Menendez Brothers & OJ - Three Faces of Evil - ...

Following the guilty verdict in L.A.’s other shocking double murder, the author makes his closing argument on the twisted tale of the Menendez brothers—and discovers new pieces of the O.J. Simpson puzzle.

by Dominick Dunne

What I have suspected since I became involved with the Los Angeles murder trials and O.J. Simpson is that winning is everything, no matter what you have to do to win. If lies have to be told, if defenses have to be created, juries have to be tampered with in order to weed out those who appear to be unsympathetic to the defendant, then so be it. The name of the game is to beat the system and let the guilty walk free. If you can get away with it. The stench of O. J. Simpson’s acquittal grows stronger by the week as allegations of jury tampering abound, and reports surface concerning a flunked polygraph test taken by Simpson two days after the murders, in the company of two of his attorneys. Although the results were thought to have been destroyed, I am told that a copy exists. And then, as if that weren’t enough, came the extraordinary moment during the penalty phase of the second Menendez trial when Leslie Abramson, the zealous defense attorney for Erik Menendez, was brought down with a resounding crash which stunned the legal profession and could possibly end with her disbarment, when her own expert witness Dr. William Vicary testified on the stand to prosecutor David Conn that changes in his notes had been made at Abramson’s request, because she believed his original notes were prejudicial to her client. We’ll get to this in sequence.

If there’s another hung jury, look for my name in the obituaries. —Detective Les Zoeller, who has been on the Menendez case since the night of the murders seven years ago and has sat through both trials.

Since O. J. Simpson was arrested for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman on June 17, 1994, his case has so eclipsed the Menendez saga that most people were unaware that a second Menendez trial—not covered on Court TV—had been going on for five months until the verdict came in on March 20. A jury of eight men and four women found the used-to-be-rich brothers guilty of murder of both parents in the first degree with special circumstances—lying in wait and multiple murders.

Lyle and Erik Menendez knew before they sat down that day that the jurors had arrived at a verdict, even though Leslie Abramson in her closing argument had virtually begged for a hung jury. “It is better to not render a verdict than it is to render an unjust one or a compromise,” she had said. They also knew there was no possibility that the verdict was going to be an acquittal, so they were prepared for bad news. The moment after the verdict was read by court clerk Penny Tinnell was breathtaking in its silence. There was not so much as a gasp heard. Even Maria Menendez, the mother of the murdered Jose Menendez and the grandmother of his killers, who had been known to make the occasional fuss, simply sat there, bravely mute. There were no breakdowns on the defense side or any traces of jubilation on the prosecution side. Leslie Abramson looked over at Erik, but said nothing. Charles Gessler, who represented Lyle, placed his hand on Lyle’s back but said nothing. David Conn did not exchange even a look with Carol Najera, the second prosecutor. Then Erik, ashen-faced, old beyond his 25 years, turned to his grandmother and mouthed the words “I love you.” It was heartbreakingly sad. I wanted to get out of that courtroom. I didn’t want to talk to anybody about what had just happened, not even to David Conn to congratulate him on the brilliant job he had done by pointing out to the jury over and over again in is closing argument the absurdities of the defense case.

David Conn is an impressive figure in the courtroom, a presence to match Abramson but altogether different. Tall and lean, 45, with a full head of black hair, he bears an uncanny resemblance to Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego, as has been frequently noted. I had watched Conn in a courtroom before, during the 1990–91 trail of the hired killers who murdered Roy Radin, a showbiz impresario who had briefly been a partner of producer Robert Evans in the ill-fated film The Cotton Club. I was struck then by his calm toughness and firm command of the case. The killers got life without parole. After the Menendez verdict, I received a telephone call from Kate Radin, Roy’s sister, in Hawaii. She was ecstatic over Conn’s victory. “I hope David gets all the credit,” she said. “All that I’m reading about out here is [Los Angeles district attorney] Gil Garcetti.”

