The Search for Justice (16 page)

Much to my disappointment, Judge Kennedy-Powell ruled that the evidence gathered at Rockingham was legally obtained and thus
admissible. Her decision (which went against Gerry Uelmen, her former law school professor) wasn ’t unexpected, given the
unwritten rule (remember the example of the marijuana versus the murder weapon) that the more important the evidence to the
prosecution, the lower the constitutional standard.

Most clients don ’t understand why, if we are correct on the law, rulings go against us. They learn quickly that where the
credibility of police witnesses is at issue, it ’s a rare judge with guts enough to rule that the police can ’t always be
believed. The public misconception about weak or lenient judges who let criminals off on a technicality is pure fiction; for
instance, even when Judge Ito criticized Vannatter ’s “reckless disregard for the truth,” he ruled the search warrant valid
and let the evidence stand.

Early in the preliminary hearing we discovered that at least one witness who had appeared during the grand jury hearings would
not be called by the prosecution. Jill Shively, who alleged that she had seen O.J. ’s Bronco leaving Bundy, sold her
story—on the same day she testified—to TV ’s
Hard Copy
for $5000 and to the
Star
tabloid for $2600—which in my opinion consigned her testimony to the cash-for-trash bin. Perhaps Clark and Hodgman concurred,
since she was never called to testify.

The early witnesses, all Nicole ’s neighbors, were used to establish a time of death, roughly between 10:00 and 11:00
P.M
. Pablo Fenjves talked about hearing the “plaintive wail” of a dog—which we were clearly meant to believe was Nicole ’s Akita—between
10:00 and 10:30. At 11:00, Steven Schwab, out walking his own dog, saw the Akita with blood on his paws. Sukru Boztepe and
Bettinna Rasmussen then testified to finding the bodies of Nicole and Ron on the sidewalk at Bundy at midnight.

On July 5 and 6, Gerry Uelmen carefully cross-examined Mark Fuhrman, pushing for inconsistencies in his version of events.
I had seen Fuhrman earlier, out in the hall. “This is your lucky day,” I told him.

“Oh, really?” he said. “And just why is that?”

“Because I ’m not doing the cross, Uelmen is.” Fuhrman was the prosecution ’s central seizure-of-evidence witness, and Uelmen
was the defense point man for search-and-seizure issues. I would get my chance to cross-examine Fuhrman at the trial itself,
and I didn ’t want him to be prepared for me. For now, I just wanted to watch and listen.

Fuhrman first became concerned about what was going on behind the security fence at Rockingham, he told Uelmen, because of
O.J. ’s Ford Bronco “carelessly, haphazardly parked… its rear end jutting out into the street, maybe a foot farther than the
front.” When he examined the car, Fuhrman saw a plastic bag and shovel in the rear, a blood dot above the outside handle on
the driver ’s door, and also something that looked like blood brush marks or swipes on the bottom of the door. That ’s when
he decided to go over the fence—which led, ultimately, to discovery of the glove.

The “plastic bag” was standard to the Bronco; it was part
of the cargo-carrying equipment. The shovel was used to clean up after the dogs at both Bundy and Rockingham. Neither item,
in any context, was particularly sinister.

I then cross-examined Detective Philip Vannatter, the senior member of the investigative team. I knew I needed to be as aggressive
and forceful as possible, not just to unravel the facts in his testimony, which would eventually impeach his credibility,
but also to keep him slightly off balance. Almost immediately I challenged him on the maintenance of the L.A.P.D. ’s murder
book for the Simpson case. The book is provided to the prosecution, which in turn shares it with the defense as part of the
discovery process. In this case, Bill Pavelic had convinced me that the record-keeping had been particularly sloppy. On the
subject of the blood on the Bronco, Vannatter testified that indeed, he needed glasses to see the speck of blood near the
door handle and did not see—and did not record—the blood “swipes” near the bottom of the driver ’s door that Fuhrman had seen.

There was also a brief and revelatory exchange regarding Fuhrman ’s reason for leaving Bundy in order to lead the others to
Rockingham. Vannatter testified that he was familiar with the neighborhood and would have been perfectly capable of getting
to Rockingham on his own.

Vannatter agreed with me that the police didn ’t go personally to notify Mr. Goldman ’s family of his death, as they did with
O.J., nor did they take pictures of Kato ’s car as they did O.J. ’s, even though it was also at Rockingham. Obviously, their
focus was only O.J. from the very beginning. “If Mr. Goldman had been the sole victim of this case under the same circumstances,”
I asked him, “would the same investigation be taking place?” Clark objected; the judge sustained her objection. But I felt
that I ’d made my point.

Gerry Uelmen on direct examination, to Arnelle Simpson: “Did you tell the officers they had your permission to search the
premises or to seize any property on the premises?”

“No,” she answered, “I did not.”

“Did any officer ask you if he could take any item from the premises?”

“No,” she said.

Dennis Fung, the L.A.P.D. criminalist, questioned by Uelmen, testified that he ’d first received a call at 5:30
A.M
.—to go to Rockingham, not Bundy. He arrived at 7:10 and tested the Bronco for only one blood spot.

On July 7, the testimony of Detective Tom Lange primarily established the late coroner call to Bundy and contamination of
evidence because of “loose” securing of premises. Lange stated that they found a total of five dime-size droplets of blood
not belonging to Nicole or Ron Goldman at Bundy, but there was no way to ascertain when they were left there.

