His Name Is Ron (42 page)

We all wanted to attend as much as possible, but this time things would be a bit different. Patti would be there every Monday, and would also attend when critical events were scheduled. Kim found it nearly impossible to be in close proximity to the killer, to see him walking freely among the public. “I don't want to breathe the same air,” she said. She would come to court when she could, but she knew that her attendance might be intermittent. But my new career gave me the freedom to be present at almost every moment.

I said to Patti, “It is an eerie situation to suddenly discover that we are only a day or two away from beginning this nightmare again.”

Our mood deepened as we drove north on the Ventura Freeway. On our left, the hills were ablaze. Wildfires, fed by the Santa Ana winds, consumed the dry brush that lay between us and the Pacific Ocean. The farther we drove, the more we were enshrouded by dark, acrid smoke.

It felt as if we were driving through hell.

THIRTY-TWO

Our attorneys booked a suite at the Doubletree Hotel, directly across the street from the courtroom. They set up a “war room,” complete with computers, phone banks, copiers, and fax machines. We would assemble there each morning to discuss the coming events of the day. Our family would be much more involved than we had been in the criminal trial. This was our case. Patti and Kim, because of their constant attendance at the criminal trial, knew the evidence better than some of the lawyers.

The problem with this arrangement was that we would walk a gauntlet as we made our way to the courthouse. On Wednesday, October 23, the crowd of spectators, aware that the infamous defendant would probably make an appearance, were both numerous and vocal. Kim was apprehensive as we emerged from the hotel. Comments were shouted at us from all sides. Reporters sought to get us to violate the gag order. Many onlookers expressed their support; others hurled insults. At this time there was no team of investigators from the D.A.'s office to protect us.

Kim thought: Some of these people might be capable of violence. She kept her head down and cried, “I can't deal with it!”

“Just pick your head up,” I advised. But she started to lag behind. “If you fall back you're only drawing attention,” I said. “Safety in numbers.”

As we passed through a metal detector and entered the courtroom, we found ourselves in close proximity to the killer, who was seated on the defense side, calmly leafing through a newspaper.

Many members of the killer's family were present. His grown children,
Arnelle and Jason, were notably absent. Before the proceedings began, the killer's clan huddled around him to pray. As they implored God to aid their cause, the murderer perused the sports section.

Finally, at 10:15
A.M.
, the jury filed into the courtroom. At that instant Patti's entire body began to tremble. She thought: We're going to have to go through all of this again!

I felt an enormous flood of apprehension. I asked myself: Would these twelve people see things more clearly than the other twelve who were so willing to ignore the evidence? God, are we going to be able to do it this time?

Dan rose to present his opening statement. In a low-keyed delivery, he promised the jurors that we would reveal “the lies and deceptions of Mr. Simpson.”

As he previewed the case, it became clear that these jurors would see and hear evidence that had never made it into the criminal case. Fibers found at the crime scene did not merely match the fibers of a Ford Bronco; they matched the somewhat unique fabric of the killer's Bronco. His taped interview with police the day after the murders raised numerous questions and conflicted with later statements. One of the most dramatic pieces of brand-new evidence was a photograph showing the defendant wearing the “ugly ass” Bruno Magli shoes that he swore he would never own.

Dan indicated that we would rely upon a different timeline than the criminal prosecutors. He contended that the murders occurred around 10:35
P.M
., several minutes later than Marcia and Chris had calculated. Some observers considered Dan's new scenario risky, because it gave the killer less time to drive home and dispose of the murder weapon and the clothes he was wearing. But we felt that we had credible testimony to establish this timeline, and we had forensic experts ready to inform the jury that the assault happened so quickly that the killer had ample time to make his escape.

Dan's new timeline made a good deal of sense. A dog will bark at almost anything, but now we had a real person who would say, “This is what I heard at the moment.” It narrowed the window of time for the killer to flee, but it gave us more credibility.

The murderer stared straight ahead during most of Dan's statement, but occasionally he clenched his jaw, smiled in mock disbelief, or shook his head in protest. Rarely did he look at the jurors. Some members of his family busied themselves with “Word-Find” puzzles. His sister, Shirley Baker, and her husband, Benny, played “Hangman.”

As Dan neared his conclusion, we listened to his clinical, graphic description of how Ron died. We all held hands and tried to get through it. But we were unprepared when he concluded with a chilling fact.

“Ronald Goldman died with his eyes open,” Dan said. “In the last few moments of his life, he saw the person who killed his friend Nicole. The last person he saw through his open eyes was the man who ended his young life, the man who now sits in this courtroom, the defendant.” That image will always haunt us.

Patti and I left court at noon on Thursday to fly to Arizona. We would miss Robert Baker's opening statement for the defense, and we would miss the first day of testimony, but there was no way that we would miss Parents' Weekend during Michael's freshman year.

Kim was able to attend.

Baker spoke without notes, sometimes seemed disjointed, and frequently backtracked. Kim concluded: He's trying to cover his ass on everything.

Baker tried to convince the jury that Nicole's own reckless and immoral behavior put her in harm's way. He also attempted to show that some of the killer's past frustrations with his wife were justified. Kim was repulsed by his depiction of Nicole as a heavy-drinking, promiscuous woman who kept company with a variety of low-life friends. In fact, he said, the defense would prove that Ron had gone to Nicole's apartment for a prearranged “date.” He tried to paint his client as a man who was simply concerned for his children, and told the jury that he was the one who had been stalked, not the other way around. According to Baker, after the breakup of their marriage, Nicole had the audacity to send her ex-husband cookies and even showed up at his country club.

No wonder he had to slit her throat, Kim thought.

