Kris Jenner . . . And All Things Kardashian (20 page)

Finally, O.J. obviously couldn’t take the pressure of sneaking in and out of his own house anymore. A few days after the murder, he moved into Robert’s house in Encino. One day, I went over to Robert’s to pick up my kids. I walked through the front door expecting to find everyone there. But the house was . . . empty. There was absolutely nobody home. No Robert. No Denice. No O.J. No kids.

One thought consumed me:
Search the place!
I didn’t know if I had ten minutes, I didn’t know if I had one minute. But however long I had, I wasn’t going to waste it standing in the hallway. So I ran up to the room where O.J. was staying, and there was his damn Louis Vuitton garment bag. I went through it with a fine-tooth comb, trying to satisfy my own curiosity, my own doubts. If there was a piece of incriminating evidence anywhere, I was determined to find it and turn it over to the prosecution. It was torturing me that there had to be
something
somewhere, and I was determined to find it. There was nothing in the Louis Vuitton bag. So I began ransacking the entire room. I looked through every closet. Searched through every drawer. I went through all of O.J.’s stuff, but I didn’t find much of anything.

Then I heard a car pull up outside: Robert and the kids. I ran downstairs and was standing nonchalantly in the entrance hall when they walked in. I took the kids and went home, the whole time just thinking,
What the hell is going on?

The next time I saw Robert, a day or two later, I asked him, point-blank, “Where’s the golf bag?”

“In my garage,” he said.

“Didn’t you look through it?” I scolded him.

“No,” was all he said.

I
forced myself to stay strong for my kids. I had to be an example to them while they tried to make sense of this whole situation. Their dad seemed to be siding with O.J., and their mom was obviously siding with Nicole’s family.

A few days after the murder, Nicole’s mom, Judi, called me, asking Bruce and me to go over to Nicole’s town house. Sydney and Justin, O.J. and Nicole’s kids, were staying with Judi and her husband, Lou. She wanted them to have all their belongings with them, because she felt that that would help make the transition easier for them. I thought it was remarkable of Judi to even think of that. She is so caring, and she’s such a good mom. She just wanted to be a good grandmother and make sure these kids didn’t have any more pain than they already had.

“I know Bruce has a trailer,” she said. “Do you think that you could go over and pick up all of Sydney and Justin’s belongings and furniture from their rooms and get it down here to us?”

“Of course,” I said.

Bruce and I hooked the trailer to the back of our truck and drove over to Nicole’s house. I was so apprehensive about walking into her town house, which was once filled with her beauty, grace, and laughter and was now filled with death. I was freaked out, devastated, and, okay, scared. I had helped Nicole move into that town house. I had helped her unpack and put her clothes in the closets. I had helped her get everything organized. She was so happy to be there, to be on her own, and to have her independence. It was to
be the home for her children, whom she loved so much, and she just wanted to make it amazing for them.

We pulled up to the back of the town house, and I retrieved the key and a garage remote where Judi had told me to get them. When we walked inside, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. This beautiful town house, with its beautiful white walls, was covered in gray-black soot, because the police had fingerprinted the entire house. I had never been to a crime scene before. I had never seen a house that had been fingerprinted, a home where police had searched for evidence. The town house was destroyed and with it, the life that Nicole had created there for her and her two children. She had made the place so special, so beautiful, so perfect in every way, and here was her pride and joy, ransacked and destroyed and blackened, fingerprint dust everywhere.

Poor Bruce didn’t know what to do because I was crying, crying, crying. We walked upstairs and into those kids’ rooms, and it just was devastating anguish to see the bedrooms and their little clothes that they had worn the night of the murder, which had occurred while they were asleep in these very bedrooms. Sydney’s ballet recital costume was still lying on her bed, kind of hanging there, sort of half on the floor and half on the bed. These two little precious children’s lives had changed forever in that instant, but their bedrooms were as if they had been frozen in time, even though it had been several days since the murder.

Sydney’s and Justin’s little toys were in their rooms, along with all of their personal treasures. Nicole had made sure they had everything that they ever wanted and needed. She just loved those kids so much and was so proud of them. Their rooms reflected that: their little school things and their artwork and their clothing were all beautiful and perfectly arranged.

Sydney’s dance recital outfit on the bed was significant because so much of the talk by the D.A. over the last several days had been
about what went on at that recital the night Nicole was killed. Remember, O.J. showed up at the recital but didn’t sit with Nicole and wasn’t invited to dinner afterward. This became a big focus of the investigation, and people around the world were talking about it. So to walk into the room and see that costume was profound.

Bruce and I had brought boxes and packing materials, and Ron Hardy came over to help us pack. Meanwhile, the television news crews were multiplying out front. They had of course gotten wind that we were there. I could hear the helicopters hovering over the house. We all started loading up the trailer while the reporters in the helicopters watched the house from above. We took apart the kids’ beds and loaded their mattresses, belongings, artwork, and clothing—every single thing in those bedrooms—into the trailer.

As we were removing Sydney’s bed and putting the pieces of it in the trailer, I looked at one of the bedposts and saw what I thought was blood. I panicked.

“Oh my God, Bruce, look at this!” I screamed.

“Oh my God, that is blood,” Bruce said.

I immediately called Marcia Clark. Sydney’s headboard was the last thing to go in the trailer, so the entire trailer was ready to go, and we were going to drive to Judi and Lou’s house and immediately set up the kids’ rooms.

