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O. J. Simpson and the Media - Charlie Rose

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A panel of Psychiatrists and journalists discuss how celebrity status and the media can sway public perception.

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From the archives: Media circus around O.J. Simpson trial

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They say one of the items O.J. was trying to get back was the suit he wore to court the day he was acquitted of murder. O.J. calls it his lucky suit. Apparently, Phil Spector wanted to borrow it. -Jay Leno

I had always thought that Phil Spector would commit suicide in the courtroom if he were found guilty of murdering Lana Clarkson. I could not even imagine Phil in prison. He's a drama queen, albeit straight, who cares deeply about his legend in the history of music in the United States. One of the passions of his life is his place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I thought perhaps he would swallow a cyanide pill. What an exit that would have been. He'd live on forever. A martyr. One night before the end of the trial I went to a sort of farewell dinner with some of the other reporters, who get as obsessed as I do at these trials and want to talk of nothing else. I said, "Does anyone think that Phil might commit suicide?" One person who was there looked at me aghast. After a long pause, he gave me and a few others in the group a very inside scoop, which he was in a position to know. The police were aware that Spector was a potential suicide. By law, they had no right to search him after he'd passed through security and entered the courtroom to listen to the verdict. One policeman in the courtroom was assigned to watch Spector during the reading of the verdict and never take his eyes off him. If he made one move toward his pocket, this officer was to leap on him.

It was all so quiet when it actually happened. All the principals were there, the people who have been sitting together in the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, in Los Angeles, for Phil Spector's murder trial every day for nearly half a year. There are those of us who have become close and friendly after so much time together. There are others we have come to dislike. Among the last to arrive in Judge Larry Paul Fidler's extremely well-run courtroom were Phil Spector and his increasingly controversial wife, Rachelle, who was believed to have recently posted on a MySpace page, "The Evil Judge Should Die," signed Chelle, which is the nickname she goes by. Phil's lawyers have denied that Rachelle posted any such note. I heard the police were investigating it as a threat against a judge. It would have been poetic justice if, after Judge Fidler declared a mistrial on account of the hung jury, Rachelle had gone to jail and Phil had gone home to the castle, at least until the re-trial and the civil trial which loom over him.

If there had been a verdict, there would have been three buzzes from the deliberation room, but there were only two. Still, we were all told to assemble in the courtroom at 1:30 on Wednesday, the 26th of September. The last to arrive were Donna Clarkson, Lana's mother, and Lana's sister, Fawn. They took their regular seats in the front row with their lawyers. My eyes met for a second with those of Mrs. Clarkson. I was sorry I had never gotten to talk with her. We had things to say to each other that no one else could say, but it was not to be. She looked exactly right for the sad news she was about to receive, that the jury was stymied by two people who were unwilling to convict Phil Spector, and thought it possible that her daughter, who had been trashed for five and a half months by Spector's lawyers, had taken her life in his house. I understood the rage she was feeling under her calm exterior.

When Judge Fidler announced the mistrial, there was dead silence. No hugs, no shaking of hands, nothing but general disappointment. An hour or so later, Phil, Rachelle, and Horace, Phil's guard, arrived back at the castle, to which they had been trailed by a helicopter. I found it utterly offensive that Phil and Rachelle danced in their courtyard and hugged Horace, and that, in a real class act, Rachelle humped Phil's leg, like a horny dog, laughing uproariously. Her public intimacy did not engage him-he never looked at her during the merriment. They looked so cheap. It reminded me of the way O.J.'s family behaved after his victory: the ladies were all holding champagne glasses and doing high kicks on the lawn at the Rockingham house. At both houses they had forgotten that a beautiful dead woman was the cause of the celebration.

For four years, ever since the shooting death of Lana Clarkson, my old friend Jackie Collins, of the best-seller lists, has been saying to me, "You have to read Ronnie Spector's autobiography. It's fascinating." Ronnie Spector was married to Phil Spector when he was still known as "the tycoon of teen." She had been the lead singer of the popular all-girl group the Ronettes, which Phil produced. For some reason, I never read the book until another old friend out here, Jack Martin, a former gossip columnist, sent over a worn-out, tattered copy to the Chateau Marmont, where I was staying for the trial. The book is called Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness or My Life as a Fabulous Ronette. "Be My Baby" is the title of one of Phil's most famous hit songs, a rock 'n' roll classic. I couldn't put the book down. It became my waiting-for-the-non-verdict reading. Ronnie was an absolute prisoner in her own mansion, surrounded by staff. She had nothing to do all day but drink, and drink she did. Phil had lost interest in her career. He told her not to talk to the servants. (When Lana Clarkson, on the night that was to become the last of her life, told Adriano De Souza, the driver of Phil's Mercedes, that she was going to stay at the castle for only one drink, Phil forbade her to speak to De Souza.) Ronnie and Phil's marriage was one of day-to-day madness, from which she ultimately escaped in bare feet. She ran down the hill to Sunset Boulevard and caught a taxi out of his life forever.

Back in the courthouse, the Spector jurors gave a sort of press conference after the mistrial announcement. Only three jurors came forward to meet with the media-Nos. 9, 10, and 12. My fellow reporters and I had spent five months trying to analyze the jurors. I'm quite proud that my own opinion of Juror No. 10, the foreman in the deliberations, altered much earlier than when he became by far the most disliked member of the jury, having personally forged the hung jury that ended this trial. I took a dislike to him when the jury went to the castle to visit the crime scene. It was he who presented 10 questions from the jury to the judge. He was extremely pleased with himself. I wrote in my notes that he had an "I'm the smartest guy in the room" attitude. He took notes with such fervor that I sometimes felt he missed what was going on, so engrossed was he with his 13 scribbled-in notebooks.

I thought it was curious that at the press conference he refused to tell us his name or whether he had voted for conviction or acquittal. He also was the least forthcoming of the three present, sitting in a corner as if monitoring what the other jurors were saying, but his power to control them was over. Beth Karas, of Court TV, and I received notes from Juror No. 9 saying he would like to talk with us. I found it interesting to learn that the vote, in which 10 of 12 jurors voted to convict, at one time had been 11-1. At that point the single vote to acquit was the foreman's, but he was able to change the mind of one other juror, No. 1. According to notes taken at the voir dire, No. 10 is a civil engineer, 32, with three sons, and lives in Alhambra, about a block and a half from Phil's castle. He said in voir dire that he had once seen Phil in the Target store in Alhambra. He owns a gun. He had a friend who shot himself, but it may have been an accident. It is usual but not obligatory for the foreman to take a vote on the first day of deliberations to see what the breakdown is before discussion begins. For the first 3 days of the 12-day process, no vote was taken. After the third day, Juror No. 9 threatened to ring the buzzer to the judge if a vote was not taken.

Juror No. 9 told Beth and me that when it came to scientific evidence the jurors, even No. 10, always relied on the prosecution expert witnesses more than the defense expert witnesses. In the next trial, Phil could save a lot of money on those expert witnesses. The word is that money's tight for the next trial. He is thought to have already spent between $8 and $10 million on legal fees. Forensic pathologist Dr. Henry Lee took a big blow to his lofty reputation, as did Dr. Michael Baden, after prosecutor Alan Jackson went to the mat with them. Keep an eye on Alan Jackson. This guy's big-time.

Another juror who particularly interested me was No. 6, although I was not able to speak to him personally. He is a former actor who is a highly-thought-of executive at a Hollywood studio, and his boss and his boss's wife happen to be friends of mine. The story on him was that he worked nights at the studio during the trial, which we thought accounted for his occasional catnaps in the courtroom. In an effort to persuade his fellow jurors to convict Spector, and to avoid the prospect of a hung jury, Juror No. 6 gave an impassioned prosecutorial closing argument, so good that it was said to rival Alan Jackson's. They broke for the weekend to think it over. On Monday, everyone still had the same feeling, except No. 10, the foreman, which was certainly his right.

Juror No. 6 asked another juror if he thought No. 10 could ever be brought around. No, replied the other juror, who then recounted a story that the foreman had told about himself during the deliberations. One of his sons, who is very stubborn, refused to eat his broccoli. His father told him he had to stay at his place at the table until he had eaten his broccoli. After 12 hours at the table, the son finally gave in. When they heard this story, the jurors gave up and told the court that they were hopelessly deadlocked. So unpopular was the foreman's stand that, after the trial ended, he received what he called threats, and has asked the Alhambra police for protection.

For a week during the deliberations, Phil Spector was put in his place when O. J. Simpson roared back into the public eye, charged with the armed robbery of a memorabilia collector in a cheap hotel in Las Vegas, where O.J. had gone to attend a friend's wedding. There were pictures of him in the newspapers in black-tie with a smirk on his face. For the week following, O.J. got much more space in the news than Spector ever got. As a result of the publicity, O.J.'s book, If I Did It, which was brought out by the Goldman family, who made the word "If" so small on the cover that the title appears to be I Did It, jumped to No. 1 on Amazon. I wrote the afterword to the book as a favor to my friend Fred Goldman. All the TV shows I was asked to be on that week wanted to talk only about O.J. I had a bit of a dustup with Star Jones on her show. She started giving me a little attitude about not mentioning Johnnie Cochran in the afterword I wrote. I said something like "Listen, Star, you and I are on different sides in the O.J. case. I remember you used to go up to his house on Rockingham nights to sit with him during the civil trial." That interview ended quickly.

O.J. in the news again stirred up a lot of memories. I think it was one of the great injustices that O.J. was acquitted for the two cruel killings of Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman. I believe in ultimate justice. He got away with murder in the courtroom, but here he was back in the clink, where he belonged, handcuffed behind his back and in a prison jumpsuit. Finally he was in the right clothes.

When I came out to Los Angeles last April, I had no idea the Phil Spector trial would last for almost half a year. I might not have come if I had realized that. But if I had not come, I would have missed the wonderful experience of living in Los Angeles again. For years I've had a very complicated relationship with this city. Great times. Terrible times. Success. Failure. The pain of the terrible times exceeded by far the joy of the good times. My daughter was murdered here. The first article I ever wrote for Vanity Fair, in March 1984, was about the trial of the man who had strangled my daughter and then received a slap on the wrist of six years in a cushy facility, cut to three years on the day of sentencing, and who was out and about in two and a half years. I went to the cemetery in Westwood and thanked my daughter, Dominique, for leading me into the courtroom for the last 24 years. I hate to see guys like O. J. Simpson walk free. I hated to see Phil Spector get to postpone his verdict the way he has for the last four years. Every place I went when I was out here covering this trial, people stopped me to ask about it. It was the talk of the town in Los Angeles. They all wanted Phil to go down. They cared deeply about Lana Clarkson. When I went to dinner parties, I was always asked to get up and speak about what had happened in court that day. I loved doing it. I saw all my old friends and had long talks about olden times. I felt like I belonged again.

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They say one of the items O.J. was trying to get back was the suit he wore to court the day he was acquitted of murder. O.J. calls it his lucky suit. Apparently, Phil Spector wanted to borrow it.

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How O.J. Simpson's Dream Team Played the "Race Card" and Won

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In our November 1995 issue, Dominick Dunne captures the fatigue of the families, reporters, and big players in the O.J. Simpson trial.

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Was O.J. Simpson a Loving Father and Brother, or a Cold-Blooded Killer?

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After months in the courtroom, Dominick Dunne continued to report on the O.J. Simpson trial in our September 1995 issue. The prosecution had rested. As the defense painted a weak, arthritis-plagued O.J., new questions arose about his actions after the murders.

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The presentation of the DNA evidence has ended, at least for now, and not a moment too soon. Everyone had had enough. Like everything else in this trial, it went on too long, especially the cross-examinations. Defense lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld were brilliant, and wonderfully prepared, but they seemed totally unaware that less is more. They didn't understand that asking the same question over and over again ultimately bores people and causes tune-out. Anyone can tell you that a point isn't worth making unless it gets across to the jury. During the DNA material, the jurors' eyes began to glaze over. For at least one of them, Willie Cravin-subsequently dismissed for allegedly intimidating another juror-the DNA evidence apparently proved absolutely nothing. The 170-million-to-1 odds that blood found at the crime scene was O. J. Simpson's didn't convince him. During Cravin's 15 minutes of fame, spent racing from one television show to another in a chauffeur-driven limousine, he referred to the defendant as "the Juice." The fact is, although DNA testing may be as foolproof as fingerprinting, it doesn't cause excitement. It's difficult to respond to. It's like advanced math, brilliant but boring, astonishing but passionless. It made everybody eager to move on to the next phase of the trial, which consisted of the autopsy pictures of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, the victims of this appalling crime, whose names are so rarely mentioned.

In most murder trials, the prosecution and defense fight over the admissibility of autopsy photographs. The defense doesn't want the jury to see them. The prosecution does. Leslie Abramson, Erik Menendez's lawyer, once called autopsy pictures "a cheap prosecutorial trick." Pamela Bozanich, the prosecutor in the first Menendez trial, gave the perfect response: "Those who have committed crimes like these, it ill behooves them to complain of the carnage they leave." Judge Ito ruled in favor of the prosecution on this point, though he described the pictures in advance of the jurors' seeing them as "horrible." Johnnie Cochran prepared the way for O. J. Simpson to leave the court during the viewing of the photographs of his former wife's slashed neck if necessary, but in the end Simpson stayed. The first day the photographs were shown to the jury, he was flanked on his left by Carl Douglas, who kept up a running conversation with him, and on his right by Robert Kardashian, who provided protection from the constant gaze of the television camera. The pictures, which were mounted on large boards placed on an easel, were forbidden territory for both the Court TV crew and still photographers. Simpson rocked back and forth on his chair, occasionally exhaling in loud whoosh sounds, and stared straight ahead or up at the ceiling the whole time, particularly during the very graphic reenactments of the murders, with coroner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran playing the perpetrator/narrator and Deputy District Attorney Brian Kelberg the victim. "Her carotid artery was transected on both sides," the coroner said. "It was literally divided in two pieces." Behind Simpson, his sister Carmelita Durio removed her glasses and wept.

Orenthal James Simpson . . . planned and prepared to assault, batter, and murder Nicole Brown Simpson and did thereafter brutally and with malice aforethought stalk, attack, and repeatedly stab and beat decedent Nicole Brown Simpson [and] left her on the walkway in front of her residence to die.
-From the wrongful-death lawsuit against O. J. Simpson filed by the estate of Nicole Brown Simpson.

Probably because of the presence of the Goldman family, seated only a few feet away in the courtroom, the autopsy pictures of Ron Goldman elicited a more emotional reaction from the jury than the equally gruesome pictures of Nicole Brown Simpson. A 72-year-old African-American alternate juror covered his face with a handkerchief and blew his nose, and the male juror sitting next to him asked if he was all right. A female juror, in obvious distress, signaled the bailiff and fled from the courtroom. When she returned 10 minutes later, Judge Ito recessed court for the day.

As someone who has seen the photographs of the mutilated bodies close up, I can tell you that they are appalling to behold. We reporters had to hire an attorney to argue our right to view the photographs, and even though the 48 of us who were picked to see them displayed on easels had braced ourselves for the viewing, a couple-myself included-got a little faint and had to sit down for a portion of our allotted 20 minutes. What I was not prepared for was that Nicole's and Ron's eyes were open, reminding me that they must have looked upon who it was who was knifing them to death. Nicole's lips were parted. You could see her teeth. Her blond hair was stained dark by the blood that flowed from the knife wounds on her scalp. One of the photos showed the contusion from a blow that was supposed to have knocked her out so that the perpetrator, according to the prosecution's version of the murders, could kill Ron, who had appeared on the scene to deliver Juditha Brown's glasses, then return to Nicole, place his foot on her back, pull her head up by her hair, and slit her throat. She looked so much like her sister Denise in the pictures that they could have been twins. I found myself thinking, Only a monster could have done this to a beautiful young mother of two, with the kids upstairs asleep. To me, Nicole's slashed neck was the worst picture of all to look at, but I couldn't stop looking. I had never seen a slashed neck before, and I hope never to see another. The color was crimson. There were exposed muscles, veins, tendons, and spine, washed free of blood for optimum clarity. Then I moved on to the next easel, to look at what had happened to Ron. God, he looked young. On the front of his neck were some torture cuts, slices made before the killer went in for the lethal strokes. Some of his hair had been shaved away to expose the knife wound on his scalp.

That afternoon, back in Department 103, O.J. made his usual star entrance into the courtroom, beautifully dressed as always. He gave his raised-eyebrow-sad-smile greeting to his sister. I found it hard to look in his direction. That morning, Johnnie Cochran had said on the Today show that O.J. was distressed over a new poll which claimed that a majority of Americans believed he was guilty.

A few days later, in what has subsequently become known as the glove debacle, prosecutor Christopher Darden asked defendant Simpson to try on the infamous pair of bloodstained gloves, the left one found at the crime scene at Nicole Simpson's condominium on Bundy and the right one found outside Kato Kaelin's room in the guesthouse of Simpson's estate on Rockingham. In a dazzling bit of showmanship, Simpson seized the moment and ran with it, just as if he had caught a pass and made an 80-yard run for a touchdown at the height of his athletic power. That the gloves contained the blood of his deceased former wife appeared to be of no consequence to him. Every eye in the courtroom was upon him. Reporters sat half out of their seats as he crossed in front of us on his way to the jury box, surrounded by deputies. Jurors stared up at him, fascinated, and wrote furiously in their notebooks at the same time. "They don't fit," Simpson said, holding his hands up in the air, and they didn't. Darden had not established in advance that the gloves could have shrunk from exposure to blood and liquids until they were almost a size smaller than they had been when they were purchased at Bloomingdale's. Exasperated by Simpson's performance, Darden asked Judge Ito, "Could we ask him to straighten his fingers and put them in the gloves as one would normally put them in the gloves?" But Simpson was like a man fighting for his life, and he may just have saved it. There are some who think he may have won the case.

When is Marcia Clark returning to center stage? She's been on the back burner far too long, as five or six other prosecutors have moved to the forefront during the long DNA and coroner portions of the trial. The jury must be confused by now as to who's in charge of the prosecution team. A lot of us in the media are. In the beginning, there was the strong duet of William Hodgman and Clark. Then came the interesting duet of Clark and Christopher Darden, with Clark in charge. Lately, it seems like a department store with a lot of specialty boutiques operating independently of one another. Who's calling the shots? Is Bill Hodgman directing the team from the 18th floor of the courthouse? Or is it Los Angeles County district attorney Gil Garcetti who's really running the show? The jury needs a strong presence on the team to bond with, and Marcia Clark is the obvious one. Meanwhile, the prosecution began to recoup its losses with the strong testimony of F.B.I. authority William Bodziak on the size-12 Bruno Magli shoe prints at the scene of the crime.

Faye Resnick took a cake at Rodeo last night.
-Overheard at Carrie Fisher's birthday party for Griffin Dunne, a reference to Resnick's first-year anniversary in Alcoholics Anonymous.

There is always a yin and yang to things. Someone I know who has access to defense information told me in the corridor during a break that the defense really believes it's going to win this case. "They think the autopsy photographs are going to work in their favor," this person said. "They're going to bring in expert witnesses who are going to say that this could only be the work of a professional killer from a Colombian drug cartel, not a man like O. J. Simpson."

