very thing the Los Angeles jury was accused of motivated the Santa Monica jury. In the mythos surrounding race in America, there is no way a Black man could be allowed to go free once he is accused. Deep within our culture is the view that there is only right and wrong, good and evil, black or white, There are no shades of gray, not alternatives to guilty or innocent. And, of course, "we" are on the right, the good side. That leaves no room for anything but evil and wrong on the other. It must be pretty deep within us because we become irrational trying to sustain this bifurcated view of the world and people around us when it comes to race. Being an ethnic in America is pretty scary. Just ask any of your ethnic acquaintances.

Next, I contend that O.J.'s personality was not that helpful to him. His desire to protect his family from the invasion of his and Nicole's privacy came across as defensiveness and avoidance rather than as respect for the dead and protection of his children. The charm with which he had been successful all his athletic career and into his acting/broadcasting careers was seen as shallow and inappropriate. His impatience with those who did not let him be the center of the universe came across as mean-spirited. There may even have been the effects

41 of head injuries plus the constant arthritic pain he was in from his football days which were not understood at the time but seen as just plain nastiness.

Finally, the civil trial and the custody hearings were going on at the same time, meaning that he could not be in both places. His priority was his children and so the jury at the civil trial did not see him every day their trial was going on. The lawyers had done their job of protecting a lot of O.J.'s wealth so even losing in Santa Monica was no big deal. Losing his children would have been something he could not bear.

So O.J. lost the civil trial. The Browns would get something to compensate for their loss and the Goldmans would get nothing, actually, though they would continue trying in other ways. And O.J. got his children.

Yes, even though O.J. won two out of three trials, it is the "other" one that is clung to by those who do not want to believe O.J. might have actually been innocent. It may well have been a set up for just that purpose. And it succeeded, I am convinced, because O.J. was more interested in keeping his family together than playing that game.

Episode 9

In a recent TV interview, Alan Dershowitz was asked about the TV series The People v. O. J. Simpson. He said it was an interesting fictionalization.

We saw that in the interactions between Chris Darden and Marcia Clark which the writers made out as very close to being a romantic relationship. There is nothing I remember in my reading that they ever apologized to each other as the series writers suggest. Over the last few days, I've read portions of Detective Fuhrman's, Fred Goldman's, Lawrence Schiller's, and Jeffrey Toobin's books about the Fuhrman testimony. All of the books made Darden out to be very hard-nosed and aggressive, not at all the gentle giant of a man shown in the series. And Clark never softened beyond changing her clothes and hairstyle during the trial.

The series writers may have made up a lot of stuff but they did make points on behalf of women's rights, especially how much they are hounded if they are accomplished and successful. They have also been clear that African Americans have been and still are victimized by the criminal justice system.

The writers made sure to have Clark say that bringing in Fuhrman for further testimony would so enflame the jury that they would ignore the evidence in order to punish the LAPD. Toobin wrote in his book that O.J. was the "undeserved beneficiary" of the the jury's attitude toward the police.

But the writers got it right when they did the court scene with Fuhrman. They had the wrong defense lawyer question him but the truth is that Fuhrman took the Fifth Amendment and looked guilty of all kinds of evidence planting and violence against the African American community.

A few years before the trial, a screen writer from North Carolina had a chance encounter with

42 Fuhrman and thought she found an experienced cop who could give her background for her writing police drama for TV. She recorded and had transcribed their extensive conversations. Not only did Fuhrman use the "N" word forty two times, he described in detail numerous events where police tactics used unprovoked violence toward Black people and tampered extensively with evidence to get convictions. Copies of the tapes and transcripts were gone over carefully by both prosecution and defense and by the time Fuhrman came into the court room, no one wanted to look at him. Even the crowd in the court room had heard snippets of the tapes over radio and TV the previous few days, The only one who really watched Fuhrman enter and sit down was Fred Goldman, Ron's father, who was furious that it was now Fuhrman on trial rather than O.J..

Fuhrman wrote in his book Murder In Brentwood that he was ready to explain everything because he felt completely innocent of any tampering with evidence and that his taped conversations had been pure fiction. But on advice of his new lawyer (his old one quit when the tapes were released) and because he knew no one on the prosecution would be willing to be his advocate, he wrote that he had to take the Fifth. Clark did turn her back on him as he came in and Darden left the courtroom, just as the series showed. Poor Fuhrman . . . not!

Anyone who knew the actual content of the tapes knew he was bad. Schilling reported that the writer who had made the tapes was called to the stand and said she was convinced during her interviews with him that he was talking about how he operated as a cop.

In the show, I noticed that there was no jury when Fuhrman testified. The books all confirmed they were not there to see him take the Fifth. Though it was not shown in this episode, Judge Ito brought them in for the writer's testimony and she confirmed it was Fuhrman's voice on the two brief segments (total of fourteen words) that were allowed to be presented. When asked, she said Fuhrman had been totally serious and scary when he described treatment of African Americans and when he used the "N" word. The series writers indicated that the jurors found out about all the stuff outside of the courtroom during conjugal visits with spouses during "pillow talk."

