Murder in Brentwood (6 page)

“I’m a good friend of O.J.; my name is Ron Shipp.”

“Ron, this is Fuhrman.”

His tone warmed to that of a friend. I had known Ron for nine years.

“Mark, what happened? Is everyone okay? O.J. didn’t hurt Nicole, did he?”

I couldn’t tell him anything.

“Ron, it’s not my case.”

“Mark, you can trust me, you know that.”

“If it were my case, things would be different. But I can’t, it’s not my case. Sorry, buddy.”

I had not been to the front of the house for a while; when I went outside, I was shocked to see dozens of media trucks and crews scurrying around carrying minicams and cameras. All of a sudden, I felt like a panda bear on loan from China. That feeling would last quite a while.

It must have been between 10:30 and 11:00 A.M. when Vannatter called to say that the warrant was signed. By this time, there were at least three or four additional Robbery/Homicide detectives at Rockingham. Although it was no longer our case, at Robbery/Homicide’s request, Brad and I assisted with the search.

Earlier, we had seen the torn baggage tags near the bench, and I had noticed a discarded airline ticket envelope in a waste-basket in the downstairs bathroom. We alerted the detectives to these discoveries. I watched one of the other detectives attempt to open a door in the hall, which was locked. Finding a set of keys in the house, I unlocked the door and entered Simpson’s office and den.

From this room, I could see the premises and the Rockingham gate through a large window. Sometime after noon, I was looking around the room when I noticed a disturbance outside by the gate. O.J. Simpson had arrived and entered the gate. A black uniformed officer was chasing after him. The officer, Don Thompson, handcuffed Simpson and led him toward the house.

From the den I heard Brad’s voice.

“O.J.’s here. He’s coming up the driveway.”

I saw him go out and approach Simpson and Officer Thompson to intercept them before they reached the house. Brad took control of Simpson. They stood together beneath a tree by the children’s playhouse. The following conversation was later related to me by Brad.

“What’s this all about?” Simpson asked.

“What’s all what about?” Brad responded.

“This. All the police all over my house.”

“O.J., you did get a call telling you your wife got killed, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I know that. But what’s this all about?”

“I’m not the detective handling this case. So, I’m not at liberty to talk with you. I’ll tell you this. Where your wife was killed there was a blood trail. And that blood trail led here.”

“A blood trail?”

“Yeah, a blood trail.”

At this point Simpson stopped asking questions. He broke into a sweat and began hyperventilating. He just kept muttering:

“Oh man, oh man, oh man.”

Moments later, Vannatter approached Simpson and engaged him in conversation. Simpson asked to have the handcuffs taken off, saying it was really embarrassing with all the media cameras on him. Vannatter took the cuffs off. It has been previously reported elsewhere that Howard Weitzman, Simpson’s attorney, asked to have the cuffs removed, but the truth of the matter is that Simpson himself asked.

Vannatter approached Brad and asked if we could take Simpson down to Parker Center. Then he asked if just Brad

could assist him with the transport. Brad went back inside to give me his car keys. By the time he came out, Vannatter was driving off with Simpson and Weitzman.

As Vannatter and Simpson were driving away from the estate, Brad related to me the conversation he had had with Simpson. We both realized the importance, not only of the statement, but the involuntary bodily reaction that Brad had observed. I suggested Brad put this to paper immediately, which he did. His written statement was then given to Vannatter and Lange. Brad’s statement could have been very helpful when they interrogated Simpson, but they did not use it.

Then we all returned to searching the residence and premises. Brad alerted Robbery/Homicide to freshly washed clothes in the washing machine. Brad described the clothes as black sweats, then and now. Also, in the half bath next to the maid’s quarters, Brad found blood smears on the light switch and various other locations. Up in the master bathroom, at the edge of the tub, we found an open knife box with the Swiss Army logo. It was empty, but meant to package one of the larger knives. I also pointed this out to the detectives.

The interior of the house was now being searched quite thoroughly, so I walked downstairs and turned into the living room area. As I entered the room, I could not help but notice the Plexiglas-encased Heisman trophy. Looking around the room, I saw other awards and photos of a successful and popular athlete who very well might be involved in the murder of his ex-wife. It was sad to be investigating a double murder in this room of accomplishment and memories.