In this age of dysfunctional families and mindless violence, a verdict of any lesser degree than the one the jury came to in the Menendez case would have given the worst sort of message to the youth of America. What a waste, that two young men who had everything the material world could provide should end up in this disgraceful state, at the age for a first fatherhood neither will ever have, carrying the two words by which they will always be described: “murderer” and “convict.” Whatever it was in their family that brought about the moments of madness that led to the brutal acts that ruined their lives irrevocably could not have been as bad as 50 or 60 or whatever number of years are left to them stagnating in a 10-foot-long prison cell. Now that they are stripped of the falsehoods that peppered their defense—the sexual abuse, the fear that their parents were going to kill them, none of which the jury bought the second time around –and left with the facts of what really happened on the night of August 20, 1989, and the days leading up to it, which only the two of them know, I wonder if they have come to realize how many options they had to deal with the hate they felt for their parents other than the violent one they picked. Their father’s older sister, Teresita “Terry” Baralt, whom I have always admired, told me one day in the courthouse during the closing arguments that her nephews, whom she loves, were “horrified by what they have done, horrified, but it’s too late.”

For Leslie Abramson, who became a much-quoted celebrity during the first trial, the final verdict was a bitter defeat. She had always appeared ready to sacrifice Lyle to save Erik, whom she referred to as “my most cherished client.” Parts of her three-day closing argument were so over the top that she verged on camp. She spoke with such passion for her client that she made winning an acquittal for a confessed killer seem like an act of nobility. An overpowering presence, a creative storyteller, an actress capable of playing Medea, she fiercely dared anyone to disbelieve her version of the murders. She ridiculed David Conn’s premise that the killings were premeditated, explaining to the jury that driving to San Diego two days before the murders to purchase two shotguns with a stolen driver’s license as identification was all logical behavior which had nothing to do with premeditation. There were times when you had to admire her sheer verve. At one point she bellowed to the courtroom in her most strident tone that the prosecution team were liars, who cared only about winning, not truth. When David Conn walked out of the courtroom into the corridor during one break, he jokingly held his hand over his ear, as if he had an earache from Abramson’s yelling. Detective Les Zoeller laughed at Conn’s performance. The trial historian Judy Spreckels cracked, “Louder ain’t necessarily better.” On the other hand, Joan Selznick, a former daughter-in-law of the late film producer David O. Selznick, who sat in a section reserved for the Menendez family, had a different reaction altogether. “Brilliant, don’t you think?” she said. “I think she’ll get Erik an acquittal.”

As if sensing that her case for Erik wasn’t playing to the jury the way it had in the first trial, Abramson injected bits of autobiographical information into her arguments. She told the jurors about her immigrant grandmother, who had worked in a sweatshop and seen friends jump out of windows during the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911, and then had gone on to be a labor organizer. She worked in that her grown daughter has an I.Q. of 165, that her two-year-old son talks baby talk, and that her husband plays the lottery but doesn’t win. She even brought in her physical ailments, by telling the jurors, for instance, that she needed a break to take her medication. She also told them that this was probably her last trial, and that it would be the “ultimate tragedy” of her life if she lost this case. Surely the jury must have been thinking the same thing a lot of us were: So what? She closed by asking the jury to hang if they couldn’t agree to acquit Erik Menendez.

That night and the following day, Erik and Lyle Menendez were back in headlines that Simpson had taken away from them, only this time the headlines were very different: menendez brothers guilty!

It was the most interesting moment I ever spent in a courtroom. —Judy Spreckels, discussing the moment Dr. William Vicary linked Leslie Abramson to his deception

The flamboyant Leslie Abramson, who had become a television personality on ABC after the first trial, may have flamboyantly catapulted herself right out of a career in both television and law if she knowingly advised Dr. William Vicary, a psychiatrist appearing as an expert witness on April 4, to deceive the jury.

This came to light during the penalty phase of the second trial, when the jurors who had found both Menendez brothers guilty of murder in the first degree were hearing testimony to decide whether their fate should be death by lethal injection or life in prison without the possibility of parole. If you read the transcript of that day’s proceedings, it seems apparent from Abramson’s immediate objection to a question posed to Vicary by prosecutor David Conn that she was cognizant that the jig was about to be up for her. When Conn asked Vicary if Erik had talked of a conversation about what life would be like without parents, Conn suddenly realized that his copy of Vicary’s notes didn’t jibe with what Vicary was reading. “I’m going to object to this,” Abramson said, but Judge Stanley Weisberg ignored her. Then came the line out of Vicary’s mouth that silenced the courtroom: “I left that section out at the request of defense counsel.”