Goldman did a news conference immediately after that session blasting the judge for allowing the trial to turn into the "people v. Fuhrman." In his book, Goldman never used O.J.'s name, but referred to him as the killer, murderer, and such terms. There is more to know about Goldman.

You may ask why Fuhrman didn't say "No" when asked specifically about evidence tampering. Another arcane rule of law is that once he started claiming the Fifth, if he answered anything but that way, he could be subjected to extensive questioning and lose his Fifth Amendment right. Fuhrman later pleaded "no contest" to the felony charge of perjury in O.J.'s trial. The LAPD found insufficient evidence to try him for the incidents he described for the screen writer. Fuhrman was thus a convicted felon, could no longer be a policeman, and even lost his right to a gun, Meanwhile he has done well as a mystery writer living in Idaho and being a guest expert on FOX.

Was anything entered into evidence in this episode that the jury could have used?

43 The opening scene has a person of foreign extraction testifying to hearing someone yell "Hey, Hey, Hey" from the crime scene. But no time is given. And Clark says he saw a Bronco by the alley gate to Bundy. What wasn't shown was that the witness went on to say he saw four men running from the scene and driving the white SUV south rather than north toward Rockingham.

The testimony was abridged by the series writers in order to focus on another point about racism. The man said someone responded and sounded like he was Black. Cochran jumped all over that presumption and said there was no way to take that seriously because no one can tell such a thing for sure.

Cochran saw the case as O.J. v. American racism. But "Americans" do not realize just how racist we are and so the show leaves the impression Cochran was using a tactic rather than showing the truth. And as Fuhrman came into focus in this episode, his racism was used as the best example of Cochran's tactic to hijack the case and put the LAPD on trial.

The writers and Toobin have set up the jury to be so angry about Fuhrman that they can't think straight and deal with the evidence. Or was Cochran correct when he said earlier in the series that they would be mature enough to look past the epithets directed toward Blacks and be able to keep their poise. We'll see next week if the jury is given that credit.

Fred Goldman

One of the interesting people involved in O.J.'s case is the father of Ron Goldman, one of the victims of the June 12, 1994, murders.

Those watching the series on O.J.'s trial, but are unaware of Ron's father, are likely to see a lot of him in the final episode. He has been in the front row of the courtroom. He is the one reacting in the background to what is happening in the trial. In Episode Nine, he was also seen doing a televised news conference in reaction to the defense bringing Detective Fuhrman to the witness stand.

Yes, the tall man with the dramatic mustache.

Let me tell you a little of what he writes about in his book HIS NAME IS RON.

He wrote the book as a way to distinguish his son from the Simpsons. Their celebrity put Ron in the shadow and he wanted people to know Ron was more than some vague friend of Nicole's. The young man was much more. He helped coach his younger brother's high school tennis team, though Fred did not mention Ron's status as a semi-pro tennis player in California. Perhaps Fred's effort was a typical grief reaction where he idolized his dead son. Ron comes off in the book as a saint.

Fred also could have been writing an "apologia," which is actually a kind of tract to support a position about the person. In this case, it was to try to block out the noise about drugs, sex, and mob connections that drifted into the media after the murders. Ron was not the only waiter from Mezzaluna and other nearby restaurants who was murdered around that time.

44 The others were apparently drug-related crimes and Fred could not allow speculation that his son might have been the actual target in the murders, making Nicole the innocent one caught up in the tragedy. On this I am willing to give Fred the benefit of the doubt.

But he never talks of Ron's black belt in karate. nor of what a fine athlete Ron was. Going to a woman's defense, that he could write about. Being any kind of competition with an older, overweight arthritic former athlete, that he could not do.

One of grief's characteristics is anger. Some people weep. Some people become deeply depressed. And some people turn all the anger in their being upon some target. In this case, O.J. became Fred's emotional outlet. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Fred could only use words like "killer" in place of O.J.'s name. The book is a very angry one with Fred's anger including Judge Ito and Johnny Cochran.

Fred tells of his family, of his first wife, of Ron's good nature and good deeds, and then of the shock of the murders. He goes into detail about the trial from his point of view. And he talks openly about the feelings he and his family members have throughout.

He also mentions something in passing, that he struggled with taking time from his job as a salesman to be at the trial and to administer the Ron Goldman Justice Fund, Fred's effort to have resources for the wrongful death civil suit against O.J. he filed in May, 1995. Right after the Fuhrman court appearance, Fred was approached by an executive who wanted to be supportive because the executive's boss was sympathetic with the Goldmans. The man offered Fred the services of a better lawyer from a major LA law firm and office space at corporate headquarters for the Justice Fund.

Fred wrote that he did not want to name the corporation or the man behind the help for fear there would be boycotts against the company. But in his acknowledgments, Fred thanks Paul Marciano of Guess, Inc. for finding the lawyer and providing "overwhelming support."

Fred Goldman is a sales representative. He is assertive, articulate, emotional, and committed to punishing the killer of his son Ron. He is a perfect foil to O.J.. Fred is a gifted antagonist who pursued the law suit against O.J., and then fought for the rights to a book O.J. wrote to try to earn some money. Fred won that fight and not only got the proceeds from its sale but got to change the title. O.J. had used If I Did It. Fred had the publishers make the word "If" very small and of a different color than the other three words, and added several more words, so that someone picking up the book would easily see I Did It, Confessions of the Killer. (Reports conflict as to whether the proceeds were split with the Browns.)