“You cannot take that bed down to Lou and Judi’s,” Marcia Clark told me. “It has to go into evidence.”

“Evidence?!” I asked.

“Absolutely,” said Marcia. “Where is it?”

“It’s in the trailer!” I said.

“Go park the trailer somewhere, and I’m going to send my forensic specialists to take a look at it,” she said.

By then, the helicopters were all over us. We had to get out of there. We drove off, but instead of going down to Lou and Judi’s house, we went to my house. We parked the trailer in the garage,
detached it from the car, and locked it up and waited for Marcia’s specialists to get there. When they arrived, they did some preliminary tests on this “bloodstain” and determined right there on the spot that it was red Jell-O.

That was the only thing that made us laugh.

Once the investigators determined that there was Jell-O, not blood, on Sydney’s bedpost, we got back in the car and drove all the stuff down to Lou and Judi’s house. We unloaded everything, and when we were done and back in our home, I kept thinking of Nicole and her town house on South Bundy. Being in that abandoned house was just so sad and so devastating. It had once been so full of life and joy and music and laughter and happiness. Now it just held silence and sadness, destruction and tragedy. I also noticed that there was sort of a smell coming out of the kitchen. It had been a couple of days since the murder, and somebody had opened up the refrigerator and didn’t close it back all the way. It was creepy, and the kitchen was a mess because of the fingerprints. All I could think was that I wanted to get back over there and clean it up.

I asked Nicole’s mom if I could go back the next day and clean out the refrigerator and pick up the mail for her. She said okay. So I did that, and it was a hard thing to do, but it gave me a way to take care of things for Nicole one last time.

T
he funeral was on June 16. It was held at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church on Sunset Boulevard in Brentwood.

It was one of the saddest and strangest days ever. Every funeral is sad, but I’ve never been to one where someone died so suddenly and so tragically. Funerals are supposed to be an ending and have some sense of closure. This was anything but. This was only the beginning of a crazy ride that we were all embarking upon.

As part of the funeral procession, Bruce and I were driven up to the church in a limousine along with a few other friends. I remember arriving and thinking what a horrible reason to be at St. Martin of Tours, which was also the elementary school my son, Rob, and daughter Khloé had attended. I was used to bringing them to school and dropping them off. Now here I was pulling into the same parking lot to pay my last respects to a friend. The media weren’t allowed inside but reporters and TV news crews were everywhere: on the street outside the gates of the church and flying above in helicopters. The
Los Angeles Times
described A. C. Cowlings as a “gatekeeper” who “waved through familiar cars, briefly questioned some arrivals, and greeted most guests with warm hugs.” I just remember going through the motions and trying to hold it together.

I saw O.J. almost immediately, standing in front of the church with his older children as well as Sydney and Justin. Everyone was standing together but not speaking to each other at all. In the middle of the group was Kato Kaelin. All I could do was wonder what he really knew. I knew Kato because he was friends with Nicole before he became friends with O.J. I had met Kato through Nicole when she had a party to celebrate her move to the house she rented on Gretna Green Way.

According to his later testimony, when Kato first visited Nicole on Gretna Green Way—apparently at the same housewarming party I attended—he asked Nicole who lived out back. “Nobody,” she said. “Could I?” he asked. “You have to clean it out,” she said. “Great,” he said, and that was how he began his journey as her tenant.

I thought he was nice, and Nicole apparently thought it was nice to have a guy living on the property, so I thought it was a good idea. She felt safer with him there, and she had two small children.

Later, he changed sides and started living with O.J. Nicole was upset about that. Kato knew Nicole and O.J. were having problems, and O.J. wanted to keep Kato close to him because he thought Kato could help him with Nicole somehow. So O.J. paid Kato a salary and had Kato live in his guesthouse. Kato had the best deal in the world.

We all quickly headed inside to escape the noise of the helicopters and commotion from the never-ending media gathering at the gate. There were about two hundred people in the church. During the service, Kato happened to be sitting right in front of me. But he never said a word, not to me or anyone else. Kato, in fact, barely said hello. I couldn’t help but notice that no one on O.J.’s side was friendly or talking to anyone else at the funeral. It was the oddest, most uncomfortable, surreal, creepiest, most horrendous experience to be at a funeral with people who seemed to know more than they were saying.

I just had the overwhelming feeling,
I can’t wait for this to be over.

I looked over at Nicole’s parents, Judi and Lou, and tried to imagine their devastation, which was impossible to do. Everyone was overwhelmed with grief. Again, I felt the urge to want the funeral to be over with so that we could find out what really happened to Nicole. But I tried my best to suppress that urge and remember that this was a day just for Nicole and nothing else, and she deserved that. She deserved to have everyone there whom she loved. She didn’t deserve the mystery that surrounded her death to overshadow this commemoration of her life. So I just really tried to be there for Nicole and only Nicole, to pray for her and love her for that one last moment. I so wanted to be close to her and remember her as that laughing, loving, generous, gorgeous young woman, and not a murder victim whose blood had to be washed off the front steps of her home.

Once the funeral began, I was stunned at the poise and the courage of Nicole’s mother and sisters who were actually able to stand before the crowd and speak calmly and eloquently about their beloved Nicole. I sat there thinking how heartbroken they must have been.

Other than that, I was in a fog and cannot remember some details. Please allow me to quote the
Los Angeles Times
: