Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (19 page)

Very quietly, as the day and the phone calls and the news reports wore on, we realized she had been stabbed. All of a sudden my head was reeling, because being stabbed, repeatedly and angrily and brutally, is much different than being shot.

The police came to my house and started asking us questions, because my voice and my messages were on Nicole’s answering machine, since we were supposed to have lunch at noon on the day after her murder. The police knew about our plans and wanted to question me immediately to find out what our meeting was all about. I couldn’t give them much information, because Nicole had left me a pretty cryptic message about why she had wanted to have lunch. She needed to talk to me and wanted it to be very private, just her and me, and it had to be out of her house. She had stressed that
nobody
could be around, and my house was full of people, and her house was full of people, which was why she wanted to meet at a restaurant where we could wear our sweats, be alone, and hopefully be anonymous.

Later on the day after the murder, Nicole’s sister Denise called me.

“It’s really important we talk,” she said. “I need to know what you know.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant.

“Nicole said she was going to see you yesterday,” she said.

“No, we made it for lunch today because I couldn’t go yesterday,” I said.

“Well, she had something really important to talk to you about,” she said. “She wanted to show you the pictures.”

“What pictures?”

“The pictures in her safety-deposit box.”

“What are you talking about?”

Denise explained that Nicole had been beaten up by O.J., and she had been keeping this physical proof in the form of photographs and, it would turn out, other evidence, in which she had documented seventeen years of abuse. Nicole really wanted someone close to her to know what was going on, so that somebody—namely me—could be a witness. I could tell from my conversation with Denise that she had talked to Nicole about sharing the photographs with me. Apparently, Nicole thought this was a good idea. Denise had seen the pictures and she was hoping I had seen them too.

“Oh my God! It’s too late! It’s too late!” I cried.

The realization that she had wanted to confide in me like that hit so hard. Right before I was divorced, O.J. and Nicole had asked Robert and me to be Justin’s godparents. I knew that Nicole looked up to me a little bit; I felt she thought that I was somebody in her life who was stable, somebody who went to church and loved God. Somebody who she could depend on. Somebody with four kids who was a good mom. She apparently felt like she could finally tell me what was going on behind closed doors with her and O.J.

And I let her down.

The news from Denise devastated me. I felt that if Nicole and I had talked on the day when she wanted me to meet her, things might have been different. I’ll never be able to change what happened
that night when she went to Sydney’s recital and then went to dinner with her family and then went home to be so brutally murdered. But at least I would have known the truth, and I would have learned it firsthand from her. Maybe I could have at least been more helpful to the prosecution during the trial.

In the end, Nicole wasn’t able to tell anybody about the abuse she had suffered. She took those pictures of her battered and bruised face and neck and put them in that safety-deposit box for a reason, and thank God she did. They would turn out to be very helpful, especially in the civil trial against O.J.

Still, it haunts me that she wasn’t able to tell me about the pictures—and that I wasn’t there to allow her to tell me. One thing I learned from this horrendous experience is something I would tell anybody going through something like this: Act on your feelings and share your thoughts rather than hold back, even if it means crossing a privacy line. When you feel like something is really wrong, it’s usually wrong. Follow your instincts; you might just change someone’s life.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Backstage at the Trial of the Century

W
e were beginning to see the trial of the century take shape, with talk of evidence, attorneys, gossip, and innuendo. It was “a modern tragedy and drama of Shakespearean proportions being played out live on television,” as Tom Brokaw described the trial on NBC. Soon, everything was Nicole and O.J. all the time, 24/7. If I turned on the television, it was all I saw. If I stepped outside, there were packs of paparazzi in front of our house.

The media figured out quickly who Nicole’s friends were. The most famous newscasters and journalists in the world were calling us for interviews, and people were sitting in front of our house, screaming out questions to us whenever we left. We were followed everywhere. It was a media frenzy.

That time was incredibly horrible for multiple reasons, one of which was that my ex-husband was in the O.J. camp and I was in the Nicole camp, and my kids were stuck in the middle. My kids were old enough, by this point, to know what was going on. Kourtney was fifteen when Nicole was killed, Kim was fourteen, and Khloé was ten. They went from being teenagers to young adults overnight as a result of this murder and the ensuing trial. This was Uncle O.J. and Auntie Nicole. These were people they had known their entire lives. When Kourtney was born, O.J. came to the hospital the next morning to see her. O.J. was always part of our life. Now they were hearing horrible stories about Nicole and horrible stories about O.J., and they were devastated. I decided that I would have a long talk with Robert about doing what was best for the kids. He agreed.

“We have to try to keep it together for the kids,” he said.

I agreed, but soon things got difficult. As the two sides were clearly drawn in the sand with a big white line, it became tougher for me to see Robert’s point of view. It became tough for me to be nice to him. Because I couldn’t understand in a million years how Robert couldn’t see what I was seeing, how he didn’t seem to even bother to look at the evidence.

Of course, O.J. Simpson as a murder suspect was tough for most people to grasp. It was just unbelievable to anybody that O.J. Simpson—everybody’s hero, the all-American athlete sprinting through the airport in the Hertz commercials, the wholesome hero selling Dingo boots, the smart sportscaster at all the football games and the Olympics, the superstar whom everybody had put up on this pedestal—could have committed capital murder.

I knew him as a bigger-than-life, amazing personality. A guy who could have a conversation with anybody. Someone outgoing and effervescent and savvy and seductive and manipulative and charismatic. Someone who loved to talk and was so good with
people and great at capturing their attention. Someone who could have said anything and you would believe him because he was so captivating. He had this incredible, magnetic personality. That’s why he was so good at being a spokesperson for different companies: people
wanted
to be around him. To quote a
Newsweek
story that was published just after the murders:

People loved O.J., and, I would soon discover, people
believed
O.J.

