Without a Doubt (19 page)

S
trange Days

On most days Jim Morrison hovers on the periphery of my consciousness. During my last few years as a deputy, I kept a four-foot-high poster of him mounted on the wall behind my desk. Jim is onstage, wearing tight leather pants and that signature pout. As a teen, I was a big fan of the Doors, and Morrison’s expression just hooked me. Here was a guy who looked Strangeness in the eye without blinking. Well, ultimately he did blink. But it was my guess that throughout the preliminary hearings, Morrison was parked on a couch in the Valhalla of dead icons, watching CNN and grinning.

This is the strangest life I’ve ever known
. It was Morrison’s line, but I found myself saying it over and over. In the days following the prelims I could not believe what was happening. What a freaking spectacle. In the space of three weeks this case had grown from a straightforward double homicide—which incidentally concerned a celebrity—into a national obsession. It was like Desert Storm with a docket number. Why is the American public such a sucker for any drama unfolding live? Will Baby Jessica make it out of that well? Will the baby killer whale make it to open sea? Will O. J. Simpson blow his brains out? The lure, I suppose, is the honesty of an uncertain outcome.

But even now, in the cold gray light of hindsight, I still don’t fully understand the appeal of this case. I know that the Bronco chase offered a powerful rush.
The first hit is free
. . . . Liking the jolt it got during those two hours of unprogrammed airtime, the public came looking for another. And another. The media fed the addiction, covering every twitch in the case as a “stunning new development.” By the time we got through those preliminary hearings, nothing was ordinary. Nothing was
allowed
to be ordinary. It was all reported at the same hysterical, accelerating pitch.

God forbid there should be a slow news day, or the press would settle its frenetic, predatory attentions on me. No one ever came right out and asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Why’d Gil Garcetti pick a
girl
for this job?” The subtext, however, was clear: Criminal prosecution is guy’s work. You gotta be tough. And for a case this big you gotta be real tough. You gotta put your best man in there. Is your best man really a woman?

I’ve never been one to cry sexism. But I know the score. I know that I have to be tougher and better than the guys I work with. My attitude has always been, So what? Having to be tougher and better makes me just that, tougher and better. And I tried looking at this particular situation philosophically. I knew that anybody Gil picked for this job was going to come in for a lot of scrutiny and a whole lot of grief. But the kind of grief I got was the sort I thought had gone out of fashion with foot binding.

After that blast of exposure during the prelims, my appearance became the subject of seemingly endless speculation. (You remember, don’t you?) The circles under my eyes. When I’m tired, I tend to get circles under my eyes. People I scarcely knew would come up and say, “When are you going to do something about those circles?” And I’d tell them, “I’ll do something after the trial. I’ll get some sleep.” During the prelims, my facial features became one of the leading indicators of the prosecution’s fortunes. As in, “Marcia’s looking hagged out; the prosecution must be having a bad day.”

Once I wore a short-sleeved white dress. There was no significance to it except that it was clean, comfortable, and not something I usually wore in front of a jury because it was just a little too casual. Since we were in pretrial motions and didn’t even have a jury at that point, I could choose comfort over formality. And so, as I got off the elevator, reporters started hectoring me: “Marcia, what is the significance of the dress? What does it mean?”

What does it mean? The dress means nothing, but the fact that you have to ask means a lot. It means there sure as hell is such a thing as pink coverage versus blue coverage. It means “She may be the CEO of General Motors, boys, but she’s still a woman
.”

The debate inevitably descended to the length of my skirts. Drive-time radio jocks wore themselves out complaining that my hems were “too short.” Let me explain something here. When I’m on my own time I wear my skirts any damned length I please. And that is usually about three inches above the knee. It’s not an attempt at seduction. It’s not the Dance of the Seven Veils. But when it comes to what I wear in front of a jury, I have always been conservative. I wear what I consider to be smart, lawyerly suits with hems slightly above the knee. Now, if you check the hems of the other female D.A.s, I suspect you’ll find a number of them at precisely the same length. (But, of course, while the controversy over my skirts was at full boil, none of them came forward to say “Check out
my
hems.”)