Searching the room, I looked toward the television and VCR, for no other reason than curiosity. Seeing an empty video box, I turned on the VCR and pushed eject. The videotape that I pulled from the machine was the movie Ghost. Although it had no evidentiary value, the tape’s being left in the VCR indicated that Simpson had probably just watched this story about love, jealousy, and murder.

I searched the living room and proceeded to search the more unpopular areas of the warrant, like the crawl space under the house, and the roof and the bushes behind the estate, but found nothing of interest. Brad and I had agreed that the shovel in the back of the Bronco was a gardening shovel, but neither one of us could find other gardening tools anywhere. The garage housed Simpson s Ferrari, a workout machine, and lots of golf equipment, but no tools used to maintain the grounds.

Around noontime, Marcia Clark from the district attorneys office arrived. She was another person I had never met before. Clark asked to be shown what I had seen, what I did, and where I had found any evidence. So I walked her through the crime scene and explained my discoveries and observations. She was soon joined by Bill Hodgman, a high-ranking district attorney, and they both wanted to speak to me. We all went outside and sat at a table on the patio.

Clark asked me if I could describe everything that had taken place at Bundy and Rockingham that concerned me. Before I could start talking, a news helicopter began hovering overhead just a few hundred feet above us. It was impossible for us to hear, so we moved inside to the living room.

As I described everything that I observed, noted, and found, she sat smiling and nodding. Hodgman listened and took notes. When I had completed my story, they stated they were very satisfied. They asked no questions.

I spent the rest of the day on the scene while the photographers and criminalists completed their time-consuming jobs. I finally left at 6:00 P.M.

It had been a long day, and I knew this was just the beginning. But I thought the killer would be found and justice served. I should have known better. If my twenty years as a cop taught me anything, it’s that people get away with murder every day.

Chapter 4 COSTLY ERRORS

To distill this case down to its irreducible minimum, if your blood is found at the murder scene, as Simpson’s was conclusively proved to be by DNA tests, that’s really the end of the ball game. There is nothing more to say.

VINCENT BUGLIOSI

I HAD ALWAYS THOUGHT that the Robbery/Homicide Division (RHD) was the cream of the crop when it came to murder investigations. But mistakes made in the first fourteen hours of the investigation, mostly by lead detectives Vannatter and Lange, would compromise the case and change my life forever. The murders at 875 Bundy should have been investigated just like any other murder, by the book. But they weren’t. One of the first avoidable mistakes was my returning to the Bundy crime scene after having been at Rockingham. When I found the bloody glove behind Kato’s room at Rockingham, Vannatter felt we had to compare the color, hand, and material of that glove to the one at Bundy immediately. Had this information been necessary to establish that the Rockingham estate was a crime scene, or to gain a search warrant, I could understand the need lo send me to the other scene. But neither case applied.

If you find two gloves at two separate scenes that are linked by a blood trail and look similar, you have enough probable cause. And even if you do feel the need to establish the match, you don’t send a detective from one crime scene to the other and risk cross-contaminating the scenes. Had the case remained mine, I would not have sent a detective back to Bundy.

But this was Vannatter’s case and he was calling the shots, so I went to the Bundy scene to inspect the glove. In doing so, I possibly took anything on my shoes or body with me that I came in contact with from Rockingham.

Probable cause for a warrant could have been easily established without close comparison of the two gloves. We had already found blood on the Bronco, blood drops in the foyer, and a bloody glove behind Kato s room. The Rockingham estate was clearly a crime scene. Would it have ceased to be a crime scene if it turned out the two gloves were not perfect matches? Just the evidentiary discoveries as they occurred and the obvious connection of the two crime scenes would have resulted in a signed search warrant, if the warrant had been written accurately and completely.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t. Vannatter’s June 13 warrant was only two and a quarter pages long, double spaced. There is no way that all the details of the probable cause and evidence we compiled at Rockingham could be described in a document of that length. And they weren’t. This brief and faulty warrant would become a focal point of the defense’s claim there had been suspicious police conduct at the scene. In the warrant, Vannatter did not establish a strong initial connection between the Rockingham estate and the Bundy scene, but merely noted the fact that one of the victims and Simpson had two children together, and that detectives had gone to Rockingham to make a notification. Upon arriving at Rockingham, Vannatter stated that “detectives were unable to arouse anyone al the residence,”