I first heard the Colombian-drug-ring idea last July, when I had dinner at '21' in New York with F. Lee Bailey, about six months before the trial began. He described it to me that night as if he were trying out his opening statement before a jury. He said Nicole's slashed voice box was the clue. He described it all wonderfully, very dramatically, but it seemed ludicrous to me then and it continues to seem ludicrous to me now. I believe it is unlikely to sway anyone other than a dedicated pro-defense juror, one who wouldn't convict Simpson even if a videotape of him committing the murders miraculously appeared. Would that I knew a way to contact a high-ranking member of a Colombian drug cartel to see how they feel about being accused by some high-priced defense attorneys in Los Angeles of savagely killing two innocent people on Bundy Drive a year ago.

Faye Resnick has been subpoenaed by the defense and, like Kato Kaelin, will surely be declared a hostile witness. She has been told to appear on July 3, which happens to be her birthday, and she is very nervous at the prospect. Evidently the defense is going to try to fit her right into the Colombian-drug-cartel scenario. The defense indicated early in the proceedings that the Colombians were after her, not Nicole.

What surprises one about Faye Resnick is how bright she is. And fearless. I don't think she's going to be the pushover the defense is expecting. She knows a lot about O.J. and drugs. She told me that she had taken drugs with him. She'd think nothing of spilling the beans on the stand if the defense got rough with her. She knows full well that Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman weren't murdered by a Colombian drug cartel who thought they were killing her because she owed them money. I've seen Resnick roar with laughter at that idea.

*I have watched the trial since the very beginning and I have noticed each week how the lawyers, witnesses, audience and O. J. have all started playing to the camera. They are obviously aware of when the camera is on them. They can see the camera move and even see the lens turn when it is zooming in to a close-up. As a result, the people in the courtroom are increasingly performing when they are on camera. *
Yesterday Barry Scheck obviously disagreed and disapproved of your ruling in such an obvious way that anyone watching television felt that he had been severely damaged in his defense of O.J. by this and other rulings.
-Portion of a letter sent to Judge Ito by George Schlatter, producer of Laugh-In and Real People.

I went to my home in Connecticut for the Memorial Day weekend, my first time back in five months. I wanted to clear my mind of O.J. for a few days. Barry Scheck was on the same plane, on his way home for the long weekend with his family in Brooklyn Heights. There was a lot of "Oh, Mr. Scheck" from the moment he stepped aboard, and soon he got upped to first class, into the seat right next to me. Scheck had had a hard day in court, conducting a vigorous cross-examination of Collin Yamauchi, the Los Angeles Police Department criminalist who performed the first DNA tests on evidence found at the crime scene on Bundy and at the Simpson residence on Rockingham Avenue. Scheck and his partner, Peter Neufeld, are masters of the art of belittlement and humiliation. That day Scheck had tried to show that Yamauchi was too inexperienced for the task assigned him, that he had been forced to rush his results, and that his speed in analyzing samples may have resulted in cross-contamination. Yamauchi's dislike of Scheck was obvious.

I didn't think I was going to like Scheck, but I did. Opposites in our beliefs, we conversed nonstop during the flight. He did most of the talking, and since my forte has always been listening, that was O.K. with me. He spoke of O.J. in glowing terms, as if he were a swell guy it was his honor to serve. Most of the people I spend time with don't think O.J.'s a swell guy at all. More and more I hear people say things like "If O.J. walks, I'm going to leave the country." Scheck really believes that the L.A.P.D. set up Simpson, or he puts on a good show of believing that. While spreading caviar on toast tips, he posed a hypothetical question, in words to this effect, for I wasn't taking notes: If I could prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that the police moved evidence in a conspiracy to frame O.J., could you as a member of the jury vote to convict O.J.? I don't for an instant believe that the police moved evidence in order to frame O.J., but I went along with his premise. Yes, I said, I could convict, knowing that. If the police had done what he said they did, then they should be punished, but I could never believe that the perpetrator of a double murder should go free because of police obstruction of justice. Scheck gave me an I-don't-get-you look. I gave him back an I-don't-get- you look.

We went on to other subjects. It interests me how people respond to fame, and Barry Scheck is now famous. Even 60 Minutes has done a piece on him and Neufeld. He said he doesn't like being recognized everywhere he goes. He told me he was upset when a radio personality made fun of the size of his nose. He thought it was embarrassing for his children. He seems absolutely crazy about his two kids and his wife, Didi. When he talked about them, he was a different person. Nice. He told me he had worshiped his father, who was a tap dancer, a hoofer, and a friend of Honi Coles, one of the all-time greats of tap dancing. Later, he said, his father managed musical acts, including Bobby Darin, Connie Francis, Mary Wells, and Hazel Scott, the great jazz pianist, who married Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Harlem congressman. When Scheck described Hazel Scott's funeral to me, which he attended with his father, I felt as if I were there.

In court the following Tuesday, we reverted to our original roles, with me watching and taking notes and Scheck up to his old belittlement tricks. "He was snapping at the witness, interrupting the witness, pointing his finger, embarrassing the witness," said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University. But Yamauchi stood his ground. "Would you mind not pointing at me like that?" he angrily demanded of his tormentor.

Everybody in this story wants to write a book about his part in it. That even goes for Ron X, the lookout man for J.R., the drug dealer to the stars who claims to have sold crystal methamphetamine to O. J. Simpson and Kato Kaelin in O.J.'s black Bentley in the parking lot of a Burger King on the night of the murders. Ron X came by to see me one afternoon. It was my first face-to-face with him; we had spoken on the telephone several times, and I was eager to put face to voice. He had told me in advance that he looked like a homeless person. He was not exaggerating. "Every homeless person smells like urine," he told me. "I let my cat pee on me. The police can smell the urine on me and think I'm homeless."

"Don't sit in that chair," I replied, pulling out a wooden one from the kitchen.

He's somewhere in his mid- to late 30s, with a nice-looking face which he manages to make very difficult to get a good look at. His hair, which is long, curly, and ratty, hangs in front of his eyes, concealing them, and the rest of his face is obscured by his mustache and beard.

The prosecution continues to maintain its distance from these dealers, even though many of the people who traveled in the world of the Simpsons before the murders suspect that O.J. was high at the time of the killings.

When I pointed out to Ron X that there was apparently no trace of drugs in Simpson's blood, he said that crystal meth leaves the bloodstream quickly. He said that the police messed up by not giving him a urine test, because the drug would have shown up in his urine. I suppose nobody had the nerve to ask such a big star to urinate in a bottle. Ron X claimed that a number of criminals in recent news stories were all on crystal meth. He called them tweeker freak-outs, a slang term for habitual users of the drug. He has a book project.

I wasn't chewing. I was sucking.
-Kimberly Maroe, KCAL-TV reporter, telling me what she said to Judge Ito when she was called into his chambers for chewing gum.

Judge Ito seems to despise the media, and frequently makes reporters the objects of his wrath. Laughter is now forbidden in the courtroom, even if something funny happens, which is rare. On two recent occasions Judge Ito rebuked the court. After hearing ripples of laughter that were really no more than stress-relieving chortles, he said through clenched teeth, "This is not an audience-participation function." Another time, after a minor disturbance, he said that if it happened again he would clear the courtroom.

Mr. Dunne, I spent an evening with O. J. Simpson. At Mortons. Every beam, shaft, and hint of light bounced off his being. He was a man who shifted the energy in the room. . . . Not for a second do I think he'll be convicted, but he'll haunt the lives of those who "knew" and did nothing about it.
-Excerpt from a letter from a stranger.

At the party for Richard Pryor's book Pryor Convictions at Georgia, a man introduced himself to me as Kato Kaelin's publicist. Kato didn't do his gig in Las Vegas after all, but he's got some TV shows lined up, and he's planning to sue Marc Eliot, his former co-author, for a share in the profits of the book Kato Kaelin: The Whole Truth. Fame being as fickle as it is, Kato's not quite as famous this month as he was last. Of course, if Marcia Clark were to put him back on the stand and were able to prove that he lied under oath-his version of things in Marc Eliot's book is different in part from what he said on the stand-he'd be right back in the spotlight again. Also at Richard Pryor's party, I ran into the young lady who had told me at Paul Jasmin's birthday party that her girlfriend had been in a three-way with O.J. "Thank God you didn't use my name," she said. "I would have died. I've got a kid now."

At Joe Torrenueva's hair salon in Beverly Hills, I was introduced to Robert Cabral, who used to teach karate to Nicole, Sydney, and Justin Simpson. He told me a fascinating story about O.J.'s not wanting to shake hands with him at Nicole's funeral, and then not looking him in the eye when he finally did. A woman who was watching her four-year-old grandson get a haircut told me that she would introduce me to a friend of hers whom Rosa Lopez used to work for before she worked at the Salingers' house on Rockingham next door to O.J.'s, where, she claimed on the stand, she saw the white Bronco parked on the night of the murders. Speaking of Rosa Lopez, there's a story going around that she's engaged to be married to a 28-year-old ventriloquist from Baltimore who saw her testify on television and then followed her to El Salvador, where they met, fell in love, and plan to marry. The only part of the story I don't believe is that Lopez doesn't want to have the wedding until after the trial, because she wants O.J. to give her away. When I told all this to Dan Rather, on whose CBS newscast I appear on Fridays to discuss the Simpson trial, he asked, "What do you think of that?" I replied, "It's perfect." And it is.

JUDGE: All right. So we may finish with the prosecution case this month? JUDGE: All right. That would thrill me to death.
-Judge Lance Ito and prosecutor Christopher Darden discussing the scheduling of remaining prosecution witnesses.

Former attorney general Richard Thornburgh appeared in court one day, as did Roone Arledge, president of the News Division of ABC. Sometimes I forget that there is another world going on here in Los Angeles, where people talk about things other than DNA and slit throats, although all conversation eventually returns to the trial.

The Beverly Hills Hotel, that grande dame of Hollywood life, reopened with a splashy movie-star party. For the purists, the Sultan of Brunei did not overgild the beloved pink birthday cake in his $100 million renovation. The Polo Lounge is as before. Don Loper's banana-leaf wallpaper still covers the halls and the coffee shop. Of course, there are those rather excessive chandeliers that look as if they came straight out of the palace in Brunei, but we'll get used to them in time. In the crush, a woman I had not seen in years told me that Marcus Allen was not going to come back to testify in the O.J. trial. The defense wants Allen to say on the stand that he told O.J. he had had an affair with Nicole and that O.J. still gave him his wedding at the house on Rockingham-all of this to prove that O.J. was not a jealous man. My friend had just talked to Allen that afternoon. He had called to say that he couldn't fly in for her daughter's wedding the following Saturday because he didn't want to come to L.A.

Batman Forever opened with an old-fashioned premiere at the Mann's Village Theater in Westwood, complete with screaming fans going mad at the sight of the stars, Val Kilmer, Jim Carrey, and Nicole Kidman with her husband, Tom Cruise. At a party afterward at the Armand Hammer Museum, I asked a friend of O.J.'s how Simpson's money was holding out, after reports that his legal costs will amount to $6 million by the end of the trial. I was told that O.J. continues to sell memorabilia, that he has received more than seven figures from his book I Want to Tell You, that he took out a $3 million line of credit on his house, and that he continues to own equity in HoneyBaked Ham.

And Dennis Hopper, of all people, emerged as the host with the most at his 59th-birthday party in his art-filled house in Venice, arranged and presided over by the beautiful actress-singer Victoria Duffy. It was what they used to call out here a star-studded evening, with 96 guests seated and place-carded, among them, in no particular order, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, Uma Thurman, Roddy McDowall, and Sean Penn, as well as such Los Angeles artists as Ed Ruscha, Robert Grant, and Chuck Arnoldi. Jury sequestration, and why it doesn't work, was the main topic of conversation at my table. Ten of the original 24 jurors are gone, and not a one because of illness or family hardship, which are the usual reasons for dismissal. Sequestration is an unnatural state, everyone agreed. Does anyone really expect us to believe that information is not whispered into some jurors' ears during the pillow-talk portion of conjugal visits? Shortly there-after, I heard that a second dismissed juror had been hospitalized following a suicide attempt.

The case is in the hands of 12 people who didn't have brains enough to get out of jury duty.
-Milton Berle at a Sunday brunch at Hillcrest Country Club.

Recently, the National Enquirer, which has been right most of the time in what it has published about the O. J. Simpson case, reported that there were secret talks of a plea bargain, that Simpson would claim Nicole attacked him first and the sentence would be seven years. Johnnie Cochran vehemently denied this in court, and told the press that the only thing his client would accept from the state was an apology. That's what's known as chutzpah.

If gossip is to be believed, another juror is in jeopardy. This news was whispered in my ear at the candlelight vigil commemorating the first anniversary of Ronald Goldman's death, honoring Ron, Nicole Brown Simpson, and all victims of violent crime. We were in a lovely park in Agoura, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles. (Simultaneously, in Dana Point, 90 miles away, the Brown family was holding a similar candlelight vigil.) A private detective of my acquaintance, who always seems to know a great deal about what is going on in this case before it happens, told me the juror had lied on the voir dire questionnaire, and that-shades of another juror, Jeanette Harris-there was domestic violence in this juror's background which had not been reported. When I passed along this bit of information a few minutes later to a reporter friend of mine, he said he already knew it, and added more to the rumor. "I heard that [the juror] is supposed to have said that Nicole deserved what she got," he said. With that, we lit our candles.

It was a beautiful night. If it wasn't a full moon, it was just a night before or a night after one. Hundreds came. They sat or stood on the hillside. There were television cameras from all the local stations. The Goldmans, with their outgoing friendliness, made themselves available to the crowd. It was a gathering of families. People brought their kids. Kim Goldman, 23, a senior at San Francisco State and an employee of Wells Fargo, was the mistress of ceremonies. She has been at the trial every day, a model of perfect behavior. Telling the crowd about Ron, she cried and laughed as she remembered him. "My brother was only 25, and just on his way to a happy and healthy and prosperous life, but he was literally stopped in his tracks."

I sat between Rabbi Bernie King, who gave the invocation and closing of the ceremony, and district attorney of the county of Los Angeles Gil Garcetti, who was also a speaker, as was I. During one of the speeches, I stood up to move around and case the crowd. In the dark, as I was talking to Suzanne Childs, communications director of the district attorney's office, a woman came up and introduced herself to me. She was Jill Shively, with her mother and a child in hand. Jill Shively, for those who have forgotten, claimed early on that she had seen O.J. in his white Bronco near Nicole Simpson's condominium on the night of the murders. She lost her value as a prosecution witness because she went on Hard Copy and took money for telling what she had seen that night. Inasmuch as everyone else involved in this trial is making a buck off it with their books and television appearances, I never saw what was so wrong with Jill Shively's taking money from Hard Copy. I went over to KCBS investigative reporter Harvey Levin, with whom I do a Sunday-night wrap-up about the week at the trial, and said, "There's Jill Shively. Grab her. I think she wants to talk." Harvey put his hand up. He was listening to the speech. All around us, candles glowed. "Not now," he said. "This is too moving."

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The Glove and Beyond: Dominick Dunne on the O.J. Simpson Trial's Most Pivotal Moments

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The presentation of the DNA evidence has ended, at least for now, and not a moment too soon. Everyone had had enough. Like everything else in this trial, it went on too long, especially the cross-examinations. Defense lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld were brilliant, and wonderfully prepared, but they seemed totally unaware that less is more.

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The opening night of the opera is a great social event in any city, and Los Angeles on May 6 was no exception. All the swells and all the music buffs turned out. Black tie. Big dresses. Big jewels. Big stars. That kind of night. Baroness Di Portanova of Houston, the Countess of Dudley of London, and Nan Kempner of New York added a touch of out-of-town glamour to the already glamorous occasion. The Founders Room was packed to the rafters during intermission. Champagne flowed. The candlelit grand promenade was the scene of the party afterward. The opera was Verdi's Otello. Placido Domingo sang Otello, the dark-skinned hero, and June Anderson was Desdemona, his fair, blonde wife. Sometime during the second act, husbands began to turn to wives, and wives to husbands, and whisper, "O.J. and Nicole." The scene onstage and the tragic dénouement seemed eerily reminiscent of the terrible events that had occurred in Brentwood a year before. Obsession. Jealousy. Suspicion. Spousal abuse. Rage. Violence. Otello's hands. Desdemona's throat. Murder.

"The jury should see this," said Mrs. Marvin Davis, the wife of the billionaire oil-and-real-estate tycoon.

The April 19 terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City put the O. J. Simpson trial back in perspective. A serious tone has returned to the trial. There haven't been any more men in drag disturbing the proceedings since the one who was removed in April, although one day a religious zealot rose from her seat and approached the well of the courtroom as if it were the high altar of a cathedral. She fell to her knees and loudly prayed, "Father, in Jesus's name, I ask you to open the heavens to give peace and strength to this court." We paid little attention as the bailiffs led her away. The Fellini-esque period-the days when Rosa Lopez, the maid from next door to the Simpson house on Rockingham Avenue, who lied on the stand, could announce to the court that she was tired, didn't want to answer any more questions, and wanted to go home, and the court would defer to her wishes-is at an end. These days, the stricter, sterner Judge Lance A. Ito would probably toss Lopez in jail for the night if she gave him any of that sass. He recently threw a couple of visitors out for whispering to each other. He threatened to have everyone in court searched when a woman whose cellular phone went off in her bag didn't come forward right away and identify herself. And, in a very angry moment over the bickering of defense attorney Peter Neufeld and prosecution lawyer George "Woody" Clarke, he loudly slapped his two hands hard on the top of his desk, bringing the entire courtroom to a stunned silence. He then waved the jury out, sanctioned the two lawyers, and fined them $250 each, to be paid immediately to the court clerk, Deirdre Robertson. He even specified that Neufeld could not bill his fine to Simpson, to which Simpson said politely, "Thank you." The judge is in no mood for any temperament from anybody. On May 18 he banned Court TV reporter Kristin Jeannette-Meyers and Gale Holland, of USA Today, for the duration of the trial after two jurors complained that they had been talking in the courtroom. The frequent sidebars of the early months have practically stopped. Judge Ito is focused on the desire of the sequestered jury-who became restless, then rebellious, over the slow pace of the trial-for him to speed things up.

Now we're back to a murder trial, with victims and blood. Blood is the key word these days. We saw new pictures of Nicole's hands drenched with her own blood. Horrifying. O.J. studiously looked away, but he must have peeked, because he covered his eyes. It was reported in the papers that he cried. He did not. We're into the DNA evidence, on which the prosecution must rest its case, as there is no murder weapon, no eyewitness, no set of finger-prints, and no confession. The prosecution believes that DNA will convict O. J. Simpson.