45 Fred Goldman holding one of his many press conferences

Someone who wanted a person capable of reminding the public about O.J. as the killer could not have found anyone better than Fred Goldman. He channels anger more exquisitely than Donald Trump and his constituency of believers that O.J. did it is larger than Trump's. His anger has been an effective deterrent to explorations of alternative solutions to the crime for over twenty years. Is it possible that Fred's passion was bought to distract responsible people from pursuing leads in other directions?

When word comes out that Martin Sheen is producing a TV series that shows O.J. is innocent and that someone else did it, I would expect something from Fred, if he is still well and active.

Where Are We?

Before we move into the last episode on Tuesday, April 5, we may want to look again at the time line of the murders and the actions of the LAPD. We will need to review the evidence against O.J. and any of the grounds for reasonable doubt, the standard of proof the jury must meet in order to not convict.

The drama depicted in the series has been wonderful TV but it is definitely not a documentary.

Let me do as simple a timeline as possible based on details offered by the series:

June 12, 1994

10 or 10:15 pm O.J.'s Bronco was seen at the Rockingham gate.

10:15 pm A "wailing dog" was heard near the Bundy murder site.

10:40 pm Kato Kaelin heard three bumps coming from his back wall.

Between 10:20 and 10:54 pm, the limo driver saw no Bronco at Rockingham, but did see a black man approach the mansion door about 10:54, and when the driver called inside, someone finally answered. O.J. then left for a flight to Chicago.

46 11:55 pm A barking dog led to the discovery of Nicole's body and the calling of the police.

June 13, 1994

Soon after midnight, police arrived on the scene of the murders.

Dets. Fuhrman, Vannatter, and Lange begin work on the crime.

Before sun-up, the detectives arrive at Rockingham to tell O.J. his ex-wife is murdered and to get his children. Fuhrman finds a drop of blood on the Bronco door and they decide to enter the estate over the wall, fearing someone may have been hurt here as well. Kato Kaelin meets them saying O.J. is out of state and tells of the three bumps in the night. While the others contact O.J. in Chicago, Fuhrman finds the bloody glove laid out on the ground on a pathway beside the mansion. (At the trial, Fuhrman takes the Fifth when asked if he planted the glove at Rockingham.) Vannatter sees blood drops running from the Bronco to the front door of the mansion.

O.J. returns from Chicago, is invited to talk with Vannatter and Lange at the police center in downtown LA. O.J. does not know where the cut on his finger is from. Nor does he have anyone who can vouch for where he was between 10 and 11 the night before. Vannatter takes a blood sample from O.J..

Blood on socks that DNA tests show were from O.J., Nicole, and Ron are found at Rockingham that evening. (At trial, Vannattter admits he does not turn in all of O.J.'s blood sample. At trial, Lange admits he takes O.J.'s shoes home overnight. At the trial, criminalist Dennis Fung admits several errors were made during the investigation at both sites.)

Sometime O.J. does poorly on a lie detecter test.

Sometime The Bronco is taken into custody.

Sometime The funeral of Nicole is held.

Sometime A warrant is signed to arrest O.J..

June 17, 1994

In the morning, O.J. is examined by his doctors and found to have no sign of bruises or injury.

When O.J. is to be taken in for arrest, he and Al Cowlings leave in Al's white Bronco and O.J. threatens suicide when they are approached by police. They return to Rockingham after a long slow chase on the LA freeways. After spending a little time with his mother and family, he turns himself in.

At the trial, there is some question as to whether the motive of extension of spousal abuse is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The sloppiness of the investigation is shown by the

47 detectives' responses to questions about their possible errors. The weapon and bloody clothes are not found. The bloody gloves that were found at Bundy and Rockingham do not fit O.J.. Fuhrman's racism is confirmed and may lay behind what was done by the LAPD in their handling of the case.

O.J.'s "escape" in the Bronco is not brought up at trial. Nor is his lie detector test. The decision of the civil trial is still months off and no one on the mixed racial jury is aware the wrongful death suits are in the works nor are they aware of the efforts to keep O.J. from custody of his children.

Is that enough grounds to believe the jury wisely voted not guilty because of reasonable doubt? Or were they influenced by their prejudice against the LAPD and Johnny Cochran's "effective use of the race card?"

We await closing arguments, the verdict, and how the series' writers dramatize them.

“A Hell of a Fight”

The American Crime Story series on O.J. has led other TV channels to produce or bring back specials about the case. Last night (April 1), Headline News Channel (HLN) showed its two one hour specials on the case, one from 2014 and one from last year. The first was about the trial, the second about the chase on the freeways of Los Angeles. I was surprised at how chummy the reporter was with Detective Tom Lange and with the Goldmans. She let them spin everything to support the premise that the jury fell for the race card and failed to look at the evidence. There were too many little moments of such presumption of guilt that it would take several posts to clean them all up.

