His Name Is Ron (49 page)

In a brutal cross-examination, Peter ridiculed Groden's qualifications and proved some of his conclusions patently false. For example, one of Groden's anomalies was a thin blue line between the edge of the negative and the film sprockets. Groden said that line appeared only on the one negative in question. But Peter showed at least two other negatives from the same roll that displayed the same line, and forced Groden to admit that the lines “could be” scratches caused by the camera mechanism.

Peter had much more to cover, but an event now occurred that, in retrospect, would loom as one of the key strokes of luck in the entire trial. The court was getting ready to adjourn for a two-week holiday recess, and the defense wanted to call forensic toxicologist Dr. Frederic Rieders, so that he could return home to Philadelphia.

Peter agreed. And that meant he would have an opportunity to resume his cross-examination of Groden after the holidays. Little did we know how important that would be.

As we were driving home, Patti asked, “Can you believe that in a month this will finally be over? I want so much to believe we are going to win
this. The evidence is so obvious, so cut-and-dried. But the evidence was there in the criminal case, too, and look what happened.”

That evening we learned that Orange County Superior Court Judge Nancy Wieben Stock had awarded the killer custody of his children Sydney and Justin. We were not surprised. California law made any other ruling highly unlikely. But we were very dismayed that the judge did not defer her decision. Patti said, “The timing is terrible. The judge had ninety days to rule on the custody issue. Why did she have to do it in the midst of the civil case?”

Would our jury be influenced by the ruling? There was no way to tell.

Somehow we had to make it through this torturous two-week hiatus. We were so close to bringing the case to a conclusion that it was difficult to accept the concept of a vacation. Celebration was out of the question.

Sleep became even more of a stranger. I lay in bed, late into the night, mulling every possible scenario: What are we going to do if they do
this
? What are we going to do if they do
that
?

One night Patti found me with a flashlight in my hands, searching a bathroom cupboard for a sleeping pill. “I didn't want to turn on the light and disturb you,” I explained. I finally found a light sedative that had once been prescribed for Lauren and took that. Sleep came, but it was all too brief.

Paul Geller joined Kim for a late coffee. Although he had never met Ron, he said to her, “You know, Kim, I feel like your brother is sitting here with us. I really miss him. Through you, I feel like I know him.”

Kim's mind flashed back to a conversation with her friend Jana Robertson. After Kim and Joe had broken up, Jana had expressed her sorrow that Ron would never know the man she would marry. That realization had inspired Kim to do her best to keep Ron alive, so that the new people in her life would know and love him, too.

Now, she said to Paul quietly, “Good, that means I did my job.”

In fact, Ron was with us always. On Christmas night Kim and Paul sat in a darkened theater watching
Ghosts of Mississippi,
a film about the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and his family's subsequent quest for justice. “The similarities to our situation are amazing,” Kim whispered to Paul. “His family—the trials—it's eerie to watch.” At one point in the film the camera panned to a close-up of Evers's tombstone. Kim gasped: Medgar Evers was born on July 2—Ron's birthday—and he was murdered on June 12—the date of Ron's death.

The following day was Kim's twenty-fifth birthday. All she could think about was that Ron was only twenty-five when he died. “No one should die this young,” she raged. “At twenty-five you haven't lived enough, experienced enough, accomplished enough.” She wondered if Ron had those same thoughts in the moments before he died.

I was in the reception area, waiting for Patti as she underwent her routine mammogram screening. After the procedure, the technician escorted her down the hallway. Recognizing me, she suddenly realized who Patti was. She said, “I feel bad for you guys. It makes me so angry to know he's walking the streets a free man. Someone's going to kill him. I'm sure of it. Someone's going to do it.”

It was just one more incident when a stranger vented her frustration to us and we continued to be amazed that people's passion had not abated with the passage of time.

Patti said, “I do not think I will ever get used to being recognized that way. I cannot count the number of people who have said to me, ‘He'll answer to a higher authority one day' or ‘His time will come,' and I always think the same thing: Yes, but will we live long enough to see it?”