By this time, it's hard for me to believe that any of the jurors could accept the defense theory that the Los Angeles Police Department engaged in an elaborate conspiracy to frame O. J. Simpson for the murders of his former wife and her friend Ron Goldman. The constant repetition of the idea of conspiracy-a sort of jury brainwash-had become a tired, worn-out act even before the trial reached a point where the defense could have put it to dramatic effect. It had been so overworked by the time defense lawyer Peter Neufeld stepped up to the lectern that there was a general feeling of "Oh, that again" every time his voice expressed outrage at the mishandling of blood samples by the police. Probably no one pointed out the absurdity of the conspiracy argument better than Sean Delonas, the cartoonist for "Page Six" of the New York Post, who on April 27 depicted Timothy McVeigh, the alleged Oklahoma City bomber, being visited in his jail cell by Simpson's dream team of Johnnie Cochran, Robert Shapiro, F. Lee Bailey, and Alan Dershowitz. Cochran, with a comforting arm around the shoulder of the man thought to be responsible for the deaths of 167 people, is saying, "We believe the authorities planted the oily fertilizer in your rental truck as you practiced your chip shot on the front lawn."

The defense is having credibility problems on their conspiracy theme with the public, too. In some quarters, they are even looked upon as villains. Robert Shapiro, an avid sports enthusiast, who used to be cheered by fans when he attended events, has recently been heartily booed at a Lakers game in Los Angeles and at a prizefight in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, people also yelled "Guilty, guilty, guilty" as he took his seat.

I know for a fact that two members of the defense team are having conscience problems with their roles in the trial. Defense DNA expert Barry Scheck told me personally that he is haunted by the grief-stricken family of Ron Goldman and can't bring himself to look at them in the courtroom. "That family could be my family," he said. If there is anyone who is totally innocent in this story, it is Ron Goldman, a young man whose adult life was just beginning. He was slain in the process of doing a good deed: returning to Nicole Brown Simpson her mother's lost eye-glasses. If I were Scheck, I couldn't look at the Goldmans, either. Several days and several second thoughts later, however, when Scheck and I happened to meet up in the men's room, he assured me that he totally and absolutely believed in the innocence of O. J. Simpson-in case, I suppose, I had suspected otherwise after our earlier encounter.

Another member of the defense told a lawyer friend of mine that he despises two fellow members of the team, whom he referred to as "fucking liars." That lawyer is known to want to withdraw from the case.

What's more, there are rumors of financial distress in the Simpson camp. "Nobody's being paid," a person close to the action told me recently. The same person said that one of the group is "hurting for money." But stick together the dream team must. They're in this to win, even if winning means a hung jury at best.

I had dinner at Drai's with Michael Knox and his wife, Beverly. Knox, in case you've forgotten, was on the jury for 49 days, but was dismissed after the prosecution complained about his unseemly behavior, such as staring too hard at pictures on the walls of O. J. Simpson's house on Rockingham Avenue during a jury visit. Knox always stood out from the other jurors because of his distinctive manner of dress. I once described him wearing a tomato-red suit, red shoes, and a red tie to court. Knox's book, Diary of an O.J. Juror, is shortly to be published by Dove Books. He told me that it will include "an honest assessment of who's who on the jury, giving readers insight into the jurors and the social baggage they bring with them." He acknowledged to me that there had been racial tensions on the jury, but he said that the tensions were black against white, rather than the other way around, and also black against black. Knox, an African-American, said, "There will be a verdict that will shock America. . . . Justice is going to prevail."

The jury mutiny in April, when the jurors protested the dismissal of three of the deputies guarding them after Tracy Hampton, the African-American flight attendant on the panel, said it was either them or her, seems to have had a healing effect on the troubled group. For the first time since the trial began, I sense a unity among the jury that was not evident before. They are more relaxed, and seem to be enjoying one another's company. During a long sidebar recently, some of us members of the press were staring at the jurors, and they were staring back. Finally, they all began to laugh at the same time, probably at us for staring at them. Just as we have nicknames for them, they most likely have nicknames for all of us regulars in the courtroom. The white female on the panel whom former juror Jeanette Harris said had kicked her seems to have formed a friendly alliance with another African-American woman, who sits in front of her. If there are tensions among the jurors, they are not evident. Larry Flax, the co-founder and co-chairman of California Pizza Kitchen, played host to the jury at his downtown pizza emporium. Flax told me that he reserved a private section with three tables for the group, and that all of them came except for one. He described them as affable, friendly, and funny. He said that although the men sat together at one table, the women seated themselves in a racially mixed manner at the other two, belying the dismal picture of racial conflict presented by Jeanette Harris. Subsequently, 13 of the 17 jurors appeared in the courtroom one day wearing California Pizza Kitchen T-shirts. On the back of the T-shirts was written, FOURTEEN ETHNICALLY DIVERSE CULTURES PEACEFULLY CO-EXISTING ON A THIN DELICIOUS CRUST.

However, all is still not bliss. The alternate juror who took Tracy Hampton's place is a 28-year-old single Hispanic woman who works as a real-estate appraiser with the Los Angeles County Assessors Office. Tall and slender, she has long black hair that hangs to her shoulders, and her extremely pale face is brought to life by her scarlet lipstick. As an alternate, she often read a self-help book called Six Pillars of Self-Esteem during sidebars. On the questionnaire she filled out during voir dire, she wrote of Simpson, "He's the only person who had a visible motive. It was his ex-wife, and she was with another man. It's something most people would have a problem with." The defense is not pleased with her as a regular on the jury.

Tracy Hampton, whom Judge Ito released on May 1, was the first of the dismissed jurors to have no words to say to assembled reporters when she returned to her parents' home, or any wish to capitalize on the fame that could have been hers. She held her hands up in front of her face so as not to be photographed. The following day, she was rushed to the hospital after reports that she had suffered a violent seizure. Her face and body were covered with a sheet as she was carried on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance. The young woman had obviously been suffering during the last weeks she was on the jury panel. A miasma of dark rumors suggesting particularly disturbing suicide attempts remain unconfirmed.

One day shortly before Heidi Fleiss was sentenced to three years for pandering, I had lunch with the famous Hollywood madam in the garden of the Hotel Bel-Air. You'd never take her for a madam. She arrived in her own style of incognito-an oversize T-shirt, huge sunglasses, and a baseball cap on backward, looking just like the 29-year-old California girl she is. In one of these columns, I wrote that she would probably do more jail time for her victimless crime than either the Menendez brothers or O. J. Simpson. I meant it cynically, but then again I didn't. Over lunch she was forthright, funny, and frightened. The idea of incarceration panicked her. When the subject of prison came up, her eyes would gaze off into space in a private reverie, as if she were visualizing that which she feared so much. Although she is currently pitching a book on her escapades, she told me that she does not intend to name the celebrated men who were her patrons. I can tell you-and I didn't get this from her-that there are names on that list that would really make you run to your nearest bookstore. I asked her if any of the rich and famous clients who utilized her services had offered to help cover her large legal expenses. With a shake of her head she gave me an are-you-kidding? look. She said she hadn't heard from any of them. Just then, in a complex juxtaposition of the many overlapping worlds of Los Angeles, Nancy Reagan and Betsy Bloomingdale, in very smart suits, arrived to be seated one table over. Heidi Fleiss knew who they were, and they knew who Heidi Fleiss was.

The much-delayed retrial of the Menendez brothers is now scheduled for August 16. But don't count on it. Most of the defense's requests have been denied by Judge Stanley Weisberg. There will be only one trial for the brothers, not separate ones, as requested by the defense. There will be one jury, not a separate jury for each, as there was last time. The trial will take place in Van Nuys, where the last trial took place, not in the Criminal Courts Building in Los Angeles, as the defense requested. The feeling in the air here is that the teary tales of Lyle and Erik Menendez-the "battered children," as the defense wants to prove-won't work the second time around, and that convictions are almost certain. The imminent publication by Dove Books of The Private Diary of Lyle Menendez in His Own Words, Norma Novelli's account of her relationship with Lyle Menendez, including transcripts of revealing tapes of her phone conversations with him in jail, has infuriated the defense, as has a recent ruling by Judge Weisberg that one of the tapes will be admissible during the trial.

You have reached Kato Kaelin International, a division of Time Warner and the Los Angeles Times. *For general information on Kato, press

For general information on Kato's hair, press 2. For information on specific upper-body parts of Kato, press 3. For information on Kato dolls, press 4. Kato dogs, press 5. Kato pilots, 6. Kato in Vegas, 7. Kato CD-ROM, 8. Kato condoms, 9. And for information on a Kato time-share, our houseguest-placement office will be with you in just a moment. You may start your message now.* Beep . . .

-Message on the answering machine of Hollywood comedy writer Bruce Vilanch.

Kato Kaelin, O.J.'s onetime houseguest, is continuing to capitalize on his O.J. fame. He has been signed as the opening act for comedian Louie Anderson for a two-week gig at Bally's in Las Vegas. Anderson said about Kato, "In addition to his acting, I believe Kato is a natural stand-up comedian." Kaelin appeared at the Kentucky Derby, where he was snubbed by Geraldo Rivera. His burgeoning film career suffered a setback when his highly promoted guest appearance on Roseanne was cut before airing.

"I noticed that Kato was wearing Charlie's jacket on the stand.""How did you know that was Charlie's jacket?""It was the one that wasn't Grant's."
-Telephone conversation between Terry Moore, mother of Grant Cramer, and Janet Sheen, mother of Charlie Sheen, about their sons' friend Kato Kaelin.

Detective Mark Fuhrman has filed a $50 million libel suit against writer Jeffrey Toobin and The New Yorker magazine for portraying him as a rogue cop who tried to frame Simpson by planting the famous bloody glove on the football hero's estate, in an article that appeared months before the trial. The suit says that the article indicated that Simpson's lawyers hoped to convince jurors that Fuhrman had planted the glove so that he could then find it and become the hero of the case. Fuhrman, who claims that his reputation was ruined by the charges, has also included defense lawyer Robert Shapiro in the suit, alleging that Shapiro either was a source for Toobin's article or was involved in making the information available.

Shapiro has retained Larry Feldman, known as the lawyer to the Simpson team, to represent him in the Fuhrman suit. Feldman was also retained by Johnnie Cochran to represent him in the palimony suit filed by his former longtime mistress, Patricia Cochran, who is the mother of his 22-year-old son. Feldman had previously won a huge settlement for the 14-year-old boy who sued Cochran's client Michael Jackson for molestation.

The Goldman family, specifically Fred Goldman and his daughter, Kimberly, have filed a wrongful-death suit against O. J. Simpson, accusing him of killing Ronald Goldman with "vicious and outrageous savagery." Kim Goldman said that the suit has "nothing to do with the money. If we can make him feel a quarter of the pain we feel, it's worth it."

Hey, Gretchen, sweetheart, it's Orenthal James, who is finally at a place in his life where he is, like, totally, totally unattached with everybody. Ha! Haah!
-Message left by Simpson on the answering machine of Gretchen Stockdale, a former Los Angeles Raiders cheerleader and model, at 7:35 P.M. June 12,1994, the night of the murders.
Mommy, please call me back. I want to know what happened last night. Why did we have to go to the police station? Please answer, Mommy! Please answer, Mommy! Please answer, Mommy! Please answer. . . . Bye.
-Message left on June 13 on the answering machine of Nicole Brown Simpson by Sydney Simpson, unaware that her mother was dead.

Benazir Bhutto, the prime minister of Pakistan, was in town for a few days. Asked by her hostess whom she would like to meet at dinner at Jimmy's, the fashionable Beverly Hills restaurant, Bhutto didn't say Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, or any variation on the movie-star theme. Instead, she asked to meet Marcia Clark and Robert Shapiro. They both accepted, and Clark brought prosecutor Chris Darden with her.

What's happened to the Browns? They almost never come to court anymore. Occasionally Tanya, Nicole's youngest sister, and her fiancé come by, but the family as a unit has not been seen for weeks in its section of reserved seats. Juditha Brown, Nicole's mother, did appear one day and engaged in deep conversation with Shirley Baker, O.J.'s sister, about pictures in Life magazine of Sydney and Justin Simpson. Brown felt that the children had been exploited. When I asked her why she had not been in court, she said, "This is not my favorite place to be."

To my way of thinking, it is a mistake for them not to come. The trial is the last business of Nicole's life. It is also important for the jury to see the family sitting there, watching and listening. Victims' families are a constant reminder that loss has occurred and that people are suffering as a result. The Goldman family, particularly Kim, Ron's sister, and Patti, his stepmother, almost never miss a day, and they pay strict attention, even during the boring parts. In many people's minds, Kim Goldman has become the conscience of this trial. On the other side of the aisle, the Simpsons are equally constant in their attendance. You have to say this for the Simpsons: they're a united family in their support of O.J., and they're respected by everyone. When Carmelita Durio, O.J.'s sister, wheeled her mother, Eunice Simpson, who was dressed from head to toe in purple, into the courtroom one day, everyone stepped back to allow them to pass.

The DNA is very pretty.
-Lisa Kahn, DNA expert for the prosecution, to Kim Goldman, sister of Ron Goldman, in a corridor of the courthouse.
It's incredibly strong. It can't get any clearer than it is. I worry whether the jury got it or not.
-Kim Goldman re Dr. Robin Cotton's DNA testimony.

For months the defense has denigrated the work of the police, the detectives, the criminalists, and the lab technicians. Certainly few, if any, of the legal pundits monitoring the case for all the TV channels are buying the defense's belabored conspiracy theory, however. One even said to me, on a guarantee of anonymity, "I think it will be seen as a disgrace to have represented O.J."

Along came Dr. Robin Cotton, director of laboratories for Cellmark Diagnostics in Germantown, Maryland, the nation's largest private forensic DNA-testing firm, to present the trial's defining moment. Dr. Cotton, who holds a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of California, Irvine, explained the basics of DNA to the jurors in a prim, precise manner, as a favorite schoolteacher might, simplifying the complicated material but never talking down to them. According to Cotton, the blood found near the victims could have come from only 1 person in 170 million African-Americans and Caucasians. That blood matched O. J. Simpson's blood. The blood on the sock in Simpson's bedroom was consistent with that of only 1 person out of 6.8 billion-more people than there are on earth-and that blood matched the blood of Nicole Brown Simpson.

At one point Deputy District Attorney George Clarke, anticipating the defense's argument that the blood samples could have been contaminated, asked Cotton, "So this process of degradation, can it change my DNA into looking like your DNA?"

"No," she replied.

"Or your DNA into looking like the court's DNA?"

"No."

"Or any members of the jury or the audience?"

"No."

The courtroom was rapt. The jurors listened attentively. Almost all of them took notes. I saw a few look at one another as Cotton supplied the statistic of 1 in 170 million. When the camera in the courtroom moved away from the defense table toward the bench, Johnnie Cochran, out of range, stretched and yawned expansively while Robert Shapiro, who was sitting next to him, closed his eyes as if he were falling asleep. I took this to be an ostentatious display for the jury, signifying that the breathtaking figures were of no consequence. Indeed, Cochran was quoted the next day in The New York Times as saying that he didn't think Cotton's testimony was "damaging at all."

The prosecution's contention that Simpson murdered his former wife and Ronald Goldman was further bolstered, however, by evidence offered by Gary Sims, the lead forensic chemist from the California Department of Justice, who showed that blood in Simpson's Bronco was consistent with the blood of Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman. Sims also showed that blood on the glove found at the Rockingham estate before Simpson returned from Chicago contained a mixture of blood types from Simpson and the victims. During this testimony, Simpson, who once announced to the court that he was absolutely, 100 percent not guilty, calmly made notes on his yellow pad.

Deputy District Attorney Brian Kelberg offered the court the most descriptive explanation of how the murders were committed. In a hearing outside the presence of the jury that Simpson himself waived the right to attend, Kelberg suggested that "the perpetrator, who we contend is the defendant O. J. Simpson," came up from behind Nicole, placed his foot on her back when she was facedown on the ground, pulled her head back by her hair, and then slashed her throat from ear to ear. Kelberg also said that the knife was drawn against Ron Goldman's throat in one sharp, clean motion.

People are beginning to say that if O. J. Simpson were white, and Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman had been black, and all the circumstances were the same, this trial would be over by now.

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Jury Mutinies and Bloody DNA Evidence: The O.J. Simpson Trial's Darkest Hours

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The opening night of the opera is a great social event in any city, and Los Angeles on May 6 was no exception. All the swells and all the music buffs turned out. Black tie. Big dresses. Big jewels. Big stars. That kind of night.

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Meet the O.J. Simpson Trial's Supporting Players, from Faye Resnick to Mark Fuhrman

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In the fervid, obsessive world of the Simpson trial, no one ever takes a recess. Nicole's sister, O.J.'s sister, Faye Resnick, Mark Fuhrman-all are creating new plotlines for this dark, unfolding drama.

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When I returned to New York last February, after seven months here covering the first Menendez trial, it never occurred to me that another cataclysmic event, another double homicide in high circles, would bring this city to a halt again so soon. But it has, and I'm back, and there's quite a lot going on, even though neither trial has started yet.

The Menendez brothers, who held the city of Los Angeles in their thrall for four years, have ceased to fascinate the town, so overwhelming is the interest in O. J. Simpson. Simpson is the most famous American to be charged with a violent crime since Fatty Arbuckle was tried for manslaughter back in the 20s, amid rumors that he had inserted a Coca-Cola bottle into a young woman's vagina during an orgy at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, thereby causing her death. Arbuckle was acquitted after three trials, but his reputation and career were ruined. In the wake of the killings of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman last June, O.J. has superseded all others in history as the town's top topic, a topic that will continue to captivate until the jury arrives at a verdict, if it does arrive at a verdict. The cynicism of the citizenry about the possibility of a conviction, after two non-verdicts in the Menendez trial, makes "hung jury" and "acquittal" the most often repeated words in the community.

The late unlamented Jose Menendez, about whom a decent word was scarcely uttered during the six-month murder trial of the two sons who had shutgunned him and his wife, Kitty, to death, was once a top-ranking executive at Hertz car rental. At the time, O. J. Simpson was doing his extremely popular commercials for Hertz. The story goes that Lyle and Erik Menendez, then pre-teenagers, were fans of the football star, so one night Jose and Kitty invited O.J. to dinner with them and their sons, and the evening was a great success. The Menendez brothers and O. J. Simpson did not meet again until they were all in the celebrity section of the Los Angeles County Jail, all three charged with double murder. O.J. was briefly in the cell next to Erik's; then Erik was moved to another cellblock. Subsequently Simpson was put in an area by himself, where he has an exercise machine and a private room for his visitors. Even in jail, the Menendez brothers have been upstaged by the star quality of O. J. Simpson.

The Simpson case is like a great trash novel come to life, a mammoth fireworks display of interracial marriage, love, lust, lies, hate, fame, wealth, beauty, obsession, spousal abuse, stalking, brokenhearted children, the bloodiest of bloody knife-slashing homicides, and all the justice that money can buy. With Kato Kaelin, Al Cowlings, Faye Resnick, Denise Brown, and Detective Mark Fuhrman in key supporting roles, there's not a vanilla character in the whole story. Even the lawyers on both sides are bigger than life. By now, who doesn't know who Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran Jr. are? Or Marcia Clark? At dinner parties and in restaurants, whole evenings are spent discussing the case. Everyone has a tidbit of information. Everyone has a theory about what happened. Even those people who affect weariness with the subject, who say things like "I'm sick, sick, sick to death of O.J.," lean in and listen intently when a new nugget is brought forth. A great many people I have encountered were friends, or friends of friends, of O.J.'s or Nicole's before the knifings. Everyone has a topper to everyone else's piece of information. "I saw Nicole jogging in Brentwood just the day before," said a man at a screening, to which another man immediately replied, "Craig Baumgarten played golf with O.J. that Sunday morning at Riviera."