I did hear two thing that were particularly interesting. The first was the portions of the interview with a juror, a Hispanic American who still believes he made the right decision, that the prosecution failed to prove its case. It did not start with Detective Fuhrman, he said. The whole investigation by all of the LAPD failed to be done properly. There were enough admissions to failures that there could be no confidence in any of the supposed "mountain of evidence."

I think that only a portion of the interview was shown because I think there was more that he could have said about the evidence than that it was not conclusive. In a trial, the jury gets to determine if the prosecution has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had motive, means, and opportunity. What people forget is that the defendant (who could be you or me) does not have to prove innocence. That's French justice. The American (derived from the British) system presumes innocence until proven guilty. The defendant does not have to testify. The prosecution has to bring sufficient evidence to prove guilt.

I contend that the jury actually felt there was proof that O.J. was innocent. If the juror was asked about that, it did not get into the show but was left on the cutting room floor.

The second thing that struck me was Lange's statement that "Ron put up a hell of a fight."

48 I had not heard that from anyone on the prosecution side before, other than Dr. Irvin Golden's autopsies. Lange was present when the autopsies occurred.

If Lange had actually said that on the witness stand, the defense should have had a field day. I think it might have gone something like this:

Defense (D): Detective Lange, did you just say that Ron Goldman "put up a hell of a fight?"

Lange (L): Yes.

D: Would you tell how you came to that conclusion?

L: During the autopsies, Dr. Golden pointed out bruises in his arms which would have been where he blocked blows aimed at him.

D: Would you show us what you mean, please?

L: (Demonstrating how a killer might raise his hand and start to bring it down in a stabbing motion) As the killer used this move, it appears Ron brought his arm up to block it.

D: And how would that show up on Ron's arm?

L: There would be bruises along the forearm somewhere between here (pointing to the wrist) and here (pointing to the elbow).

D: And Ron had such bruises.

L: Yes, he did.

D: Would there be any other signs of Ron's putting up a good fight?

L: There would be bruises and abrasions on his knuckles.

D: Detective Lange, were such bruises and abrasions on Ron's knuckles?

L: Yes, there were.

D: And why would there be such bruises and abrasions there?

L: They would be from where he struck the killer.

D: So based on the bruises on his forearms and on his knuckles, you conclude that Ron "put up a hell of a fight?"

L: That is correct.

D: Now, where on the killer would you find signs of Ron's defensive move to the stabbing

49 move, Detective Lange?

L: On the underside of the forearm is where the bruises would be.

D: And, Detective Lange, where would Ron most likely have hit his assailant to cause the abrasions and bruises on his knuckles?

L: Ron's blows could have landed on his assailant's head, face, torso, or whatever part of the body presented itself to his punch.

D: Detective Lange, based on your knowledge of such minor injuries, how long would you say the bruises would last, a few seconds? An hour? A few days?

L: Bruises last up to a week or so, depending on how deep the injury goes.

D: So based on your understanding, the assailant against whom Ron put up "a hell of a fight" would have had bruises on his underarm and perhaps on his face or torso or even his leg for up to a week after the fight. Is that correct?

L: That is my understanding.

D: Detective Lange, did you and Detective Vannatter examine O.J.'s body for any injuries the day he returned from Chicago?

L: We did.

D: And what did you find?

L: We found a cut on the middle finger of his left hand next to a split in the skin.

D: Did you find any bruises on O.J.'s forearms, top or bottom?

L: No, we did not.

D: Did you find and bruises or abrasions on O.J.'s face, arms, or body that might have been inflicted by Ron's "hell of a fight?"

L: No, we did not.

D: Then who was Ron having this "hell of a fight" with, Detective Lange?

Who indeed? It could not have been O.J..

But I do not think that exchange ever occurred before or during the trial. I wonder if it happened within the jury, without Lange, of course.

Esquire TV Channel

50 By chance we came upon another effort to go into the O.J. trial. Esquire TV aired it this weekend and is repeating it this coming week (April 4-9) as a twelve part series. Two or three segments will be shown each morning between 7:00 and 10:00. The content has no commentary but shows only excerpts from the trial and some news conferences from that time.

Two things are clear: One, the things the jurists actually heard and saw are different from what Jeffery Toobin and every other writer about the trial has said. Two, what was presented, viewed from the present day, makes the "not guilty" verdict look understandable

First, as my wife and I have been watching, we were seeing things that we hadn't seen or heard before, little details that now mean something we either missed or that the book writers missed, whatever their viewpoint. There is so much richness of detail. All of the versions of the trial leave out so much that, while it helps to read as many books as possible, it appears that it will be necessary to go back to the actual trial transcripts to be sure what was said.

Second, the editors of this Esquire series have chosen some of the more interesting moments of the trial so it is also dramatic television. It certainly gives the viewers a chance to make up their own mind about two key witnesses, Kato Kaelin and Mark Fuhrman. Each takes up at least two episodes and more. The closing arguments refer again and again to each of them and their credibility.

In any event, it is another effort to participate in the current interest in the case. We found it to be well worth watching. I hope it encourages you to go back to the transcript.

A & E Channel’s Specials

Apparently the series on FX about O.J. has caused a stir. We keep finding another two to four hours of TV specials on the case every few days. We ran across A & E's two last night (April 4).

