His Name Is Ron (19 page)

Amid all this insanity, the defendant had the audacity to publish a book.
I Want to Tell You
was his response to letters he had received while he was in jail.

Kim declined a reporter's request to comment, but her mental response was: I haven't read the book and have no intention of ever reading the book. I think it is self-serving garbage and it bothers me that he is making money and autographing copies during breaks in the trial.

That is what Kim wanted to tell
him.

Finally the first witness took the stand. She was Sharyn Gilbert, the dispatcher who answered Nicole's 911 call at 3:58
A.M.
on New Year's Day, 1989. Her testimony laid the groundwork for the introduction of People's Exhibit 1.

We had heard the tape on the news, but when Patti and Kim listened to it being played in the courtroom, with the Brown family sitting so close by, they ached for the family as they heard the fear in their daughter's voice. A sad silence hung throughout the courtroom.

This was followed by the testimony of the police officer who responded to the call, Detective John Edwards, who had found Nicole outside of the Brentwood estate, hiding in the bushes. He said that she ran to him and collapsed into his arms, hysterically crying that her husband was going to kill her.

This was the episode that resulted in the defendant's “no contest” plea to spousal abuse, and we could see why. Photographs of Nicole were displayed on the screen and copies were handed to the jurors for their perusal. They showed a bruised and haggard-looking young woman with hollow, frightened eyes.

Patti and Kim met witness Ron Shipp and his wife, Nina, upstairs in the D.A.'s office, and liked them immediately. In court Nina sat next to Kim as her husband testified. Under her breath, Nina continually muttered, “There's more … why don't they ask him about the rest of it?”

Throughout the testimony the defendant avoided eye contact with Shipp. He busied himself by jotting notes or whispering to his attorneys. Once, when one of the defense lawyers made an absurd comment, Shipp looked over and said, “This is sad, O.J … really sad.”

Since Shipp happens to be a distant cousin of Johnnie Cochran, Defense Attorney Carl Douglas handled the cross-examination. It was Douglas's day in the sun, his chance at the limelight. His lispy voice echoed through the courtroom as he accused Shipp of being a drunk, a womanizer, and especially a liar. The litany rang in our ears: “Did ya
lie
about that, Mr. Shipp? Do ya
lie
about a lot of things, Mr. Shipp?”

Near the end of two days of testimony, Douglas sank to new depths. He asked Shipp, “Isn't it true, sir, that you have in the past told Mr. Simpson's friends that if Mr. Simpson were not around, you might have a shot at Nicole Brown Simpson yourself?”

“No, I did not,” Shipp replied.

“You've never said that to any of Mr. Simpson's friends?”

“Excuse me for smiling,” Shipp said. “But, no, I did not.”

We felt very bad for the Shipps. Ron had put his reputation on the line, told the truth, and was attacked without mercy. And Nina had to listen to it. At the conclusion of the testimony, when the jurors were getting up to leave, Patti gave Shipp a thumbs-up for doing such a good job.

The following day, Marcia informed Patti that her thumbs-up gesture had been a “boo-boo.” The defense had thrown what Patti characterized as “a hissy fit” and complained to Judge Ito. The judge addressed the issue in open court, reminding everyone not to make gestures to any of the witnesses. As the judge lectured, Patti felt his eyes trained directly on her, and she was sure that everyone knew he was talking about her.

Patti's so-called boo-boo became so infamous that it even made the ten o'clock news. “Can you believe this?” she said. “Another day at the circus.”
She wrote a brief note of apology to Judge Ito, but was never given the courtesy of a reply.

The prosecution continued to paint a portrait of the defendant as a wife beater and a stalker.

Nicole's sister Denise testified, tearfully recalling how the defendant had humiliated Nicole in public, slammed her around, and berated her.

At one point in her testimony, Denise described the defendant as having a “huge ego.” From what we had seen, that was a massive understatement. Even during this testimony, he sat in court with his chin in the air, rolling his eyes.

