His Name Is Ron (47 page)

“The first thing I pulled out was the neck bone,” I said. “And it just put me over the edge.”

If I know I am going to encounter violence in a movie or some atrocity
on the news, I am somewhat prepared for these reactions. But it is at moments like these, when I become aware how deeply such everyday things can devastate me, that I wonder if I will ever be whole again.

On Tuesday, December 3, after the extended holiday break, our plaintiffs' team was unleashed. A wave of witnesses rolled over the shifting sands of the murderer's testimony. He was finally on record in open court and, over the course of several days, Dan and his associates launched a vigorous assault, calling numerous witnesses—some friendly, some hostile—to impeach the killer.

In the spring of 1983 a woman named India Allen saw the murderer with Nicole in the parking lot of the veterinarian's office where she worked. Nicole was wearing a fur coat when she came to pick up her dogs from the groomer. The murderer drove up in his car. “… And he was very angry,” Allen testified. “When he got out of the car, he came kind of around the car very quickly and started yelling at her about wearing the coat out during the day. And he was very upset; he told her that he—I don't know if I can say this or not, out loud.”

Baker said that he was going to object on hearsay grounds, but Judge Fujisaki overruled him.

Allen continued: “He said, ‘I didn't buy this fur coat for you to go fuck somebody else,' is what he said. And then he said, ‘I want the coat back,' and he grabbed her by the back of the coat and started trying to pull the coat off of her.”

When asked to describe the killer's appearance that day, she testified: “Well, he got out of the car, and he was mad. I mean he looked like he was gritting his teeth, and his fists were clenched, and it was—it was kind of intimidating. I stayed where I was. It was enough to keep me where I was with the dogs, and they were a little agitated, so it was difficult to hold on to them …

“He hit her in the face, and knocked off her sunglasses and headband. When she came up, it was the only time I saw her without her sunglasses, and she had a sort of fading bruise under her eye.” Allen also noticed a redness on Nicole's cheek, where she had been slapped. “I was shocked,” she said, “because they were two beautiful, famous people who looked like they were getting ready to have a knockdown, drag-out fight right in front of me.”

Pharmacist Albert Aguilera testified that he saw the defendant slap Nicole across the face on July 1, 1986, knocking her down onto the sands
of Laguna Beach. “He swung his right hand, hit her across the face, and she went down,” he recalled. Aguilera said he could hear Nicole crying, “No, no!”

The Browns' attorney, John Kelly, asked, “When you say he slapped her, what exactly did you observe Mr. Simpson do at that time?”

“He swung his right hand and hit her across the face. And she went down.”

“When you saw her go down,” Kelly asked, “did she fall to the side, or how did she exactly fall?”

“Almost straight down.”

“Okay. And she was—when she was on the ground, what position was she in on the ground at this time?”

“She was on her knees … He was crouching over her.”

Several witnesses were brought forward—friends of the defendant—who testified that he had talked sadly and repeatedly about his breakup with Nicole in the weeks before the murders. This was in stark contradiction to the killer's assertion that the breakup was no big deal and that he had been the one to initiate it.

A. C. Cowlings, clearly a reluctant witness, was questioned about the brawl on New Year's Day, 1989. Several times he contradicted the defendant's sworn statements. The killer had insisted that he never climbed a neighbor's fence as he fled the scene that day. But Cowlings testified that the defendant had told him he jumped the fence while fleeing with car keys and a bag of Nicole's jewelry. The killer had testified that he was not aware that the police were looking for him after the fight, but Cowlings said that later in the day, when he drove back to the house, the defendant ordered him to take a circuitous route, to see whether a patrol car was waiting. Finally Cowlings said that Nicole told him her husband had pulled her hair and hit her during the fight. Cowlings showed more emotion when the photos were shown than the killer ever did.

The killer had testified that, on the night of the murders, he did not answer the limo driver's repeated buzzes because he was afraid his dog, Chachi, would run out if he opened the gate. However, his housekeeper and his regular limo driver both testified that Chachi never left the property.

