Murder in Brentwood (31 page)

Mistakes by the investigating team and prosecution were the only case the defense had. At the beginning of the trial, the defense investigators were supposed to find out who really killed Ron and Nicole. But aside from a few crackpot witnesses and some vague theories about Colombian “neckties,” they never came up with one piece of evidence pointing to anyone other than their client. You’d think that with all that manpower they could at least have produced something, but instead, the investigators focused solely on attacking the prosecution’s witnesses. And since I had done nothing wrong during the investigation, and had discovered a great deal of incriminating evidence, the defense played the race card against me.

This country has become so hypersensitive to race that we ignore the facts: antisocial behavior, crime, and immoral acts are not color coded. To either judge or disregard peoples behavior because of their race is the biggest crime our society can commit.

That’s exactly what the defense did. They took advantage of racial sensitivities and exploited this country’s horrible legacy of injustice toward black people. They had no defense other than their client’s skin color. If that isn’t racism, I don’t know what is.

Chapter 23 THE TAPES

They’re important, and we know you’re going to get them. We just want the opportunity to try and sell them first.

LAURA HART MCKINNEY’S ATTORNEY, MATTHEW SCHWARTZ, IN A CONVERSATION WITH JOHNNIE COCHRAN AND ROBERT SHAPIRO

I MET LAURA HART at an outdoor cafe in Westwood in 1985. She was sitting at a table drinking coffee and working on what appeared to be a small typewriter. Looking closer, I could see that it was a computer. I had heard about laptop computers but had never seen one, so I walked over and asked her about it. She told me a little about the machine and that she was a writer.

Her interest was obvious when I told her I was a police officer. Somewhat jokingly, I told her that she should write something really good about policework, not like all the phony stuff you see on television. She said that she had always wanted to do a screenplay based on a police story. Naturally, I was interested; I told her that I had some ideas for a really good screenplay. I .aura seemed intrigued, and we exchanged phone numbers.

We met a couple <>(‘ limes in discuss ideas for a screenplay.

I mentioned how the department had taken a tongue-in-cheek joke about a group called “Men Against Women” and turned it into a serious investigation. She was interested in the concept, and I started fleshing out ideas based on a fictional group that made females’ lives in the department a living hell. I envisioned the film with a female role-model hero, several subplots, and lots of down and dirty action. Laura was interested in the story I began to spin.

Meeting at her apartment in Santa Monica, we began laying out the goals of the screenplay. During these sessions we also socialized, and ultimately we became involved in a casual sexual relationship. We were both single, but neither one of us wanted to carry the relationship further, or so it seemed.

Laura sometimes sent me letters, which I guess could be described as love letters. She bought me gifts once in a while, but I never reciprocated. I just didn’t feel the same way.

Early into the screenplay project, I discovered that Laura was clueless when it came to policework, or the realities of violence and life on the street. She was extremely naive and slightly eccentric.

Agreeing that we needed hard-hitting action and tough characters, we began a series of interviews where I laid out police procedures, stories, characters, and situations. These were all on tape. I let my imagination run wild. Throughout the interviews, I was creating fictional situations, sometimes based loosely on true incidents. Characters were developed from composites of many people, from police management down to the lowest criminals. Dialogue in the screenplay was a mix of conversations I remembered, and others that were imaginary.

When I was making up dialogue, I spoke in the first person. But these weren’t my own words, my own experiences, or my own sentiments. They were the words of fictional characters I had created based on my imagination and experience. I knew I had to exaggerate things to make the screenplay dramatic and commercially appealing. I knew enough about Hollywood to understand that producers didn’t want a nice, warm and fuzzy movie about good cops, but something dark and hard-edged. And since Laura and I sometimes drank wine while we had our recorded conversations, occasionally I got a little carried away. As I mentioned, Laura was extremely innocent, and I got a charge out of shocking her with some of the things that I said and making her laugh with others.