The parties and private screenings go on and on, and so does the chatter after dinner. Sometimes people talk right through the film. "This piece of shit cost $60 million" said a Hollywood mogul the other night about a film we were watching at someone's house, where the screen came out of the ceiling and the Picassos went up at the push of a button to reveal the windows of the projection booth. The comment signaled that conversation could begin. There's always a lot to say about Paula Barbieri, who was O.J.'s last girlfriend before the slayings.

"Paula Barbieri visits O.J. in jail.""Bob Evans knows Paula Barbieri.""I heard that Paula Barbieri was with Michael Bolton at the Mirage in Vegas on the night of the murder.""If Paula had been there, I bet Nicole would never have been killed that night. He didn't have anyplace to go."

Although I once lived here for many years, I have never before been so aware of what a small town the Hollywood community really is. Everyone knows everything about everyone else. It's like an update of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, except in this version everyone drives a Ferrari or a Rolls-Royce, and the Stage Manager has been-but may not be much longer-Robert Shapiro, one of L.A.'s best-known defense lawyers. Shapiro, who is an acknowledged spin doctor and master of media manipulation, has been heading O.J.'s defense team. "He only had $60 on him," Shapiro said on-camera to offset the belief that O.J., with Al Cowlings at the wheel of the white Bronco, was escaping to Mexico five days after the killings. Actually, according to all reports, O.J. had something like $8,000 with him at the time, but, as they keep saying out here, Shapiro was just doing his job. We live in an age of the defense attorney as superstar. Witness Shapiro's daily arrival at the downtown Los Angeles courthouse, surrounded by television cameras, with microphones stuck in his face and reporters yelling questions at him. This is a man experiencing Nirvana. Shapiro has even hired the lawyer-agent Ed Hookstratten to field book offers and to discuss possibilities for his own television talk show.

Everyone seems to know Shapiro. He's a bona fide member of the film colony, as well as a personable and jovial fellow to meet. He's here, he's there, he's everywhere-the most ubiquitous figure in movieland society, and everyone in town is talking about him.

"Bob was Tina Sinatra's lawyer in her stalking suit against Jimmy Farentino."
"Bob was Bob Evans's lawyer at the Cotton Club murder trial."
"I heard Bob got an out-of-state death threat, but he denied it.""I bet you didn't know that Bob was the lawyer for the guy who shot Marcia Clark's first husband."

'Nicole knew how to push O.J.'s buttons," said a woman who knew the Simpsons as a couple, at lunch at Le Dôme. "When she didn't save a seat for O.J. at their daughter's dance recital that last afternoon, she knew how crazy that was going to make him, having to walk up and down the aisle looking for a place to sit. She knew that was the equivalent of giving him the middle finger. Once she found out he was still seeing Paula Barbieri, after they were supposed to be reconciling, she said, Over, out! Fuck you, Charlie." The lady paused. "Mind if I smoke? You see, Nicole stayed too long in that relationship. You're supposed to get out of an abusive relationship, not stay in it. Even after they were divorced, they were involved. You know what happens? It becomes a dance of death. That's what they were in.

"You won't quote me, will you? I mean, you can tell the story, but don't attach my name to it. Is that a deal?" Many people who know things about the Simpsons do not want to take any chances going public, in case O.J. is acquitted.

In the midst of all this, the Prince of Wales came to town, shortly after his I-never-loved-her-my-father-made-me-marry-her declaration about the mother of his sons. What a flat tire that trip was. I can remember a time out here when the visit of any member of the British royal family was the social event of the season. Years ago Sharman Douglas, the daughter of the late Lewis Douglas, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James's, gave a dinner dance at the Bistro in Beverly Hills in honor of her old friend Princess Margaret. That party was considered to be the beginning of the A group and the B group in the movieland society set, so humiliating was it not to be invited to dine with the princess, who danced that night with Paul Newman. How things have changed. The city was most certainly not gripped with royal fever during the visit of the heir to the British throne. The beleaguered Prince was simply not a hot ticket. There was a great deal of behind-the-scenes telephoning to beg people to show up at certain of the charity events. The stars did not turn out. There was no hostility toward the Prince, merely indifference.

Robert Shapiro was one of the most photographed superstars at Barbara and Marvin Davis's Carousel of Hope Ball in October, right along with Hillary Clinton, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Dustin Hoffman, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, and Fergie, the Duchess of York. One of the hottest items bid on at the silent auction preceding the ball was lunch with Shapiro after the trial; it went for $2,000. All eyes in the ballroom were focused on Shapiro for his reactions as Jay Leno, the master of ceremonies, told a round of O.J. jokes. "One of O.J.'s lawyers only handles clients with one glove," said Leno, referring to Johnnie Cochran, who represented Michael Jackson in the child-molestation suit in 1993, as well as to the bloody glove found on the Simpson estate.

"I saw Bob last night at Eclipse. He's one of the backers.""My wife sat next to Shapiro at Jackie Collins's party last night.""When the camera panned around the Rose Bowl at the Rolling Stones concert, Bob got more applause than any star there.""I wish you could have seen Bob at this Halloween costume party we were at last night at Chasen's. He came as a prizefighter, in black satin shorts and a white satin robe with SHAPIRO embroidered on the back. He and Linell won first prize for best costume. Linell was in a very short white leather mini, like a ring girl announcing the rounds. Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the defense jury consultant on the case, came as Carmen Miranda. And Kardashian (do you know Bob Kardashian? His ex-wife's married to Bruce Jenner) came as Count Dracula."

It was from Robert Kardashian's house in the San Fernando Valley that O.J., with a gun, a lot of cash, a passport, a fake beard, and Al Cowlings at the wheel, departed on his famous bolt for Mexico, or his bolt for Nicole Simpson's freshly dug grave to commit suicide, depending upon which version of the story you believe. Shapiro and Kardashian claimed that they had been upstairs in a conference room and didn't know O.J. and Cowlings were leaving. Kardashian, with Shapiro at his side, read O.J.'s cover-every-base "suicide" note at a press conference. As for the fake beard, Shapiro's spin was that O.J. had been planning on taking his children to Disneyland, an interpretation which might work for Michael Jackson but which seems improbable for Simpson, who was not having problems being mobbed by fans, particularly kids, prior to the slayings in June. Again, as they say out here, Shapiro was just doing his job.

Robert Shapiro appeared at Michael Jackson's 2,700-acre Neverland ranch last August to attend the wedding and reception of Jackson's bodyguard Miko Brando, a son of Marlon Brando's. His co-counsel Johnnie Cochran, who had represented Jackson during his alleged-child-abuse woes, did not attend the wedding. Neither did Marlon Brando. Shapiro had been defense attorney for Miko's half-brother Christian Brando, who in May 1990 left his father's house, took his half-sister Cheyenne to dinner, drove to his girlfriend's house to get a gun, and then returned to his father's house, where he shot and killed Cheyenne's boyfriend, Dag Drollet, whose child she was carrying. Christian Brando is now doing 10 years in San Luis Obispo (which means he will probably serve only 5, because most California sentences have been cut in half), following a plea bargain arranged by Shapiro. High drama is a constant in the lives of these people: Michael Jackson had to leave Miko's wedding reception when he got word that Delores Jackson, his ex-sister-in-law, had drowned in her boyfriend's swimming pool. An investigation is now under way, since the coroner discovered suspicious marks on the body.

Nicole Pulvers, a lawyer from Robert Shapiro's office, is in charge of O.J.'s visitors list. Some of O.J.'s pals, such as the producer Craig Baumgarten and NBC's West Coast president, Don Ohlmeyer, are also on O.J.'s material witness list and, as witnesses, have regular access to his private visiting room, where sounds of party-like hilarity have been reported. Other prisoners in the L.A. County Jail, including the once rich Menendez brothers, usually receive their guests in large visiting areas supervised by deputies, and have to speak to them over telephones through glass partitions. Four nights a week, O.J. receives visitors in a room where he can speak to them directly without telephones. There is only a lawyer present, usually Nicole Pulvers.

There are more attorneys here than I have ever seen before on a homicide case. The prosecution has a squad of 11. Every time I look at the huge defense team, I wonder how much this is costing Simpson. Besides the famous names-Shapiro, Cochran, Dershowitz, Bailey, and Uelmen-there is a battery of up-and-coming young lawyers on the defense staff. One day the big legal guns on both sides retired to Judge Ito's chambers for an in camera hearing. Whatever they were discussing went on and on. As time passed, the atmosphere relaxed, and general conversation took place. Some of the lawyers began to gravitate to O.J. and sat down at the defense end of the table. Within minutes, the scene had the curious look of a dinner party, where Simpson was the host, holding court. The young lawyers often laughed too loudly at things he said, the way people who are not used to being in the orbit of a celebrity do.

The tide of sympathy for the man people used to call a hero has turned. When the 911 tape of Nicole calling the police was played on television, it marked the beginning of the turn. More recently, the extraordinary television appearances of an enraged Denise Brown, Nicole's sister, have had their effect on the public. Whatever spin the defense puts on the 911 tape in the trial, if it is ruled admissible, there can be no doubt in anyone's mind that we were listening to a terrified woman who was not unused to the situation she was in. If the DNA results are anywhere near as overwhelming as they are whispered to be, it will be difficult for even the most diehard loyalist to remain loyal. Rarely, very rarely, someone says that he thinks O.J. is innocent. It happened at a dinner I attended one night.

"I don't think O.J. did it," said one guest, who was a friend of Simpson's. He used to go to the house on Rockingham. He liked O.J. a lot and said so.

There were oh-come-on-get-real groans from some people at the table.

"I mean it. He couldn't have killed two people in that amount of time."

"Just ignore John on this topic, thank you very much," said the hostess. "Otherwise, he's charming."

"I don't know Faye Resnick. I've never met her. She came into Nicole's life in the last couple of years, but she covered it all in her book. It's heartbreakingly true. I could have done without the blow-job story, but it was her life. Nicole was a woman with her own life.""The newspapers keep calling Faye Resnick a socialite. I've never seen her anywhere, have you?""Faye Resnick's hiding out at Michael Viner and Deborah Raffin's house in Stowe, Vermont. She and Mike Walker wrote the book in three weeks."

Michael Viner, the president of Dove Books, is Resnick's publisher. He also brought out her book on tape, which Resnick reads herself. Mike Walker is a gossip columnist for the National Enquirer. Whether Resnick's book would have reached its dizzying heights of success without Judge Ito's ire over its publication and his exhortation to prospective jurors to avoid bookstores is open to speculation.

The defense team, especially Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran, schmooze with the media in the corridor outside the courtroom, know the names of all the regular reporters, and laugh and joke with them. The prosecution team all smile a greeting but move on, almost never stopping to chat.

Out of the courtroom, Marcia Clark, the prosecutor with William Hodgman, has a friendly manner and a feisty wit. Her background story, which I know of only through the National Enquirer, is movie material in itself. The Enquirer, which is the tabloid every reporter and journalist covering the case reads faithfully every Monday morning, must not be dismissed for inaccuracy in its reporting. Clark was once a dancer. After she divorced her first husband, Gaby Horowitz, a backgammon gambler who played for high stakes with such fanatics of the game as Lucille Ball and John Wayne, he was accidentally shot in the head by his best friend, Bruce Roman, who was represented by Robert Shapiro. Horowitz survived, but is severely handicapped. Clark has two very young children by her second marriage, to Gordon Clark, from whom she filed for divorce three days before Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed.

"My boyfriend went to the birthday party for Justin Simpson the other day. Arnelle, O.J.'s daughter, arrived in Nicole's jeep. Al Cowlings was there.""Al Cowlings was backstage in the Rolling Stones' inner sanctum after their concert at the Rose Bowl.""Actually, Al's a nice guy. He really loved Nicole and the kids."

In 1989 the Menendez brothers appeared to be the inheritors of their parents' $14 million estate. That was before they were caught and charged with double murder, after suggesting to the police that the Mafia might have committed the crime. The Beverly Hills house where the killings took place has been sold. The bank accounts of their parents, which paid for their defense in the first trial, are empty. Leslie Abramson has continued to represent Erik, at a greatly reduced fee, which is paid this time by the county of Los Angeles. Lyle's lawyer Jill Lansing left the case after the first trial. The court assigned a public defender to represent Lyle in the second trial. At a recent court hearing I attended, Judge Stanley Weisberg referred to Lyle Menendez, the former rich kid, as an indigent defendant.

Lyle is not happy with William Weiss, the public defender assigned to him by the court, and wants Jill Lansing back on the case. The greatly underpraised Lansing changed the course of the first trial when she expertly guided Lyle Menendez step-by-step through his tearful testimony, proving concretely the staggering power of male tears on a female jury. David Conn and Carol Najera, the new prosecution team assigned to the case by Los Angeles district attorney Gil Garcetti, may effectively block Lansing's return by calling her as a witness in the second trial.

Conn was the prosecutor in the Cotton Club murder case, in which film producer Robert Evans, with his attorney, Robert Shapiro, at his side, took the Fifth. Conn got life sentences without parole for the two hired killers and for Lanie Greenberger, the mastermind of the hit, in which Roy Radin, an aspiring film producer, was shot to death in gangland fashion. In that trial, Marcia Morrissey, who is now the co-defense counsel with Leslie Abramson, was one of Greenberger's lawyers.

The second Menendez trial is going to be very different from the first. Leslie Abramson, has long wanted the trials to be separate, with Erik's going first. The prosecution wants the brothers tried together, as before. The general belief is that Erik will turn on Lyle. As of now, Judge Weisberg has indicated that there will be only one jury this time, not two. The defense will be two separate camps, rather than one cohesive unit dominated by Abramson.

"I went to Whoopi Goldberg's wedding to that union guy. Richar Pryor was there. Richard knew O.J. All anybody talked about at the wedding was O.J. Did you know that Whoopi had fuck you painted on the roof of her house on the day of her wedding to keep the helicopters away?"

In the old grab-it-while-you're-hot Hollywood syndrome, several lawyers in high-profile cases are taking advantage of their newfound celebrity status to ensure a continuation of their fame beyond their trials. Since Leslie Abramson's spectacular sexual-molestation defense of Erik Menendez, which resulted in hung juries for both Erik and Lyle Menendez, she has won an acquittal for another client, Roman Luisi, who was also charged with double murder. Fame and recognition have come her way. Abramson describes herself as a proponent of a line of defense that seeks justice for victimized people who kill their victimizers, which, roughly translated, means the abuse excuse.

Abramson, like Robert Shapiro, now moves in the orbit of celebrity. Barbara Walters on ABC picked her as one of the 10 most fascinating personalities of 1994. Liz Smith devoted an entire column to her in New York Newsday, in which she stated that things were cooking for a possible future career in television. Abramson attended the International Press Freedom Awards dinner at the Grand Hyatt in New York accompanied by ABC anchorman Peter Jennings. She made the rounds of the New York publishing houses with her literary agent, Kathy Robbins, to pitch a book proposal, and got a $500,000 deal with Simon & Schuster for a book entitled My Life in Crime. Part of that fee will be split with her co-author, Richard Flaste. "The book I am thinking of writing is a typical lawyer's autobiography. I would probably not even mention Erik and Lyle in it," she confided to Liz Smith.

At Princeton University on November 11, Leslie Abramson gave a luncheon talk at a seminar called "The Appearance of Justice: Juries, Judges, and the Media." The event was co-sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton and the Annenberg Washington Program of Northwestern University. Abramson was accompanied by Hazel Thornton, an Erik Menendez juror who has appeared with her on television since the first trial. Hazel Thornton has written a book called Hung Jury: The Diary of a Menendez Juror, about her experiences in the jury room of the Menendez trial, which has yet to find a publisher. Abramson spent several minutes of her speech blasting me. She called me a liar and said that I made up facts in my coverage of the Menendez case. I subscribe to the theory that name-callers project onto others what they most dislike in themselves. In a BBC Omnibus documentary called "The Trials of Dominick Dunne," which was aired in November, Abramson snarled into the camera and said, "He's trying very hard to be Truman Capote.... He doesn't have ... Truman Capote's talent." About that, at least, she was correct.

Abramson has signed with ABC to be a commentator at the O. J. Simpson trial. The scuttlebutt in television-news circles is that she will receive $4,000 a day which could, if the trial is as sensational as people expect it to be, net her as much as $20,000 a week. In her book proposal, Abramson wrote, "Rick [Flaste] and I will spend the months before Menendez resumes in the spring going over my career and combing through transcripts, an incredibly rich source for a book like this. Much of this work will have to be done while the Simpson trial is in progress, and I expect that I will be called on again for extensive work as a commentator for ABC News. (The plan is to turn my television experience into a chapter, too-behind the scenes at the media circus.)"

"The dirty D word that is not being mentioned in the Simpson case is drugs."

O.J. Simpson, whatever his private torments may be, puts on a front that is as audacious as his absolutely-100-percent-not-guilty reply to the guilty-or-not-guilty query. He enters the courtroom each time looking like a star. Shapiro and Cochran often precede him out the door of the holding room, where O.J.'s manacles are removed and he changes from his jailhouse blues into his own, beautifully cut suits. They often enter laughing, as if they have just heard a wonderful joke. Shapiro sometimes turns back to O.J. to whisper some final thing. They are all aware that the camera is on them, and behave accordingly. By contrast, the Menendez brothers, their luster dimmed, schlepped into the courtroom in Van Nuys, looking like TV actors whose series had been canceled. The ranks of their groupies had greatly diminished. Those who were there wore yellow ribbons of the free-the-hostages variety.

Lyle Menendez, the indigent defendant, was wearing a new $2,500 toupee, by Don Kovakovich, of Fresno, California, who made and then gave the piece to Lyle. Kovakovich is a bit of celebrity himself in the world of false hair, having recently appeared, rather controversially, on the Jenny Jones television show in Chicago, where he discussed the hair problems of Lyle Menendez and O. J. Simpson in the Los Angeles County Jail. He said that Lyle wears his toupee and O.J. uses his hair-restorative treatment every day.

The Simpson dream team put together by the defense is not so dreamy these days. From all reports, there is disharmony in the ranks. People seeing Robert Shapiro out and about on the party circuit have begun to ask, "When does he work?" Friends of Shapiro's have urged him to cut down on his overactive social life, even to quit the case, saying he's gotten all he can out of it. Nowadays, Shapiro is constantly denying that he is leaving. Johnnie Cochran is moving more and more toward center stage, however, and will probably lead the actual trial.