“When did defense counsel ask you to rewrite your notes, leaving out material?” asked Conn.

“In preparation for my testimony at the first trial,” replied Vicary.

“And which defense counsel made that request of you?” asked Conn.

“Ms. Abramson,” replied Vicary.

“Did she tell you why she wanted you to rewrite your notes?” Conn persisted.

“She said this was prejudicial, and it was out of bounds, and it was not necessary,” answered Vicary.

This is how the universe responds. —Judy Hilsinger, C.E.O. of Hilsinger Mendohlson Inc., the public-relations firm, discussing Leslie Abramson.

Within an hour or so of that fateful moment in Abramson’s life, 11 people in California, some of whom had witnessed her humiliation in the courtroom, called me to say that she was “ruined,” that she could be “disbarred.” Vicary did not attempt to justify her instructions to him. But why should he? His career was also presumably in tatters. Who would ever put him on the stand again as an expert witness after he had deceived the court?

I don’t like Leslie Abramson, and I know she doesn’t like me. We sniffed each other early on, some six years ago, and didn’t take to each other’s smell. Back then she said to me, “The trouble with you is you always root for the wrong side.” I told her, “It’s hard to root for the kind of people you represent.” Among her past courtroom triumphs at the time was the case of a Pakistani doctor named Khalid Parwez, who had been arrested on charges of strangling his 11-year-old son and surgically cutting him into more than 200 pieces. Abramson had tried to work out a plea bargain for second-degree murder. A plea bargain carrier with it an implication of guilt. The then district attorney, Ira Reiner, had turned her down, saying that the state was going for a conviction on first-degree murder. When the case went to trail, Abramson won an acquittal for Parwez, who even received a round of applause from the jury. Subsequently she sued Parwez for payment for her legal services.

The only thing that surprises me about the latest development is that such a smart woman—and, believe me, she is smart—might have done such a stupid thing. Over the years a lot of people have wanted to bring Leslie Abramson down, but in the end she seems to have brought herself down. She had turned over to Dr. Park Dietz, an expert witness for the prosecution in the second trial, a box of documents pertaining to Erik. In that box were notes Vicary had made in preparation for the first trial—before they had been redacted by him—and those were the notes Conn had in front of him. Once he realized that discrepancies existed, he approached Vicary to see what he was reading from. He picked up the notes and studied them carefully for almost a minute while the courtroom sat in silence. Then he pounced. Subsequently, Vicary testified that he had made 24 changes.

It was just a fluke, some people say, a lucky accident, the hand of God, but the novelist part of me wants to interpret it as an intervention by Jose Menendez, bellowing his rage at Abramson for the monstrous, distorted picture she had presented of him and his wife. There was not an iota of proof to support the sexual-molestation defense, nothing but the word of the two defendants, both of whom are world-class liars. I never believed them or fell for their tears on the stand. Abramson’s clear intention from the very beginning was to portray Jose Menendez as a pervert who sexually molested her client for 12 years, right up to a night or two before the murders, in order to make the jury believe he deserved to be killed. Eight of the things the brothers claimed their father had done to them are chronicled in other people’s case histories in a book called When a Child Kills, by Paul Mones, who was an adviser to the defense in the first trial. The brothers’ own aunt Terry Baralt, who loved them but did not believe the allegations of sexual abuse, told me during the first trial that they had both read Mones’s book in jail. Baralt, who took the stand reluctantly during the first trial, told me she had said to Abramson at the time, “Be careful what you ask me, because I will not lie.” If what the brothers said about their father was true, they didn’t need to embellish their defense with other people’s experiences.

When Dr. Vicary claimed that the altercations in his notes were made at the request of Abramson, the jury was present to witness her disgrace. So were print and television reports, members of the family of the killers, and members of the public. Her defense team immediately distanced themselves from her, as if she had been carrying a communicable disease. A shot on television showed her standing apart from her confreres outside the courthouse during a break, smoking furiously, while they talked among themselves. Barry Levin, her co-counsel, told Judge Weisberg that he would advise Erik Menendez to ask the court to remove Abramson from the case. “Her credibility in front of this jury has been so severely tainted and damaged,” he said, “that it’s very unlikely that any of her arguments are going to persuade this jury.” Charles Gessler and Terri Towery, Lyle’s lawyers, argued that their client had been harmed, through no fault of his own, by Abramson’s wrong call in putting Vicary on the stand with his altered notes. In what some experts are saying is a courtroom first, Abramson twice invoked her privilege against self-incrimination by taking the Fifth Amendment at the same time that she was trying to keep a client from receiving the death penalty. Her alleged deception not only plunged the trial into total chaos but also cast her future into a doubtful state.