Michael's first semester of college went well. It was refreshing for him to get away from the tension that surrounded our lives, yet he was still vitally interested in the case. Several of his term papers concerned the conduct of the criminal trial, and the manner in which the press reported it.

Although we had spoken on the phone several times a week and tried to keep Michael informed of developments in the civil trial, it was always difficult to give him the full picture. Now, after he had spent the first portion of his holiday break with his father in Chicago, we had a wonderful, all-too-brief visit with him. When he discussed the highlights of the trial with Patti, he commented, “Mom, how can we
not
get him?”

I raced into our suite at the Doubletree on Monday, January 6, and said immediately, “Let me see those photos!”

Peering through a magnifying glass, I studied a contact sheet with thirty small prints, all snapped by part-time photographer E. J. Flammer at the September 26, 1993, Buffalo Bills football game, the same day that Harry Scull's camera had captured an image of the killer wearing Bruno
Magli shoes. Flammer had delved into his files and discovered these shots. Over the holidays his attorney had contacted our team and provided this dramatic new evidence. Flammer had the negatives, and he would testify to their authenticity.

Dan had four of the photos printed to full size and had three of those enlarged further to show details of the shoes. The murderer was dressed exactly as he appeared in the Scull photo, from the top of his sports coat to the tips of his Bruno Magli shoes.

“This is major,” Patti said. “I think that's the case. It's the frosting on the cake that we needed.”

We all had the same reaction: GOTCHA!

The Browns' attorney, John Kelly, wanted to save the damning new evidence until our rebuttal case, but Dan argued for immediate action. “If we wait for our rebuttal case and the judge does not allow us to raise the issue of the photos, we've lost our chance,” he reasoned. “We've got to try to get them in
now
.” Fortunately for us, Peter was ready to resume his cross-examination of defense photo “expert” Robert Groden.

Before the jury was seated, the two sides argued bitterly over the admissibility of the Flammer photographs. Baker and company were apoplectic.

Dan cited testimony from the killer, who had labeled the previously shown Scull photo a fraud. The killer had said, under oath, “I wasn't wearing Bruno Magli shoes.” And pointing to the Scull photo, he testified, “Those shoes are not my shoes.”

Now Dan argued that we should be allowed to show jurors the new photos to impeach the defendant's credibility. “If you're going to go in front of the jury and make those kinds of representations, you have to suffer the risk that you may be caught red-handed—and that's what happened here,” he said.

Defense attorney Daniel Leonard countered that it was unfair to introduce these photos at the last minute and pleaded with Judge Fujisaki to halt the trial for two weeks to give them time to prove that the photos were either irrelevant or fake. “It's a total sandbag,” he whined.

Judge Fujisaki's response was immediate. “That's usually what impeachment amounts to, Counsel,” he said.

If the Fuhrman tapes had bushwhacked the prosecutors in the criminal case, these new photos did the same to the defense team now. As the jurors filed into the courtroom, the defense team huddled, obviously in panic, trying to spot something in the photos that would allow them to question their authenticity.

Peter showed Groden one of the new enlargements and asked, “Does this change your mind” about the authenticity of the Scull photo?

Groden glanced at the enlargement and declared that he remained convinced, “to an overwhelming degree of certainty,” that the Scull photo was phony.

Peter asked that the Flammer photo be handed to the jury. As the jurors began to examine it, Peter produced a second enlargement and asked Groden, “Does this change your mind?”

“No.”

Peter methodically presented the additional prints and blowups, asking the same question and eliciting the same denial, even as the jurors passed the evidence to one another. Finally Peter asked a hypothetical question: Assume that experts studied the negatives—assume that you studied the negatives—and everyone agreed that these thirty photos were authentic, “Would that change your mind?”

The squirming witness had to admit that it “probably would.”

