Murder in Brentwood (34 page)

His advice to the jury was even worse than Judge Ito’s comments about my taking the Fifth.

“I am going to ask you to consider the fact of his misstatements or lies or untruths, however you want to term it, because you have to consider that. That’s the law. You have to consider everything Fuhrman said on the witness stand because that’s evidence in this case. And I want you to consider it. I want you to consider all the evidence. So don’t think that I’m saying, hey, just overlook it, just overlook what he said, just overlook the fact that he lied about having used that slur in the past ten years. But I’m asking you to put it in proper perspective. You decide what it’s worth. You decide what it means. If it helps you in assessing his credibility-and it should, or his lack of credibility, I don’t know-then you use it.”

Chris assumed that because I took the Fifth I must have been lying. Then he tells the jury to use that in assessing my credibility (which Chris himself doesn’t have much confidence in) despite the fact that it had no bearing on the rest of my testimony or any of the other evidence.

Chris apologized repeatedly for prosecuting Simpson, and constantly offered the jury an excuse for voting to acquit. “Nobody wants to do anything to this man,” he said.

We don’t want to do anything to this man? Sure we do; he’s a murderer. We want to put him away for the rest of his life. Is Darden saying that even though he is supposed to be prosecuting Simpson for murder, he doesn’t want to do anything to him? Is Darden speaking for himself, or for the prosecution team? What about the victims’ families, who were sitting right behind him-didn’t they want to do something to Simpson? What about the people of California? If Chris didn’t want to put Simpson in prison for the rest of his life, what was he doing prosecuting him? It was almost as if Chris knew what the verdict would be, so he was making a disclaimer.

The jury could have made the right decision had they been led by strong advocates for the prosecution. But Chris Darden kept giving them reasons to vote for acquittal. At one point, he said to the jury, “Whatever you do, the decision is yours, and I’m glad it’s not mine.” If Chris felt that way, why didn’t he just sit down and shut up? He had no business asking the jury to make a decision that he himself admitted he didn’t have the courage to make.

With a different set of prosecutors, perhaps the jury would have voted for a conviction. They might have been able to see behind the smokescreen of race. But Chris Darden admitted he didn’t have the moral depth to sit on a jury in a case where race could possibly be an issue. And his obsession with race surfaced many times during his summation. Consider his reference to black police photographer Willie Ford: “You heard that brother testify. Did he look like a co-conspirator to you?” Ford was also referred to by Johnnie Cochran, who said that the photographer was the only law enforcement professional not involved in the conspiracy.

Chris and Marcia both told the jury that Simpson is innocent until proven guilty. But Mark Fuhrman is guilty without a trial or even a formal charge against him. We’re going to strip him of his LAPD title, the respect he got from this case, and his twenty-year career. Then we’re going dig a deep hole and throw him into it. If he isn’t guilty, so what? We’re finished with him. He got us here. Now we’re trying to use him to get us out.

As they did throughout the trial, Marcia and Chris tried to do too much, but in the end, they didn’t do nearly enough. Marcia kept getting bogged down in details of evidence that the jury had already seen. She tried to convince the jury that she knew what was going on inside Simpson’s head the night of the murders.

In a murder trial where you don’t have an eyewitness and the suspect does not confess, the only thing you have to prove is that he is the only person who did or could have committed the crime. The prosecution in this case tried too hard to establish Simpson’s every movement, action, and thought-an impossible task. Instead, all they had to prove was that he was there and committed the crimes. There was no reason to lock themselves into inflexible theories that the defense could later tear apart.

Of course, the defense took advantage of every opportunity the prosecution handed them. In the opening arguments of both Clark’s and Darden’s summations, the defense objected only three times, which is about normal for this stage of a trial. But when the prosecutors returned to make their rebuttals, the defense repeatedly objected in an attempt to rattle the speakers. In Darden’s rebuttal, the defense objected twenty-one times. In Marcia Clark’s final address, they objected fifty times. Yet out of a total of seventy-one objections, Judge Ito sustained only two.

