Jeffrey Toobin - The Run of His Life - The People v. O. J. Simpson

There were, in fact, relatively few coroner-related issues in dispute in the trial, yet Kelberg kept Lakshmanan on the witness stand through eight excruciating days of direct testimony. A former medical student who switched to law, Kelberg had a sophisticated underderstanding of pathology, but he hadn’t tried many cases in recent years. The examination amounted to a display of selfindulgence, with the jurors forced to stare at horrible autopsy photographs for days on end: Nicole’s neck wound propped open, as big as a baseball, her eyes open in hazy comprehension; Goldman’s savaged torso, pockmarked by knife wounds. Kelberg’s extravaganza also cost the prosecution the high ground on the issue of the length of the trial. Previously, most of the delays had come from long and meandering cross-examinations. Now, defense lawyers could (and did) blame this prosecution excess.

The truth was, Kelberg’s fellow prosecutors did not know when he was going to finish this marathon, so when he did, they were caught by surprise. Late on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 13, Richard Rubin received a frantic call in New York saying he had to be on a plane to Los Angeles the following morning. Rubin didn’t even know precisely why he was being called to testify. He was, after all, only an expert on gloves.

In a trial that showcased a good deal of shoddy detective work, the investigators also scored some brilliant successes. One of them involved the famous pair of brown leather gloves-the left hand recovered from the murder scene, the right from the narrow pathway behind Kato Kaelin’s room at Simpson’s Rockingham estate.

The detectives set out to learn where and when-and, if possible, by whom-the gloves had been purchased, and they started with only one clue: the gloves themselves. Each glove bore a tag with the trade name Aris, the size (extra-large), and the style number (70263). A phone call to the Aris Isotoner company revealed that the prosecution had caught a break. Even though Aris was the biggest glove company in the world-selling about 4 million pairs a year-this particular style number constituted only a tiny part of its inventory. Even better, as far as the prosecutors were concerned, this style was sold only at one chain of stores in the United States: Bloomingdale’s. When Phil Vannatter tracked down Richard Rubin, who had been the general manager of the Aris Isotoner glove business in the early 1990s, Rubin told him, “You have no idea how rare those gloves are.”

So the investigators took it a step further. They asked Nicole Brown Simpson’s parents if they could locate her old credit card bills. The Browns turned them over, and Vannatter and Lange carefully looked through them to see if there might be a charge for a glove purchase at Bloomingdale’s. To their astonishment and delight, there was-right around Christmas 1990.

The detectives then enlisted the assistance of the FBI, which sent agents to Bloomingdale’s in New York to locate the actual sales receipt. They were lucky again. According to a receipt, on December 18, 1990, Nicole Brown Simpson bought two pairs of “Aris Lights” leather gloves at the Bloomingdale’s flagship store in New York. Researching further, the detectives found that while Bloomingdale’s had received about twelve thousand pairs of Aris Lights in 1990, only three hundred were brown and size extra-large-and just two hundred of those had been sold.

Besides the DNA evidence, this sales receipt may have been the most incriminating evidence in the entire case. Who else in Los Angeles except O.J. Simpson would have had access to these extremely rare gloves? Who else except O.J. Simpson would have used them to murder his ex-wife? Even if one accepted the defense theory that Fuhrman had planted one glove at Rockingham, the record of Nicole’s purchase of the gloves amounted to devastating evidence of her ex-husband’s guilt in her murder. It is therefore all the more astonishing that the day prosecutors presented this evidence to the jury turned out to be the single best day of the trial-for their adversaries.

The conclusion of Lakshmanan’s horrific (and interminable) testimony left the participants in the case with an almost giddy sense of exhaustion. Even the defense team welcomed the glove evidence as a respite from Lakshmanan’s catalogue of severed arteries and transected jugulars. When the doctor finished his testimony just before lunch on Thursday, June 15, the defense lawyers spent much of the break examining-and goofing around with-the gloves. Just about every lawyer tried them on. When Richard Rubin, the prosecution’s glove expert, came to court and subjected the gloves to an almost comically meticulous examination, defense investigator Pat McKenna quipped, “Who is this guy-the Dr. Lee of Bloomingdale’s?”

The lunchtime hijinks did have one important ramification. Shapiro and Cochran noticed that the gloves, even though size extra-large, were not very big-and Simpson’s hands were. In the L.A. county jail, the defense lawyers had spent months greeting Simpson with the customary jailhouse handshake, palm-to-palm contact against bullet-proof glass. They had seen his hands every day. The gloves, they suddenly realized, might not fit.

The subject of the gloves’ fit was also on the prosecutors’ minds that afternoon. Bill Hodgman was in his office preparing material for the cross-examination of Simpson, if he decided to take the stand. Sometime earlier, the prosecutors had examined the gloves and found just how tight they were. Phil Vannatter, who has a big, meaty fist, had put the gloves on and had noticed the snugness. This was intentional on the part of the maker, for the Aris Light was a very unusual model. Made from extremely thin leather, more like a woman’s style, it was meant to feel very light for a cashmere-lined man’s glove. It was designed to fit closely, almost like a racing glove.

At lunch, Clark and Hodgman discussed whether they should put the evidence gloves on Simpson’s hands. They decided it wasn’t worth the risk. These gloves were several years old, had been through extensive DNA testing, and had several small samples of the leather cut out. The two lawyers figured that all the wear and tear might have made them shrink. Worse, Simpson would have to wear latex gloves underneath the evidence gloves, which would almost certainly alter the fit. Especially when the latex gloves were taken into account, there were simply too many variables to risk a demonstration. Mostly, though, they feared that Simpson himself would control the experiment. Clark passed the word to Darden just after lunch.

“Don’t do it.”

Darden nodded agreement. Even though he’d had the eight-day duration of Lakshmanan’s testimony to prepare his next witness, Darden had never spoken to Richard Rubin before the former glove-company executive arrived in Los Angeles the day before his testimony. When they did speak, Darden never asked Rubin a single question about the size of the gloves, their fit, or their condition. In other words, Darden called Rubin to the stand virtually cold.

Earlier that day, Darden had called Brenda Vemich, who had been the Bloomingdale’s glove buyer, to testify about the receipt from Nicole’s purchase of the gloves in 1990. Cochran couldn’t do much with Vemich on cross-examination, so Darden was feeling pretty confident when Rubin followed her to the stand.

Rubin’s direct testimony was actually very brief-no more than ten minutes-and had nothing to do with the size of the gloves. He testified solely to explain that Aris had delivered only about three hundred pairs of brown extra-large Aris Lights to Bloomingdale’s in 1990. After a rather aimless cross-examination by Cochran, Rubin was about to be excused.