Going as far as the judge's restrictions allowed, Baker tried to raise the old, tired issues of contamination and corruption of evidence. Although prohibited by the judge from mentioning Mark Fuhrman's perjury plea, he managed to interject the controversial ex-detective's name into his statement whenever possible.

Then Baker made a key mistake. He mentioned that the killer had once offered to take a lie-detector test, but the prosecutors had refused. This was a good news/bad news situation. It left the jury with the impression that he had not taken the test, but it opened the door for us to revisit the topic later.

Baker said one thing with which we heartily agreed. Above all, he told the jury, “listen to the testimony of O.J.”

With Kim as our only family member in attendance, the mind games began in earnest. She described the scene vividly in her journal:

Having to be in close proximity to the killer is much worse than even I expected. I knew it would be uncomfortable, but it's nearly impossible to take. He stares at me, often running his tongue across his upper lip, with a smirking leer on his face. I stare back, willing the daggers in my eyes to pierce straight through him. It's become a sick game of one-upmanship. I heard him whine to a reporter, nodding in my direction, “Look what I have to deal with. She does this 24 hours a day.” Then I was confronted by a woman, who is the killer's self-proclaimed best friend. She walked over to him. He motioned towards me. She walked over and stood in front of me to block my view. I moved to the left. She followed. I moved to the right. She followed. I tilted my head, as did she. I looked at her and said, “Do you think what you are doing is effective? I could just move around you.” And I did. She turned to me and said, “He is pretty good looking to stare at, isn't he?”

The killer and his idiot bodyguard were laughing. They knew exactly what she was doing and saying.

This is the beast whom I believe butchered my brother and left him to die. His ex-wife, the mother of his children, met the same horrible fate. Yet, he saunters around the legal system, mocking us, laughing at us, it's like pouring salt into an open, oozing wound.

We are constantly warned to maintain decorum and dignity, to turn the other cheek and simply take it.

But I am ready to rumble.

I can feel it coming. I can feel it brewing inside me. I cannot maintain this much longer. An explosion is in the offing. And there is precious little I can do to stop it.

And then there was Sharon. Until now, we had ignored her, and she had returned the favor. But on this day, after court, she came up behind Kim and whispered, “Do you want to reconsider talking to me? You are making this obvious.”

“Sharon, walk away from me,” Kim replied.

“It's ‘Mom' to you,” Sharon said.

Kim turned to leave, aware that reporters and lawyers hovered everywhere. “You are a little bitch,” Sharon hissed in her ear. “Who do you think you are? You have an attitude. That is my son and you have no right to sit here. I don't know who you are. You are not my daughter, and you can tell your father that, too. How dare you both make shit out of me on TV. I'll get you back.”

“Stop talking to me!” Kim growled.

Kim was rattled, and very angry. She reported the incident to Dan, and he suggested that Kim just politely tell Sharon that this was not an appropriate time to be discussing such matters. For the sake of the trial, we did not need to air our dirty laundry.

But Kim had had enough. “No way,” she told Dan, “just tell her to stay the hell away from me.”

Once again Kim heard a witness recall Ron's final words.

As testimony began on Friday, our “ear witness” Robert Heidstra told the jurors that he was walking his dog in an alley behind Nicole's condominium at about 10:34 on the night of the murders when he heard the sounds of two men arguing. “I heard a clear voice yelling, ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!,' ” he said. “It was a male, no doubt about it.” Then he said he heard “another voice, a deeper voice, talking very fast—it sounded like an argument…. Then I heard a gate clanging, bang.” Five minutes later he saw a white Jeep-like vehicle with tinted windows, come “out of the dark” and speed from the area.

In a surprisingly brief cross-examination, Baker got Heidstra to stress that the white vehicle turned south, speeding away in the opposite direction from the Rockingham estate. But Baker spent little time attacking Heidstra's testimony because he, too, was satisfied with the later timeline.

Stewart Tanner, the Mezzaluna bartender, testified that Ron did not have a “date” with Nicole that evening, that he was, indeed, merely returning Juditha Brown's eyeglasses; in fact, he said, he and Ron had had plans to meet another friend at Marina del Rey later that evening.

Other witnesses set the grisly scene. Brentwood resident Sukru Boztepe recounted how he tried to calm the frantic, bloodstained Akita that he found on Bundy Drive at about 10:55
P.M.
, and described how the dog dragged him to Nicole's condominium, where he saw a bloody body.

As Boztepe testified, jurors leaned forward to stare at a crime-scene photo. There before them was the grisly sight of a bloody walkway, with Nicole's body visible at the far end.

It soon appeared that testimony would speed along much more quickly than it had during the criminal trial. By midafternoon Dan told Judge Fujisaki that, because he had anticipated more rigorous cross-examination, he had run out of witnesses for the day.

Patti and I were back in court on Monday; Kim was back at work. Things continued to move along briskly. Our side called the first three LAPD officers who had arrived at the crime scene. Officers Robert Riske and Miguel Terrazas and Sergeant David Rossi described the crime scene and identified where they had found various pieces of evidence.

Dan used Riske's testimony to introduce photographs of the crime scene. It was the first time since the criminal trial that Patti and I had seen the chilling pictures of the bloody, horrible place where Ron had died. This viewing was even more painful than before. We were closer to the television screen, and this was
our
case. Patti and I were reduced to tears.

The officers testified that blood drops on both the walkway and the back gate appeared fresh and moist. Additional officers, who had responded a few hours later, said that the stains were bright red, not the brown color of blood that has been exposed to the elements for a long time. This early testimony was very important. The officers clearly established that there was blood all over the place about midnight. At midnight, there was blood on the back gate. The officers testified that they saw only
one
bloody glove at the crime scene. At midnight. Long before the detectives—including the maligned Mark Fuhrman—arrived on the scene.