The killer had testified that he returned a black sweat suit to the production company after filming an exercise video, but wardrobe stylist Leslie Gardner said that she gave him the sweat suit as a gift. “He never returned anything to me,” she declared.

Throughout this assault on his sworn testimony, the defendant stared off into space. He appeared almost bored. He displayed no passion. I
thought: He perceives that once again he is going to get away with it. He's the classic sociopath.

I studied the jury carefully. The weight of the evidence was so clear. Under oath, the killer had told one whopper after another. Was this jury getting the message? Reluctantly I concluded: I have no clue.

Nancy N. Ney, a volunteer counselor for Sojourn House, a shelter for battered women, described a twenty-minute hot-line call she received on June 7, 1994, five days prior to the murders. The call came from someone who identified herself as a white woman named Nicole, in her mid-thirties, who lived in West Los Angeles, had a son and a daughter under ten, and had been married to a high-profile man for eight years. This woman named Nicole, according to Ney, “said that her ex-husband had been calling her on the phone … begging her to please come back to him. She said he was stalking her. She would be in a restaurant, and he'd be sitting at the next table, staring at her. She'd be in the market, he'd be there in the next aisle, looking at her. She'd be driving down the street and look in the rearview mirror, and he'd be there.” According to Ney, this woman named Nicole said that her ex-husband had told her on several occasions that if he ever caught her with another man, he would kill her.

Dr. Ronald Fischman, a close friend of the defendant, testified that the killer was unusually withdrawn, subdued, and tired at his daughter's dance recital, hours before the murders. Sharon's attorney, Michael Brewer, asked, “In all the years that you knew O. J. Simpson, he never appeared the way he appeared at that recital, true?”

“It's true,” Fischman responded.

Although the killer had repeatedly denied that he ever received Paula Barbieri's “Dear John” call on the morning of the murders, her testimony indicated otherwise. Barbieri assumed that he did get the message because he left three messages for her later that day, asking her what had gone wrong.

The killer had sworn that he did not deliberately pack his passport in the black travel bag he took with him while fleeing arrest; it just happened to be in the bag. Barbieri, however, reported seeing the passport on the nightstand next to the bed at Kardashian's house, where the killer had slept the night before.

In his pretrial deposition, the killer had described his futile efforts to learn what had happened to Nicole. He called Denise Brown, but she yelled at him and hung up. His daughter Arnelle did not know anything and was somewhat hysterical. He could not reach Kato Kaelin. Although he talked
repeatedly to his lawyer and secretary, he claimed that they did not discuss what the police knew or what information had been uncovered. Now, hearing a deposition taken from Mark Partridge, a Chicago attorney who had sat next to the defendant on the flight back to L.A., the jury learned that the killer told Partridge that his ex-wife had died as a result of a crime and that her body had been found near her house. He also mentioned that there was a second victim, whom he identified as male.

He was either lying when he testified that no one had told him these details, or had firsthand knowledge of them.

Friday, December 6, was my fifty-sixth birthday.

This day we planned to finish the presentation of our case. The final two witnesses would be Juditha Brown and me. After nearly two and one half years, I would finally get the chance to speak out, under oath, about how the killer's unspeakable acts had devastated our lives.

We had supplied Dan with numerous family photographs and videotapes, but I did not know how he planned to use them. Many people had offered me the same advice: “Stay calm.” I had responded, “At some point, that may be impossible.”

We were up early in anticipation. We left home about 7:15
A.M
. and picked up Maralyn Gold. Traffic was fairly light on the Pacific Coast Highway, and we arrived at the Doubletree about ten past eight. Kim was running late. She phoned from her car and begged us to wait for her. She did not want to walk across the street alone. None of us did. Kim arrived with fifteen minutes to spare, but she was extremely nervous.

The mood inside the courtroom was electric. Everyone speculated whether Baker would risk cross-examining Judy and me. We believed that the classy thing for him to do would be to refrain from questioning the victims' parents but, as Patti said, “He is incapable of that.”

First, Dan had a few details to handle. He asked the defendant's longtime friend and business attorney, Leroy “Skip” Taft, how many cuts he had noticed on the killer's left hand the day after the murders.

“As I sit here today,” Taft replied, “I recall one cut.”

The answer infuriated Dan. It was
not
what Taft had said during his deposition. And when Dan asked Taft to refer to a certain page of his deposition, the witness snapped, “No, let
me
tell
you
what page to look at.”

Judge Fujisaki flashed an animated, puzzled look, as if to ask the witness: “What did you just say?”

His voice thundering, Dan read aloud from the deposition, when Taft testified that he saw “for sure two” cuts and possibly a third when he sat with Simpson in police headquarters on June 13, 1994.

For many minutes Dan and the witness screamed at one another. Taft insisted that he had confused his observations of June 13 with the subsequent viewing of photographs. His testimony was so full of contradictions that reporters watched with their mouths open in astonishment. Finally Judge Fujisaki angrily directed Taft to answer Dan's questions as they were asked, and not try to change the subject. Taft was forced to acknowledge that he had told a different story during his deposition.

Patti said, “I loved watching that liar squirm.”

During a break I said to Dan, “This guy just committed perjury.”

“Without question,” Dan answered.

“What can we do to make sure he gets disbarred?” I asked.

Dan explained that we had two courses of action. We could lodge a formal complaint with the California Bar Association, and we could turn over evidence of perjury to the L.A. district attorney's office. Once the trial was over, we resolved to do just that.

We had to work hard to persuade Sharon not to testify in person, because it was likely she would embellish the description of her relationship with Ron. “We're opening a huge can of worms,” Dan cautioned Sharon's attorney. “It would be a sideshow.”

The problem was that Baker was sure to launch a contentious cross-examination. The issue of the trial was not whether Sharon had a horrible relationship with Ron; it was whether the defendant murdered two people, and we did not want the focus to shift from that question.

So Sharon told her story via a videotape of her own pretrial deposition. Kim had not seen Sharon's taped deposition and became very upset while watching it now. “Once again, she is talking about Ron as if she knew him. She's making things up and embellishing everything,” Kim said. “All I've ever gotten from her is lies, lies, lies.” But Sharon admitted that she saw Ron and Kim only sporadically after our 1974 divorce. When our family had moved to California, she lost contact with the children altogether, and there were only tentative attempts to reestablish communication.

After the lunch break, Juditha Brown was called to the witness stand.

We heard something fall behind us. Glancing back, we were stunned
to see that Judy had dropped her sunglasses. Patti and Kim stared at each other in astonishment as they watched Denise Brown pick them up. Judy's sunglasses were the genesis of our nightmare.

Clutching a tissue, Judy trembled as she described the defendant's demeanor at Sydney's dance recital, hours before the murders. She characterized him as nervous, upset, and so angry that he stared right through her. His facial expression unsettled her, leaving her with a nervous feeling that lingered even after he drove away.

“Had you ever seen that look on Mr. Simpson?” John Kelly asked.

“Never,” she answered emphatically.

From his seat at the defense table, the killer smiled broadly and raised his eyebrows.

Continuing with her anguished testimony, Judy told the jury that at her daughter's wake, the defendant pushed her aside, knelt over he coffin, kissed Nicole on the lips, and said, “I'm so sorry, Nic, I'm so sorry.” She then asked him whether he had anything to do with her daughter's death. Judy testified that the defendant refused to answer the question directly, saying only, “I loved your daughter.”

During Baker's cross-examination, however, he played a tape of Judy's earlier response to that same question during an interview on
Primetime Live.
Then she had said that when she asked him whether he had anything to do with Nicole's death, he replied, “No, I loved your daughter.” All of us were upset, particularly with Kelly. He should have prepared her better for this question.

But all in all we thought that Judy did an outstanding job.