O.J. told Robert that he didn’t kill Nicole. O.J. told him that it was a horrible thing that had happened to Nicole. O.J. told Robert that he didn’t know who had killed Nicole, but that it for sure wasn’t him. Robert really wanted to believe the best of O.J. He was somebody he had known for most of his life.

So Robert believed O.J.’s story that he was innocent.

I didn’t believe O.J., not for a second.

T
he morning after the murder, the police dusted Nicole’s house for prints and dissected and searched the front lawn, the back garage,
and everywhere else, over and over again. The whole process was captured on television, because the news crews were parked across the street from Nicole’s town house, which faced the street. They captured every pathetic moment of the police gathering their evidence, which apparently didn’t amount to much.

Watching all of this on television, I called up my dear friend and Nicole’s neighbor Ron Hardy and told him, “Ron, get over there quick.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I am watching TV, and the police are done with their investigation,” I said. “The police have taken down the yellow caution tape, and nobody has washed Nicole’s blood off of the steps.

“I’m sitting here watching this, and I can’t take it anymore. Go over there and wash the blood off the steps!”

Again, I would have done it myself. Again, the media still had us surrounded.

“Okay, okay, I’m on my way,” said Ron.

Today, I can’t believe I asked him to do this. I really wasn’t thinking clearly about his feelings, and I still feel badly about that. How could I have asked him to go wash someone’s blood off the stairs? I just blurted it out: “Go over there and wash the blood off the steps!”

And, God bless him, he did it.

Like everyone else, I watched what happened next on television. I watched Ron Hardy drive up to Nicole’s town house. I watched him park in the back alley and come out onto the front steps with a garden hose, where he started washing the steps. It was so surreal and horrific and devastating, as was everything.

T
he next day, I was driving in Brentwood with my dear friend Cici, Robert’s first cousin. We were at a stoplight on San Vicente in
Brentwood when we turned and found ourselves sitting in traffic next to Robert’s car, and in the passenger seat was O.J. Simpson.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Cici cried out.

We looked at the two of them and they looked at the two of us, said nothing, and then just drove off.

We couldn’t believe it. I mean, if one of your best friends had lost his wife to a terrible tragedy the day before and you hadn’t talked to your friend yet, wouldn’t you expect him to pull the car over and jump out and hug you? But O.J. and Robert were just cold. They didn’t speak. They didn’t smile. They didn’t say a word. They just looked over at us as if we were two strangers and drove off. Cici and I were like, “What the hell is going on?” It was such a crazy moment that I would tell the prosecutor, Marcia Clark, about it during the trial.

That night I called Robert.

“What the hell was that all about?” I asked, meaning the silent treatment on the street.

“O.J. was really upset because we had to go to the airport to get his golf clubs,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“Well, Kris, he was at a golf tournament,” Robert said, referring to O.J.’s supposed whereabouts in Chicago the day after the murder. “When the police came and took him to the airport and he got on the plane, his golf clubs didn’t make it. They just arrived today.”

I thought that sounded suspicious in any situation, especially on the day after O.J.’s wife had been brutally stabbed to death in her front yard.

“So you’re trying to tell me that you guys needed to go to the airport to get golf clubs from the airline when we all know that the airline will deliver them to your house?” I asked Robert.

“Kris, he really needed his golf clubs,” Robert said.

“His wife is fucking dead!” I screamed. “Why did O.J. need his golf clubs?”

The rumor that would soon circulate was that the murder weapon was in O.J.’s golf bag, a knife hidden among the metal clubs so that it wouldn’t set off security alarms. If he had the knife in the golf bag, it would make total sense that O.J. and Robert
had
to drive to LAX to personally retrieve the bag. I’ve thought back to that moment beside them in the car on San Vicente many times since—about how odd and crazy it was for us to run into them on their way home from picking up these golf clubs.

The golf clubs were in the trunk of Robert’s car that day. I’m not sure how he justified in his mind that this man needed to get his golf clubs from the airport himself. O.J. Simpson did not need to go to the airport himself. He had enough people to go to the airport for him. The airline would have sent the golf bag back to the house. That’s what made no sense whatsoever.

Much later, Robert told me that one thing stood out to him about O.J. after the murders. It came to him soon after he took him to pick his golf clubs up at the airport. Robert and O.J. went back to Rockingham with the clubs, but the media were swarming around O.J.’s house. It was impossible for him to get into the house with those golf clubs, so they drove to Robert’s house. They left the golf clubs in the garage there.

According to Robert, that night or shortly thereafter, O.J. said that he wanted to go for a walk, and he needed to go by himself. He said he needed to go “talk to Nicole.” So he went on this really long walk in the dark in Robert’s neighborhood in Encino, where Robert had leased a house. I’ll always wonder what O.J. did on that walk. Did he take the knife out of the golf bag and throw it into a canyon or in somebody’s trash can? That still haunts me.

Robert lived in Encino with his girlfriend, Denice. Things were going really well for Robert and Denice when all this happened.
O.J. was living in the house on Rockingham, where the media constantly hounded him that day after the murder. The media could not figure out how he kept getting in and out of his house without seeing him. I knew he was coming and going through the tennis court in the backyard that connected to a neighbor’s property. I wanted to scream at the television:
You can’t see him go in and out because he’s going out from behind his house! Figure it out, people!