The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (19 page)

At about 7:15
P.M.
, when A.C. and O.J. were still wending their way to Brentwood, Detective Tom Lange had reached Cowlings on the cellular phone in the Bronco. In their conversation, Cowlings confirmed that he was heading to O.J.’s home and that Simpson remained suicidal. Lange did his best to calm the situation. Without telling Cowlings, Lange also arranged for the LAPD’s SWAT team to go to the Rockingham house and prepare to arrest Simpson there. A team of about twenty-five SWAT specialists, with their arsenal of stun grenades and night-sighted weaponry, arrived at Rockingham about fifteen minutes before Cowlings did. Several of Simpson’s friends had set up a vigil there, but the officers evicted everyone except Kardashian and O.J.’s twenty-four-year-old son, Jason. True to form, though, the LAPD did invite one outsider to tag along: Roger Sandler, a photographer for
Time
and
Life
magazines.

The SWAT team’s plans nearly went awry immediately. As soon as the Bronco stopped in the driveway, Jason sprang from the front
door and began yelling at Cowlings, who seemed to be equally hyped up. The 6-foot-5-inch Cowlings, a defensive lineman taken out of USC by the Buffalo Bills the year after they selected Simpson, stuck his long arm out the driver’s window and pushed Jason away. There was a considerable poignancy to the scene. Jason’s relationship with his father had long vacillated between poor and nonexistent. Cowlings’s pokes made clear the status of the pudgy and unathletic son: He was not wanted in his father’s moment of crisis. A pair of officers gingerly approached Jason and all but dragged him back into the house.

Jason’s approach unnerved Cowlings. He started screaming that the police had to get back, get away. He even stepped out of the car and caught sight of one of the officers posted on the wall along Ashford. “He’s got a gun!” Cowlings screamed before he reentered the car. “Don’t do anything stupid! Get the police away!”

The police, of course, were not going to go away. Lange had handed over negotiating duties to the SWAT team’s Pete Weireter, who was posted inside O.J.’s house. Weireter reached O.J. on the cellular phone and attempted to talk him into surrendering.

Minutes passed, and the world waited to see if O.J. Simpson would blow his brains out on live national TV. Unaccustomed to chases of this duration, the local television stations agreed that they could share one another’s pictures of the scene so each helicopter would have a chance to refuel. Suddenly, there was very little to see: just the Bronco parked in the driveway. Close observers noticed one spectator with the best view of all. Jason had brought Kato, the white Akita that had apparently witnessed the murders, to live at Rockingham. The dog, which Jason would later rename Satchmo, wandered around the Bronco as O.J. and A.C. lingered inside it.

The silence at the driveway standoff contrasted dramatically with the scene unfolding at the foot of Rockingham, on Sunset Boulevard. A raucous crowd several hundred strong had gathered there, drawn to the drama. Sunset was impassable; even residents of the area couldn’t get home. (Shapiro had asked Michael Baden and Saul Faerstein to meet him at O.J.’s home, but the wall of people prevented either doctor from reaching Rockingham.) Local reporters broadcasting live from Sunset found a stark racial division
at the scene. The whites, a minority of the revelers, were curiosity seekers—“looky loos” in the LAPD phrase—who had come simply to experience the bizarre scene. The African-Americans, on the other hand, had mostly come to show solidarity, and their chants and shouts made their feelings clear. “Free O.J.!” they repeated again and again. Interviewed on KCBS, one of them said, “I feel that the black people ought to come together. They’re trying to make us extinct.” A woman then added, “First it was Michael [Jackson] and Mike Tyson and Rodney King. I’m calling for the unification of the black race!”

Up at the Rockingham house, Weireter eventually obtained Simpson’s promise that he did not intend to hurt anyone except himself. The negotiator told O.J. that his children needed him. Simpson asked to speak with his mother, who had checked into a San Francisco hospital for stress-related symptoms. No problem, said Weireter, just come inside. He seemed to be making progress when the battery in O.J.’s phone went dead. Cowlings went into the house to fetch a replacement. Finally, Simpson agreed to give up.