In my view they were poorly titled. They used "The Secret Tapes" and "O. J. Speaks, The Hidden Tapes." They should have said, "The Fred Goldman Story, Parts I and II." The scripts couldn't have been more biased in Mr. Goldman's favor. The two shows were based on opinions and presumptions of those who agreed with him.

Most disconcerting from a professional point of view was the use of a psychologist who did not have O.J. as a patient nor have extensive interviews with him. The psychologist formed his opinions based on his reading of books and looking at videos. While such research has merit to open up lines of inquiry for further exploration on behalf of a patient, it is unprofessional to take such observations as being valid for the purpose of diagnosing the person on TV.

But even a biased program can show some things of value in understanding the whole situation facing us as we look for the truth in O.J.'s case.

51 For one, it was helpful to get some details about the Santa Monica trial that helped us understand it better. Paul Marciano of Guess, Inc. was revealed to have helped the Goldmans. The level of proof ("preponderance of evidence") was mentioned as was the need for only 9 of the 12 jurors to agree to rule against O.J.. Also noted was the racial composition of the jury, 9 of which were white. There could be no hung jury. But it took the jury nearly two weeks to come back with their verdict!

For another, it showed the strategy of defeating O.J. in civil trial. The lawyer for Goldman used interrogation techniques guaranteed to expose any weakness and even lies in O.J.'s responses. It took eleven days of intensive questioning during the deposition period leading up to the trial before Dan Petrocelli could find enough of what he felt were inconsistencies he could use in the trial itself.

The most prominent of those were O.J.'s inability to remember a voice mail message from his girl friend on the morning of June 12, 1994, breaking things off with him. He also had no explanation about how the blood from Ron and Nicole got into his Bronco and onto his socks, as if he was supposed to know if he did not do it himself. He didn't know about his wife's diary, as if she would want him to know about it while she kept it in a safety deposit box. And O.J. didn't remember owning the Bruno Magli shoes, saying he hated their style and would never wear them.

For another bit of information, the law firm that took Goldman's case is probably the largest in Santa Monica and perhaps the most prestigious in the Los Angeles area, able to put six of their staff on the case which lasted many months. O.J. was able to afford only two. Yet the script said that it was a David and Goliath scene with Fred Goldman as the David. O.J. did not have that much left after paying the legal fees for the criminal trial, and the costs of the child custody battle O.J. was in during the civil trial.

Finally, the suing parties had the privilege of testifying. The special included practically nothing from the Browns but it contained a great deal of emotional testimony from Goldman.

"Preponderance of evidence" was all that was needed, no matter its quality. There was an enormous amount of emotion included.

And the shoes. . . . . The coincidence of the shoes. In my reading on the criminal trial, there were two ways the gloves and shoes could have been taken from O.J.'s house. One, O.J. was very generous and gave away a lot of the stuff because his various sponsors had overloaded him with their products. Two, O.J. found his home unlocked the night before he left for Chicago. The alarm was not set, either. It is possible someone was able to access his house looking for things they could use to implicate O.J. in a future crime.

Maybe the section of O.J.'s brain that remembers things had been damaged by football injuries. Maybe in his narcissism he could block out things and not realize it. Maybe . . ., we can speculate for two reasons, one to show that there may be other explanations just as plausible as the ones condemning O.J., and two, offer areas to explore in our search for truth. The A & E specials used speculation as truth.

52 It is hard to watch opinions presumed to be facts and people reading O.J.'s mind and diagnosing his character without any feedback from those who might disagree. The A & E channel's offerings about O.J. stressed me a lot. But I did learn some new things and I hope they have also helped you, my reader.

Episode 10 (I) Comments

Before discussing the jury's decision and whether or not the series provided reasonable doubt, a lot of things can be said about "The People V. O. J. Simpson" series. It deserves plaudits for its creativity, quality, and class. And it needs to be commended for inclusion of important details that are not usually present in other tellings of this story.

Having watched Esquire channel's use of the tapes of the actual closing arguments, I was pleased at how the series writers condensed the lengthy, repetitive, and verbose statements of the lawyers at the original trial. They were summarized succinctly and adequately.

The dialogue about resignation between Marcia Clark and Chris Darden probably never happened but the series writers brought out the themes they had been displaying throughout the series, the struggle for justice for battered women and for blacks confronted by police. As was reported at the end, Clark and Darden resigned from the Los Angeles DA's office for the reasons each said in the script. Clark was beat up by the experience but has gone on to not only write but establish a law office of her own concerned about domestic violence. Darden did not have the stomach for the culture of image, politics, and career emphasis in that job.

I also liked the use of the gift of the puppy to O.J. (something I have not heard of before) to be sure he always had a friend. That was a foreshadowing of what O.J. would soon face.

The most difficult to get across was how Robert Kardashian, O.J.'s best friend up to and through the trial, could descend into such doubt about O.J.'s innocence. The writers implied the first doubts came when O.J. flunked the lie detector test.

I think what hurt Bobby the most was something the series writers did not address, that O.J. had left Bobby out of the loop on how the marriage was going. Being together as couples so much, Bobby would have expected O.J. to trust him.

