Teresa Carpenter - Without a Doubt

Usually a prior inconsistent statement by a witness is a credibility killer. At best, you’re left doubting the witness’s memory; at worst, his honesty. But Schwab was so sturdily forthright you just knew he’d made an honest mistake. He endeared himself to the spectators in court by recounting the process by which he had verified in his own mind the Akita encounter. He had an unvarying nightly routine, centered on old reruns. A cable network showed his favorites and he always watched the Dick Van Dyke Show , which ended at 10:30. Then he would take his dog for a half-hour walk, returning in time to catch the opening minutes of the eleven P.M. showing of Mary Tyler Moore .

Such banal details mark all of our daily lives and give our days some predictability. Schwab’s recitation drew laughter, but no one could doubt the truth of his testimony. He had seen the dog at 10:45, not 11:15. Our time line was secure.

Pablo Fenjves was my essential “dog bark” witness, the neighbor who heard the Akita’s “plaintive wail” starting at 10:15 P.M. His description of that sound lodged in the memories of reporters and public alike. Taken in tandem with Sukru Boztepe and Bettina Rasmussen’s solemn, emotional account of finding Nicole’s body, it seemed to cast an eerie spell over the gallery. We were still in that state of morbid dislocation when Judge Kennedy-Powell dismissed us for the Fourth of July weekend.

I spent very little of that weekend at home. I worked all day Saturday. And on Sunday morning I drove out to Bundy, to the little condominium on the downscale side of Sunset.

For the past few days I been increasingly anxious to scope out the condo. I had not been to Bundy since the morning after the murders, and then I’d been detained at the perimeter, like a bystander. The condo’s various appointments-the security gate, the dog leap stairway, the landing where Nicole lay, the fenced-in corner where Ron was killed-had all become part of the public’s collective consciousness. Yet to me they remained abstractions.

I met up with Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter at the rear of the condo. Bill was there, too, as were Patti Jo and several officers from Robbery/Homicide. We were all silently relieved that the media hadn’t trailed us.

We’d gathered in the lane at the rear of the condo, when Lieutenant John Rogers noticed blood-drops of blood, on the back gate. What the hell? We stopped dead in our tracks and looked at one another. Could Dennis Fung have overlooked this crucial evidence on the morning of the thirteenth? We stopped everything and called for a criminalist.

The realization that we’d probably just stumbled upon another incredible fuckup cast a pall over the party.

Tom led us down the walkway toward the front of the condo. I could still see some of the blood droplets and the faint outlines of the bloody shoe prints, mere ghosts of the images I’d seen countless times in photographs. What had it been like, I wondered, for the officers that night to see all this evidence lying before them? I’d never seen so much left at a crime scene. This murder was obviously the work of an amateur.

At the front of the condo I stood on the upper landing and looked down on the area enclosed by the front gate. It was cramped and dark, even smaller than photos could convey. I turned to Bill and said, “The jury has to see this. When they realize how small it is, they’ll understand how impossible it would be for two men to have fit in here to commit the murders.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” he replied, clearly as moved as I was. Then, ever practical: “We’ll have to get a motion going on it.”

We’d been told by Nicole’s friend Ron Hardy that the intercom controlling the lock on the front gate was broken. If Nicole had wanted to let a visitor in, she’d had to go down and open the gate manually. If this was true, it was easy to conceive how Nicole and Ron were both at the front gate when Simpson moved in for the kill.

He could have attacked Nicole from behind, hitting her on the head, making a quick cut to her neck, and slamming her into the staircase wall. She would have been knocked unconscious long enough for him to deal with Ron before going back to dispatch her with the coup de grâce.

Frankly, I favored a slightly different scenario: Nicole Simpson hears something outside-the sounds made by her ex-husband lurking in the shrubs around her condo. Nicole steps outside to investigate. She ventures down to the front gate, looks down the walkway and into the shrubbery to the north. Nothing. And then, when she turns to mount the steps, to reenter the house where her children are sleeping, she walks right into him, smack into the man who she had vowed would no longer be the center of her life. He is dressed for silent combat-dark sweats, knit cap, gloves. He has come to take her life.

Somewhere during this time, Ron Goldman, on his innocuous errand, appears. Perhaps Ron has come up the walk while Simpson is in the midst of his stiletto mêlée. Why doesn’t he flee? Perhaps he has come too close and can’t escape. Or perhaps-and this seemed a stronger likelihood-Ron feels compelled to come to Nicole’s aid. He is about to engage in an act of selflessness that will lead to his death.

In either case, my strong feeling is that Simpson did not have to confront both of his victims simultaneously.

He murders first one, then the other.

The blood pools on the sidewalk.

The dog howls.

How many minutes for each?

How many times on other cases had I worked through this same gory calculus? You can never quite capture the factor of pain.

Like Rockingham, the interior of Nicole’s condo at Bundy was white with some muted pastels for accent. It had the tranquil, static quality of a photograph from House Beautiful . The kitchen was tidy, nothing out of place. In the center of the sunken living room sat a large square table. On it stood several candles, which had been burning on the night of the murders. The spent wax had dried in a pool around them. But everything in that room seemed like wax. Cold. Solid. Lifeless.

Nicole’s bedroom was done in the same white and pastels, but the room felt anything but tranquil. Attached to one of the posts of her large four-poster bed was a pair of toy handcuffs. Something else interested me about the bed: the blankets and sheets. They lay in a rumpled heap, just as they’d been found by the first officer on the scene. Until now I had left open the possibility that Nicole had sexual designs on Ron. If so, I figured it had been a spontaneous idea, occurring after Juditha Brown lost her glasses. But the sight of Nicole’s messy bed made me doubt this theory. What woman plans an intimate night with a man and leaves the bed unmade? You just wouldn’t do it. Not even if you intended to limit your fooling around to the couch downstairs.

Ordinarily I would not have allowed myself such intimate speculations about a woman I’d never met. And yet a couple of times of late I’d been surprised by a sense of connection to Nicole. Looking back on it, I don’t know why it seemed so improbable that I might identify with a woman who was taking her first toddler steps into the world after divorce. And yet it seemed strange to me at the time. The sight of Nicole’s chaotic bed and the cold dead wax of her candles chilled me. So did the memory of her pale, bloodless face. And so I did what I always do with emotions too painful to confront: I pushed them to the back of my mind.

Things continued going well for us the following week. The limo driver, Allan Park, was concise and unimpeachably credible. I even managed to extract some new information from the eternally stumbling Kato Kaelin. His recounting of Simpson’s activities that night preserved our time line, and the description he gave of the thumps outside his cottage and the confusion around Simpson’s attempt to hook up with the limo driver made a clear pitch to the judge-and to millions on television-that something undeniably suspicious was afoot at the Rockingham residence.