At times some of Groden's ludicrous testimony brought muffled laughter from the spectators. During one such moment, Patti happened to glance at the killer's sister Shirley Baker. One seat from where Shirley was sitting, a woman, one of the spectators, was snickering at the witness. Shirley took umbrage with that. She reached across the person next to her and dug her nails into the woman's sweater-covered arm.

Patti concluded: Violence must run in the family.

During a break, the spectator approached us. She pointed to her arm and told Patti there were visible gouges. She asked, “Do you believe what she did?”

Patti rose to the woman's defense. “Tell her to keep her hands off you,” she said. “Tell her she has no right to lay a hand on you that way!”

“I can't do that,” the woman said. “They'll kick me out.”

“No, they won't,” Patti vowed. “I saw what she did to you.”

We were jubilant as we ate our lunch, until a touchy subject arose: Would the jurors get it? Would they understand that the photos—like the other evidence—proved that the defendant had lied under oath, blatantly and with detached arrogance? Would they be able to peer through the veneer of this man's public persona and see him for what he really was?

Someone on our team idly mentioned the possibility of a hung jury.

“What do you mean?” Patti asked sharply. “I thought it's either we win or they win.”

No, one of our lawyers explained, in a civil case a minimum of nine
jurors must decide one way or the other. “Eight-four is a hung jury,” he said. “Seven-five is a hung jury.”

Patti looked as though the wind had been knocked out of her. “I don't know if I could go through this again,” she said.

“It's zoo time,” I commented as we walked to the courthouse after lunch on Friday, January 10. The killer was once more going to take the witness stand, and the crowd was predictably larger and more vocal than usual. Michael had come to court today. It was his final day on holiday break, and he was eager for a chance to hear the killer's testimony in person.

For three and a half hours a warm and fuzzy Robert Baker took the killer through a meticulously rehearsed litany of his past achievements and
Ozzie and Harriet
lifestyle. The performance was so saccharine that Baker several times addressed the witness as “Juice.”

Foreign-sounding, comical words tumbled out of his mouth. According to the killer, he and Nicole lived an almost idyllic life, surrounded by a “cornucopia” of friends. Hearing this, we glanced at one another, wondering who had coached him to use that word.

Baker asked if he had ever lied about anything; the defendant replied, “No, I don't lie.”

Throughout the afternoon, Dan lodged few objections. He wanted the killer to ramble, letting his ego—and his big mouth—get him into trouble. The killer admitted that one source of tension in the marriage was that he wanted to go places and do things, but Nicole preferred to stay home with their daughter, Sydney. The “devoted” father slipped away from his prepared script when he commented, “And when Justin came around, it almost went to a new level.”

To hear the killer tell it, the New Year's Day 1989 incident was merely a family argument, and Nicole's hideous injuries must have occurred when she attacked him and he wrestled her out of
his
bedroom. Our mouths dropped open in amazement when we heard his proof that he had not hit Nicole. If he had, he almost boasted, “She would have looked a little different.”

He painted Nicole with a sordid brush, expressing his concern that she had fallen into a society of heavy drinkers, drug users, and promiscuous friends. In the past he had raged at Denise Brown and Faye Resnick for broaching such subjects, protesting the effects on Sydney and Justin. But now, desperate to reclaim whatever reputation he thought he had left, clearly
worried about his dwindling fortune—and determined to win at all costs—he was willing to trash his ex-wife.

“Those poor kids,” Kim said. “How can he say those things about their mother? Doesn't he realize they will hear all of this someday?”

Later, I summed up his testimony: “I'm a handsome, well-dressed, generous, former Heisman trophy winner with tons of friends—incapable of any kind of violence—who, unfortunately, was beaten and stalked by my ex-wife, who had morphed into a sex-crazy, drug-taking lush. And, oh yes, I
never
lie.”

Prior to Dan's cross-examination of the killer on Monday, a contentious argument ensued over the admissibility of an eight-page, undated letter written by Nicole. The defense made its usual “it's prejudicial” rant, but Judge Fujisaki ruled that we could use it to show Nicole's state of mind.