Abramson, who is never at a loss for words, was unable to declare her reaction to Vicary’s allegations until a gag order imposed by Judge Weisberg was lifted after the jury came in on April 17 with the sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole for both brothers. The following day, she gave her first extended interview, to the Los Angeles Times, where her husband, Tim Rutten, is a staff writer, one of the team that covered the O.J Simpson trial. She told the reporter Ann O’Neill with a laugh, “I don’t know how commonplace it is to have your psychiatric expert turn on you and lie on you in the middle of a trial. He has a guilty conscience that he rewrote his notes? That’s his problem.” To which Vicary responded, “I know that’s what she’s saying, and I honestly believe that she remembers it that way, but that’s not my memory. I would never, ever take anything out of my notes that I think is important.”

I have learned that a criminal investigation of Abramson will take place. Prosecutors from her past trials who are still in the district attorney’s office, some of whom were eager to comment on her situation, were prevented from doing so by the gag order. One law-enforcement official said to me in disgust, “The system countenances this sort of thing as long as you get away with it.”

People in publishing circles are wondering how this will affect her forthcoming book, My Life in Crime, for which Simon & Schuster paid $500,000. The title should still work. It has been reported that the last chapter will be Abramson’s defense of her current situation.

O.J. will never be accepted back into the world he so desperately wants to be a part of. Never. They will never take him back. —Tina Sinatra at dinner at Le Colonial.

Knock, knock. Who’s there? Kato. Kato who? That’s my biggest fear. —Joke told by Kato Kaelin on television.

Unlike the Menendez brothers, O. J. Simpson had never, from the day of his arrest, ceased to be a newsmaker or a main topic of conversation, no matter what table you happen to be sitting at. Although his call-ins to radio and television shows don’t get reported much anymore, he still makes them from time to time. Shortly after I returned to Los Angeles for the closing arguments in the Menendez case, he had something to say about me when he talked to radio station KJLH-FM, speaking in the patronizing voice of a man recently acquitted of two murders:

Look at the people [Geraldo Rivera] brings on his show. Why would anyone bring Dominick Dunne on for any kind of perspective? Because Dominick Dunne from day one has had one perspective. He sat there with his mouth open when the verdict came in, when reasonable people, even [Associated Press reporter] Linda Deutsch, and these other people who followed the trial daily, none of them were surprised by the verdict. They may have been surprised by the speed of the verdict, but, based on the evidence, none of them stated they were surprised. This guy was in shock. That shows just how far out of the mix he was.

I have a different reaction. I think his call depicts just how far out of the mix he is. People tell me he still doesn’t really get how he is perceived by most people. Although, according to Japanese-American sportswriter Russell Kishi, he told a new golfing buddy during a match at Canyon Lake Country Club, near Temecula, about 50 miles from Los Angeles—not the sort of course where he used to play—that he is worth $120 million, a source close to the defense says he is broke and still owes money to some of his lawyers from his murder trial. Nevertheless, appearances being everything to him, the house on Rockingham shows no signs of lack of maintenance. His pay-per-view, which was supposed to bring him $20 million, never took place. His highly touted $29.95 video, O.J. Simpson: The Interview, which was supposed to make him $1 million up front and a percentage of the profits, has been a bust. “They haven’t sold 30,000 copies,” Charley Steiner of ESPN told me at the Tyson-Bruno fight at the MCM Grand in Las Vegas. The video’s producer, Tony Hoffman, known to some as “the king of the infomercial,” disputes these accounts without disclosing the actual figures. Almost everybody else connected with the case is writing or has written a book for big money, and that is said to infuriate Simpson. According to the National Enquirer, Simpson has a new girlfriend named Kimberly Ashby, who looks exactly like Nicole and thinks he’s guilty, but who loves him anyway. Ashby has denied the report. Can this story get any tackier?

