His Name Is Ron (16 page)

Marcia Clark countered, pointing out that they had only themselves to blame. She said that the families were angry at the manner in which the defense had painted all the evidence and the witnesses as tainted and unreliable. “They are outraged at the way you've turned this into a circus. If Mr. Cochran does not like the response, then don't make the first salvo. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

On December 1, Shapiro cried uncle. Arriving for court, he told reporters, “In the spirit of trying to accomplish what we all want, we will take the high road. We no longer will be talking to the press on a daily basis. We will comment when we think it's necessary. We hope everyone else will take the high road with us.” I said nothing, but I already had a pretty good idea of what a Shapiro-Cochran promise was worth.

On December 9, carrying a Bible in his huge hands, Rosey Grier took the witness stand at a pretrial hearing. In 1986, well after ending his football career, Grier had been ordained a minister. Deputy Sheriff Jeff Stuart claimed to have overheard an explosive private conversation between Grier and the defendent on November 13. Stuart's report had been filed with Judge Ito and was now held under seal. Neither the prosecutors nor the defense team had seen the material, but the rumor was that Stuart had overheard him confess his guilt to Grier.

Naturally the prosecution wanted to introduce Stuart's testimony. Of course the defense argued against this, contending that the statement had been made during a privileged conversation with clergy. Bill Hodgman tried to pry any information he could from Grier, but the witness remained stone-faced, aided and abetted by Johnnie Cochran.

Bill asked Grier what he and the defendant talked about during their frequent visits.

“We go over Scriptures,” Grier replied. “We pray. We discuss various people in the Bible, problems they had, talk about who God is … what is sin. We talk about all kinds of things in the Bible.”

During a later session of the hearing, Deputy Sheriff Jeff Stuart took the stand. Carefully warned not to divulge the actual statement that he said he overheard, Stuart testified that he was in a control booth about ten feet away from the two men, filling out paperwork, when a loud bang caused him to look up. The defendant had slammed down a phone. Then he slammed his fist against a table. He “appeared to be crying,” Stuart testified. “He appeared to be very upset.”

Asked to describe the defendant's tone of voice, Stuart replied, “He was yelling … it was very loud, in a raised voice.”

Throughout the testimony on this issue, the defendant seemed almost bemused. He frequently smiled and arched his eyebrows.

Finally Judge Ito ruled that the statement should remain confidential.

That was an outrage. In my mind, the situation was analogous to a church full of parishioners overhearing something in a confessional. No, the priest could not be compelled to testify, but the members of the congregation certainly could.

We thought truth was the issue. If this man had confessed, we wanted the entire world to know about it.

For all of us, sleep was still an elusive commodity, and when it did come, it was often distorted by haunting imagery. “They say you don't dream in color, but they're wrong,” Kim declared. Bright yellow was the color she had seen. The restaurant was very dark, and the bright yellow shirt that Ron was wearing almost glowed. Kim walked over to him. Just as Ron started to speak to her, he disappeared into the darkness.

In another of her dreams, we were back in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, where Ron and Kim grew up. I was pestering her to hurry up and Ron was waiting outside. The three of us got into the car and Ron drove us off to the coroner's office. We were going there to identify Ron's body—but Ron was driving the car! Suddenly Ron disappeared and Kim found herself alone in a huge, antiseptic room. She pulled open a metal door to find Ron's and Nicole's bodies lying on the slab, covered with blood.

Normally, when one awakes from a nightmare, reality is welcome. But not for Kim. Not for any of us.

The pain in Kim was so deep that I tried to hide my own anguish from her. But my strategy did not always work. When we spoke on the phone, tears welled up. My voice choked. I knew that I was adding to her pain, but I could not stop.

What I was not aware of was that Kim had some unfinished, painful business that she had not yet faced. In the spring of 1994, a few months prior to Ron's death, she was assigned to write a paper for her sociology course. Her task was to analyze an ongoing, interpersonal conflict. Her first thought was to focus on her relationship with Sharon, but a series of events had occurred over the past couple of years that changed her mind. Her relationship with Sharon was beyond repair. Instead, she focused on some troubling aspects of her relationship with Ron.

Ron had looked after Kim all through their childhood, but of course, once he reached adulthood he left home in pursuit of his own goals. Not only did he leave Kim physically, but it sometimes felt, to her, as if he became increasingly disinterested in her—unless he wanted something. The feeling opened old and very deep wounds in Kim that could be summed up in a single word: abandonment.

In the paper, Kim had revisited a specific pain that arose in 1993, when she was in school in Santa Barbara. Ron had a heavy foot when it came to driving the California freeways, and he had managed to accumulate his share of speeding tickets. Kim and I have also put in our time at traffic school, so we never came down on him too hard.

But this time, since he was driving a friend's Jeep and had several outstanding tickets, the police had thrown him in jail. Ron was reluctant to call me. Instead, he called Kim. Kim had made the drive from Santa Barbara, and loaned him the necessary cash.

Ron thanked her profusely, but as time passed he never mentioned the incident and seemed to forget his obligation to pay her back.

“My feelings were hurt,” she confided, “and it began to gnaw at me. I saw him spending money on his apartment, and his girlfriend, without ever apologizing for not paying me back. I got madder and madder, but I kept it all inside. It was never about the actual money, I just wanted him to acknowledge what I'd done for him. I was always bad with confrontation and I didn't want anybody mad at me. I especially didn't want my big brother mad at me.”

In December of 1993, during the holidays, Kim finally wrote Ron a bitter letter—the only gift she gave him that year. She vented some of her feelings about the things she had done for him over the years, and how she thought that Ron took her for granted. A single line in Kim's letter summed up how she felt that Ron had treated her: “You do for me and maybe I will do for you.”