One of the arguments is whether or not O.J. will take the stand. There are two schools of thought. Some feel that his attractiveness and charm can win over the jury. However, there are others on the defense who feel that O.J. is incapable of answering a question simply. When he talks, he talks too much. It is the complicated answer that can trip up a defendant in a cross-examination. At a bail hearing, when Cochran asked Judge Ito if the defendant could make a statement, Simpson went into a long harangue, saying that prosecutor Clark thought he was trying to escape in the white Bronco when all he was doing was making a phone call to his father-in-law and heading home. If O.J. were to talk like that on the stand, Marcia Clark, in cross-examination, would make mincemeat of him. He also has a short fuse. He has a tendency to roll his eyes if someone says something he doesn't like, and he has had to be admonished by Judge Ito because of unauthorized audible statements he has made during jury selection. An angry O.J. outburst on the stand might be one of the most exciting moments ever seen on television, but it would also be a disaster for the defense.

Yes, if only dogs could talk. Nicole Simpson's Akita, named Kato after Kato Kaelin, who lived in O.J.'s guesthouse, was, as far as everyone knows, the only witness to the crime. It had blood on its paws. It led someone back to the crime scene. It knows everything. The Akita is a watchdog, bred to defend its human family. But Nicole Simpson's Akita did not come to its mistress's aid. Janet Ross, who has raised Akitas for 20 years, told a writer for Newsday, "I was at an event last weekend where there must have been 40 Akita people and not one of them thought [Simpson or Goldman] had been killed by a stranger." The Akita is now in the possession of Jason Simpson, O.J.'s son by his first wife, who has reportedly changed the dog's name from Kato to Satchmo. Kato Kaelin, who will appear as a prosecution witness, is apparently out of favor. So is Paula Barbieri. Jason kicked her out of his father's mansion, where she had been living. As for Jason himself, he has been charged with two misdemeanor counts, driving with a suspended license and leaving the scene of an accident.

Nicole Simpson's outspoken sister Denise Brown, who has become something of a loose cannon with her comments, is a constant vexation to the defense. "If O.J. is so innocent, why are they trying to suppress all the evidence?" she demanded. Shapiro responded that that is what lawyers are supposed to do. Recently, Brown, who bears an uncanny resemblance to her slain sister, and Ron Goldman's father have gone public with their rage against Shapiro and Cochran. "O.J. did it," Brown told Geraldo Rivera. "He murdered my sister." Cochran railed against them in court, calling their assertions of O.J.'s guilt in the double murder part of an organized media blitz. That was just before the Star published Nicole Simpson's letter to her family, foretelling her death and detailing the incidents of abuse she had sustained from her husband during their relationship. Although her father later denied the authenticity of the letter, it shook people here to their roots.

If O.J. didn't kill his wife and Ron Goldman, who did? It is the question that everyone asks. Are the police looking for other suspects? I don't think so. The defense floated a story that the perpetrator was a Colombian or Mafia drug dealer. The story went that the slashed voice box was the clue, that people who talk too much about their drug dealer meet their end that way. That story got laughs. The poor Mafia. Everyone blames it for everything.

The defense attack on Detective Mark Fuhrman was a brilliant tactic. Even if Fuhrman's record is ruled inadmissible in the trial, there is probably not a single juror or alternate juror who has not heard about it. Fuhrman, who discovered the bloody glove on the grounds of the Simpson estate that matched the bloody glove at the crime scene, is going into the trail under a cloud of allegations that he is a racist who tried to frame Simpson by planting the bloody glove near the guesthouse where Kato Kaelin was staying on O.J.'s estate.

Whoever said crime doesn't pay was nuts. Some people are getting rich on the Menendez and Simpson cases. The most extraordinary story to me, which will be denied but which is true, is that O. J. Simpson, represented by a major talent agency, is in negotiations for a pay-per-view interview provided he is acquitted-similar to the handling of certain major sports events. No Barbara Walters, no Diane Sawyer, no Connie Chung for him. It is estimated that the gig would net O.J. $10 million, which should be enough to pay off his defense attorneys, settle all his bills, and allow him to start out a new life someplace else.

Meanwhile, down the hallway from Judge Ito's courtroom on the ninth floor of the Los Angeles courthouse, the pandering trial of Heidi Fleiss, the so-called Hollywood Madam, who monopolized the headlines for quite some time last year after her arrest, an arrest that scared the daylights out of some of the film industry's most notable names, was drawing to a close. Poor Fleiss has become a ho-hum media figure. She scarcely gets her picture taken, so lukewarm is the press's interest in her compared with O.J. Seats were always available in her courtroom. Yet, as one cynic observed, "Heidi Fleiss will probably do more time than O.J. or the Menendez brothers." There are stories that Frank Sinatra Jr. is going to marry Heidi Fleiss when she is free. Big Frank is said not to be delirious with happiness over his son's intended nuptials.

Among Fleiss's courtroom observers were Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine; Sydney Biddle Barrows, the former Mayflower Madam, who was elegantly dressed in what appeared to be a dark-blue Chanel suit; and Norma Jean Almodovar, who has documented her police and prostitution experiences in a steamy book entitled Cop to Call Girl. Later, Goldstein sat in on a Simpson hearing relating to Captain Margaret York, the highest-ranking female in the Los Angeles Police Department, who, incidentally, is the wife of Judge Lance Ito. The defense wanted to question York about any role she may have played in investigating the controversial Detective Mark Fuhrman during a sexual-harassment inquiry. Some thought putting Captain York on the stand was a way of making Judge Ito recuse himself, because of a conflict of interest, in order to put a new judge on the bench. If that had happened, the entire legal process might have had to start over. In reality, no one actually wanted Ito to go, even though at that moment a great portion of the media was gloating over the public roasting the judge had been getting for having appeared on a heavily advertised five-segment television interview with Tritia Toyota on KCBS during November sweeps. Ito's public disdain for the media, as well as for those on the case who used the media for self-aggrandizement, brought on some of the most blistering attacks in recent memory on a judge, even though Ito discussed only his personal life, not the case. On one day alone, the Los Angeles Times had three separate articles on Ito's interview with Tritia Toyota, including an unfavorable review by the paper's television critic Howard Rosenberg.

Anyway, back to Al Goldstein; he is a regular court watcher at the big-time trials. Once, during the Menendez trial in Van Nuys, he slept outside on the court steps all night so that he would be assured of the first place in line to get into the trial the next morning. Goldstein was accompanied by his good friend Ron Jeremy, a porn star, who, according to Goldstein, has appeared in 1,100 hard-core films.

Perhaps this is an appropriate moment to say that the night maids at the hotel where I am staying leave a condom in a gold wrapper, looking like a piece of chocolate, on my pillow every night. Very flattering. To paraphrase Cindy Adams's standard closing line in the New York Post, "Only in L.A., folks. Only in L.A."

Although I am in a minority, I still am not ruling out the possibility of a last-minute plea bargain. Plea bargains are the special province of Robert Shapiro. If he should bring such a thing about, he would re-emerge from his current shaky position to the national eminence he craves.

With a plea bargain comes an admission of guilt, which Simpson would probably be loathe to make, especially after his absolutely-100-percent-not-guilty plea and his insistence, according to an insider, to his lawyers, when they tried to talk turkey to him, that he didn't do it. In a plea bargain for a case of this nature, the defense might ask for a manslaughter conviction, and the prosecution might counter with one count of murder in the first degree and one of murder in the second degree. An agreement, if reached, might fall somewhere between. Granted, it would be a national disappointment. The country has been looking forward to this trial. We are all a part of an entertainment classic in the making, onstage and backstage. As the rapper Dr. Dre, whose new video, "Natural Born Killaz," performed with Ice Cube, shows a re-enactment of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, said in a television interview on Hard Copy recently, "Murder sells. Sex sells, but it is not as popular as murder." I wonder if O.J. would still earn $10 million on pay-per-view if he plea-bargained.

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How O.J. Simpson's Grisly Criminal Case Captivated Hollywood

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When I returned to New York last February, after seven months here covering the first Menendez trial, it never occurred to me that another cataclysmic event, another double homicide in high circles, would bring this city to a halt again so soon.

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A surprising and dangerous defense strategy under consideration by O. J. Simpson's legal team, led by Robert Shapiro, centers on Detective Mark Fuhrman, the police officer who jumped over Simpson's wall-and found the bloody glove.

When Robert Shapiro rose from his chair, on July 9th, to give his summation at O. J. Simpson's preliminary hearing on murder charges, he could not explain away the most damaging evidence against his client-matching bloody gloves. The tale of the gloves had been told three days earlier, in the polished and articulate testimony of Detective Mark Fuhrman, of the Los Angeles Police Department. Fuhrman recounted how he had been among the first police officers to arrive at the town house in Brentwood where the slashed bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found before dawn on June 13th. There, Fuhrman testified, he discovered a single bloody glove. As he was securing the murder scene, the police brass began to realize the magnitude of the crime on their hands, and the case was assigned to two of the city's highest-ranking homicide detectives, Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange. It was still before dawn when Vannatter, Lange, and Fuhrman travelled the short distance to Simpson's house, on Rockingham. Fuhrman, receiving no answer to his buzz at the entrance to the estate, vaulted over a five-foot-high wall and opened the gate for his less agile colleagues. As he was searching the grounds, he found a single bloody glove along a two-foot-wide pathway behind Simpson's guesthouses. It seemed to match perfectly the one found at the murder scene-and turned out to be the piece of evidence that most bedevilled Shapiro and his colleagues in the defense camp. According to news leaks last week, the results of sophisticated DNA tests suggest that the blood of both victims was on the glove found at Simpson's house. If Simpson did not bring the glove from the murder scene to his home, who did? At the preliminary hearing, Robert Shapiro had no answer.

He does now-Mark Fuhrman. In a series of conversations last week, leading members of Simpson's defense team floated this new and provocative theory as part of both the public-relations war surrounding the case and their continuing effort to keep the prosecution off balance. Those conversations revealed that they plan to portray the detective as a rogue cop who, rather than solving the crime, framed an innocent man. "Just picture it," one of the attorneys told me. "Here's a guy who's one of the cops coming on the scene early in the morning. They have the biggest case of their lives. But an hour later you're told you're not in charge of the case. How's that going to make that guy feel? So now he's one of four detectives heading over to O. J.'s house. Suppose he's actually found two gloves at the murder scene. He transports one of them over to the house and then 'finds' it back in that little alleyway where no one can see him." That would make him "the hero of the case," the attorney said.

At one level, it is a brilliant theory. It's what some defense lawyers call a "judo defense," in that it turns the strength of the prosecution's case against the prosecution. The fact that the blood on the glove is consistent with the victims' blood goes from being strong evidence of Simpson's guilt-who else but Simpson could have been at both Nicole's house and his own that night?-to being evidence of a police conspiracy. (However, if Simpson's blood is found on the gloves, the defense theory will be harder to maintain.) If it was Fuhrman who transported the glove, then the bloody gloves become, for the defense, harmless at worst and exculpatory at best. That the Simpson defense team is advancing this theory shows just what kind of hardball it plans to play at the trial. For the theory, while ingenious, is also monstrous. It means that the defense will attempt to persuade a jury of Los Angeles citizens that one of their own police officers planted evidence to see an innocent man convicted of murder and, potentially, sent to the gas chamber.

In fact, the defense's theory is even more monstrous. The defense will assert that Mark Fuhrman's motivation for framing O. J. Simpson is racism. "This is a bad cop," one defense lawyer told me. "This is a racist cop." That would be an explosive allegation in any community, but it has a special resonance in Los Angeles. It was, of course, several officers in the Los Angeles Police Department who administered the notorious videotaped beating of Rodney King, in 1991-and it was the acquittal of those cops of state charges, in 1992, that prompted rioting in the city. For all the interest in the Simpson case, it has so far been regarded, particularly in Los Angeles, as a largely apolitical event. Its public impact has been, if anywhere, on the issue of domestic violence, not race relations. The wares of the T-shirt salesmen in front of the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building last week included "Save O.J." and "Let the Juice Loose!" models, but the same people were also selling shirts that said, "Remember Ron and Nicole." One vender told me, "It's all about business for us here, not politics."

If race does become a significant factor in this case-if the case becomes transformed from a mere soap opera to a civil-rights melodrama; that is, from the Menendez brothers writ large to Rodney King redux-then the stakes will change dramatically. Simpson's attorneys understand the implications of a racially tinged strategy, and there appear to be subtle but real differences of opinion within the defense camp about how hard to push the race angle. One Simpson attorney asserts that, while his client does appear to be the victim of a racist cop, the team will not claim that he was framed unless it truly believes he was. Another says that the Fuhrman defense is a done deal. Still, it appears that the case is about to enter a new phase-one with the potential to affect the city of Los Angeles as a whole, and not just one of its most famous residents.

Mark Fuhrman was born on February 5, 1952, and grew up in Washington state. An older brother died of leukemia before Mark was born. Mark's father was a truck driver and carpenter, and when Mark was seven his parents divorced. In 1970, Fuhrman joined the Marines. He served in Vietnam, as a machine gunner, and he thrived in the service until his last six months there. As Fuhrman later explained to Dr. Ronald R. Koegler, a psychiatrist, he stopped enjoying his military service because "there were these Mexicans and niggers, volunteers, and they would tell me they weren't going to do something." As a result of these problems, in 1975 Fuhrman left the Marines and went almost directly into the Los Angeles Police Academy.

Fuhrman excelled at the academy, finishing second in his class, and his career with the L.A.P.D. had a promising start. His early personnel ratings were high. One superior wrote, "His progress is excellent and with continued field experience he should progress into an outstanding officer." But in 1977 Fuhrman's assignment was changed to East Los Angeles, and his evaluations began to show some reservations. "He is enthusiastic and demonstrates a lot of initiative in making arrests," a superior wrote at the time. "However, his overall production is unbalanced at this point because of the greater portion of time spent in trying to make the 'big arrest.' " Dr. Koegler wrote, "After a while he began to dislike this work, especially the 'low-class' people he was dealing with. He bragged about violence he used in subduing suspects, including choke holds, and said he would break their hands or face or arms or legs, if necessary."

Fuhrman was moved into the prosecution of street gangs in late 1977, and, while his job ratings remained high, he later reported that the strains of the job affected him. "Those people disgust me, and the public puts up with it," he told Dr. John Hochman, another psychiatrist, referring to his gang work. Fuhrman said that he was in a fight "at least every other day" and that he had to be "violent just to exist." In just one year, he said, he was involved in at least twenty-five altercations in pursuing his duties. "They shoot little kids and they shoot other people," he told Dr. Hochman. "We'd catch them and beat them, and we'd get sued or suspended." In fact, Fuhrman was sued for his actions during this period. A man named Mario Carillo said that on October 16, 1978, he was stepping onto his sister's porch when Fuhrman and another officer jumped out of their car and threw their batons at him. According to the civil lawsuit that Carillo filed against Fuhrman, the other officer, and the L.A.P.D., Carillo "ran inside the residence for protection and the police officers forced their way in and beat him." (The case never came to trial and was ultimately dismissed, in 1985, when it appeared that Carillo was out of the country.) In any event, Fuhrman told Dr. Hochman, "That job has damaged me mentally. I can't even go anywhere without a gun." He explained, "I have this urge to kill people that upset me."

The stress of police work took such a toll that, in the early nineteen-eighties, Fuhrman sought to leave the force. At the time, his lawyers asserted that in the course of his work he "sustained seriously disabling psychiatric symptomatology" and as a result should receive a disability pension from the city. To get that pension, Fuhrman waged an extended legal battle. The extensive case file, replete with detailed psychiatric evaluations of the officer (it is part of the public record), is paradoxical. In Fuhrman's own briefs, he is portrayed as a dangerously unbalanced man; as one of them puts it, Fuhrman is "substantially incapacitated for the performance of his regular and customary duties as a policeman." In the city's answers, however, he is called a competent officer, albeit one involved in an elaborate ruse to win a pension. Dr. Hochman observed, "There is some suggestion here that the patient was trying to feign the presence of severe psychopathology. This suggests a conscious attempt to look bad and an exaggeration of problems which could be a cry for help and/or overdramatization by a narcissistic, self-indulgent, emotionally unstable person who expects immediate attention and pity." In neither case-whether Fuhrman is a psychotic or a malingerer-is the picture of him an attractive one. He lost his case, and, as a result, is still on the force.

Simpson's lawyers say that they are continuing a vigorous investigation of Fuhrman's past. "We are hearing things that are unbelievable," one of the lawyers told me. In fairness to Fuhrman, the proposition that he planted the glove on Simpson's property may be just that-unbelievable. An L.A.P.D. spokesman told me last week that there was no public record of any disciplinary proceedings against Fuhrman. Fuhrman and all other members of the L.A.P.D. are under orders not to answer press questions about the Simpson case. I did, however, speak briefly with him on the telephone last week, and I asked him whether he had planted the glove on Simpson's property. "That's a ridiculous question," he said. But did he do it? "Of course it didn't happen," he said. When I asked whether he had ever been sued for civil-rights violations, Fuhrman said that he could not speak further with me, and ended the conversation. It is true that the public record of Fuhrman's career since he was denied his disability pension is uniformly favorable. In 1989, he helped arrest the former chief fund-raiser of a major charity for burglarizing post-office boxes, for which the man was convicted. In 1991, he was involved in the case against two University of Southern California football players in connection with a string of robberies and beatings. Later that year, he helped investigate two Santa Monica men who were charged in connection with as many as twenty-five muggings of elderly people. Simpson's lawyers, led by Shapiro, will have the task of persuading a jury-or, at least, part of a jury-that such a man could be capable of a heinous form of official misconduct.

The projected attack on Fuhrman is just part of a concerted defense strategy to portray Simpson as a victim-of official misconduct and, in a larger sense, of his race. For one thing, the Simpson defense team is considering diversifying its own ranks. One Simpson lawyer told me that the team was negotiating with Johnnie L. Cochran, a prominent black litigator in Los Angeles, to join Shapiro on the trial team. The team is also at work on a motion, perhaps to be filed as early as this week, that will begin to lay out some of the perceived unfairnesses to Simpson. The motion will allege that the police mishandled the crime scene, making it impossible for the defense to conduct its own forensic tests of blood and hair samples. "Nobody was living at the house or planning on selling it at the time, but still they cleaned up the scene and made it impossible to pick our own samples of what was there," one of Simpson's lawyers told me. The defense will also allege that the prosecution is unfairly refusing to share the blood and hair samples that it did seize. "We want to make our own independent examinations," the Simpson lawyer said. "Even if it's not a fifty-fifty split, we should be allowed at least a third, or something reasonable like that." The defense will assert, further, that there was additional tampering with evidence, beyond the placing of the second glove at Simpson's house. Finally, Simpson's lawyers will ask the judge to give an unusual instruction to the jury: that because of prosecution errors the defense was not allowed to conduct a full range of forensic tests on the evidence. All these claims, like the Fuhrman frameup theory, have a judolike appeal. Bad evidence becomes good; if Simpson's own tests fail to exonerate him, the defense can argue that it was because it was not given access to adequate raw material. If the government's tests tend to show guilt, then the government wasn't playing fair.