H.R.H. Princess Margaret, on a recent visit to Los Angeles to raise funds for the British Museum, told me at a party that she thought the whole Simpson case was “such a bore,” but I don’t find it at all boring. I see it as a morality tale that is still playing itself out, like a Russian novel set in Los Angeles, with 1,000 characters and 1,000 subplots. It’s my dream that one day all the pieces of this story will come out. There are so many people in this town who know things—bits and pieces of the puzzle—who won’t come forward. People tell me, “I don’t want to get involved,” or “I’m scared,” or “I’ll tell you after the civil case is over.” A man I know and trust, a friend of Simpson’s for over 20 years, says he’s dying to tell me, but can’t, the name of the person who called him from the crime scene on the night of the murders, before the police arrived.

“You knew about the murders before the police?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied.

Even Kato Kaelin, Simpson’s houseguest and star witness, said on Geraldo Rivera’s show in March that he believes that Simpson is guilty of the murders.

New Simpson stories continue to proliferate. On a wet Sunday morning in February, I met with a man I know in West Los Angeles who told me an extraordinary story about a plastic surgeon he is acquainted with in Beverly Hills whose name I cannot reveal. On two occasions during Simpson’s glory days as a University of Southern California football star, the plastic surgeon claims, he was hired to repair the faces of two young women Simpson had allegedly beaten up. Like so many background people in the O.J. story, the doctor has had second thoughts about talking. “It was a long time ago, and besides, my hands didn’t make the incision,” he told me, implying that he was not the only doctor involved.

“I was at Eclipse one night having dinner. There was a large table next to us. I knew someone at the table and stopped to say hello. My friend said, ‘I’d like you to meet Robert Shapiro’—who I hadn’t noticed was at the table. Shapiro rose and held out his hand. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Shapiro, but I cannot shake the hand of anyone who was responsible for O. J. Simpson’s acquittal.’ ”

“Can I use that?” I asked.

“Sure, but you can’t use my name.” —Conversation at the Hotel Bel-Air with a beautiful actress/model/television hostess/wife of an important industry figure.

Five months after O.J.’s unpopular acquittal, one member of his Dream Team, F. Lee Bailey, was hauled off to jail in leg-irons and handcuffs to do time for contempt of court for failing to hand over more than $20 million in stocks and cash appropriated from a drug-dealer client, money the Florida judge in the case believed belonged to the government. Linda Deutsch, the doyenne of crime reporters, said to me one day about the Simpson case, “It was a story of damage. Everyone connected with the case was damaged by it.”

In late February, I ran into Barry Scheck and his wife in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He said he wasn’t in L.A. on Simpson business but to receive an award at a dinner that night. The Los Angeles Criminal Courts Bar Association presented him with an award that read, “In acknowledgement and recognition of his role as a member of the ‘Dream Team’ in the successful defense of The People of the State of California v. Orenthal J. Simpson, in the ‘Trial of the Century.’ ” Subsequently, a case in which Sheck and his partner, Peter Neufeld, had gained notoriety in 1992 came back to haunt them. A convicted rapist, Kerry Kotler, whom they had cleared through DNA evidence after he had served 11 years, was charged with another rape after his release.

At the Brookins Community A.M.E. Church in South Central Los Angeles, Johnnie Cochran and Carl Douglas received “lawyers of the year” awards. In his acceptance speech, Cochran said that the defense team had won because God was on their side, that God was a brother. The congregation cheered. A lot of churchgoers I know were distressed by his claim of divine support. It has since come to light that two days after the murders Simpson, accompanied by Robert Shapiro and Robert Kardashian, went to the Los Angeles office of Dr. Edward Gelb—who once did a TV show with F. Lee Bailey called Lie Detector—and took a polygraph test on which his score was minus-20, which is classed as deceptive. The long-suppressed story was broken by Harvey Levin of KCBS in Los Angeles. When Levin tried to get Shapiro to make an on-camera statement at the signing of his book, The Search for Justice, at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, Shapiro, Levin said, “became manic” and went on signing books, ignoring him. I was told by Fred Goldman that during Simpson’s deposition for the civil suit, several weeks earlier, Daniel Petrocelli, Goldman’s attorney, had asked Simpson if he had taken a lie-detector test. Simpson, under oath, said no.

At Robert Shapiro’s New York book party at ‘21,’ a man who looked familiar came up and spoke to me. He was Richard J. Zuckerwar, the president and C.E.O. of the Grandoe Corporation in Gloversville, New York, which manufactures gloves. An expert witness for the defense, he had been in the courtroom one day during the trial, but declined to take the stand. He startled me now by saying, “I could have proven that the glove did fit. The prosecution went completely wrong. Why didn’t they go to the tanner who tanned the leather? I can show you that the glove fit. It’s cut on a die. When I heard a juror say she acquitted Simpson because the glove didn’t fit, I couldn’t believe it.”

Simpson’s friend A.C. Cowlings, the driver of the white Bronco in the freeway chase, maintained a hostile silence about the case until he had to give his deposition for the civil suit on April 17. His statements were surprising. He acknowledged that he was aware that Simpson had viciously beaten Nicole and had once thrown her out of the house, which contradicted what Simpson has said in his deposition. Cowlings testified that Nicole had had an affair with football star Marcus Allen, who had been married in Simpson’s house, but he refused to elaborate. And he took the Fifth Amendment on questions dealing with his activities between the morning after the murders and the freeway chase.

I was a friend of Nicole’s. I introduced her to one of her boyfriends. —A young man named Lonny who was standing on the step behind me on the escalator at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills.

Trial fame fades fast for some. Judge Lance Ito, who was for almost a year the most famous judge in the United States, as well as the inspiration for the Dancing Itos on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, had practically faded from sight—without ever making any public comment on the Simpson case—when he was rudely thrust back into the news in most unfavorable circumstances. The anonymity he had sought was not to be his. He took a shellacking from prosecutor Christopher Darden both in his book, In Contempt, and in an interview with Barbara Walters on 20/20. Darden said that Johnnie Cochran had run the courtroom, not Judge Ito. Then 60 Minutes did a report on jury tampering in the Simpson trial, and Judge Ito got it again, for dismissing juror Francine Florio-Bunten—who believed Simpson to be guilty and who would have hung the jury—without any investigation whatsoever after he received what I believe to have been an obviously fraudulent anonymous letter which made accusations about Florio-Bunten and her husband. On the heels of that, a guilty verdict pronounced on former Lincoln Savings and Loan boss Charles Keating in a state court in 1991—Ito’s biggest case before Simpson—was overturned on appeal because of an error Ito had made in his instructions to the jury. Keating remains in prison on federal convictions.

They call Judge Weisberg Stanley Scissorhands since he cut so much out of the defense case. —Radio reporter who covered the second Menendez trial.

Marti Shelton called from Virginia after the Menendez verdicts. She had had a telephone friendship with Lyle Menendez during the first trial and had taped many of his calls. I have listened to some of the scare tactics that were later used to keep her from coming forward with what she knew. “It’s the right verdict, but it’s sad,” she said.

Faye Resnick called me from Paris today. She’s so glad to be out of here. She was getting death threats. —Stacy Gantzos, maître d’ at Drai’s, talking over her shoulder as she led me to my table.

Faye Resnick’s coming back from Paris. She missed [her daughter] Francesca. —Stacy Gantzos, talking over her shoulder as she led me to my table three weeks later.

One of the most interesting people I met on this trip out to Los Angeles—in the back room of Hamburger Hamlet on the Strip—was Anthony Davis, the great football star, who followed Simpson at U.S.C. and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated three times. Surprisingly, he also looks like Simpson, although he is heavier, and he is often mistaken for him, especially when he is in Brentwood. Davis, who is called A.D., is definitely not a Simpson supporter. “Socially, he was not part of his people. I know him like the back of my hand. I always hated being compared to him, because I’m nothing like him,” he said. Davis, who speaks in a low voice, is a charismatic figure who demands your attention. He said he first met Nicole in Buffalo at Simpson’s house, when he and O.J. were both in the pros. “ ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.‘That’s O.J.’s woman,’ I was told. I thought she was too young for me, and I was 24 at the time.

