Teresa Carpenter - Without a Doubt

Kato had mentioned to police that he’d witnessed a scuffle between Simpson and Nicole in the fall of 1993. Only later would I get the police report documenting that fight. A unit from West L.A. responded to a 911 call from 365 Gretna Green and found a terrified Nicole. “He’s in the back,” she told them, “He’s my ex-husband, he’s O.J.- I want him out of there! ” She showed them to the back door, which, she said, Simpson had smashed. “French doors-wood frame splintered, door broken, still on hinges,” the cops wrote. Simpson was railing angrily out back in the guest house. “She’s been seeing other guys!” he yelled to the cops. The cops had recorded that Kato had apparently been trying to calm him down.

But today, Kato downplayed the episode. “I saw maybe an argument,” he admitted, twitching insistently.

“Do you recall the nature of the argument, or just that it was one. I asked.

“That it was one,” he said. He insisted that he didn’t know about any other fights.

Still, Kato’s testimony advanced us a few notches. He had admitted that Simpson was a jealous guy. Certainly jealous enough to manipulate his wife by buying her friends’ loyalty. And during my questioning about the night of the murder, Kato had substantially widened the time period during which Simpson was unaccounted for. Now the window was open between 9:45, when they’d returned from McDonald’s-which was fifteen minutes earlier than the estimate Kato had given the cops-and about 10:53, when Simpson responded to the limo driver.

Kato also gave a fuller account of the now-famous thump on the wall of his guest house, which he now recalled as a “three-thump noise.” I asked him to demonstrate what it sounded like, and he made a fist and pounded three times on the table in front of him. “Like that,” he said. It had been strong enough, he added, to tilt a picture on his wall, and scary enough to make him search the grounds for an intruder.

He would never actually say “intruder.” Back in the office when I’d tried to get him to tell me what he thought had caused the thump, he’d danced all around the question.

“Uh, uh… I don’t know what I was looking for.”

“A prowler,” I probed.

“Uh, I don’t know. Maybe.”

(Later, he would volunteer for the benefit of the plaintiffs in the civil trial that the thumps sounded like a body falling against his wall.)

On the stand, however, he did reveal, for the first time, having seen a “knapsack” lying on the grass. What happened was this. Kato had rounded the corner of the main house, flashlight in hand. He checked out the area behind the garage and, finding nothing, started back toward the front yard and then opened the gate to let the limo driver in. He noticed a golf bag on a bench by the front door. He went back to check the area behind his own room, and by the time he ventured out front again, Simpson himself was talking to the limo driver. But now Kaelin noticed something else on the grass near the driveway. It was “like, a bag,” he said, in Kato-speak. He didn’t recall the color, except to say it was dark.

“To the best of my recollection, it was like a knapsack-type bag,” he said.

That knapsack had not been found among the pieces of luggage Simpson brought back from Chicago. Could it have held evidence from the crime scene?

Not bad for a recalcitrant witness. But I was convinced even then that Kato knew a lot more than he was telling.

Outside, in the waiting room beyond the grand jury chamber, were a half-dozen prospective witnesses, crowded on benches like applicants for passports. These were Nicole’s neighbors, the limo driver, Ron Goldman’s co-workers, and our own technicians and criminalists.

Since I’d had the experience with DNA evidence in other cases, I told David I’d take the criminalists. Meanwhile, David debriefed the coroner, Dr. Irwin Golden.

Had this been a preliminary hearing, we wouldn’t even have bothered calling the coroner. Cause of death is almost never in dispute, so the defense usually agrees to stipulate to the medical examiner’s testimony. The prosecutor usually reads the coroner’s conclusion into the record. Since there are no defense attorneys present at a grand jury proceeding, however, a prosecutor has to protect the record, and the rights of the defendant, by giving all the witnesses a critical questioning.

Neither David nor I had worked with Dr. Golden before. The truth is, most coroners are not Quincy. After all, what happens if they screw up? The patient lives?

The morning we put Golden on we had not given his file a thorough going-over. David, in fact, received the report only minutes before putting him on the stand. One thing immediately struck us as strange. The coroner’s investigator had reported that Nicole Brown Simpson was alive at eleven P.M., when she had spoken to her mother. If this were true, of course, Simpson would be in the clear, since he had been spotted at Rockingham at that hour. The coroner’s estimate seemed too late. (In fact, phone records would show that Nicole and her mother had spoken at around 9:45 P.M.) Now, a coroner’s report is not like a police investigative file, and these kinds of mistakes are common. Still, they give the defense something to seize upon. And we would learn, in the days and weeks ahead, that the coroner’s report was, in fact, riddled with errors.

I sat at counsel’s table while David questioned Golden, a serious, horse-faced man whose speech was marked by long pauses. What I remember most about the testimony that afternoon was not the witness, but the exhibits-the pictures of the victims. David had organized and mounted the autopsy photos on a strip of cardboard. It was a stroke of superb lawyering. Up until then, I’d been busy with the criminalists and hadn’t even seen those unforgettable, gruesome photos.

“Good God,” I whispered to myself. For the first time, I saw the wreckage of Ron Goldman’s body. The gashes to the head, the gaping slices cut into his neck from ear to ear. Stab wounds to the left thigh and abdomen had soaked his shirt and pants in blood. In death, his eyes remained open. The killer had waged a merciless assault against an unarmed, unsuspecting victim, a victim who was rapidly trapped in a cagelike corner of metal fencing and slaughtered. Whether the motive was sexual jealousy or the need to eliminate a witness, this killer had made a ruthless determination: Ron Goldman would die.

While Goldman’s wounds suggested that the killer had been in a frenzy to kill him, Nicole’s did not. The attack had been swift, smooth, and efficient. There were no hesitation marks, no half cuts or superficial throat wounds that might have shown uncertainty. Her killer did not romance the deed. Nicole had apparently been swept up, thrown down, slashed at the throat, and dropped at the foot of the steps.

I had looked on literally thousands of coroner’s photographs over the years. None were worse than the last pictures taken of Nicole Brown. Her face was a grotesque white-no wonder, since she’d bled out nearly 90 percent. The slash across her neck had nearly decapitated her. She lay there, disjointed, like a marionette discarded by the puppeteer. I had a mental flash of the photo of her that hung by the stairs at Rockingham. I recalled her bright, glossy features. That was a rich man’s wife, someone to whom I couldn’t relate. Now, as I saw her frail and broken in death, I felt a surge of helpless anger.

I fought back the feeling. Times like this call for cool reason. The last thing you can afford is too much feeling.

I drove home that night feeling dejected. Next to me was a stack of files and documents high enough to qualify me for the car-pool lane. The cell phone rang, but I didn’t pick it up. I’d answer calls when I got home, after the kids were asleep. That was when the night shift began. First priority was the grand jury. But I also had to start drafting replies to a blizzard of motions coming our way from Shapiro’s office. Most of them were absolute garbage. I didn’t get to sleep until the early-morning edition of the L.A. Times was hitting the streets. On the front page, a story that read: