His Name Is Ron (43 page)

The killer himself did not show up in court until the afternoon, and we noted his own reaction to the crime-scene photographs. At first, he did not wince or shed a tear or display an iota of remorse. But after he consulted with his lawyers during a short recess, whenever the photographs were shown, he turned his head away quickly.

“What a joke!” Patti murmured.

Kim met us at court on Thursday. It happened to be Halloween, but Kim was tired of wearing a mask. She said, “You know, Dad, we are not behaving normally. People commend us on our ability to remain calm and
dignified under these terrible circumstances and it just isn't right. We should be screaming, yelling, and clawing at him.”

Our attorneys cautioned her to stay calm, and not to say or do anything that might jeopardize our case. “People watch every single move we make,” she complained. “If they catch us smiling, they want to know why. If we look upset, they assume the worst. Why don't I have the right to just be myself and permission to say the things that are churning inside me all the time?”

We wished the cameras were there to catch the derisive expression the killer developed for Kim. His eyebrows would arch, one side of his mouth would turn upward, and his eyes scanned her body from head to toe.

This proved to be a ghoulish day that left us all limp with anger and despair. Former Dectective Tom Lange testified about the passport, revolver, money, underwear, socks, and the fake moustache and goatee that the killer had brought along with him while fleeing arrest five days after the murders. Prosecutors in the criminal case chose not to deal with this evidence, but we contended that he was carrying supplies to enable him to escape the country. To us, it was clear evidence of “consciousness of guilt.”

However, it was Tom's duty to portray the horror of the crime scene for the jury, and this entailed the presentation of photographs that were larger and far more vivid than the ones displayed previously.

As the court viewed Nicole, slumped in a fetal position, surrounded by her own blood, the killer looked away, just as he had done in the criminal trial. He mouthed words to himself and seemed to be breathing rapidly. A few jurors audibly gasped, but listened attentively as Tom pointed out the positions of the bodies, and the bloody trail of footprints and drops on the walkway.

Kim glared at the murderer. It was her way of saying: You're not going to get any more of me. I'm going to make sure you know I hate your guts.

Then photos of Ron were on display. Kim and I hung our heads and struggled to maintain composure. As many times as we had heard this testimony, as many times as we had seen the photos, it did not get any easier. Kim whispered, “I can't even close my eyes, because the pictures are already in my mind.” As she listened to Tom describe Ron's wounds in a clinical, professional manner, she thought: He tried so hard to ward off the knife. What were his last thoughts? Was he scared? Did he know what was happening? Did he think about us? Did he know he was dying? Did he know how much we loved him?

A part of us wished that the public could see these ghastly photographs. People would have to say, “Oh my God, this is real!”

I could only glance at the photos briefly before I had to look away. I wanted to see Ron. But I did not want to see Ron this way. I stayed in court longer than I wanted to, to support Kim. Finally, knowing that I was close to hysteria, my daughter sent me out.

By day's end, our nerves were shot and our emotions were raw. Court was adjourned and the room was almost empty. We were still inside, with our attorneys. I happened to turn and see that the killer was near the closed courtroom door. He was staring in our direction with his face contorted into a sneer. As he opened the door and was confronted by reporters, I shouted, “Don't give me any of your goddamn dirty looks!”

Appearing indignant, he raised his voice to respond, “I wasn't looking at you. I was looking at your daughter, who was staring at me. She plays staring games.”

Later, Patti had to listen to my rage: “That scumbag lying son of a bitch who first murders my son and then has the colossal gall to stare at my daughter and give me a snotty look. He's trash, that's all there is to it!”

THIRTY-THREE

On our way home from court one day, Patti pulled into the shopping center at Kanan Avenue and Lindero Canyon Boulevard. She stayed in the car while I went into Ralphs to pick up a few groceries. As I was going through the checkout line, my gaze fell upon the cover of
Globe
magazine. In the lower left-hand side of the page was the caption:
RON DIED WITH HIS EYES OPEN.
Underneath was a close-up of Ron's eyes.

Somehow I made it out of the supermarket and back to the car. Patti started to shift into drive, but I reached out my hand and said, “Stop.”

Patti hesitated. When she saw tears pouring from my eyes, she shoved the gearshift back into park. “What is it?” she asked.

I told her what I had just seen.

Patti slipped her arm around my shoulder and asked, “Do you want me to go in to see it?”

“It's up to you,” I said.

Patti consoled me for a few moments. Then she slipped out of the driver's seat and disappeared into Ralphs. When she returned she, too, was shaking. “Why did they have to print that?” she asked.

We sat in the parking lot for several minutes, hugging one another.

“It never ends,” I said.

We had heard it in court, but we were unprepared to see the photograph on a tabloid cover.

*   *   *

Yet events were racing toward a conclusion. Many of the same witnesses who had testified at the criminal trial took the stand. They generally presented similar testimony, but there was a refreshing crispness to the proceedings. Dan stuck to business, asking the key questions and refusing to get bogged down in nit-picking details. In the process, he stymied the defense team, which could only address issues that we raised during direct examination.

This tactic left Baker almost in shock, seething with questions that Judge Fujisaki would not allow him to ask. By the time the relatively brief testimony of Detectives Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter ended, Baker seemed, as I said to Patti, “confused and dazed.” He frequently took out his frustrations by demeaning his son in open court. Philip Baker was a young associate counsel on the defense team, clearly there as his father's whipping boy. Kim referred to him as “Little Baby Baker.”

During the criminal trial, LAPD chemist Gregory Matheson spent five days on the witness stand. Now, when he testified that the defendant was one of about 550 individuals in the population who could have left a blood drop on the front walk at the murder scene, he was on and off the witness stand in a matter of hours.

Criminalist Dennis Fung testified that he had found possible traces of blood in the killer's shower, in his bathroom sink, and on a wire dangling in an alleyway on the killer's Rockingham estate, near the site where Fuhrman found the bloody glove. The stains were so tiny that Dennis could perform only a basic chemical test, but those results indicated the possible presence of human blood.

This was critical new evidence, disallowed into the criminal trial record. If there was blood on a wire in the alleyway, it strengthened our assertion that the defendant was bleeding when he vaulted the fence behind Kato Kaelin's room—and it refuted the theory that the glove was planted. The relevance of the shower and sink stains was obvious.

Cross-examination was conducted by Robert Blasier, a holdover attorney from the criminal trial, who tried to mount a blistering attack. Dennis acknowledged that he could have done some things differently, but contended that his procedures overall were correct. During the criminal trial, Dennis had endured a nine-day ordeal on the witness stand; now he was finished in little more than an hour.

Richard Rubin, the former president and general manager of Aris Glove Company, once more testified that the bloody gloves fit the defendant. He acknowledged that the fit was of “poor quality,” but he said that was because they had shrunk by about 10 percent. Judge Fujisaki allowed the defense
to show a video from the criminal trial, reprising the murderer's infamous “attempt” to force his hands into the gloves. The judge, however, would not allow the jury to hear the audio portion of the performance. It was quite remarkable to watch this scene without sound. There was the image of the killer holding his hands up in front of the jury with an insolent look of amused victory on his face. But without the distraction of his dubious comments, the gloves did, indeed, appear to fit.

Turning to the subject of the cuts on the killer's hands, Dan and his team had a barrage of interesting information to present to the jury. The public seemed to remember only the one dramatic cut on the middle finger of his left hand, but Dr. Robert Huizenga testified that when he examined the defendant days after the murders, he found three lacerations and seven abrasions on his left hand. The cuts measured from
inch to ½ inch, and were all fresh.

In one of the versions of his story, the defendant had said that he first cut himself at his home the day of the murders, and then reopened the wound in Chicago when he broke a drinking glass in his hotel bathroom. But our attorneys now read from the deposition of Detective Kenneth Berris of the Chicago police, one of the investigators who had examined the killer's hotel room. There was not one drop of blood in the bathroom. There was a broken glass in the sink, but no blood was found on it. And there were no chips of glass on the vanity or on the floor, as one would expect to find if the defendant had backhanded the glass with his left hand. Berris said that he found blood on the bedsheets, and we displayed photos for the jury. Would the killer have to change his story, claiming that he crawled back into bed for a nap after learning of Nicole's murder?

It was difficult to know at this point, for the killer left court early that day, claiming that he was ill. However, he was seen playing golf.

“Sometimes when I read the paper or listen to the news, I can't believe that the reporters were in the same courtroom, listening and watching the same testimony I was,” Patti said. “If the criminal trial had to be televised, I think this one should have been, too.”

The press walked a tightrope. ABC TV's Cynthia McFadden and Shoreen Maghame, and Court TV's Dan Abrams had become close to us, especially to Kim, but their jobs required objective, nonbiased reporting and, just as in the criminal trial, their public accounts were sometimes difficult for us to listen to.

Shoreen told Kim that the killer had approached her and commented
on the brace she was wearing to counter a carpal-tunnel problem. He had touched her arm and commented about arthritis. “Kim,” she said, “I was paralyzed. All I could see were the scars on his hands!”

The killer seemed to develop a crush on one of Dan Abrams's colleagues, a tall, attractive redhead. He constantly made suggestive comments to her, winked, whistled, and flirted. The woman was repulsed, and attempted to avoid him.

Another reporter told us, “The day my editor says I have to interview him is the day I quit.”

Patti and I were sitting in court one morning, waiting for the judge, when we realized that Lawrence Schiller was sitting directly behind us. He was the writer who collaborated with the killer on his offensive book
I Want to Tell You.
He had also helped produce the killer's videotape. Now Schiller had written his own account of the defense team's antics, wherein he disclosed that the murderer had failed a lie-detector test, and reported that Robert Kardashian had developed doubts about the innocence of his longtime friend.

We had never spoken to Schiller, but Patti could not resist the opportunity now. She turned to him and commented, “You're sitting on a different side this time.”

Schiller smiled and said of the defense, “They're probably ready to kill me.”

“Oh, well—” Patti responded, and then turned her back on him.

Friday, November 8, was a dramatic day, when once more we had to steel ourselves to listen to gruesome autopsy testimony. The Browns chose not to come; once again we decided to tough it out. The murderer did not attend and everyone assumed that he was still feeling poorly. It was only later that we heard a report that he played golf this day also.