“You’ll have to come to us,” said Mike Albanese, chief of the SWAT unit. After a pause, Simpson hesitantly put a foot out the door of the Bronco. It was 8:53
P.M.
, nearly an hour after Cowlings had arrived at Simpson’s home. In his hands, O.J. held a couple of family pictures, which he had been clutching in the car. He staggered into the foyer and collapsed into the officers’ arms. “I’m sorry, guys,” Simpson kept repeating. “I’m sorry I put you through this.” Albanese allowed Simpson to use the bathroom and gave him a glass of orange juice to drink while he called his mother on the telephone. Deferential even then, the officers finally asked whether Simpson was ready to go. He nodded. The officers put handcuffs on him and led him out the front door—with Roger Sandler behind them, recording the moment for posterity and
Time
. The police had forbidden the news helicopters from shining their powerful lights down on the scene, so the public never saw Simpson being placed in an unmarked cruiser for the trip downtown.

With Simpson gone, other members of the SWAT team examined Cowlings’s Bronco. (When he was booked at the police station, Cowlings had $8,750 in cash in his pockets.) In what appeared to be Simpson’s travel bag, they found O.J.’s passport and
a plastic bag that contained a fake goatee, a fake mustache, a bottle of makeup adhesive remover, and three receipts from Cinema Secrets Beauty Supply, dated May 27, 1994. The officers also found a fully loaded Smith & Wesson .357 magnum blue steel handgun. It was registered to Lieutenant Earl Paysinger, yet another of Simpson’s friends on the LAPD. About five years earlier, at a time when Paysinger was providing security for O.J., the lieutenant had bought his client the gun.

An eighteen-car caravan escorted Simpson to his booking at Parker Center. He was then transported to the L.A. county jail for his first night in custody, which he spent on suicide watch. In his book
I Want to Tell You
, Simpson wrote, “The first week I was in jail I thought about Jesus being crucified.”

6. HAIRSPLITTING

S
impson was arraigned in municipal court on the following Monday, June 20. He was physically transformed from any O.J. Simpson the public had seen before. Looking dazed and bewildered, he staggered from the holding pen to the defendant’s table before Judge Patti Jo McKay. He wore a black suit and white shirt, but he was denied a tie, belt, and shoelaces—even, apparently, collar stays—for fear that he might turn them into instruments of suicide. Head cocked to one side, Simpson stared vacantly around the courtroom. Asked his name, he appeared confused, and Shapiro had to prompt his answer. Asked his plea, Simpson muttered quietly, “Not guilty.” The proceeding was over in moments, and in the only real business transacted, Judge McKay scheduled the preliminary hearing for ten days hence, June 30.

Both sides held press conferences the same day. There was, of course, nothing that required the lawyers on either side to answer reporters’ questions at that time, and much to recommend silence. Shapiro had a client who had acted like a very guilty man the previous Friday. The circumstances seemed to call for a discreet weighing of options. Garcetti’s prosecutors, on the other hand, faced the prospect of convicting a popular celebrity. Their task seemed to call for a serious, untheatrical getting down to business. The worst thing they could do was appear unduly zealous. Yet the adversaries could not resist an attempt to posture and spin. Shapiro fancied himself a master at manipulating the press. Likewise, Garcetti—under the tutelage of his ever-present director of
communications, ex-prosecutor and ex–local news anchorwoman Suzanne Childs—had similarly high regard for his own talents in this realm. In fact, throughout the case, many efforts at press management by both sides failed, and that was never more true than after the parties’ first day in court.

Shapiro faced a bank of television cameras at his Century City office shortly after the arraignment. Looking almost as sorrowful as his client had in court, Shapiro offered Simpson only lukewarm support. Shapiro portrayed himself less as an advocate than as someone who was looking for answers just like everyone else. “At the present time,” he said, “I have not discussed at any great length the facts of the case with [Simpson].” The lawyer was asked about the possibility of raising an insanity defense—that is, one based on the premise that Simpson had committed the murders. “Every possible defense has to be considered by any trial lawyer,” Shapiro responded, “and I certainly would reserve all possibilities.” His lawyerly words made Simpson look even more guilty.