“He really believes he's above it all,” Patti commented. “So he was a big shot in his football days, so what? He thinks he can get away with anything.”

Kim echoed her sentiments: “He is a narcissistic beast; it is so obvious that he only thinks of himself.”

The trial became a daily ritual. Patti and Kim—and whoever else was attending that day—needed to be at the courthouse by 8:00
A.M.
, so they rose early, showered, packed a lunch, and grabbed a bagel or a banana and coffee. They were in the car and on the road by 6:30. Often I could join them later; often I could not.

It was about an hour's drive to our designated parking spot at Parker Center Police Headquarters. The parking-lot guard, Ron Zito, was always helpful and friendly and scurried to move the parking cones that reserved our place. D.A. investigators met Patti and Kim there and escorted them to the courthouse. Their policelike jargon was amusing. “We are picking up the package,” they would say into a walkie-talkie, or “We are now delivering the package.” It took us a while to realize that they were there to do more than act as simple escorts; they were there to protect as well. We all shared a fantasy—that just once we would get a chance to see the defendant being led out of the prison van in shackles.

Before the day's session began, everyone waited upstairs in Patty Jo's office, where there was always time for friendly and very down-to-earth small talk. Chris Darden always made time for us. The lead detectives, Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter, answered our questions patiently and thoroughly.

Susan Arguela was replaced by Mark Arenas as our Victim-Witness Assistance advocate. All of us warmed to him immediately. Mark was a
compact, dark-haired young man of Hispanic descent, honest and clean-cut, who effectively shepherded us through some of the roughest times imaginable. The judicial system in this country is complicated for the initiated. For neophytes like us, it was nearly impossible to navigate. Mark not only saw to our needs, he often anticipated them, and we will be forever grateful to him.

When it was time for the day's session to begin, Mark accompanied Patti and Kim to the elevator that would take them downstairs to the courtroom. They often arrived in the hallway outside the courtroom at the same time as the defense lawyers, and this inevitably produced a mad dash to see which side could get through the metal detector first. Members of what we now referred to as the “Scheme Team,” especially Johnnie Cochran, would elbow their way past, preparing to strut for the camera. To be fair, Robert Shapiro occasionally stepped back, allowing Patti and Kim to enter first, but those times were infrequent.

Kim preferred sitting in the first row so that she could be closer to Marcia and Chris. Occasionally our family sat in the second row, and when that happened Kim was usually on the end. That placed her closer to the defendant, with the result that she found herself focusing on him instead of the trial. This bothered her. She did not want the defendant to drain any more energy from her than he already had.

We understood the rules against eating and drinking in the courtroom. Judge Ito did not want the camera to record a sea of spectators in picnic mode, but it was also annoying to watch the prosecutors and the defense attorneys drinking coffee, eating pretzels and candy, and sipping Diet Coke while the families of the deceased were not allowed a sip of water or a cough drop.

The arrogance that permeated the courtroom was suffocating. You could smell it, taste it. Every member of the “Scheme Team” was an individual whom we would have instinctively avoided in everyday life. We never saw a shred of humanity or decency. It was a cockfight, plain and simple. And it was calculated and orchestrated.

We decided that Defense Attorney Robert Shapiro needed a third eye. As the camera panned, he and Carl Douglas constantly monitored it, so that they could alert the defendant to stop joking and grinning and tapping out a tempo with his fingers.
Lights! Camera! Action! Time to wipe the eye. Time to bite the lower lip.

Often, during prosecution testimony, some of the defense lawyers would position themselves within earshot of the jury. Barry Scheck was a master at this. As Marcia questioned a witness, Scheck made certain that the jury heard him say to an associate, his voice laden with sarcasm, “That's
bullshit,” or “This is total crap.” Simultaneously he shook his head in mock disbelief. Judge Ito let him get away with it. We worried about the effect these theatrics were having on the jury.