Also not explored was O.J.'s narcissism which disallowed much real feeling toward anything and anyone not in the center of the universe where O.J. thought he sat enthroned.

Between these two dynamics, O.J. alienated Bobby. Bobby finally saw O.J.'s inability to trust a friend with his own personal pain and O.J.'s lack of affect for his wife's death. Bobby had not faced up to those facets of O.J.'s nature.

Add the perception Bobby had that O.J. tested so badly on the lie detector, and one can understand Bobby's withdrawal from O.J.. It was not simply a view that O.J. was guilty. The party after O.J. was released was the final straw, though, according to other writers. It was because there was no remembrance of the loss of Nicole. O.J. was O.J. as if Nicole hadn't existed.

53 No matter how much of a schmuck O.J. may have been, that still did not prove he was guilty. For that we have to turn to the evidence. That will be the subject of the next post.

I really liked the creativity of the series writers, but I honor their quality. Compared to all the other things done about the case that I've seen so far, this one showed genuine depth of research as well as depth of concern for broader issues like domestic violence and police/black confrontations. I've had to add or correct some of the details offered so far, but far fewer than I've felt about all the others except Esquire's rebroadcast of tapes of the trial. The series writers integrated the facts into a dramatic narrative which was very powerful. The details of clothes, cars, office spaces, courtroom were authentic enough that there were few jarring moments as we watched the other TV shows which contained original material and then watched the series on FX.

The series had class. What was jarring was the difference in who advertised each of the different TV efforts. With the others, we saw ads typical of TV channels with small audiences. In this series, the ads were from top corporations.

More significant, the drama did little to make either side be simply good or evil. The bad on both sides was shown but not dwelt on in a way that seemed unbalanced. O.J. was not made out to be an evil caricature and Fred Goldman was not made out to be devilish in his actions. The strengths and weaknesses of all the lawyers were laid out with respect, even when they did not choose the best course of action. We saw the "nightmare" side of the dream team but we saw them stay together to the end. Only Detective Fuhrman seemed to be clearly disliked by the series writers, but I think for very good reason.

The classiest thing I appreciated was closing with pictures of Ron and Nicole and their life dates. The writers did not forget the victims.

Finally, I was grateful to see two very important things, the inclusion important details left out of nearly every other telling of the myth of O.J. Simpson and what happened when the jury went into consideration of their verdict. More on the latter in my next post.

There were three more important details I wish to note.

This last episode included a scene in which a deputy treated O.J. with respect and appreciation. O.J. made friends while he was in jail that lasted seventeen months after his arrest. In fact, the party at O.J.'s included many of those deputies, something missed by the series writers.

The detail of the child custody hearing shown during the concluding post-drama notes is rarely ever added. But as was pointed out in an earlier post, it was going on during the civil trial against O.J.. The drama hinted that the Goldmans might follow up by suing O.J. in civil court. In fact, Fred's first wife had long since begun rolling that ball within weeks of the beginning of the criminal trial. Though the Goldmans got very little once the civil court granted the Browns their share of the proceeds from the sale of O.J.'s mansion and other assets, the Goldman's got their half million out of the sale of O.J.'s book If I Did It.

54 O.J.,Nicole, and their daughter Sydney

The DA was asked after the trial if they would seek out the real killer now. As well shown in this episode, Gil Garcetti, with a look, said O.J. was the killer and he just got off scot free. In the prosecution's mind (and inability to admit mistakes), there was no need for the LAPD to do it. In fact, the reason O.J.'s quest for the real killer failed was because it was blocked by the police. They refused to share any of their evidence or cooperate in any way with O.J.'s investigators, according to Freed and Briggs in Killing Time.

The key argument I encounter whenever I talk about O.J. being innocent is that, as Kardashian said in an early episode, there was no other suspect. As I've indicated, there were other clues but the LAPD put all its eggs in one basket and left the impression there were no other.

I thank the writers, producers, and actors for preparing such a good piece of work. As you will see when I discuss the jury's decision, I believe the writers agreed with them. But they were even-handed enough that those who do not agree with the "not guilty" verdict will be able to argue against my viewpoint and feel completely justified.

It will be up to you to decide if the jury was right and if I am right going beyond their decision by affirming O.J.'s innocence.

Episode 10 (II) The Jury’s Verdict

O.J. didn't do it.

Episode Ten provided specifics for why the jury found reasonable doubt in the case against O.J.. The viewer had to be paying close attention when they were listed in the jury scene. Four important items were noted: there were no bruises on O.J., there was no blood on the floor of the mansion, there was no blood leading to the glove behind Kato's guest house, and

55 the gloves were not inside out. Let us look at each.

One, in the video of the real trial, pictures of O.J.'s face, torso, arms. legs, and hands were shown to the jury at the beginning of the trial during the defense's opening statement and again in the closing statement. It was clear that there were no bruises or other signs of his being in a life-or-death fight with Ron Goldman in the Bundy condo's small garden area. Those pictures were not shown during the series on FX but O.J.'s condition was referred to in passing in the second episode. I already indicated this as a major problem for the prosecution. I noted Detective Lange's observation in the HLN series when he said Goldman put up "a hell of a fight." The quick one liner in Episode Ten that O.J. had no bruises indicates it was a real issue with the jury. They saw no evidence that that fight was with O.J..