Some-perhaps much-of the defense team's newly aggressive posture may be nothing more than grandstanding. For all its bravado this week, the defense has not foreclosed any option, including a claim that Simpson did kill his ex-wife and Goldman but was suffering from some sort of insanity at the time. Even a plea bargain remains a possibility, though the defense attorneys state that they (and especially their client) have made and will make no overtures in securing one. By one reckoning, the new strategy may simply be a sign of desperation; the race card may be the only one in Simpson's hand. But it appears that his defense team will be playing it, even if it means that helping O. J. Simpson threatens the tender peace of the city of Los Angeles. To Alan Dershowitz, one of Simpson's legal strategists, such a tradeoff may well be worth making. In his book "The Best Defense" he wrote, "Once I decide to take a case, I have only one agenda: I want to win. I will try, by every fair and legal means, to get my client off-without regard to the consequences. ♦

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002. He is the author of, most recently, " American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst."
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When Robert Shapiro rose from his chair, on July 9th, to give his summation at O. J. Simpson's preliminary hearing on murder charges, he could not explain away the most damaging evidence against his client-matching bloody gloves.

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OJ Simpson has been granted parole and could be released from prison as early as October. He was jailed in 2008 for armed robbery after taking memorabilia from his football career from dealers in a Las Vegas hotel room.

While the case has no connection to his infamous 1995 acquittal in a double murder trial, Simpson's release would thrust a man that a poll suggests three-quarters of Americans believe is probably guilty of those killings back into the spotlight.

Here's a recap of the key details of the OJ story.

One of the defining images of OJ Simpson's fall from grace, for many people, was broadcast live on television on 17 June, 1994.

Imagine your childhood sports hero - an icon beloved across the country - suddenly captured in a car chase with police along the freeways of Los Angeles.

In the back seat of the white Ford Bronco was Simpson, holding a gun and being driven by an old friend, Al Cowlings. The former NFL player had been charged with the bloody murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, who had been found stabbed to death outside her condominium in LA's affluent Brentwood neighbourhood.

He had earlier agreed to turn himself in to police but decided to flee instead.

Crowds waved and egged on the man they called "The Juice" - an African-American athlete who had risen to fame in the late 1960s and later used his status as a springboard to a lucrative career in acting, sports commentary and television advertising, including a role in the Naked Gun films.

The two-hour chase ended at Simpson's home - where he eventually surrendered.

The scenes gripped a nation and the legal proceedings that followed were dubbed "the trial of the century" by the American media - with scenes from the courtroom broadcast to millions.

The media sensation around the OJ trial took place against the backdrop of an America racially divided in its opinion on the case.

And the sensational proceedings occurred in a city - Los Angeles - where trust between police and the black community had been shredded by the 1992 acquittal of police officers for using excessive force in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, which triggered the LA riots.

Most white Americans thought he was guilty and most African-Americans thought he was innocent, polls suggested. Simpson's alleged history of domestic violence came up during the trial, with police records revealing Nicole Brown Simpson required hospital treatment after being beaten by her husband in early 1989.

During the trial, OJ famously tried on a pair of bloody gloves - one of which was found at the murder scene - which did not appear to fit him, a moment seen as a major blow for the prosecution.

Simpson was - to the shock of many - found not guilty by the jury of the murders on 3 October 1995.
'OJ Simpson knife' not a murder weapon
The legal "dream team" defending him had, as the recent eight-hour, Oscar-winning documentary OJ: Made in America makes clear, put race front and centre in the trial, despite Simpson having not previously associated himself strongly with the black community and the civil rights struggle.

"Not only did we play the race card, we dealt if from the bottom of the deck," Robert Shapiro, one of Simpson's lawyers, would say after the verdict.

But the families of Ronald Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson pursued Simpson in a civil case which in 1997 found him responsible for the pair's deaths and ordered him to pay the families tens of millions of dollars - most of which is still outstanding.

Ten years later, in September 2007, Simpson and a group of associates stormed a hotel room in Las Vegas where two sports memorabilia dealers had items that Simpson considered to be rightfully his. Two of the men with Simpson were armed.

He was convicted in October 2008 on a litany of charges, including armed robbery, assault and kidnapping, and sentenced to at least nine years in prison, and a maximum 33-year term.

Some observers, including Simpson's lawyer, described the jury's decision as "payback" for the 1995 acquittal.

As part of the process of obtaining the money they were owed from the civil case, the Goldman family was in 2007 awarded the rights to If I Did It, Simpson's controversial ghost-written book describing how he would have committed the murders, had he been responsible.

They republished it with new commentary but significantly shrank the size of the word "if" on the cover, and added the subtitle Confessions of the Killer.

And while the 1994 murders remain unsolved, that is how many Americans see "OJ" today.

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OJ Simpson has been granted parole and could be released from prison as early as October. He was jailed in 2008 for armed robbery after taking memorabilia from his football career from dealers in a Las Vegas hotel room.

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I n light of the season finale of "American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson," we're looking back at the L.A. Times' first-run coverage of the "Trial of the Century." Written by Times staff writer Jim Newton, here's The Times piece 474 days in the making: the verdict.

Bringing one of history's most riveting courtroom dramas to a stunning climax, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of two counts of murder Tuesday, verdicts that set the football Hall of Famer free 474 days after he was arrested and charged with a brutal double homicide.

At 11:16 a.m., Simpson returned home to his Brentwood estate, embracing his longtime friend Al Cowlings in the same driveway where the two were arrested on June 17, 1994. As night fell, crowds of well-wishers and detractors gathered beyond police barricades while the Simpson entourage partied inside the famous home.

Within hours of the verdicts--broadcast live and bringing businesses across the country to a temporary standstill--family members of the victims retreated in grief, and the first of the anonymous jurors emerged to give The Times an interview in which he dismissed the prosecution's physical evidence as "garbage in, garbage out."

While jurors scattered to their homes, prosecutors, defense lawyers and family members of the victims and defendant gathered in an extraordinary series of news conferences.

In a statement read by his eldest son during one of the media sessions, Simpson expressed relief, gratitude and a commitment to finding whoever murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman.

"I am relieved that this part of the incredible nightmare that occurred on June 12, 1994, is over with," Simpson said. "My first obligation is to my young children, who will be raised in the way that Nicole and I had always planned."

Simpson vowed to pursue "as my primary goal in life" the killer or killers responsible for the murders, concluding: "I only hope someday that--despite every prejudicial thing that has been said about me publicly, both in and out of the courtroom--people will come to understand and believe that I would not, could not and did not kill anyone."

After 266 days of sequestration at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, jurors deliberated a mere three hours before accepting Simpson's contention that the charges against him were unproven.

Their verdicts, which were delivered in a courtroom so tense that some spectators trembled visibly in anticipation, united jurors and Simpson in a strangely triumphant moment.

Simpson smiled thinly and mouthed the words "thank you" as the not guilty verdicts were read. Two jurors smiled back. Another, Lionel (Lon) Cryer, raised his left fist in a salute toward Simpson as the panel left the courtroom.

But the same finale was greeted with shock by the family of Nicole Simpson, and it wrenchingly broke the spirits of Goldman's relatives.

Nicole Simpson and Goldman were knifed to death outside her Brentwood condominium on June 12, 1994, a foggy summer evening in an otherwise quiet neighborhood. O.J. Simpson pleaded not guilty to the crimes, but he was the only suspect, and members of both victims' families came to believe that he was responsible for the murders.

In court, Fred Goldman, the victim's father, stared in pain at the ceiling, his wife in one arm and his daughter in the other, both sobbing openly as the verdicts were read. In the quiet courtroom, Kim Goldman's gulping sobs were the only sound that accompanied the reading.

"Oh my God," Patti Goldman said, turning to her shaken husband.

"Murderer," he said under his breath, repeating that later as he left the courtroom.

Kim Goldman, Ronald's sister, fought to keep herself from speaking out while court was in session--Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito had warned that any outbursts would be grounds for ejection. But after the verdicts were delivered, she could not contain herself. She quietly burst out a short string of expletives, then turned to the people sitting near her on the courtroom bench and apologized.

"I'm sorry," she said, repeating that twice more as her long red hair cascaded over her tear-stained cheeks.

Later, Fred Goldman said the night of the murders "was the worst nightmare of my life."

"This," he added, "is the second."

Prosecutors Solemn, Defense Celebrates

For the police who investigated the case and the prosecution team that brought it to trial and spent six months presenting what Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti labeled a "mountain of evidence," the quick verdicts were a devastating repudiation.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden turned toward the panel as it was being polled and glared at its members, his mouth half open in disbelief and dismay. None of the jurors would meet his gaze.

Next to him, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark refused even to turn toward the jurors. She looked over her right shoulder and pursed her lips, expressionless but for the exhaustion in her eyes.

The two lead police investigators, Tom Lange and Philip L. Vannatter, sat a few feet away. They showed no emotion and declined to comment at length afterward. Asked whether he could believe the verdicts, Vannatter responded only: "No, not at all."

Afterward, at a news conference featuring the district attorney team and the Goldman family, downcast prosecutors publicly thanked each other for their efforts but were obviously shaken by the swift dismissal of a case in which they summoned 72 witnesses during 99 days of testimony.

Clark, her voice thick and her eyelids heavy, expressed her sympathy and love for the victims' families and thanked the members of her team for doing a "beautiful job."

Darden stepped to the lectern next. The young prosecutor, who distinguished himself in the trial's closing arguments, said he was not bitter about the verdicts, but when he began to thank his colleagues, he faltered: "I'm honored to have. . . ." he said. Then he paused, his voice tightening up.

With a small wave of resignation, he stepped away from the microphone and crumpled in the arms of the Goldman family.

Although Darden said he accepted the jury's verdicts, his boss, Garcetti, conceded that he was angry.

"We are, all of us, profoundly disappointed," he said.

"This case was fought as a battle for victims of domestic violence," Garcetti said. "We hope this verdict does not discourage the victims, who are out there throughout our communities, throughout this country, from seeking help."

For the defense team, the trial's end represented an enormous legal triumph: Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., the defense's lead trial lawyer, hugged colleagues and denounced pundits who viewed the verdicts as an indication of the predominantly black jury's distaste for the LAPD rather than a reflection of its evaluation of the evidence.

"I just want to say how grateful we all are for this verdict," Cochran said at the defense's news conference. "We think the verdict bespeaks justice. We were always optimistic. That optimism proved right."

He and the defense team were joined at the news conference by Simpson's family--his mother, sisters and grown children--who effusively expressed their gratitude and relief. His mother, Eunice, said her belief in her son had never wavered, and her grandson, Jason, read his father's statement.

Cochran said his client did not attend the news conference for security reasons--Nation of Islam guards were present at the courthouse and have provided security for the Simpson family and defense team in recent days.

But one of Simpson's sisters, Shirley Baker, said family members were ecstatic: "I just feel like standing on top of this table and dancing a jig."

A Case of Twists and Turns

The Simpson case tragically and violently began with a double murder in the normally placid Westside community of Brentwood. No credible eyewitnesses ever surfaced to the murders, but the culprit or culprits left behind a number of clues.

Bloody shoe prints from Size 12 shoes led away from the bodies, and drops of blood were found to the left of those shoe prints. A bloody glove and a knit cap were found next to the corpses.

Four detectives went to Simpson's house before dawn that morning--they said they were there to notify Simpson of the killings and to help him care for his children, who were inside their mother's home when she was killed. Once there, they jumped the fence and one of them, now retired Detective Mark Fuhrman, told his colleagues that he had found the mate to the bloody glove at the crime scene.

It was at that moment, Vannatter testified, that Simpson became a serious suspect.

Over the next few days, more pieces of evidence would fall into place that seemingly implicated Simpson: When he was interviewed by police on the day after the killings, for instance, police noticed several cuts on his left hand, one of which they believed was large enough to have left the blood drops at the scene.

Bloodstains also were found in Simpson's car, and analysis of the drops leading away from the bodies revealed that they matched his blood type. A pair of his shoes revealed that he wore Size 12.

Still more evidence would surface later: A limousine driver interviewed by police said he saw a shadowy figure darting inside Simpson's house just before 11 p.m. and Simpson then quickly answering the intercom. Simpson said he had overslept, but investigators believed that was a lie, that he actually had just returned from committing the crimes and was trying to hide his tracks.

Armed with sophisticated DNA tests, a history of domestic violence between Simpson and his ex-wife, and powerful circumstantial evidence suggesting that Simpson had the opportunity to commit the crimes, prosecutors boasted early on that convictions seemed likely, even inevitable.

Simpson and his high-priced but often divided legal team argued strenuously from the outset that he was innocent, and his lawyers launched an extraordinary assault on the police investigation.

Cochran accused police of a "rush to judgment" and attacked every aspect of the inquiry. According to Cochran and the rest of the legal contingent assembled by Robert L. Shapiro, coroners were not summoned promptly, criminalists were ill-trained and poorly supervised, and evidence in the case was hopelessly contaminated and corrupted.

A highly touted pair of DNA legal experts, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, were brought in from New York to take on the prosecution's physical evidence, a task they tackled with vigor. With aggressive cross-examinations of prosecution witnesses, they challenged the evidence collection techniques, and they called Dr. Henry Lee, one of the nation's foremost criminalists, who testified that "something's wrong" with the physical evidence.

Although prosecutors responded to each point, jurors dismissed early in the case said they had doubts about the integrity of some evidence after hearing the defense challenge.

Then, just as the trial was winding down, the defense team dropped a bombshell whose impact will reverberate through Los Angeles long after the spotlight has moved from Simpson. One of the detectives in the case, Fuhrman, had given a series of interviews to an aspiring screenwriter; in them, he boasted of beating suspects, singling out minorities for brutal treatment and manufacturing evidence.

Gamely fighting back, prosecutors responded that Fuhrman's evident racism and lying discredited him but should not taint the case as a whole.

Although Shapiro had once promised that race would not be an issue in the Simpson case, Cochran made no such pledge. In his closing argument, Cochran called Fuhrman a "lying, perjuring, genocidal racist," compared him to Adolf Hitler and blasted the investigation as nothing short of a sham.

Joined by Scheck, he encouraged jurors to "do the right thing" and called on them to reject the Police Department and its Simpson investigation with not guilty verdicts.

That message carried the day.

One juror, returning home Tuesday, declined to comment in detail about the case, but her brief statement echoed Cochran's argument.

"I think we did the right thing," she said. "Matter of fact, I know we did."

From the beginning of their deliberations, Cryer said, 10 panelists believed Simpson was not guilty; the other two, he said, came around after testimony of the limousine driver was read back to them. Cryer also dismissed the government's central theory of the case: that Simpson had killed his ex-wife as the final act of a violent, controlling relationship.

"The prosecution tried to build a picture of him raging that day on June 12 to a point where he was wanting to be controlling of Nicole," Cryer said. "And apparently he didn't have that control anymore, and that's why he went over there and killed her.

"To be honest with you," Cryer said, "I never bought into it. I didn't see it."

Reaction Quick and Emotional

Throughout Southern Californian and the nation, reaction to the verdicts was heartfelt, and opinions often broke along racial lines--as they often have throughout the case.

Outside the courthouse, where crowds grew larger and more unruly in the trial's closing days, demonstrators got word over radios and television sets. Dozens immediately burst into joyful shouts. Some pumped fists in the air. Some cried.

Bus riders traveling along Alvarado Avenue on the No. 18 line broke into cheers when the driver announced the verdicts over the loudspeaker system.

But in the Orange County neighborhood where Simpson's children are being cared for by their grandparents, someone posted a sign reading: "O.J., you're not welcome here."

Tuesday night, the intense emotions that swept through the region all day coalesced at Simpson's Brentwood estate, where supporters and detractors gathered outside the gates. Preachers shouted messages of love and forgiveness, and a saxophonist played "Amazing Grace" to a backdrop of helicopter noise.

The crowd's chants of "O.J.! O.J.! O.J!" drew his sister, Shirley Baker, to the estate gate, where she briefly addressed news crews. "We just want to thank all you guys," she said. "O.J. is home, and at a later time, he's going to speak with you."

But not all were there in support.

"What about Ron Goldman?" asked Shane Novak, who criticized Simpson and his lawyers for holding a party to celebrate the verdicts. "There's no one playing a saxophone at Ron Goldman's party now."

In political circles, from Washington to Sacramento, there also was no shortage of comment on the case that has preoccupied the country for nearly 16 months.

President Clinton, who watched the verdicts from the Oval Office, wrote out a short statement in longhand.

"The jury heard the evidence and rendered its verdict," he wrote. "Our system of justice requires respect for their decision. At this moment, our thoughts and prayers should be with the families of the victims of this terrible crime."

Gov. Pete Wilson echoed Clinton's sympathy for the families, but also argued that the long, contentious trial demonstrated the need for legal reforms. Wilson, who is a lawyer, said television cameras should be removed from criminal trial courtrooms, and recommended that attorneys be prohibited from asking juries for a "political message" such as the one sought by Cochran in denouncing the LAPD.

"I would urge the removal of cameras from our courtrooms," Wilson said. "To contribute to turning a serious legal proceeding into a circus-like atmosphere is not in the interest of justice or public confidence in the justice system."

Wilson also was fiercely critical of Cochran. "I find it particularly distressing, in fact it is more than that, when lawyers do not argue the issue at hand," the governor said, "and instead ask jurors to use a verdict as a means of sending a political message to law enforcement."

In Los Angeles, Mayor Richard Riordan, who broke off a trip to Asia to be at his post when the verdicts were announced, praised jurors for their "extreme sacrifices to meet the challenges of this trial." The mayor urged residents to accept the panel's decision.

"Whether we agree or disagree," Riordan said, "we must accept the decision."

Police Chief Willie L. Williams, whose department has been subjected to yearlong criticism and whose officers went on tactical alert Tuesday, said he hoped the jurors' decision was not based on "the defense team's decision to put my department on trial."

"The vast majority of the men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department day in and day out put their lives on the line serving the people of our community," Williams said. The chief urged residents to "move on . . . make sure all the races in this city work together."

Nevertheless, many legal experts said the verdicts demonstrated how badly the LAPD's credibility has eroded, particularly in the minds of many black residents.

"This just shows that you can't get black jurors to trust LAPD," said Harland W. Braun, an experienced defense attorney who represented Officer Theodore J. Briseno in the Rodney G. King civil rights case. "If you can convince jurors to eliminate any evidence that LAPD might have tainted, this is what happens."

Steven D. Clymer, who prosecuted that case and won convictions against two of the officers, said the verdicts also demonstrated the power that charges of racism can bring to a criminal trial.

"I think it's a tragic irony that O.J. Simpson, a person who probably never suffered the kind of racism that Mark Fuhrman dished out, is a beneficiary of the claims of racism," said Clymer, now a professor at Cornell Law School. "I doubt that O.J. Simpson in his adult life experienced those things. I feel it's a terrible result. I feel so bad for those families."

But John Burris, an Oakland civil rights lawyer, said he considered the verdicts well-supported by the defense case and justified by the questions raised about the LAPD's performance.

"The verdict is a perfectly sensible verdict in light of the evidence presented," he said. "It reaffirms my faith in the good sense of African Americans that police misconduct won't be tolerated."

