The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson (8 page)

After the other three detectives left for Bundy, Vannatter decided to take a look around O.J. Simpson’s property. He stepped out the front door and onto the driveway, near the two parked cars. The sun was coming up at this point, and in the spreading daylight, Vannatter noticed what appeared to be a drop of blood on the ground. Then he found another … and another. The drops were all more or less in a row heading from the Rockingham gate to the front door. Vannatter opened that gate and took another look at the Bronco parked nearby. He stared in from the passenger side and noticed blood on the console between the two seats—and more blood on the inside of the driver’s door. Vannatter thought back to what he had seen at Bundy. The individual drops to the left of the bloody shoe prints leaving the two bodies resembled in size, shape, and color the drops here at Rockingham. Vannatter went back into O.J. Simpson’s home and found more blood drops in the foyer, just beyond the front door. The trail of blood now led right into Simpson’s home.

The criminalist, Dennis Fung, arrived at Rockingham at 7:10
A.M.
and did a quick test of the red stain on the exterior of the Bronco. It was only a presumptive test, and so not 100 percent definitive, but it suggested the presence of human blood. Fuhrman returned from Nicole’s condominium a few moments later. He said
the glove at Bundy was for a left hand, and told Vannatter that it did indeed look like a match for the right glove found behind Kaelin’s room.

That’s it, said Vannatter. We need to get a search warrant for this place. Vannatter left for the West Los Angeles station to write one up. Once there, he decided to touch base with deputy district attorney Marcia Clark. Vannatter and Clark had recently completed work together on a murder case that focused on blood and other trace evidence, and the detective wanted a second opinion on the facts he had gathered so far in this case. Checking with a prosecutor made sense for a detective; lawyers usually had better antennae than cops for determining whether a judge would grant a search warrant. For her part, Clark was only too pleased to receive Vannatter’s call at home shortly after eight on that Monday morning. A workaholic, and something of a crime junkie, she relished the details of criminal investigations as much as courtroom prosecutions.

Vannatter told Clark about the apparently matching gloves and then summarized the trail of blood—which wound from the left side of the shoe prints at Bundy, to the Bronco on Rockingham, to the driveway, and then to the foyer of Simpson’s home. Clark listened to Vannatter dispassionately and was struck only by one thing: the fancy neighborhood where the murders had taken place.

“Marcia,” Vannatter said. “It’s O.J. Simpson.”

“Who’s that?” Clark replied.

“You know, the football player, actor,
Naked Gun
.”

Marcia Clark had never followed sports. She went to the movies only once in a while. Just about her only connection to mass culture was when she listened to her Doors albums. For relaxation, she read novels about serial murderers.

“Sorry,” Clark said. “Never heard of him.”

On hearing the facts of the case, Clark thought there was more than enough evidence to get a search warrant—probably enough to arrest Simpson himself. But Vannatter said they should take it one step at a time, and he hung up. Then he began drafting the affidavit he would be required to submit in order to get a search warrant.

In his affidavit, Vannatter said he had been a police officer for over twenty-five years and a detective for fifteen. He wrote that
after examining the crime scene, he and his partner had traveled to 360 North Rockingham to notify O.J. Simpson of the murder of his ex-wife. When they examined the Ford Bronco, Vannatter went on, they “noticed what appeared to be human blood, later confirmed by Scientific Investigation personnel to be human blood on the driver’s door handle of the vehicle.” Vannatter continued, “It was determined by interviews of Simpson’s daughter and a friend Brian Kaelin [that Simpson] had left on an unexpected flight to Chicago during the early morning hours of June 13, 1994, and was last seen at the residence at approximately 2300 hours, June 12, 1994.”

A magistrate signed the warrant in the late morning, and Vannatter returned to the Rockingham estate at just about noon on Monday, June 13, which was, as it happened, almost the same time O.J. Simpson arrived home from his abbreviated trip to Chicago.