The bulk of these tapes were made during a period of three to four months. The purpose of the tapes was twofold: to educate Laura about the sinister side of the world, about which she knew nothing, and to create characters and action she might use in a screenplay. Laura used the tapes and transcripts as a library she could refer to while writing the script.

Laura always emphasized that unless you are a sought-after writer, there isn’t much money in screenplays. Although I would be paid if the screenplay sold, Laura told me that the way for me to make real money would be as a technical adviser. I tried to make myself unique and indispensable as a source of police street smarts.

Writing these memories down on

[F. Lee Bailey asked me if I had ever used the “N” word in addressing a person. I could truthfully answer that I had not.]

paper, I can see the misguided, get-rich-quick mentality I had then. In hindsight, I can see how these attitudes, combined with my sexual relationship with the writer, led me to try to impress or shock her.

Laura and I enjoyed each other’s company, but after several months we both realized that we didn’t have much in common outside of the project. So, without arguments or guilt, we simply ended the romance, but remained friends and continued to work on the project.

As Laura wrote the screenplay, she would send manuscripts to me in the mail or I would pick them up, then review them, make corrections or suggestions, and return the manuscripts to her. It was obvious that we were working on a fictional screenplay, and not an autobiography or the true story of my police career.

As months turned into years, my interest in the screenplay diminished. Laura moved to North Carolina, married, took a new job, and had children. I was glad she had found someone who made her happy.

My life ran the same path. I married, bought a house, started a family, and worked extra jobs to pay the bills. I always thought Laura was naive about the street, but I guess I was equally naive about Hollywood. Maybe the screenplay wasn’t good enough or perhaps the timing wasn’t right. For whatever reason, I eventually accepted that it probably would never sell. Still, Laura and I never really gave up on the project. Periodically, she flew to Los Angeles to have lunch with a producer. Laura always wanted me to attend these meetings because she felt I could help sell it. In others words, I was on stage. Whether it was necessary or not, I gave them the Dirty Harry meets Attila the Hun routine. If the screenplay ever sold, I wanted to be technical adviser on the project. I needed to impress these people as someone they could not do without.

After the Simpson arrest and preliminary hearing, Laura and I met once at my house. She brought her two children and met my wife and kids. We talked about a last-ditch effort to sell the screenplay now that I was, temporarily at least, a minor celebrity. Even at this late date, I never thought about the tapes having an impact on the trial or any negative reflection on me. We were doing background for a fictional screenplay. I didn’t think we had done anything wrong.

At one point during the trial, we had a meeting in Westwood with Laura arid someone else whom I believe was connected in some way to actor Fred Dryer. Laura’s agent had previously contacted Fred Dryers people and given them the screenplay to read. They seemed interested in it, and wanted me to meet with Fred Dryer. I didn’t think this was a good idea, but said I’d talk with one of his representatives.

The lunch meeting took place at Alice’s Restaurant in Westwood Village. We discussed the screenplay and Laura taped the conversation, as she always did, with her mini tape recorder in plain view. Nothing came of the meeting, and the screenplay wasn’t sold.

Or was it?

When I testified in the Superior Court trial, I did not think about the tapes. Bailey asked me if I had ever used the “N” word in addressing a person. I could truthfully answer that I had not. I never thought that screenplay notes and character dialogue could be misrepresented as my own words. I hadn’t told Marcia about the tapes simply because I didn’t remember them at first, and when I did, I didn’t think they were at all relevant to the case.

But when the tapes became public, I worried. I had seen how the defense and the media had already twisted previous statements of mine. While I couldn’t remember exactly what I had said on those dozens of hours of tapes, I was sure that the defense would find a way to make the tapes an issue as part of their strategy to turn the trial of O.J. Simpson into a trial about race and about me.