“O.J. doesn’t like black women. It’s like he forgets his own mother was black. The man forgot his roots. He forgot he was a black man. He abandoned his people,” said Davis. He has equal contempt for Johnnie Cochran, and is furious that Cochran is representing U.S.C. against Marvin Cobb, a black former U.S.C. athlete whom the university removed from his position as assistant athletic director. “I’m embarrassed to be a black man with guys like that out there. Guys like that make it tough for me. You’re looking at a real nigger, a black nigger,” he said, pointing to himself. “These guys stepped over the line. I try to be an upstanding guy. I’m clean. I help my community. O.J.’s a goddamn sellout. This trial set us back; the verdict set us back years. There’s been a mist in the air ever since the verdict. The only thing that beat the system was his money. The race thing wasn’t the issue; murder was. But Johnnie’s for Johnnie, and O.J.’s for O.J. I can take you down to South Central and line up 10 brothers, and 9 of them would tell you he’s a sellout. When you sell out, you lose. We still live in a racist society. You can be the greatest star on the cover of every magazine, you’re still going to be a nigger here. I’m not here to blast the man. I’m here to talk right and wrong. Once the trial was over, he went to the black community one time only and never went back. My people, the black people, know what O. J. Simpson was about. We knew exactly where he stood for years. I believe we have a responsibility to our people.”

Davis, who drives a black Lincoln and has an office in Beverly Hills, deals in affordable housing. His theory of the murders is very different from most versions. He believes that Simpson was involved “with bad people” in shady business deals involving drugs and that Nicole knew about them and had started to talk. “Nobody’s going to do 30 years because of some pussy you’re jealous of, man. This is something bigger. There’s things about that story that no one knows about yet.”

The guy would have been better off if he’d gone to jail. In jail he wouldn’t look so bad. Another prisoner would say, “Oh, that’s nothing, O.J. I killed five people.” Or another guy would say, “Listen, O.J., I’m a child-molester. In here, they think that’s worse.” —A television reporter who didn’t want his name used, during dinner at Eclipse.

Iran into prosecution lawyer Brian Kellberg one Saturday morning on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was Kellberg who had acted out the murders in front of the Simpson jury—with himself as the victims and the chief medical examiner, Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, as the perpetrator—staging each assault, with a ruler for a knife, the way he believed Simpson cut the throats of his wife Nicole and Ron Goldman. Although Kellberg had never been very friendly during the trial, that day on Rodeo Drive we instantly connected, like war veterans at a reunion, in the bond that unites all of us who sat in Judge Ito’s courtroom for the long haul, and we began talking of the experience we had shared.

“What do you make of how O.J.’s behaving since the acquittal?” I asked.

“He has deluded himself into believing he didn’t do it,” said Kellberg.

We’re not the original Smothers Brothers. But we are real brothers.

I’m Erik. This is Lyle. We don’t care who Mom liked best. —The Smothers Brothers in their nightclub act.

Ihad lunch at Dr. Deli on Van Nuys Boulevard with Craig Cignarelli, who stopped by the courthouse one day during the closing arguments. Cignarelli had been a principal figure in the Menendez case since a few days after the second memorial service for the slain parents, in Princeton, when Erik Menendez, who has been his best friend for two years, confessed to Cignarelli that he and Lyle had killed their parents. During the first trial, Cignarelli quoted Erik as having told him, “Lyle said, ‘Shoot Mom.’ ” Jose Menendez had not liked Cignarelliu and had once kicked him off the property of the Beverly Hills house. Cignarelli was a prosecution witness twice. Despised by Leslie Abramson, he despises her right back. During lunch he told me that Abramson had walked by him in the corridor and said, “Scumbag.” Last year he graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is currently working on the political campaign of Richard Sybert, who is running for Congress from the 24th Congressional District. After the campaign, Cignarelli will attend law school. It is his hope to be a United States senator one day, an ambition mocked by Abramson in her close argument.

Al Cowlings comes in here. I told the manager I wouldn’t serve him, but they said I had to if he was a customer. Last time he was here, I called Petrocelli’s office, because they were looking for him to serve a subpoena for the depositions for the civil suit, but no one called me back. If I had to wait on him, I’d tell him I didn’t like to wait on someone who tried to help a killer get away. If he did anything to me, I’d call the National Enquirer. I’ve got the number taped to the wall by the telephone in the kitchen. —Waitress at Nate ’n Al’s, a popular Beverly Hills deli, where many industry figures have breakfast.