Two, there was no blood on the carpet in the mansion. In the real trial, Johnny Cochran's closing argument reminded the jury that at Rockingham none of O.J.'s blood was found anywhere else but the kitchen, the front hall, and the driveway back to the Bronco. That was explained by O.J.'s jamming his finger in the Bronco getting out his cell phone when he hurriedly grabbed for it when getting ready to leave for Chicago.

The jury's observation was that there was no blood anywhere else in the house, not O.J.'s, not Nicole's, nor Ron's. If O.J. slipped into the house at 10:54 pm with bloody clothes on, how come there was not a drop on the carpet toward the stairs up to his bedroom, on the carpeting on the stairs, on the hand rail, on carpeting in the hallway, on the bed or on the carpeting in the bedroom? The prosecution claimed there had been blood in the Bronco so why not where O.J. went to change out of the bloody clothes and showered? And, especially, why was there no blood on the carpeting beneath the one object in the bedroom that had blood on it, a pair of O.J.'s socks?

The prosecution started out with the premise that O.J. was finished killing by 10:15 (the wailing dog timeline) and had time to dispose of the bloody clothes and knife before returning to Rockingham. However, Marcia Clark later claimed that O.J. would have been recognized if he had stopped anywhere on the way home. That allowed her to change the murder timeline to 10:35 when another witness said the dog howling began. But that meant O.J. would be in bloody shoes and clothes when he entered the house. And there was no sign of blood anywhere else in the house. That observation, as scripted, was very brief but it was loaded with the implication that O.J. did not go upstairs after he bloodied his finger getting his cell phone and therefore the socks had to be planted. Clark failed to prove O.J. was ever in bloody clothes in his house and now was saying he could not have dumped them because he would have been recognized. That provides reasonable doubt.

The third observation, there were no drops of blood near or on the way to the bloody glove that Fuhrman found. The jury, as shown in the series, saw no drops of blood leading from the Bronco to the right of the garage and back to the pathway where the glove was found. The drops were only to the left toward the front door. Whose narrative was more likely true, O.J.'s about stubbing and bloodying his finger or Clark's that O.J. dropped the glove on the way to bury it out in the back somewhere?

And fourth, the gloves were not inside out. That was the hardest to comprehend given that the

56 series writers did not show at trial how O.J. took off the gloves that were too tight. We saw it in the real trial video. He was able to slip out of them only by pulling at the fingertips of the gloves one at a time. According to Clark, the left glove fell off during the fight by Ron pulling it off his hand at the "V" near the palm. But if the glove was as tight as that Aris glove was made to be, it would have rolled up O.J.'s hand like a latex glove and come off inside out, in a ball. Both gloves were right side out. There was no way they came off accidentally.

I mentioned in another post that pictures of the crime and evidence were in front of the jurors for months and they had time to notice such things. That was shared by Armanda Cooley in the book Madam Foreman.

Whether or not O.J. faked the fitting of the gloves at trial so they just looked too small, they were made to fit tightly and that meant they would not come off accidentally right side out. Defense said they were planted and that narrative made more sense than Clark's explanation.

While it wasn't mentioned specifically beyond the general phrase, "the prosecution failed to make its case," the blood evidence that the prosecution thought was a mountain was doubted by the jury. The defense was able to show it had been tampered with and all three detectives and the main criminalist implicated themselves in testimony to have done inexplicable things that tainted the credibility of all of it.

Based on the above evidence, the jury had more than reasonable doubt. I believe they proved O.J. could not have been the killer and that the blood and fiber evidence had all been planted. That made the decision very easy for the jury. That's why the verdict and paper work took less than four hours.

Because no further investigation occurred, the LAPD left the world with no answer to the question, "If not O.J., then who?" By refusing to consider anyone else, they let everyone presume O.J. was the only possible perpetrator.

That left no closure for the families of Ron and Nicole. And it let the real killers off.

I think the series shows that there was reasonable doubt. I think that the jury made a legitimate decision based on what the evidence showed. I think they made their decision separate from the emotional pressures of racism and spousal abuse fervor.

Those who watched the series and chose not to pick up on the clues the writers left will not think the jury was fair. The raised fist by the black male jurist for O.J. to see was only a personal sign of support from him to O.J.. It could easily be read as proof of the race card paying off in a case that the jury was solely influenced by racism. Even the clear evidence about Fuhrman could be discounted because of the technicalities around the use of the Fifth Amendment.

I have laid out my arguments that O.J. was innocent of the murders. I think the series writers felt obligated to include grounds for reasonable doubt while focusing on the great and dramatic issues of the times. I appreciate their larger vision. Even if they had tried harder to

57 show his innocence, there are too many unwilling and unable to accept it and would discount it anyway.

That O.J. did not do it will probably have to be shown another time in another way. I'd like to think this set of postings will be persuasive but I know better. Maybe another trial and the conviction of the real killers might settle the matter but even that will not do it for many. Sometimes the myth is stronger than the truth.