The defense’s closing argument, presented by Johnnie Cochran, deserves little if any attention. Like the rest of the defense case, his argument never said who did commit the murders. He didn’t cite any evidence that pointed to anyone other than his client. And his close was almost devoid of reason.

I don’t enjoy revisiting what Cochran had to say about me, but it’s even more difficult to read Clark’s and Darden’s summations. Whether these two prosecutors ever liked me, whether they ever felt that I was evil or corrupt, these were simply their opinions about someone they didn’t know. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who do know me. Marcia’s and Chris’s words hurt me, but they also hurt my family, friends, and colleagues, who had no forum and therefore no way to prove that I was not a racist or a rogue cop.

Marcia and Chris wanted to think that they were all right and I was all wrong. But deep down they must have known that this was crap. They knew who screwed up this case. They knew who bungled evidence. They knew who failed to collect evidence. They knew who lost evidence. They knew who ignored evidence. They knew who wrote bad search warrants. They knew who failed to follow up on clues. They knew who blew the interrogation. And it wasn’t Mark Fuhrman.

Because of this trial, and throughout the writing of this book, I have talked at length with Vince Bugliosi. Vince is a classic example of a dedicated man, a man who, after the trial of mass murderer Charles Manson, could have embraced fame and fortune and left behind the ideals that made him what he is. But he didn’t do that. He maintained his professionalism, his honor, and his integrity. Unlike Clark and Darden, Vince is a famous prosecutor, but he’s also an exceptional prosecutor, who won convictions in twenty-one consecutive murder cases and won 105 out of 106 felony jury trials. As Vince describes my situation in the Simpson case, he told me he would have confronted the problem head on, worked with me, and had me explain my story in court.

That’s exactly what I wanted to do. Unfortunately for this case, and for justice, these prosecutors acted more like spoiled children instead of adults charged with a professional responsibility.

How would it have hurt them to sit down with me and talk about the tapes? They could have hated me. They could have even told me they hated me. But then at least we could have resolved that issue and gone back to doing our jobs-prosecuting a murderer.

Chapter 26

VERDICT

About three hours into it, one of the jurors said “ladies and gentlemen, what do we have here?’ And it came up, well, what we really have here is reasonable doubt.

ARMANDA COOLEY, JURY FOREMAN

I WAS AT HOME in Sandpoint standing in the kitchen when my wife told me the jury was in and they were going to announce the verdict in the Simpson trial. Since the jury had only deliberated a few hours, I figured they would return a guilty verdict.

I was too nervous to sit down and watch, so I stood and just listened. As I heard the clerk read the verdict of not guilty, I went numb; I couldn’t believe that the jury could be so wrong. My wife said, “They’re going to blame this all on you.”

She was right. As you might imagine, the day of the verdict was not a fun one for us. The media was already outside our house, and although we had been the subject of media frenzies before, this was the worst we had ever experienced. The sharks were everywhere.

Cameras lit
 
up
 
the whole neighborhood like a football stadium. Outside our windows, we could see antennas climbing into the sky. Power cords were stretched across the road. Cars and vans were parked hundreds of feet down the block. Journalists, camera crews, technicians, and gofers crowded on the sidewalk and spilled into the street. Reporters tried interviewing the locals, but they weren’t getting the sound bites they wanted. Instead of offering commentary on the trial, or about me, my neighbors told the media to leave us all alone.

Night came, but the street remained blindingly bright. Inside our house we had the curtains drawn and the lights out, yet still it was brighter than daylight. Ron Chaney, my good friend and the mayor of Sandpoint, saw the disruption the media was causing and called in the police to tell the camera crews to turn out the lights and shut down the generators. This is a residential neighborhood, the police said, people are trying to sleep. So ended the first day after the verdict.

When we woke up, the media was still outside waiting in shifts to make sure they didn’t miss a movement. Still, I was able to smuggle my wife and kids in and out of the house, as our neighbors created diversions. But I had to stay in the house.