Although Tuesday's verdicts mean that Simpson can never be tried again for the murders, they do not end the legal action spawned by the brutal murders nor Simpson's legal troubles.

The district attorney's office has indicated that it will consider perjury charges against Fuhrman, though most legal analysts say a conviction would be difficult to win. The Justice Department and the LAPD, meanwhile, are investigating possible criminal charges growing out of Fuhrman's comments in the taped interviews.

And Simpson faces an immediate future still dotted by legal challenges. Three separate wrongful-death lawsuits have been filed against him, one by each of Goldman's parents and the third by Nicole Simpson's estate.

Those cases do not require a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, only that jurors conclude that a preponderance of the evidence favors one side or the other. And they are unaffected by Tuesday's acquittals.

Robert Tourtelot, the attorney who once represented Fuhrman and continues to represent Fred Goldman and his family in their lawsuit against Simpson, pledged Tuesday to pursue that lawsuit aggressively in the coming months.

"Today, the judicial system took a very big hit," he said. "A lot of people will be looking to us for justice."

Having successfully dispatched the criminal charges, Cochran and his staff will represent Simpson in those cases as well.

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Simpson Not Guilty: Drama Ends 474 Days After Arrest

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Bringing one of history's most riveting courtroom dramas to a stunning climax, O.J. Simpson was acquitted of two counts of murder Tuesday, verdicts that set the football Hall of Famer free 474 days after he was arrested and charged with a brutal double homicide.

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Ron Goldman's father is still trying to get O.J. Simpson to pay $70M settlement

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Fred Goldman wants Simpson to start forking over his profits from signing autographs

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goldman attorney ready to collect from o.j. simpson - cnn

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Attorney ready to collect from O.J. Simpson

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The attorney for the Goldman family says he's ready to collect on the multimillion-dollar civil judgment against O.J. Simpson as soon as Simpson goes on parole.

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His great accomplishment was to be indicted for a crime and then receive the kind of treatment typically reserved for rich white guys.

Photo collage by Jeff Elkins*

M y reaction to O. J. Simpson's arrest for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman was atypical. It was 1994. I was a young black man attending a historically black university in the majority-black city of Washington, D.C., with zero sympathy for Simpson, zero understanding of the sympathy he elicited from my people, and zero appreciation for the defense team's claim that Simpson had been targeted because he was black.

O. J. Simpson wasn't black. He came of age in the 1960s-the era of Muhammad Ali's opposition to the Vietnam War and John Carlos and Tommie Smith's black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics. But the O. J. Simpson I knew, and the one poignantly depicted this year in Ezra Edelman's epic documentary, O.J.: Made in America, recognized only one struggle-the struggle to advance O. J. Simpson. When the activist Harry Edwards attempted to enlist Simpson in the Olympic boycott, Simpson rebuffed him and later claimed that organizers like Edwards had tried to "use" him. Protest "hurt Tommie Smith, it hurt John Carlos," Simpson said. Smith and Carlos were "standing on [Edwards's] platform, [when] they should have been standing on their own platform."

My view that Simpson existed beyond the borders of black America was based not merely on his narrow political consciousness, but on his own words. "My biggest accomplishment," Simpson once told the journalist Robert Lipsyte, "is that people look at me like a man first, not a black man." Simpson went on to tell the story of a wedding he'd attended with his first wife and a group of black friends. At some point he overheard a white guest remark, "Look, there's O. J. Simpson and some niggers." Simpson confessed that the remark hurt. But that wasn't the point of the story. The point was not being seen as one of the "niggers."
The support of Simpson struck me as unintelligent, politically immature, and ill-advised.
Simpson sought to be post-racial in a world that was not. His myriad achievements-becoming the premier running back in college football, the first NFL running back to rush for 2,000 yards in a season, one of the first black pitchmen for corporate America-did not mark the erosion of the great wall between black and white Americans. It marked Simpson's individual success at hurdling that wall. Landing on the other side, Simpson, a product of public housing in inner-city San Francisco, found reinvention as a celebrity. He became wealthy. He courted the attentions and advice of affluent businessmen. And though he'd married Marguerite Whitley, who was black, the same year he arrived at the University of Southern California, he now courted white women. "What I'm doing is not for principles or black people," Simpson told Lipsyte. "No, I'm dealing first for O. J. Simpson, his wife, and his babies."

And yet, during his trial, whenever I walked the streets of D.C., I saw black people broadcasting their support as though he were one of them. Vendors hawked run o.j. and free o. j. simpson T‑shirts. Community activists, for whom Simpson had previously had no use, offered fervent defenses of him. When the verdict was announced, national-news cameras came to Howard Law School to record what turned out to be a jubilant response to Simpson's acquittal. I found all of this very frustrating. I was 19 years old. I was the kind of militant black kid who flirted with Louis Farrakhan, Frantz Fanon, and veganism and who believed "What should black people do?" was a question that could be asked in earnest. The answer, I was sure, would open a new era of black excellence. The support of Simpson was a step backward. It struck me as unintelligent, politically immature, and ill-advised.

Two things, it seemed to me, could be true at once: Simpson was a serial abuser who killed his ex-wife, and the Los Angeles Police Department was a brutal army of occupation. So why was it that the latter seemed to be all that mattered, and what did it have to do with Simpson, who lived a life far beyond the embattled ghettos of L.A.? I vented in the school newspaper. "Since Simpson's practices show he clearly has no interest in the affairs of black people," I wrote, "the question becomes why do blacks have any interest in him?" In those days, I conceived of African Americans as a kind of political party, which needed only, in unison, to select the correct strategy in order to make the scourge of racism disappear. Expending political capital on O. J. Simpson struck me as exactly the opposite of the correct strategy. Looking back, I realize what eluded me. I had lived among black people all my life, but somehow I had come to see them as abstractions, not as humans.

I had not yet read Ragtime, the E. L. Doctorow novel that Simpson claimed to love. After his retirement in 1979, he began doing some acting and dreamed of playing Coalhouse Walker in the film adaptation of the book. Simpson felt the role of Walker, a black ragtime piano player turned revolutionary, matched his life. The parallels are strained-and in any case Simpson lost the role to Howard Rollins. But Simpson does resemble another character in the book, one whose feats explain the strange bond between Simpson and the black community. Doctorow offers a fictionalized Harry Houdini, whose escapes from straitjackets, bank vaults, piano cases, and mailbags thrill the poor people of the nation. He is jailed in Boston, imprisoned on an English ship, tossed into the Seine in manacles. Each time, he escapes. Houdini's act allows him to make the greatest escape of all-out of poverty-though he eventually discovers that no amount of money will buy him the respect of the elite. The poor are enthralled by Houdini not because he organizes on their behalf, but because his exploits resonate with them: They know that their lives are trapdoored and trip-wired, that they too have been jailed, imprisoned, chained, and tossed into the sea. A Houdini performance was their life in miniature, with one heroic difference-he escaped.

L ong before he led the police on a chase through L.A., Simpson had been an escape artist. His rare athletic talent freed him from an impoverished childhood, and brought him to USC on a football scholarship in 1967. Made in America, deftly capturing his athleticism, is alert to symbolism too, replaying Simpson's manifold escapes while at USC and later with the Buffalo Bills. They are dazzling to behold. Simpson's speed was enhanced not by grace but by awkwardness. In one frame he leaps past a defender, lands seemingly off balance, and then cuts across the field at full velocity. At several junctures, you expect him to fall, and the one time he does, the defender falls with him-but then Simpson, in a matter of milliseconds, glides to his feet and races off. He would angle himself against the earth, his hips flying one way, his head another. He seemed to run too high, with his chest exposed, presenting what should have been an inviting target for the defense. And yet he escaped.

Simpson was a running back, a position dominated by African Americans for the past half century-a fact that has often been invoked to boost racist thinking about the innate athleticism of blacks. More pertinent, the job of the running back-to escape-is the most basic of vocations, one that a kid from the projects can begin practicing in that first game of tag. Running also holds a special significance to a people denied violent resistance as a viable option, if only because it has always been the most potent tool available. The runaway slave is a fixture in the American imagination. As the writer Isabel Wilkerson notes in her account of the Great Migration, the blacks who fled the South during the 20th century "did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left." There is also a less reputable history of fleeing among African Americans-the tradition of those blacks light enough to "pass" as white and disappear into the overclass.

Simpson's great fortune was to reach the height of his powers in the 1970s, after the civil-rights movement, a time when one might enact the rituals of passing not by looking white, but by possessing qualities that white society envied. Simpson was a celebrity. He was handsome, articulate, and charming. He was identifiably black, but measured against the brashness of Muhammad Ali and the coiled rage of Jim Brown, his distinction was to radiate reassurance and respectability. In the successful series of ads he starred in for Hertz beginning in 1975, he was still running-only now through airports, an icon of social mobility, with white people cheering him on: "Go, O.J."

An old friend of Simpson's says in Made in America that Simpson was "seduced by white society." Perhaps. But the seduction was mutual, and he used his football fame to gain access to white patrons eager to expose him to the finer things in life. "I took him places where I think very few black men had ever been," Frank Olson, the former CEO of Hertz, says in the film. Simpson mingled with wealthy entrepreneurs at golf clubs where he was one of the few black members, or the first and only black member. He gave them the thrill of convening with a real sports hero at his mansion, Rockingham, nestled in the wealthy white suburb of Brentwood. Simpson's social circle helped him amass a small fortune. By the 1990s, his net worth was estimated to be $10 million. He was the CEO of O. J. Simpson Enterprises, which owned stakes in hotels and restaurants, and he sat on four different corporate boards.

His pursuit of white women was profligate. In a telling moment in the documentary, Joe Bell, a friend of Simpson's since childhood, recalls them slowly cruising down Rodeo Drive in the 1970s and being awed by the response. "Women come up, throw their arms around O.J., and just lay it on him," Bell says. "Not just women. White women. Fine white women." In 1977, Simpson began an affair with a beautiful blond 18-year-old, Nicole Brown, who came home from their first date with her pants ripped. "Well, he was a little forceful," she told a friend. Two years later, he left Marguerite to pursue a relationship with Nicole. But the affairs continued: Bond girls, Playboy playmates, models, actresses, most of them white. For Simpson, the women on his arm were not women but bodies, ornaments, evidence of conquests-an outlook he had seen taken to its most violent conclusions in the form of neighborhood pimps. "Man, they'd beat a ho down right there on the street," Bell remembers, laughing. "So that all the women would know this is the kind of treatment you're gonna get if you don't bring me my money." Those women were black, but the basic notion of women as property knows no racial boundaries. Nicole Brown was proof to the world that Simpson, among the millions of black men caught in the maze of American racism, had risen above it. What sort of abuse-verbal and physical-was going on behind the mansion gates, almost no one, black or white, guessed. Or much cared.

The goings-on in the ghettos of L.A. were both more knowable and better explored-but not by O. J. Simpson. He eschewed involvement in any sort of politics that might tarnish his brand, and thus his pursuit of wealth. If it was easy for Simpson to forget the world he came from, that was partly because the world he now belonged to was invested in forgetting. In an incredible moment early on in the documentary, Edelman, off camera, asks a white USC teammate of Simpson's what he remembers about 1968. A montage of violent events flashes across the screen-Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, the raucous Democratic National Convention. Edelman then returns to the teammate, who says, "I think of winning all the games, getting O.J. famous, everybody on campus thinking it's the greatest thing on Earth. That's all we thought about. There was nothing else going on."

But Edelman does not allow us to forget, because the Simpson story turned out to be intimately enmeshed with the story of black Los Angeles and its relationship with the police. This was the community the Simpson jury was drawn from, and ultimately the one that held his life in the balance. For years, much of the country has wondered how Simpson could possibly have been found innocent. An unspoken assumption underlies this conjecture-that the jury understood the legal system to be credible. What the film makes clear in piecing together a parade of victims beaten, killed, and harassed by the LAPD is that the predominantly black jury-quite rightfully-understood no such thing.
Whether I saw Simpson as black or not, racism pervaded his case.
Even I, college radical that I was, grasped the LAPD's brutality only abstractly. The officers were brutal because my own politics, and my own experiences with the police, suggested they would be so. But brutality understates what the LAPD did in those years: It didn't just brutalize black communities; it terrorized them. The terror emanated directly from the top. Police Chief Daryl Gates was a drug warrior who once said at a Senate hearing that casual drug users "ought to be taken out and shot." In 1982, after numerous deaths of black people had resulted from police use of choke holds, Gates commented, "In some blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people." The intensifying sense of constant injustice came to a head when four officers were videotaped ruthlessly beating Rodney King in 1991, only to be acquitted when they went on trial. Two weeks after King's beating, a Korean American grocer shot a black customer, 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, in the back of the head. The grocer, convicted of voluntary manslaughter, received probation, a fine, and community service, but didn't go to jail.

By the time Simpson came to trial, most of the black community in Los Angeles had ample reason to view law enforcement as lacking not just credibility but basic legitimacy. Victimization fed a loss of respect for law enforcement, and that loss of respect in turn transformed victims into victimizers. The footage of the protracted beating of a white man, Reginald Denny, who was pulled from his truck during the Los Angeles riots, is chilling. But when law enforcement becomes capricious, citizens are apt to resort to their own law, rooted in ancient impulses, tribal loyalties, and vengeance.

The beating of Reginald Denny was vengeance for the beating of Rodney King. And vengeance for King played a role in Simpson's acquittal, according to one of the jurors, Carrie Bess. But revenge only partly explains Simpson's last great escape. What I couldn't fathom in 1994 was a reality that black people around me likely sensed and that Made in America brings into deeply discomfiting focus: that Simpson may well have murdered his ex-wife and her friend, and that the jury got it right in declaring him not guilty. When the LAPD collared O. J. Simpson, the police force had gotten its man. The evidence all looked so obvious to a lay observer: the vivid record of spousal abuse ("He's going to kill me," Nicole Brown Simpson yelled to an officer who responded to one of her many calls); the bloody shoe print, which matched shoes Simpson owned; the bloody glove found at the murder scene, which matched the glove at Simpson's home; the blood on Simpson's car and his socks and in his bathroom.

But juries are not merely lay observers, and the defense needed to neither wholly exonerate Simpson nor completely contradict all the evidence. His lawyers simply needed to instill reasonable doubt. The LAPD had spent decades seeding that doubt in the minds of people like those on the jury, the majority of whom were black women. To make sure the doubt was harvested, Simpson leaned on the kind of activist he'd long spurned. These days Johnnie Cochran is remembered almost in caricature, mocked on Seinfeld and derided as a race hustler. Back then, even my view of Cochran was shaped in part by the satirization of him on Saturday Night Live. Edelman resurrects a lesser-known Cochran, a hero to the black lawyers who'd been the prominent legal advocates in the fight against police brutality since the late 1960s. The New York Times called Cochran's rage at police misconduct "all consuming." Contrary to the portrayals of him in popular culture, that rage was genuine and directly acquired. In 1980, Cochran was pulled over by LAPD officers and instructed to get out of his car. His daughter and son were in the backseat. When Cochran stepped out, the officers had their guns drawn. The tension was defused only when the officers searched the car and found a badge-Cochran was then the third-highest-ranking official in the district attorney's office. Cochran received a personal apology from the chief of police. "I never made an issue of it," Cochran later wrote. "But I never forgot it."

Simpson, who had turned his back on race men while making millions selling himself as inoffensive to middle-class white people, didn't hesitate to empower one of them now that his life was on the line. Thus the Simpson defense team presented an ironic alchemy-an activist tradition that Simpson had rejected, fueled by funds that he'd garnered rejecting it. "O.J. had money to spend and a willingness to spend it on his own defense," one of Simpson's lawyers, Carl Douglas, says to Edelman. "This was a first for me."

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Whether I saw Simpson as black or not, racism pervaded his case. The role it played went beyond the evidence on display. Racism was not just blatantly revealed in the tapes of the LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman bragging about, among other things, beating black suspects, whom he identified as "niggers," and explaining how he disregarded their constitutional rights. ("You don't need probable cause," Fuhrman said. "You're God.") And racism was not just confirmed by Fuhrman's exposure as a perjurer who was then maneuvered into pleading the Fifth in response to grilling by the defense-including the pivotal question of whether he'd planted any evidence. Racism formed the substrate of the defense's case: The notion that the LAPD might frame a black man was completely within the realm of possibility for black people in Los Angeles. Simpson's legal team worked those preconceptions the way a boxer might work an opponent's wound, relentlessly attacking the numerous flaws in an investigation and an evidence-collection process that were egregiously careless: the blanket thrown over Nicole Brown Simpson's body, exposing it to fibers and the DNA of others in the house; the sensitive material collected bare-handed; the sample of Simpson's blood stored in an envelope in an officer's care and brought to Simpson's house.

Errors that to white viewers could look like technicalities in what they presumed to be an abstractly "fair" trial tapped into fundamental questions of trust for black viewers, who saw up close a machine operated by humans striving for an ideal standard, but often falling woefully short. How many black men had the LAPD arrested and convicted under a similarly lax application of standards? "If you can railroad O. J. Simpson with his millions of dollars and his dream team of legal experts," the activist Danny Bakewell told an assembled crowd in L.A. after the Fuhrman tapes were made public, "we know what you can do to the average African American and other decent citizens in this country."

The claim was prophetic. Four years after Simpson was acquitted, an elite antigang unit of the LAPD's Rampart division was implicated in a campaign of terror that ranged from torture and planting evidence to drug theft and bank robbery-"the worst corruption scandal in LAPD history," according to the Los Angeles Times. The city was forced to vacate more than 100 convictions and pay out $78 million in settlements.

The Simpson jury, as it turned out, understood the LAPD all too well. And its conclusions about the department's inept handling of evidence were confirmed not long after the trial, when the city's crime lab was overhauled. "If your mission is to sweep the streets of bad people ... and you can't prosecute them successfully because you're incompetent," Mike Williamson, a retired LAPD officer, remarked years later about the trial, "you've defeated your primary mission."

O. J. Simpson's great escape still sticks in the craw of much of the country. Simpson's lawyers are not praised as adept defense attorneys, but disparaged as unscrupulous flouters of the rules who played the "race card" in a case that should have been about science-no matter how poorly that science was deployed. Resentment continues to fester that Simpson was afforded the best defense money could buy, in the form of Cochran. "It offended me," Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor, says to Edelman, "because he was using a very serious, for-real issue-racial injustice-in defense of a man who wanted nothing to do with the black community."

It offended me, too. Simpson should have been the last person in the world to reap a reward from the struggle waged against the LAPD. Months after he was acquitted, I watched him give a speech at a black church in D.C., where he was embraced by the local community. He was presented with traditional African garb. The black nationalist Malik Zulu Shabazz greeted Simpson as if he were the reincarnation of Malcolm X. I have not, in my life, ever felt much shame in being black. That was a moment when I felt it deeply.