While I was still in Los Angeles and about to retire from the department, the custody of the tapes was being fought over in a North Carolina court. During this hearing, Johnnie Cochran argued his case in the court of public opinion as well as the court of law. Still, he was defeated. On Friday, July 28, Judge William Z. Wood ruled that I had been a technical adviser on a work of fiction and therefore the tapes were not material to the Simpson case. The defense team quickly appealed, and Cochran’s strategy eventually paid off. The North Carolina Court of Appeals, bowing to public pressure and curiosity about the tapes, overturned Judge Wood’s ruling.

While the tapes were still in court action in North Carolina, I called Laura from my attorneys home, and pleaded with her to destroy the tapes. “Nobody will believe what we were trying to do,” I said. “These will destroy me. This has nothing to do with this trial about a murderer.”

Laura wouldn’t destroy the tapes. I asked her as a friend, but she said that her attorney, Matthew Schwartz, told her that the tapes were about to become evidence and she couldn’t legally do anything to them.

In his book, Lawrence Schiller reports the rumor that Laura feared I’d kill her over the tapes. I sincerely doubt that Laura felt that way. Even when I knew she was giving the tapes up, we never had a cross word, and we still haven’t. But the rumors helped the defense highlight the supposed importance of the tapes.

At first I thought any use of the tapes would be seen as just one more desperate measure by a defense team that was quickly running out of options. As mistake-ridden as the investigation and prosecution had been, the evidence against Simpson remained irrefutable. Unfortunately, the irrefutable evidence was about to be overshadowed by the completely irrelevant tapes.

Anthony Petheano, my private investigator, called me in Sandpoint to tell me that Laura’s attorney had been trying to sell the tapes to the tabloids for two months, asking a six-figure fee. I knew Petheano had accurate information, but I didn’t want to believe a trusted friend like Laura would sell me out for money.

Petheano’s discovery reminded me that Laura’s attorney had requested that we turn our verbal agreement about the screenplay into a written contract, because after the trial there might be renewed interest in the script, and we should have our agreement in writing. We went back and forth several times on the wording of the contract and eventually both signed a document. This occurred while Simpson’s attorneys were appealing the lower court ruling in North Carolina. I can see now that Laura and her attorney wanted a written agreement because they were preparing to sell the tapes.

Whether the tapes were sold or not, they were soon in the hands of the defense team, who leaked the most shocking and offensive segments almost immediately. Of course the excerpts were never put into context. The news reports mentioned that these were interviews with an aspiring screenwriter, but they also treated my tall tales as if they were personal memoirs, conveniently forgetting that we were trying to write a screenplay, not an autobiography. Hearing my ugly words and not knowing the context, the public was understandably outraged.

It’s easy to think that if people get to know the real you, they’d understand and sympathize. No doubt everyone feels that way. But I was a lead witness in a high-profile murder trial that just about everyone in the country was following on a daily basis. Ever since they realized that I had found the most crucial piece of evidence and had not made any mistakes in my investigation, the defense team tried to impeach me by making my personal character an issue. If they hadn’t found the tapes or my disability claim, they would have made an issue out of something-anything-else. Unfortunately, I had inadvertently provided the bullets.

The legal wrangle over the tapes was far from over, since Ito still had to rule on their admissibility. And now my problems with Margaret York would once again become an issue, because Laura had been interested in females in the department, and I therefore said a few things about York. Since I thought the conversation would be confidential, and only used for the screenplay, I not only spoke my mind, but vented. The result was not pretty.

Now the tapes were in front of York’s husband. Since the beginning, both the prosecution and the defense could have derailed the trial by challenging York’s declaration to Judge Rappe, which could have been contradicted by numerous witnesses who had already made public statements contradicting her statements. But the prosecution didn’t want to risk a retrial. And the defense figured that it was more useful not to press the issue, but rather simply to remind Ito of the power they held.

Before Ito heard the tapes or read any excerpts, he called an in-camera hearing to discuss the possibility of his wife’s becoming a material witness.

In Ito’s chambers, Cochran told the judge, “This is a very delicate issue.... It is going to have to do with credibility, because you know, her declaration-this guy, unless he is