After a couple of days, I got stir crazy and decided to play with the media. It was October and already growing cool. The reporters were spending more and more time near their cars. I opened a window in one of my kids bedrooms and jumped down onto the backyard. Then I made my way across a street, down an alley, and back around three hundred feet away from the shivering journalists. I dropped in on a couple of good friends of mine, Vicki and Gale Dolesby, without anybody seeing me. They greeted me warmly and asked me inside, where we sat and drank a beer and laughed at the whole pathetic spectacle.

But it wasn’t really that funny. I knew as well, or even better than anyone, that O.J. Simpson was guilty. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong in handling the case. And I knew that I never would have become a target of the defense if I wasn’t a good detective.

Meanwhile, the media was beating the hell out of the story.

They interviewed the jurors, and while some mentioned me, others said that it wasn’t racial issues but “doubt” that made them vote for acquittal. I don’t know how a juror presented with that evidence could have had any doubt about Simpson’s guilt. I thought the jury would be able to make a decision based on the facts of the case. But it seems they just didn’t want to convict O.J., no matter what evidence was presented. They didn’t want to believe that a popular celebrity could have murdered two people. So when the defense came up with their ridiculous theories and the prosecution made countless errors the jury latched onto whatever slim speculation would justify a verdict of not guilty.

It wasn’t only the jury’s fault; their verdict was a reflection of the attitudes that many brought to the case. The people who

lined the freeway, shouting “Go, O.J.,

[“Is [Fuhrman] the worst has to offer? Yes. Do we wish LAPD had never hired him? Yes. In fact, do we wish there was no such person on the planet? Yes. – from Marcia Clark’s closing statement]

go!” The defense groupies who tried to peddle bogus evidence. The trial LAPD junkies who watched it like a soap

opera. The media, long bored with the day-one story that Simpson obviously did it, who wanted the trial to be as

long and as controversial as possible. The talking heads who had to
 
say something different about the trial every night or they wouldn’t have any reason to appear on television. The prosecutors, more worried about politics and looking good on television than doing their jobs. The defense, willing to say or do anything that might divert attention from their client’s guilt. And the judge, star-struck by the cameras and intimidated by the defense.

Somebody had to take the heat. To the world, I was the racist cop who may or may not have planted evidence, but either way I was definitely the reason that Simpson got off. I could live with false accusations and personal attacks; the media didn’t know mo personally, and I wasn’t about to give them a chance to learn any more than they already knew. I’ve been shot at before, so someone sticking a camera in my face is no big deal. But the difference is, when someone shoots at you, you can shoot back. When someone points a camera at you, you’re defenseless.

After the verdict I was portrayed in a worse light than at any point during the trial, because now, even the people who thought Simpson was guilty turned on me, since I apparently had lost the case. A lot of people in the media and in Los Angeles blamed me for the verdict. But the people who knew me, the people who knew the case and were honest about it, and my friends in Sandpoint didn’t blame me.

Several days after the verdict, I went on a long-planned hunting trip to southeastern Idaho with a good friend of mine from Sandpoint named Jeff Free. Jeff was acting as guide on a mule deer hunt, and asked me to help out on the trip.

I managed to sneak out of the house and make my way out of town, bound for the wild country. Pulling into camp I met for the first time with Larry Heathington, the outfitter, a retired cop, and former head of his departments SWAT team. He told me, “Listen, you got screwed. But here in camp, you’re just guiding a few hunters. That’s all. Don’t expect anything different, and don’t worry about a thing. You’re among friends.”

One of the hunters on the trip was an actor named Marshall Teague, who recently played one of the bad guys in The Rock. Jeff and I buddied around with Marshall and his girlfriend Lindy and became friends with both of them. Marshall still calls to check up on me, and last year I put ivory handles on a knife that was very special to him.

I spent the next few days in the wilderness, perhaps the one place the media couldn’t find me and wouldn’t be able to catch up to me even if they did. It was great being out in the woods with Jeff and our hunter, Chuck Davis. But eventually I had to go back.

Returning to Sandpoint, I had to sneak into my own house. The media were staked out all over town, waiting for me to return. Their presence was so obvious my friends were able to get me through undetected.