Johnnie Cochran was clearly the worst offender. He was the consummate showman, a fake, constantly playing to the crowd. He snickered at the witnesses and mocked the prosecutors. If we could hear his stage whispers—“What bull,” “Oh my God,” and “That's crap”—we knew that Judge Ito could hear him and that the jury could hear him as well. As with Scheck, we were concerned that by not reprimanding Cochran, the judge was sending the jury a message of tacit agreement and it bothered us tremendously. The prosecution remained professional and did not resort to this kind of trickery, but we constantly wondered how the jury was internalizing these messages.

Judge Ito was never in charge of that courtroom, Cochran was. His movements were choreographed and predictable. Whenever he rose from the defense table, we knew exactly what he was going to do. He pushed his chair in, straightened his shiny, colorful suit jacket, tugged at his African-motif tie (with matching pocket handkerchief), and strutted across the courtroom with the air of a bantam rooster. He glanced at Judge Ito, smiled, nodded his head, and waited for the judge to return the smile. The judge always did. The unspoken conversation said, “Hey, buddy, how ya doing?” Every time we saw this performance, we cringed, knowing instinctively that Judge Ito was sending a message to the jury: This guy is just peachy. Cochran also had a tendency to schmooze with Marcia and Chris, a tactic that drove Kim crazy.

After these nauseating niceties, Cochran stationed himself near the jury, at the podium, and made blatant eye contact with the jurors.

We did not know if Judge Ito was inept or stupid or starstruck, or if he was concerned because the trial was televised around the world, but he coddled the defense and Cochran played against this judicial weakness. Cochran objected. Judge Ito overruled. Five or ten minutes later, Cochran argued the same issue again and the judge called for a sidebar conference. Cochran would walk toward the bench, turn his shoulders, thrust his chin in the air, and again gaze at each and every jury member with what Patti called “that Cheshire cat grin” on his face.

In sum, we began to realize that we were up against the most conniving, slimy, deceitful, unethical, immoral lawyers in the country. Perhaps they will take that as a compliment.

After the long, long days, Patti and Kim faced the drive home, often through rush-hour traffic, listening to the never-ending trial recaps on the car radio. Depending upon what had happened during the day, they would
scream and otherwise vent their anger or ride in depressing silence. Often one of them would call me during the drive home and request that a bottle of wine and two straws be waiting for them when they arrived. Then, there was the obligatory stop at the grocery store, and dinner to prepare. If I had not been able to attend court that day, I wanted to know everything that had happened. Our dinner-table conversation would center on a blow-by-blow description of the day's events.

Patti was acutely aware that Michael and Lauren, although they too were vitally interested in the trial, had other needs. They were teenagers, one a freshman and one a senior, experiencing the normal, daily triumphs and frustrations. Patti felt that she should be spending more time with them, and guilt began to gnaw at her. Patti and I also knew that we should try to find some private, quiet time for each other, but it was nearly impossible. There were still only twenty-four hours in a day, and we had no energy left to deal with the usual issues of life.

We had always been such an open and talkative family, never wanting things to simmer and go unresolved. Now it seemed that we had all become closemouthed and afraid of stepping on one another's toes. All our feelings were raw, as if our nerve endings were exposed to a frigid blast of air.

Early in the trial we discovered that Judge Ito had incited jealousy among the pool of reporters by assigning the seat next to us to a man who introduced himself as Dominick Dunne. He explained that for the past eighteen months he had been writing articles about the murder case of Lyle and Eric Menendez, and was working on a fictionalized book about it. Now he had been assigned by both
Vanity Fair
magazine and CBS news to cover this trial.

Neither Patti nor Kim were familiar with his work, but he seemed like a gentleman.

In one of his pieces for
Vanity Fair
, he wrote that the 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 money can busy.”

This man who sat beside us was in a state of perpetual motion, always in a hurry. We did not understand his passion until he gave Kim a copy of one of his first books,
People Like Us,
and it explained a lot. It was the story
of his daughter Dominique, an actress best known for her role in
Poltergeist
, whose boyfriend, John Sweeney, strangled her to death in 1982. After learning that he understood the indescribable depths of our pain, we warmed to him very quickly.