I hadn't yet learned that black people are not a computer program but a community of humans, varied, brilliant, and fallible, filled with the mixed motives and vices one finds in any broad collection of humanity. More important, I did not understand the ties that united Simpson and the black community. When O. J. Simpson ran from justice, returned to it, was tried for murder, and eluded justice again, it was the most shocking statement of pure equality since the civil-rights movement. Simpson had killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. I suspected that then, and I am sure of it now. But he'd gotten away with it-in much the same way that white people had killed black men and women for centuries and gotten away with it.

The virtue of equality does not always feel like a virtue, because equality does not always run on the same axis as morality. Equality for African Americans means the right to be treated like anyone else-whether we're doing good or doing evil. Simpson's great accomplishment was to be indicted for a crime and then receive the kind of treatment typically reserved for rich white guys. His acquittal, achieved as incarceration rates skyrocketed, represented something grand and inconceivable for blacks. He had defied the police who brutalized black people, the prosecutors who tried them, the prisons that held them. He had defied them all, and in the process, much like Houdini, he escaped.

Related Story

* Photo-collage images courtesy of Getty Images and Bettmann, Charles Steiner / Image Works, Focus on Sport, Jean-Marc Giboux, Lawrence Schiller, Lee Celano, Michael Ochs Archives, Mike Nelson, Myung Chun, Peter Turnley, Tiziana Sorge, and Vince Bucci A Discussion on Police and Violence in America
In 2016 we confront a new phase of the problem of police legitimacy. The Rodney King video was a shocker in its time. Now it seems that every week brings a new video of a black body being beaten and shot by the police. A flurry of government reports on policing in Ferguson, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Chicago have all delivered the same message-that racism has deeply infected American policing. Simpson is currently in prison for charges unrelated to the killing of Brown Simpson and Goldman. And yet the problems that moved those crowds of black people to cheer for a murderer remain. The same anger, the same fear of police remain. The elements that interacted to turn the Simpson trial into a spectacle are still with us, so that today, two decades after Simpson was acquitted, "the audience for escapes," in Doctorow's words, "is even larger."

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His great accomplishment was to be indicted for a crime and then receive the kind of treatment typically reserved for rich white guys. M y reaction to O. J. Simpson's arrest for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman was atypical. It was 1994.

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The Los Angeles Times front pages during the 1992 L.A. riots

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How The Times covered the turmoil that followed the acquittal of LAPD officers involved in the beating of Rodney King.

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O.J. Simpson, the football great who rose from the mean streets of San Francisco to international celebrity, was arrested Friday for the murders of his ex-wife and a male friend after leading police on a gripping, two-hour chase through the rush-hour freeways of Southern California.

The dramatic capture of one of the best-known and best-loved public figures in America came shortly before 9 p.m., about 10 hours after he was to have turned himself in to Los Angeles police. Simpson's lawyer, Robert L. Shapiro, said Simpson, 46, had agreed to surrender earlier, but bolted at the last minute with Al Cowlings, a longtime friend and former teammate at USC and with the Buffalo Bills.

A massive manhunt involving scores of law enforcement officers ended in the cobblestone driveway of Simpson's Tudor-style mansion, as Los Angeles Police Department officers in bulletproof vests converged on the white Ford Bronco in which Simpson and Cowlings had fled.

As the truck sat parked, its hazard lights blinking silently in the balmy June night, Cowlings got out of the driver's seat and walked into the house. Then, for nearly an hour, a distraught Simpson sat inside the truck, reportedly cradling a blue-steel revolver and demanding to speak to his mother.

Hundreds of supporters gathered in the upscale neighborhood, chanting "Free O.J.," and rocking police cars. Meanwhile, the LAPD Special Weapons and Tactics team and negotiators surrounded the house, eventually coaxing Simpson out of the vehicle by cellular telephone. He put the gun down and emerged about 8:50 p.m. carrying a framed family photo.

Simpson went into the house, used the bathroom, called his mother and drank a glass of juice, authorities said. He was then transported by police motorcade to Parker Center for booking and transported to Men's Central Jail. Cowlings was booked on suspicion of harboring a fugitive. He was being held on $250,000 bail.

The dramatic arrest, broadcast live on national television, capped a tragic weeklong drama that began with the slayings of Simpson's ex-wife, 35-year-old Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Lyle Goldman, a 25-year-old Brentwood waiter whom she knew.

Nicole Simpson and Goldman were found stabbed to death early Monday morning outside her Brentwood condo. Police sources said the two were slain sometime after 10 p.m. Sunday as her two small children slept inside.

Although the Police Department had refused all week to label Simpson a suspect, and Simpson's lawyers said he was innocent, sources inside the LAPD made it clear from the outset that he was the focus of their investigation. The former college and professional football star was briefly handcuffed at his mansion Monday afternoon and taken to police headquarters for questioning. He was later released, and remained free as evidence mounted against him day by day.

By Friday, detectives had concluded their case, recommending that Simpson be charged with two counts of first-degree murder. The charges, which include a "special circumstance" of multiple killings, could bring him the death penalty if he is convicted.

Los Angeles Police Cmdr. David J. Gascon said Simpson had been scheduled to turn himself in to police at 11 a.m. Friday, with arraignment scheduled for that afternoon in Los Angeles Municipal Court.

But 45 minutes, and then an hour, ticked by and Simpson was nowhere to be seen. Finally, just before 2 p.m., police held a news conference to announce that Simpson had officially become a fugitive.

"He is a wanted murder suspect," Gascon said tersely, "and we will go find him."

It was unclear how the 6-foot-2, 210-pound Simpson--who had been dogged by crowds of reporters and cameramen for most of the week--had managed to escape authorities, who had felt confident that someone so famous would never attempt to flee.

Throughout the week, Simpson had appeared to be sequestered in his Brentwood home, emerging only to visit his children and to attend Nicole Simpson's funeral in Orange County. After the services Thursday, a man resembling Simpson was photographed ducking past hordes of news reporters into the home--escorted by an off-duty LAPD sergeant.

Police sources said Friday, however, that the man who resembled Simpson was a decoy, who was under the escort of LAPD Sgt. Dennis L. Sebenik, a 25-year veteran who works in the LAPD Harbor Division. Police said they want to interview Sebenik.

Unbeknown to department leaders, Sebenik was serving as a member of Simpson's security detail even as police were investigating the former football star.

Sebenik said he manages a "legitimate security company" and had been hired to provide security for Simpson. He would not comment on why an off-duty Los Angeles police officer was protecting a man widely reported to be a suspect in a double homicide.

Gascon said department officials were investigating Sebenik's conduct.

"I'm not going to rush in here and defend anything that might have occurred, but I'm not going to rush to judgment either," Gascon said. "We have no interest in excusing what is obviously going to be a difficult situation to explain."

Shapiro said Simpson had been told Friday morning that he would have to surrender that day. Because of Simpson's "fragile" emotional state, Shapiro said he had asked several doctors to join him at the San Fernando Valley home of Simpson friend Robert Kardashian, where a heavily sedated Simpson had spent Thursday night.

Shapiro said Simpson had spent the morning in the throes of what appeared to be a suicidal depression. He updated his will, the lawyer said, called his mother and his children and gave three sealed letters to a friend at the house.

One, addressed "To whom it may concern," reiterated Simpson's denial that he had any part in the murders, and reflected his anguish at the events of the past week.

"I think of my life, and feel I have done most of the right things," the letter said. "So why do I end up like this? I can't go on. No matter what the outcome, people will look and point. I can't take that. I can't subject my children to that."

Shapiro said the plan for Simpson's surrender had not been an unusual one, adding that he had made similar arrangements for other clients in previous cases. But the surrender, he said, had been delayed for nearly an hour by a medical examination of Simpson.

Police, impatient about the delays, called the house to say that they were coming to make the arrest. But Shapiro said he did not pass on that news to Simpson, who was with Cowlings in another part of the house.

It was apparently at that point that Simpson and Cowlings slipped away, Shapiro said.

From that point on, the afternoon was a frenzy of police activity and public astonishment.

In downtown bars people watched television sets, once primed for the championship basketball series, now tuned only to the breaking news story. At the Spectrum Club in Santa Monica, exercisers pedaled stationary bikes to TV sets tuned to coverage of O.J. Simpson's temporary disappearance. Downtown streets were deserted. Even West Hollywood's Sunset Strip, generally bumper-to-bumper with night-clubbers and party-goers, was empty.

At Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, 15 television monitors were tuned to the Simpson story, and customers were transfixed.

"It's paralyzed our business," said manager Gary Wilde. "They're just standing there in awe."

What they saw was nothing less than the running to ground of one of the most famous murder suspects in U.S. history. Every move was chronicled on live television, a jump-cut documentary of an icon's demise: now he was reported missing, now feared dead, now alive and headed south on Interstate 5.

Before the police could finish announcing that he had disappeared, the drama had shifted back to the scene of the crime.

Shortly after 2 p.m.--at almost the same moment that authorities were announcing to an audibly shocked press corps that Simpson was a fugitive--Nicole Simpson's grieving father rushed from his daughter's tile-roofed condominium, begging a teen-ager to dial 911.

LAPD Sgt. Bob Brounstein said a man claiming to be Simpson had called the house at least twice, saying he was coming over to the scene of the murders to kill himself.

"I'm going to go join Nicole," the caller allegedly said. But Simpson never turned up at the residence.

"We have a big mess," Sgt. Doug Abney told an anxious crowd. "This is a false alarm."

Then, just before 6 p.m., Highway Patrol officers spotted Cowlings' white Ford Bronco heading south through Orange County on Interstate 5.

A phalanx of police vehicles took off in pursuit, blocking traffic on the freeway and entrance ramps as Simpson and Cowlings wound their way through Orange County and back to Simpson's Brentwood home.

During the pursuit, LAPD Detective Fred Lange, the lead investigator on the case, contacted Cowlings on the phone, and was told that Simpson was in the back seat with a gun to his head, that he would never surrender and that he wanted to see his mother.

As TV news choppers broadcast the astonishing spectacle--the white Bronco slowly wending its way across Southern California, a cadre of 20 black-and-white squad cars in its wake--traffic came to a halt along the freeways from Disneyland to Los Angeles and commuters jammed the overpasses to cheer and wave at Simpson as he passed. Some held up huge signs exhorting, "Go O.J." Meanwhile, scores of callers from across the country pleaded with him over the airwaves on KNX-AM news radio to pull over and turn himself in.

The disappearance of Simpson threatened to create a public relations nightmare for the LAPD and the district attorney's office, whose decision not to arrest the ex-football star earlier had been second-guessed in some quarters. Police sources had been saying all week that the evidence against Simpson was strong enough to warrant his arrest, and yet the department held off, hoping to build an airtight case before taking him into custody.

Gascon said the department was "very unhappy" with Simpson's disappearance and stressed that police had not given Simpson special treatment in their handling of the investigation.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, who described himself as "upset and angry" about Simpson's disappearance, also defended the Police Department's performance, saying investigators had done a commendable job at building the case against the former athlete.

In the four days after the killings, police sources say, evidence steadily mounted linking Simpson to the crimes.

Bloodstains on the walkway where the bodies were found matched Simpson's blood type, they said, and two bloodstained gloves were recovered, one at the scene, its match outside his Brentwood home.

Polices sources also said that a trail of blood drops stretched across Simpson's cobblestone driveway. And Friday, they said that bloodstains inside his home matched Nicole Simpson's blood type. The blood evidence appeared to figure against Simpson but is not necessarily conclusive, sources said. Even the rarest blood types are shared by many people.

Garcetti said that a murder weapon, which he described as a "substantial knife," had yet to be found.

It was shortly after midnight Sunday that the blood-soaked bodies of Nicole Simpson and Goldman were found sprawled on a Spanish-tile walkway outside her Brentwood condominium. Coroner's investigators said both their throats had been slit, and their corpses bore multiple stab wounds.

Within hours, police began looking for Simpson, who, they later learned, had taken an 11:45 p.m. flight to Chicago.

Notified of his ex-wife's death, Simpson returned to Los Angeles, arriving shortly before noon.

As police bore in on Simpson during their investigation, he changed lawyers, hiring Shapiro on Tuesday. But Shapiro said his client grew increasingly distraught and began undergoing treatment for depression.

At his news conference Friday, Shapiro said he and Simpson's doctors feared that the football great might attempt suicide. One of Simpson's last acts before disappearing had been to write the three letters to his children, his mother, who was hospitalized in San Francisco Friday night, and to the public.

Although the letters to his children and mother were not released, close friend Kardashian, who joined Shapiro at the news conference, read the public letter to a hushed group of reporters on live television.

In it, Simpson expressed regret for the life that he would never have with his current girlfriend and thanked a list of former teammates, golfing buddies and good friends. He acknowledged the much-publicized fights with his ex-wife and their recent decision not to reconcile after years of turmoil, but characterized them as the natural ups and downs of long relationship.

He urged the news media to leave his children in peace. And he denied that he was the man who committed the brutal killings.

"I have nothing to do with Nicole's murder," Simpson wrote. "I love her, always have and always will.

"Don't feel sorry for me," the letter concluded. "I have had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J., and not this lost person."

The Sequence of Events

8:30 a.m.: Robert Shaprio, lawyer for O.J. Simpson, receives call from LAPD officials telling him to surrender his client.

9:30 a.m.: Shapiro goes to an undisclosed home in the San Fernando Valley, and informs Simpson he will have to surrender by 11 a.m.

Murder charges are filed against Simpson in the slayings of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman; arraignment is scheduled for the afternoon.

11 a.m.: Simpson is scheduled to surrender.

AFTERNOON

Shortly afternoon, accoridng to Shapiro, the lawyer receives call from LAPD officials telling him that police must annonuce that Simposon is a fugitive. he gives police directions to the house.

Police arrive at the San Fernando Valley house. Shapiro, who is with Simpson's doctors and others in a room at the house, says Simpson and Al Cowlings, a former college and pro football teammate of Simpson who had been with him, had left the house.

1:50 p.m.: LAPD Cmdr. David Gascon announces that Simpson has not surrendered for arraignment as scheduled and is a fugitive.

2 pm.: Police respond to 911 call at the scene of the slayings, after a man identified as Nicole Simpson's father comes out of the house asking people to call 911.

3 p.m.: LAPD officer at Nicole Simpson's condominium tells reporters, "O.J. Simpson is not here."

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, at news conference, says anyone helping Simpson to flee will be prosecuted as a felon. "We will find Mr. Simpson and bring him to justice." Police are searching for his former teammate, Cowlings. Garcetti says prosecutors have not decided whether to seek the death penalty in the case.

4:45 p.m.: Police issue an arrest warrant for Cowlings.

EVENING

5 p.m.: Shapiro holds press conference, during which a longtime Simpson friend, Robert Kardashian, reads a letter from Simpson: "Don't feel sorry for me," ends the note. "I've had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person. Thanks for making my life special. I hope I helped yours. Peace and love. O.J."

5:51 p.m.: Simpson reportedly makes a 911 call from the cellular phone in his Ford Bronco. His location is traced to the Santa Ana Freeway in Orange County near Lake Forest, where his ex-wife, Nicole, was buried Thursday.

5:56 p.m.: CHP begins pursuit.

7:30 p.m.: After moving onto the Artesia Freeway, the Bronco turns north on the San Diego Freeway in Torrance, soon encountering crowds standing on the roadway and overpasses.

7:57 p.m.: Simpson and Cowlings arrive at Simpson's Brentwood home and negotiations for surrender begin.

8:47 p.m.: Police issue an all-clear after taking Simpson into custody.

9:37 p.m.: Simpson arrives at Parker Center in police custody.

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Simpson Held After Wild Chase: He's Charged With Murder of Ex-Wife, Friend

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O.J. Simpson, the football great who rose from the mean streets of San Francisco to international celebrity, was arrested Friday for the murders of his ex-wife and a male friend after leading police on a gripping, two-hour chase through the rush-hour freeways of Southern California.

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Much of the nation, President Bill Clinton included, stopped to watch the verdict. The reaction was divided - largely along racial lines.

In a scene that lent a certain symmetry to the entire Simpson saga, Mr. Simpson immediately returned to the freeways of Los Angeles in a white van, and as fans waved from the streets he headed back to his home at 360 North Rockingham Avenue. While a dozen helicopters flew overhead, and fans festooned the fence with roses and balloons, he was met by A. C. Cowlings, who had been in the driver's seat of the white Ford Bronco on June 17, 1994, five days after the killings.

Mr. Simpson pursed his lips, gulped a few times and wore a forced, pained grin as Deirdre Robertson, the law clerk to Judge Lance A. Ito, read the verdict. Mrs. Robertson tripped over "Orenthal," but not over what came next: "not guilty." When she uttered those words, Mr. Simpson's body instantly uncoiled. He then breathed a sigh of relief, and a faint smile appeared.

Read the full article.

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The O.J. Simpson Murder Trial, as Covered by The Times

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Much of the nation, President Bill Clinton included, stopped to watch the verdict. The reaction was divided - largely along racial lines. In a scene that lent a certain symmetry to the entire Simpson saga, Mr. Simpson immediately returned to the freeways of Los Angeles in a white van, and as fans waved from the streets he headed back to his home at 360 North Rockingham Avenue.

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Simpson also was part of a world record-winning track and field relay team.

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In this Sept. 3, 1977 file photo, Simpson (32) runs past Tampa Bay Buccaneers' Council Rudolph (78) during an NFL football game in Buffalo, New York.

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Football greats Joe Namath, left, and Simpson, right, stand in front of the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio

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Simpson appeared as Catlett in the 1979 movie "Firepower."

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Bill Cosby chats with Simpson at Cosby's celebrity tennis tournament on April 14, 1973, in Los Angeles, California.

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Simpson retired from football after the 1979 season, later being inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and taking on careers in both acting and football broadcasting. He worked as a commentator for Monday Night Football and The NFL on NBC. In this photo, he is reporting at a football game, circa 1980.

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Simpson's electrifying performances garnered the attention of professional teams, and he was the No. 1 NFL draft pick in 1969.

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Simpson is seen here in a 1978 Hertz advertisement.

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This Feb. 24,1978 file photo shows Simpson, center, with actresses Gilda Radner, left, and Jane Curtin as he appeared on NBC's Saturday Night Live in New York.

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Simpson took on roles in TV and film. He played a narcotics agent hunting an international heroin smuggler in the 1976 film, "The Cassandra Crossing."

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Simpson married Marguerite L. Whitely in June 1967. They had three children together: Arnelle L. Simpson, Jason L. Simpson, and Aeren Lashone Simpson.

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Simpson accepts the Heisman Trophy on Dec. 5, 1968, at the Downtown Athletic Club in Manhattan, New York City.

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He went on to play both offensive and defensive positions at City College of San Francisco from 1965 to 1966. His skills on the field later won him an athletic scholarship to University of Southern California.

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In this Nov. 9, 1968 file photo, USC's Simpson (32) runs against rivals from Cal Berkeley during an NCAA football game in Los Angeles. Simpson won the Heisman Trophy later that year.

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O.J. Simpson College Stats | College Football at Sports-Reference.com

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Heisman Trophy Winner - O.J. Simpson, 1968

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O. J. Simpson became USC's second Heisman Trophy winner in 1968 when he captured the award by the most one-sided margin in history. During the regular 1968 season,