Vannatter went on to describe the
 
Bronco and the blood found on the door handle. But he did not mention the fact that the Bronco was parked at an odd angle, or that there was blood observed inside the car; a package addressed to O.J. Simpson, a gardening shovel, and a piece of heavy gauge folded plastic in the rear cargo area; or that a piece of wood that did not fit the neighborhood was found near the car. These items were not easily explainable, and taken together indicated that the Bronco might have some connection to both Simpson and the Bundy crime scene.

The search warrant also failed to describe a Nissan 300Z that was parked on Ashford, which DMV records showed was registered in Hollywood. Although the Nissan later proved to be Kaelin’s, it was at that early stage important to establishing probable cause: who did the vehicle

[These errors were minor compared to the truly tragic loss of evidence that could have put the case away that morning.]

belonged to, and why it was parked outside the estate? Vannatter described waking and interviewing Arnelle Simpson, at which time he learned that Simpson was the primary driver of the Bronco, and that Simpson had gone
 
to Chicago.
 
The warrant mistakenly describes his trip as “unexpected,” an error that was made much of during both the preliminary hearing and the criminal trial. I don’t know why Vannatter said the trip was “unexpected.” To my knowledge, no one characterized it as such.

Why didn’t Vannatter even mention Kato Kaelin in the warrant? Not only was he interviewed before Arnelle, but he described suspicious thumps on his wall that he thought so unusual he went outside to investigate.

Although Vannatter did note the discovery of the glove behind Kaelin’s bungalow, his description was vague and incomplete. The search warrant described the glove as being found “during the securing of the residence,” almost implying that someone tripped over it, rather than its being discovered during a search following Kaelin’s statement. And by the time Vannatter wrote the warrant, he knew that the gloves matched, but even though he sent me back to establish exactly that detail, he never put it in; he simply described it as a brown leather glove.

Throughout the warrant Vannatter missed important details. He did not describe the blood seen inside the Bronco or the three drops of blood in the foyer. He did not include the theory that the suspect probably left the Bundy scene in a vehicle parked where the blood drops stopped and that blood drops started again from the Bronco and led into the residence.

Because so many easily described pieces of evidence and easily explained observations and conclusions were omitted from the first search warrant, Vannatter appeared to be groping for probable cause, when it was staring him right in the face.

A second search warrant was executed on June 28, after Simpson had already been arrested and the preliminary hearing was well under way. It gives a concise and detailed description of all of the probable cause leading up to the June 13 search warrant. There were few similarities between the two documents, except for the first three paragraphs of both warrants, which are almost identical, with the exception that Ron Goldman is identified as the male victim in the second one.

The first warrant was obviously written in haste, while the second might well have taken days. Even beyond that, however, the style, verbiage, and syntax of these two warrants have little in common. Vannatter signed both, but the documents are so different they could have been written by two different people. If Vannatter didn’t write the second search warrant, who did?

When Vannatter established the Rockingham estate as a crime scene and asked Brad and me to evacuate the home of family and friends, we checked all the rooms for people. As we walked into Simpson s bedroom, we immediately noticed a pair of socks on the floor. After completing our search, I told Vannatter about the socks. This was about 8:00 A.M.

There was nothing obviously sinister about the socks, except that they were the only pieces of clothing on the floor in an otherwise neat bedroom. Later these two socks became crucial evidence, when it was discovered that they contained blood evidence from Nicole and Simpson. Brad and I could have established the socks being on the floor in the master bedroom long before the search warrant was signed or Simpson gave a blood sample to Vannatter and Lange. Instead, because the socks did not show up on a videotape shot to memorialize the condition and possessions of the Rockingham house, the defense was able to question whether the socks had been in the bedroom, creating doubt in the juror s minds. Later, it was proven that the video photographer had shot the room after Fung had already removed the socks. But doubt had already been planted.