The real problem was that I was overexposed. During a single week, my image had been beamed for some seventy hours into the living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, and kitchens of strangers. That’s about five years’ worth of
Seinfeld
episodes in seven days! No wonder strangers felt a false sense of intimacy with me.

One day after work I swung by the grocery store to pick up some ground turkey and green peppers for dinner. By the time I got to the checkout counter, my cart was loaded with stuff, including the obligatory Popsicles and Cheerios. The girl at the counter looked up at me and said, “What are
you
doing here?”

Meaning, “Big shot like you must certainly have people to do this kind of stuff for you.”

I felt like telling her, “Look, honey. I live in a rat hole with a leaky bedroom. My car window is busted. I can’t pay the mortgage. My nanny doesn’t drive. Who do you suppose runs my errands?”

But I didn’t. Some kid who makes $4.25 an hour bagging groceries probably doesn’t care about the distinction between Princess Diana and a public servant who stumbled into the spotlight.

Like it or not, I was a celebrity. I guess I was getting a taste of what drove my man Morrison nuts. Everywhere I turned, people seemed to be grabbing at me. They felt that they were entitled to interrupt me, no matter what I was doing. When I went out to dinner, they’d come over to my table. Or worse, they’d make that cute gesture of sending a waiter over with a glass of o.j. I’d try to be gracious, but I’m not an extrovert by nature. And I found dealing with these flat-footed overtures very depleting.

Everywhere I looked, there were hands. Hands wanting to shake mine. Hands wanting autographs. Hands wanting to touch me. It was getting to me. I had a recurrent waking nightmare that one of those hands reaching out to me, slow motion, held a gun pointed at my heart.

This was not some irrational, free-floating anxiety. During the Rebecca Schaeffer case, I’d learned about the pathology of obsession from Gavin de Becker, a security consultant and perhaps the world’s wisest authority on the psychology of stalking. Gavin helped me develop a psychological profile of Rebecca’s killer. When the Simpson case broke, I didn’t even have to call him. He phoned me to see if I was okay.

“Marcia”—Gavin’s mellifluous voice is unmistakable—“have you been receiving mail?”

I had, in fact—by the box load. I hadn’t read it. I didn’t have the time. Gavin offered to sort through it for me to see if there was anyone to watch out for. He also told me how to mitigate the risk factor in signing autographs: “Never sign more than your name,” he warned. Even a meaningless expression like “sincerely” could give encouragement to an unbalanced fan. If a situation seemed the least bit weird—a guy looking twitchy, avoiding eye contact—I should get the hell outta there.

“Kind of ironic, huh, Gavin,” I told him. “Whoever thought I’d be on the receiving end of this bullshit?”

There were others looking after me, too—like Lieutenant Gary Schram, a big, barrel-chested ex-marine who was in charge of the D.A.‘s investigators. Schram was this sweet, wonderful guy who worried over me constantly. He assigned his men to follow me around. If I was out on the freeway, I’d look up and see one of them in my rearview mirror. If I changed lanes without thinking and lost my escort, my car phone would scream almost instantly. It would be Schram, chewing me out for my carelessness.

At Gary’s insistence, I began carrying a handgun, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. I wasn’t opposed to the idea in principle; a lot of criminal prosecutors carry guns. And I was certainly no greenhorn when it came to firearms. My ex-husband had been a gun enthusiast, and we’d gone out to the range together now and then for some target practice. Since I’d been living alone, in fact, I’d kept a handgun on the upper shelf of my kitchen cabinet.

Having one in your purse, though, is a whole different trip. It requires a CCW, a permit to carry. Schram took me down to the police firing range in the hills behind Glendale. The old cop who ran the range gave me a quick refresher on cleaning and loading procedures. We reviewed safety tips that I already knew. I fired a few shots at a silhouette to demonstrate I could aim at Van Nuys without taking out Long Beach.

It usually takes weeks to get a permit, but Schram and his buddies had one laminated and in my hands before I left the range. On the way out, Schram fixed me with his steady blue eyes. “I want this in your, purse at all times,” he told me. “It won’t do you any good in your desk drawer.”