Simpson’s friends often used the same expression to describe him: “He loved being O.J.” That was, in many respects, his occupation—being O.J. By 1994, he was long retired from his days of football glory. He had modest visibility as a sports broadcaster and some minor success as an actor in occasional self-mocking roles in the
Naked Gun
movies. He judged beauty contests. He shilled for Hertz. He pitched in an infomercial for an arthritis cure. At the time of his arrest for murder, Simpson had only a vaporous, peculiarly American kind of renown: He was famous for being O.J. (When Nicole Brown Simpson called 911 on October 25, 1993, and complained that her ex-husband was “going nuts” outside her home, she assumed that his name would be immediately recognizable; but having heard it, the dispatcher asked, “Is he the sportscaster or whatever?”)

The event Simpson planned to attend in Chicago on Monday, June 13, demonstrated how he made his living as a “sportscaster or whatever.” He was due that day at the Mission Hills Country Club, in suburban Northbrook, to play in the Hertz Invitational, the rental car company’s annual tournament for its top corporate customers in the neighboring thirteen-state area. In 1994, playing golf was pretty much all O.J. Simpson did for Hertz, though he did a lot of it. (The previous week, he had played for Hertz in Virginia.)
It had been a different story when he first signed with Hertz in the 1970s, when he was still playing football. At that time Simpson starred in some of the best-known television advertisements of the era, which featured the handsome athlete leaping over furniture in airports to make a swift connection to his rental car. “Go, O.J., go!,” a grandmotherly matron shouted after him. At the time Hertz even tied its corporate slogan to its celebrity spokesman, touting itself as “the superstar in rent-a-car.” But a decade and a half later, the company paid him about half a million dollars a year to be, as his friends put it, “the house golfer for Hertz.”

The creation of a public image—that is, defining what “being O.J.” meant—had been Simpson’s life work. In the years before he was arrested for murder, O.J. Simpson was interviewed countless times about his life story, and he would invariably invoke the same themes, even the same anecdotes. Though it is now difficult to remember in light of the notoriety of the murder case, Simpson for many years enjoyed a clean-cut and lovable image. This was a man who, after all, had been sanctified with a nationally televised “roast” by Bob Hope before he was twenty-five years old. So Simpson often went out of his way to boast in interviews about his hardscrabble origins and rascally past—a history that would take on a more sinister cast after his arrest.

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 7, 1947, the third of four children of James and Eunice Simpson, in San Francisco. (His unusual first name, which O.J. loathed, was an aunt’s suggestion of obscure origin.) His father was an intermittent presence in his life; in later life, he came out as a homosexual, and he died of AIDS in 1985. His mother, who worked nights as an orderly and then a technician in the psychiatric ward of San Francisco General Hospital, supported the family as best she could.

In an authorized, highly laudatory biography published in 1974, when O.J. was twenty-seven, Larry Fox wrote of Simpson’s childhood: “There was the throwing rocks at buses, the shoplifting (after all, they were too young to
buy
beer and wine), the breaking up of parties, and, above all, the fights, the constant fights.” And Simpson himself admitted in an extensive
Playboy
interview in 1976, “If there wasn’t no fight, there wasn’t no weekend.… Sports was lucky for me. If I hadn’t been on the high school football
team, there’s no question but that I would’ve been sent to jail for three years.”

When asked about his formative influences, Simpson repeated one story from his adolescence over and over again. The year was 1962, and Simpson, a sophomore in high school, was in trouble. In some versions of the story, he had been caught stealing from a liquor store; in others, he had been arrested for a fight involving his gang, the Persian Warriors, in his Potrero Hill neighborhood. Simpson was asleep in his apartment when there was a knock at the door. Knowing of O.J.’s troubles, as well as of his athletic promise, a concerned adult had arranged for Willie Mays, the legendary center fielder for the San Francisco Giants, to pay a call.