Ron called her and said that the letter bothered him a lot. “Kim,” he
said, “you're my sister. I don't take you for granted. You have to know how I feel. You're my sister. I love you and I don't feel like I have to call every week to tell you that. God, you're my best friend.”

The phone call helped, but Kim had still retained a measure of anger, and she addressed it in her conflict paper. The assignment helped her to understand that she may have transferred—unfairly—some of her resentment from Sharon to Ron.

Kim wrote: “I have talked about this with other people and they can not quite capture the bond that Ron and I share. They see me as being so strong and then to watch my brother hurt me, they wonder how I could be so stupid? How can they say that? Ron and I raised each other, only we know the dynamics of our connection. I do feel genuine love from him and part of me returning that love is accepting him for the whole person that he is, the same way I ask him to love me … unconditionally.”

Both Kim the sister and Kim the psychology major knew that everything was muddled inside. Kim the psychology major knew that she and Ron would work through the rough spots and remain close, perhaps in a more adult manner than before. But it was Kim the sister who declared the bottom line: “My mother and I are not alike at all. I will not walk away when things get bad like she did.”

We live our lives assuming that there is always tomorrow to say “I'm sorry” or “I love you.” What was especially painful for Kim now was to look at the date on the paper, May 10, 1994. It was Mother's Day, the last time she had spoken with Ron.

We received a letter from Steve Rufo, who was now separated from Sharon. He expressed sorrow over our loss and told us that he wanted us to know that the things that Sharon was saying to the press were untrue. She continually stated how much she missed Ron, what a tremendous relationship they enjoyed, and how often they talked to one another. He told us what we already knew: Sharon had seldom mentioned Ron or Kim and that when she did, it was to complain that the pregnancies had left her fat. He said that her conduct had been outrageous and that he was embarrassed ever to have been associated with her.

I forwarded the letter to Kim in San Francisco.

With Joe listening on the extension, Kim called Sharon. They spoke for about an hour, and the conversation was ugly. Sharon maligned me, repeated her litany of lies, and in general continued to rant and rave. She complained that Kim was a selfish and uncaring person. Sharon would never
admit that she was the one who disowned them. Kim tried to point out that a six-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl were not capable of making the decision to sever a relationship with their mother. She tried in vain to reassert her view that I had absolutely nothing to do with her and Ron's feelings toward Sharon.

The bitter conversation accomplished nothing, and when Kim hung up the phone she felt more isolated than ever.

Things got worse. Over the years Sharon had convinced Kim's maternal grandparents that it was the three of us—Ron, Kim, and me—who refused to have anything to do with her. Many letters flew back and forth between Kim and her grandparents, but they were never able to accept the reality of the situation. Now Kim received a letter from her grandfather telling her that he hoped God would forgive her for her sins and announcing that he was removing all of Ron's and Kim's pictures from his house. They were severing all ties.

Kim responded to the letter tersely: “If you can't treat me with respect and talk to me the way I deserve, I don't want to have anything to do with you.” And it was clear they didn't want to either.

As the holidays approached, Kim tried to remember happier times. “Ron and I were always the youngest in our temple,” she recalled, “and we would sit in the balcony, lean over the side, and giggle while we counted all the bald heads on the men and the pearl necklaces on the women. We would use the bathroom as an excuse, and sneak downstairs and chase each other around. As we got older, religion took on different meanings for all of us. We still went to temple, but mostly out of deference to our dad. It was important for him to have us there, so we went. Still, it took us back in time and often Ron and I resorted to our childish behavior.”

Now, instead of bringing peace, she knew that the holidays would make her sad and lonely.

Supremely frustrated—as she put it, “Everything pissed me off”—Kim quit her job and took a leave from college. We drove to San Francisco to pick her up. Leaving her new kitten, Dakota, with Joe, she returned home.

It was, quite simply, where she had to be.

ELEVEN

The legal system staggered slowly forward.

The defendant's deep pockets allowed him to assemble a gaggle of attorneys that the media began to characterize as the “Dream Team.” Johnnie Cochran was clearly elbowing his way into the starring role, pushing aside Robert Shapiro. Gerald Uelman handled the intricacies of constitutional law. DNA experts Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld were brought in from New York. The defendant's longtime friend Robert Kardashian was technically assigned to the team; this appeared to be a ploy to activate the attorney-client privilege so that Kardashian could not be compelled to testify about his interaction with the defendant in the week following the murders. Attorney F. Lee Bailey was there for show. We were not quite sure why Carl Douglas was part of the team.

But the strategy was clear. Throw a thousand issues—like darts—at Judge Ito, to see if any of them found the target. This resulted in one pretrial hearing after another, and a series of rulings, some of which were vital and some picayune.

Judge Ito ruled that a single television camera would be allowed in the courtroom. And he ordered that the jurors and alternates would be sequestered for the duration of the trial. Handing the defense a clear victory, the judge decreed that, under California law, the prosecution could not introduce material from Nicole's diary because it was hearsay and because the defense lawyers could not cross-examine Nicole. The press speculated
ad
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whether or not the defendant would testify. But Judge Ito, by his ruling, made it clear that one of his victims would not.

The defense tried to prohibit any of our or Nicole's family members from being present in the courtroom on the absurd pretext that some of us might be called as witnesses. Had it been entirely up to them, Ron's and Nicole's names would never have been mentioned at all. Judge Ito rejected that motion, and the issue then became a matter of degree. At first the judge decreed that our family could have five seats in the courtroom and the Brown family could have five seats. However, when we learned that the defendant's family would be assigned seven or eight seats, we raised a heated objection. Marcia Clark reported our dissatisfaction to Judge Ito, who grudgingly assigned the victims' families seven seats each. But there was a catch. If we were to be allowed seven seats, we had to fill them regularly or we would lose the privilege.