I kept forgetting it. It was a form of denial on my part, I suppose. If I wasn’t in danger, I wouldn’t need a weapon. Right? Schram didn’t buy this pretzel logic. If I happened to pass the lieutenant on the way out of the office, he’d hold me up for a random inspection. If he didn’t find the Smith & Wesson in my purse, he’d send me back to my office to get it. I finally got used to carrying that gun as a matter of habit.

I’d gotten word through the rumor mill that one of the networks was having me tailed, that the
National Enquirer
was having me tailed, that O. J. Simpson’s private investigators were having me tailed. All of them were presumably competing for lane space with my own security detail. Every time I climbed into my car I felt like Goldie Hawn in
The Sugarland Express
.

It was no longer possible for me to walk down the hall to the D.A.‘s office and take a meeting with Gil Garcetti. Now, the sight of me opening those glass doors excited too much speculation. So Gil showed me a back way. There’s an entrance on the north side of the building that lets you circumvent the reception area and enter the D.A.‘s office unobserved. I’d spent ten years in this place and nobody had ever bothered to tell me about it.

Used to be that Bill and I could jump in a car and go visit a witness. No fuss. No armed escort. Now, we couldn’t leave the CCB together without staging a major military operation. One day, Bill and I had to interview a witness named Danielle Rose. She was a friend of Kato’s girlfriend, Rachel Ferrara. Danielle had called us about a conversation she’d had with Rachel a day or two after the murders. According to Rachel, Kato had seen Simpson outside the house within moments of hearing the thumps on his wall. It was hearsay on hearsay, but we still had to check it out.

Danielle was nervous about coming to our office. She’d seen how reporters pounced on anyone they suspected had been speaking to the prosecution, and she wanted no part of it. This distinguished her from any number of wannabe starlets who’d had even fleeting contact with any of the main players in the case and now were coming out of the woodwork and selling their stories to evening newsmagazines. This one wanted anonymity. Cool. We came up with a plan to meet her in an alley a short distance from the apartment of one of her friends.

Bill and I got into Phil Vannatter’s car, D.A. investigators flanking us before and behind. As we drove, Phil kept in radio contact with our escort. So far, so good. No tail spotted. I was beginning to think that we could all use a few weeks in therapy to lose the paranoia. No sooner had we pulled into the alley, however, than Phil pointed off to the left. Two men in sunglasses sat in a parked nuthin’-special car. One of the investigators checked them out—sure enough, they were reporters from a local TV station. He shooed them off like cowbirds.

We didn’t mention this little episode to Danielle. Poor kid was freaked out enough as it was. And all for nothing. As she stammered through her story it became clear to me that she might have simply misunderstood Rachel, whose main concern was not what Kato had done when, but that he had dragged her into this mess at all.

On the drive home, I was still boiling about the leak. What had alerted the station? A phone tap? A comment overheard in the hall? We never did find out. But after that we doubled our precautions. No more talking on cell phones. We had our cars and offices swept for bugs. From that point on, there was no more talking about the case in public. Not in the halls, not in the elevators, not even in the johns.

Meanwhile, the Fuhrman controversy showed no signs of slackening. It irritated the hell out of me to be drawn off the preparation of the case by diversionary tactics of the defense. But I also knew we’d never get back on track until we faced the problem head-on.

It did not seem logical to me that Fuhrman would try to frame O. J. Simpson with as little information as he’d had at the time he’d found the glove. How, for instance, could he have known that Simpson didn’t have an airtight alibi for the time the murders occurred? How could he know whether an eyewitness, or even an ear witness, might come forward to identify someone else? What if someone stepped forward to confess? How could he know whether Kato had already gone far enough down the south pathway to see the area where the glove was found? Did Fuhrman even have the
opportunity
to move evidence?

I’d asked the LAPD for a list of all of the officers who’d arrived at Bundy
before
Mark. There were sixteen of them. Only four had gotten beyond the perimeter to see the evidence near the bodies: Officer Robert Riske, first officer on the scene. Lieutenant Frank Spangler, one of the highest-ranking officers supervising the scene. Sergeant David Rossi, in charge of the patrol officers. And Detective Ron Phillips, Fuhrman’s supervisor, who arrived at precisely the same time Mark did. I interviewed those four men personally, and each was very clear about one thing: there had been one glove, and one glove only, lying between the bodies.