“Willie didn’t give me no discipline rap; we drove over to his place and spent the afternoon talking sports,” Simpson told
Playboy
. “He lived in a great big house over in Forest Hill and he was exactly the easygoing friendly guy I’d always pictured him to be.” (In a revealing segue in the interview, Simpson went on to defend Mays because “a short time after that, Jackie Robinson took a shot at Mays by saying he didn’t do enough for his people.” But, Simpson protested, “Mays always put out good vibes.”) Of the Mays visit Larry Fox wrote, “Willie’s message was not so much in his words. It was in his achievements and what these achievements had brought him in the way of material goods.” Telling the Mays story in the book
I Want to Tell You
, which he nominally wrote later from his prison cell, Simpson said, “It was the first time I saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

Getting a big house and putting out good vibes became the leitmotif of Simpson’s professional life. After high school, he spent two years playing football and running track at the City College of San Francisco, a local junior college. He averaged more than ten yards per carry at CCSF, so the recruiters from the big four-year schools came calling in droves. But Simpson only had eyes for the University of Southern California. As a boy, O.J. had admired the pageantry of USC football—the Trojan wearing a suit of armor seated atop a great white stallion. But as a prospective Trojan himself, Simpson saw that USC delivered media exposure—and thus potentially lucrative contacts—beyond that of any other college football program in the land.

Almost half a century earlier, the USC football machine had been willed into existence by one man, an obscure, Illinois-born academic named Rufus Bernhard von KleinSmid. After bouncing around several different universities after the turn of the century, Dr. K, as he was known, became president of USC in 1921. There he faced a dilemma familiar to college presidents. “Supported by tuition, possessed of virtually no endowment (hardly more than $1 million by 1926) with which to finance its expansion, U.S.C. needed money,” the historian Kevin Starr has observed. “Football offered a solution.” Dr. K invested in recruiting, bands, and a magnificent new stadium, the Coliseum, which would serve as the centerpiece of the 1932 Olympic games in Los Angeles. Von KleinSmid’s gamble paid off beyond even his own imaginings. Trojan football became one of the few activities to unite the fractured metropolis of Los Angeles. When USC defeated Notre Dame on a last-second field goal in 1931, a crowd of 300,000, one third the population of the city, greeted the returning team at the train station. The passage of time did not dim the school’s (or the city’s) enthusiasm for the sport. By the 1950s, the Trojans’ greatest star was Frank Gifford, about whom a fellow student, the novelist Frederick Exley, would observe, “Frank Gifford was an All-America at USC, and I know of no way of describing this phenomenon short of equating it with being the Pope in the Vatican.”

In 1967, at the University of Southern California, O.J. Simpson became pope—and then some. He quickly established himself as the best running back in the school’s history on what was perhaps the best team in USC history. He gained 158 yards rushing in his third game and 190 in his fourth. Southern Cal had not beaten Notre Dame in South Bend since 1939, but in 1967 Simpson and his teammates routed the Irish there, 24–7. In the final week of O.J.’s first season, USC played crosstown rival UCLA in a game freighted with even more significance than usual. Both schools, with just one loss each, remained in the hunt for a national championship, and likewise both teams needed only to beat the other to win a bid to go to the Rose Bowl. Finally, the game matched the leading contenders for the Heisman trophy, awarded annually to the best player in the nation—Gary Beban, the senior UCLA quarterback, and O.J. Simpson, the USC junior. Late in the fourth
quarter, the game came down to a single play. UCLA led 20–14, and the Trojans had the ball on their own thirty-six-yard line. The drive looked like it would be Southern Cal’s last chance to score. It was third down and eight yards to go.

In the huddle, Toby Page, the USC quarterback, called a play that did not involve Simpson, but he changed his mind at the line of scrimmage and called out, “Twenty-three blast!”—signaling to his teammates that he was calling an audible. In the reconfigured play, Page handed the ball to Simpson, who took off—first right and then back against the grain to the left, all the while trailing UCLA defenders. Simpson outran his own blockers as well as the defense, and his touchdown gave the Trojans the game. Decades later the play remains known to USC faithful as, simply, “the run.” USC went on to beat Indiana in the Rose Bowl, where Simpson was named player of the game, and to win the national championship. (Beban, however, still won the Heisman in a close vote.)