Marcia Clark, as she finished up with Thano Peratis, the nurse who took O.J. ’s blood at the lab and put the bandage on his
finger: “One more question, Your Honor?”

Judge Kennedy-Powell: “You always have one.”

Clark: “I know. It might be a prosecutor ’s last-word thing.”

On July 8, L.A.P.D. criminalist Gregory Matheson testified that after performing standard blood-typing, or basic serology,
tests on Nicole ’s blood (type AB), Ron Goldman ’s (type 0), and O.J. ’s (type A), he then analyzed a dime-size blood drop,
one of five discovered at the Bundy crime scene. The serology testing ruled out that drop as belonging to either Nicole or
Ron and indicated a likelihood that, according to the crime-lab data, the crime-scene blood drop had the same characteristics
as the blood from one out of every two hundred people. O.J., he said, was in that blood group.

Watching Dean Uelmen ’s careful cross-examination was like observing a quietly determined chess master. He elicited the information
that because the police lab primarily runs tests on people arrested or suspected of criminal activity, the data base resulting
from those tests is not representative of the population as a whole; in fact, ethnic and racial minorities are substantially
overrepresented. For example, the African-American population in California is about 7 percent of the total population but
accounts for approximately a third of the arrests.

“The tests… are exclusionary tests, is that correct?” asked the Dean. “None of these tests can tell you specifically that
a particular bloodstain was left by a particular person?”

“That ’s correct,” answered Matheson. “There ’s nothing here that would individualize a stain to any one particular person.”

“So any attempt to analogize this to fingerprints or precise identification of a person would be inaccurate?”

“That ’s correct,” Matheson said.

During his cross, Uelmen was able to successfully raise questions about contamination in the lab and point out problems with
the collection and storage of blood samples. When asked whether the blood at the scene could have been a mixture of blood
of both victims and assailant, Matheson said he didn ’t have a test that could either ascertain that or rule it out. In addition,
we were able to get on the record that anywhere from 40,000 to 80,000 people in the Los Angeles area carried the same genetic
markers contained in the blood drops found at Bundy but ruled out as being Nicole ’s or Ron Goldman ’s. All in all, I felt
that Uelmen had laid some fine tactical groundwork for the trial.

Additional groundwork was laid with my cross-examination of Dr. Irwin Golden, the Los Angeles deputy coroner who had performed
the autopsies. In addition to helping establish the time and cause of death, the main contribution a coroner can make is to
determine the type and size of the murder weapon. I had gone over Dr. Golden ’s report with Michael Baden and knew that his
testimony would be both grim and graphic. I also knew his report was full of errors; ultimately, the coroner ’s office would
own up to making at least sixteen mistakes.

In the absence of an eyewitness, pinpointing a time of death is difficult. The sooner a coroner begins an examination (using
such criteria as body temperature, stomach contents, and degree
of rigor mortis), the more likely it is that an accurate time can be estimated. In this instance, the L.A.P.D. delayed calling
the coroner for ten hours. In addition to mislabeling forensic evidence (fluid samples from Nicole ’s body), the coroner discarded
Nicole ’s stomach contents, although he saved Ron Goldman ’s. On direct examination, Golden stated that he could only put
time of death somewhere between 9:00
P.M
. and midnight. On cross-examination, however, he stated that three out of four forensic criteria for setting the time would
put death
after
11:00
P.M
.—which was, of course, critical to O.J. ’s alibi.

No one in the courtroom was immune to the horror and sadness that Golden ’s descriptions of the two bodies evoked, and as
I cross-examined him, I was acutely aware of Nicole ’s father and Ron Goldman ’s young sister sitting somewhere behind me.
The senior Goldmans had gone out to the hall when they just couldn ’t listen anymore. My wife was also in the courtroom. She
’d come every day during the preliminary hearing, and we took these images home with us each night. But there was no way to
tiptoe through cross-examining someone I believed had been incompetent, especially since it was Golden who had assured Lange
and Vannatter that the knife O.J. had purchased could have been the murder weapon. It was consistent with
“some
of the wounds,” he said, “with
many
of the wounds.”

“There are two morphologically different types of stab wounds on the victims,” he said. “Some… are indicative of a single-edge
blade, some of the wounds have a characteristically double-pointed or forked end.” This indicated, he said, that the wounds
could have been made by two different weapons, a single-edge blade and a double-edge blade, thus raising the distinct possibility
of a second assailant. I moved in on him a little, asking why he hadn ’t yet done more detailed, definitive testing to try
to exclude the weapon similar to the one O.J. had purchased. Such a test existed; he just hadn ’t done it yet. Why was that?
His response was that he figured that testing could be “done at some other time.”

“You understand a man is sitting in jail, facing charges of double homicide, do you not?” I asked. “When could those tests
be done, to protect his rights? When would you suggest doing these tests?”

“Now?” he responded stiffly, with a somewhat puzzled look on his face.

Months later, when I heard Michael Baden say on television that “the coroner ’s office is not just a body removal service,”
I remembered that moment in court with Golden. Baden ’s tremendous respect for human life contains within it an equal respect
for death and the mysteries that surround it. Baden has always maintained, as does Dr. Henry Lee, that the job of forensic
specialists is not to answer the whodunit question but rather to find out
what happened
—to reconstruct the way that someone ’s life ended and not take sides or make assumptions in the process. The difference between
these two men and Golden, I ’ve decided, is that Golden is the kind of man who can eat lunch and examine bodies at the same
time.