Thanks again to FX, their sponsors, and all who put this series together. It was riveting drama and provided a lot of insights about the complexities of American life.

The People v. . . . . What If He Confessed?

My friends that believe O.J. did it wonder if anything could change my mind.

"What if he confessed, admitted that he had done it?" they ask.

My answer is that he'd have to answer several questions because I couldn't believe him based on the evidence. Where did he remove the bloody shoes, and clothes? When did he change out of them? Where did he hide them and the knife? How did he get the coroner to write phony autopsies? How did he hide the dog bites when Kato charged out after him? How did he hide the bruises and abrasions from Ron's "hell of a fight?" How did he get the bloody right hand glove onto the walkway behind Kaelin's guesthouse? How did he get the Bronco back to the Rockingham gate without the limo driver seeing or hearing him drive up?

Give me time and I could come up with more questions.

There are things I take as facts: the police photographer's video from the morning after the murders that showed O.J.'s bedroom to be orderly, immaculate, and no socks on the floor; the autopsies as printed in the book Killing Time are duplicates of the coroner's actual reports; Ron and Nicole were not passive victims but would have fought back; O.J. did not have a mark on him from a fight to the death; the detectives involved in the case presumed O.J. was guilty and planted evidence to implicate him; and there wasn't time for O.J. to do everything required if he were the killer.

I have already explained some of these when I was critiquing the various episodes so let me focus on the video, the autopsies, and the timeline.

During the Esquire playing of segments of the original trial, a video taken of O.J.'s bedroom the first thing on the morning of the 13th was shown to the jury by the defense. The video was taken by the police photographer when he first arrived at Rockingham. The camera panned from the entrance to the bedroom all the way across the room to the headboard of the bed. It showed the room to be completely in order as if the maid had just finished cleaning it, nothing on the floor, not even a ripple on the bedspread, no dark smudges, and no clothes hastily thrown about the room. It showed that after showering, dressing, and packing for the Chicago trip, O.J. took time to make sure the wrinkles on the bedspread had even been smoothed out and everything he might have rejected as unnecessary for the trip was put away.

58 The video shows that O.J. was a neat freak, that he would have taken time to be sure the room was neat, and that there were no bloody socks lying in the middle of the floor. (As pointed out earlier in this blog, the bloody socks appear in another police photo taken around 5 pm.) If it can be shown that the video was taken at a different time such as days before or after the house had been cleaned after the police were done with their investigation, then I would reconsider my opinion.

The autopsies to me are absolutely critical to my argument that O.J. didn't do it. Upon review, the two show three different knife blades, they show stabbing and not slashing as the way the killings occurred, and they show the two victims fought back, causing some real injury to whomever attacked them. If it can be shown that those autopsies were not authentic and the real autopsies provide different information, then I would reconsider my opinion.

There was insufficient time between when O.J. tried to call Paula Barbieri at 10:03 pm on his cell phone and 10:54 when the limo driver saw him go into the mansion. He would have had to kill two energetic, physically trim younger people; fight off a dog; walk slowly to the front at Bundy and also to the back leaving the Bruno Magli bloody tread marks both ways; leave only trace amounts of blood in the Bronco; stop the Bronco to get out of the bloody clothes and change into the dark outfit the limo driver saw at 10:54: go behind the house to accidentally drop one of the murder gloves; hide the knife, clothes, and shoes someplace no one has found them to this day, and bleed profusely on the driveway at Rockingham. From 10:54 to 11:15, O.J. would have had to change out of the dark clothes he wore according to the limo driver's testimony, hang them up, take a shower, get into his travel clothes which included a white shirt, straighten up the bedroom, stop the bleeding of his finger, talk with Kaelin briefly about the bumps on the wall, help load the limo, and leave in the limo by 11:15.

Let's look at the things a little more closely. It would take about five minutes each way to go from Bundy to Rockingham. It takes about ten minutes to change from one set of clothes and shoes to another. That leaves about 31 minutes to stab to death two active people fighting back; drop the bloody glove behind Kaelin's guest house; hide the bloody clothes, shoes and weapon(s) so that they have never been found. And that is presuming a killing time of 10:15. It also presumes that everything goes right like all the stop lights being green, no one interrupts him, the shoes laces not snaggling, and the cuffs not hanging up on hands or feet, etc.

If the killing time is 10:35, that means O.J. would have had five minutes to get back to Rockingham and 14 minutes to do the rest, with the same potential for disruptions. If he did not stop to change and hide the weapon et al, he would have had to do those at Rockingham between 10:54 and joining Kaelin in the kitchen at 11:05 to look for the flashlight before he could get the suitcase and clubs into the limo. Even my friends who claim to take a two minute shower would not have been able to disrobe, shower, dress, clean up his bedroom, get rid of the bloody stuff, drop the glove out back, stop the finger's bleeding, etc. and leave by 11:15.

If it can be shown how O.J. could have done all that in either time frame, and still get out to the limo immaculately dressed for the Chicago trip, then I would reconsider my opinion.

59 I do not think I set too high a bar here. I can be proven wrong. But please bring proof on those three points. You too, O.J., if you want to confess.

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