Yet the prosecutors made even more trouble for themselves. Since the murders, Garcetti had turned himself into a virtual interview machine. In addition to his press conferences, he appeared on ABC’s
Nightline
,
CBS Evening News
,
NBC Nightly News
,
Today
, and a special nighttime edition of
Good Morning America
. Garcetti did use these appearances to focus, in part, on his longstanding and heartfelt devotion to the issue of domestic violence, but the promiscuity of his efforts suggested he was seeking attention for himself as much as for any issue. In an especially surreal touch, Garcetti appeared live on ABC to describe the freeway chase as it was happening. “We’re all hurting right now,” Garcetti told Peter Jennings as the Bronco sped on. “We’re all sharing a very painful experience.” But in truth, over these first fevered days, Garcetti didn’t looked pained at all; rather, he looked like he was exploiting the moment for all it was worth. He even strayed into some dubious ethical territory, predicting that Simpson would ultimately admit to committing the murders. Appearing on yet another national program,
This Week with David Brinkley
, on Sunday, June 19, Garcetti said, “Well, it’s not going to shock me if we see an O.J. Simpson, sometime down the road—and it could happen very soon, it could happen months from now—say, ‘Okay, I did do it,
but I’m not responsible.’ We’ve seen it in Menendez. It’s going to be a likely defense here, I believe, once the evidence is reviewed by the lawyers.”

Marcia Clark’s June 20 press conference only contributed to a perception that the prosecution camp was celebrating. It was the public’s first real view of Clark, and a revealing one at that. She was a formidable extemporaneous speaker. There was also no mistaking the sincerity of her passions—or the fixity of her beliefs. Like her boss, Clark did not even pay lip service to such legal niceties as the presumption of innocence. She was, if anything, more categorical than Garcetti in her judgments of the accused. Although it had been just two days since the arrest—and only eight days since the murders—Clark announced, “It was premeditated murder. It was done with deliberation and premeditation. That is precisely what he was charged with because that is what we will prove.” Thus, in a single breath, Clark wrote off the possibility of arguing that Simpson had murdered his ex-wife in a fit of jealous passion—a perfectly reasonable theory of the case. Asked about the possibility of accomplices, Clark again spoke with total confidence, even arrogance: “Mr. Simpson is charged alone because he is the sole murderer.” Of course, no responsible prosecutors would have filed charges against Simpson unless they felt he was guilty. But Clark and Garcetti put their case at risk when they let themselves, rather than the evidence, do the talking—and they heedlessly limited their options at trial by rushing into a single theory about how the crime had occurred.

Clark was an accomplished lawyer but a far from obvious choice to prosecute such an important case. In fact, Garcetti never really assigned Clark to the Simpson case at all; she had simply taken Vannatter’s call on Monday, June 13, and stayed with the case through the tumultuous first week. It is difficult to say whether Garcetti, given a real choice, would have picked Clark. She had prosecuted several murders, but other senior deputies had tried more, and more difficult, cases. Moreover, Clark’s June 20 performance suggested that for all her competence, there may have been good reason not to choose her. Among those with long memories of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, Clark’s behavior at the press conference raised disquieting echoes. The office’s losing
streak in big cases was well known. What was less known—or at least less commented upon in the media—was that most of those cases had been lost by women prosecutors with pugnacious demeanors, among them Lael Rubin in McMartin Preschool; Lea D’Agostino in
Twilight Zone
; and Pamela Bozanich in Menendez. All of these prosecutors came across as aggressive and outspoken, just as Marcia Clark did at her postarraignment press conference. Of course, it might have been just a coincidence that it was female prosecutors in Los Angeles who had failed in the high-profile cases—just as the harsh judgments of them might have been the result of sexism—but Shapiro and his colleagues on the defense team regarded these perceptions as important. From the beginning, they thought that, like the other prominent and unsuccessful prosecutors, Clark would come across as unduly harsh; consequently, they were delighted she had the case.