I want to show you something. See this trash bin? In the trial, this is what they said in court O.J. put the package in. They didn’t even have this kind of trash bin until later. Here’s the kind over here he put it in. See? —Baggage handler for American Airlines at LAX.

Simpson’s friend Robert Kardashian will always be remembered as the person who walked off Simpson’s property the day after the murders carrying a Louis Vuitton bag that many people believed held the bloody clothes worn by the killer. I have never felt that that was so. I don’t believe that Simpson would have brought bloody clothes back to Los Angeles from Chicago, where he had gone after the murders to play in a golf tournament, knowing that he would have been met by police. I do wonder, however, if Kardashian could have played a part in the removal of the murder weapon from the golf bag that arrived at LAX the day after Simpson’s return from Chicago, when he and Simpson, in the midst of his mourning, went to the airport to pick up Simpson’s golf clubs. A knife in a golf bag might have gone through security undetected.

One day as I was walking in the American Airlines terminal at LAX, a woman I didn’t know yelled out to me that I had just missed Kardashian, who was going to Minneapolis on a frequent-flier ticket. Then I ran into him in the Admirals Club. “I hear you’re going to Minneapolis,” I said. I have had a complicated relationship with Kardashian throughout the Simpson case. Once, I warned a lady from Johnnie Cochran’s office, whom Kardashian was rumored to be involved with, that one of the tabloid papers was going to write about the relationship. He thanked me at the time. Although I had not written warmly about Kardashian, when my son Alex was missing in the Arizona mountains during the trial, he wrote me one of the nicest letters I have ever received, a father-to-father letter, which touched me very much. I never did find out why he was going to Minneapolis that day, but we had this exchange:

I said, “I’ve seen you on Hard Copy a couple of times when you and [writer Larry] Schiller were with Simpson when he was making his video.”

Kardashian looked me straight in the eye, touched my arm, and said, “Not anymore, Dominick. I’ve pulled away.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Later I heard that Kardashian and Simpson were no longer speaking. What I had known prior to this accidental meeting was that Kardashian was the secret partner of Larry Schiller on his book about the case, which was actually being written by James Wilwerth of Time magazine, who covered the trial. The deal under discussion is that Kardashian will get a substantial portion of Schiller’s fee but receive no credit. Someone I know who works for one of the tabloid papers told me that many of the Simpson stories that appeared after the verdict had been sold to them by Schiller and Kardashian.

Kardashian was at the time of the murders engaged to a beautiful, rich, blonde widow in her 30s named Denice Halicki, with whom he lived in the house from which Simpson and A.C. Cowlings took off on the famous white-Bronco freeway chase after Simpson had been examined and photographed by Dr. Henry Lee, America’s foremost forensic scientist, who was an expert witness for the defense at the trial. The couple had moved into the house just three weeks earlier. During the trial, I became friendly with Denice Halicki, although we were ostensibly on opposite sides. “Glamorous” is the best word to describe her. She has very long legs and wears very short skirts and is a knockout. After Kardashian and Halicki broke up, she moved out. The story went at the time that she took all the furniture and the television sets with her.

Halicki has the kind of looks that could make you think at first that she is all beauty and no brains, but that is certainly not the case. Although she and her late husband, H.B. “Toby” Halicki, a maverick independent-film-maker known as “the car-crash king,” had been married only three months when he was killed in an accident on the set of Gone in 60 Seconds II—an accident she witnessed—they had, she told me, “been together” six years. He left an estate of “close to $15 million,” including heavy investments in real estate as well as enormous antique-toy and vintage-automobile collections. She was the principal beneficiary. Then two of her husband’s 12 siblings and a few other people wanted a share. She went to Kardashian for legal advice, which is how they met. During the Simpson trial, she won five lawsuits over her inheritance, and two more, against the court-appointed administrator, are pending. She started a Bible-study group in order to alleviate the dark feelings that many people in the courtroom felt. Simpson’s sisters, Shirley and Carmelita, were among those who attended, as were Simpson’s daughter Arlene and Johnnie Cochran’s wife Dale. Halicki is a close friend of Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, the jury consultant for the defense. During the trial they went to the Cannes Film Festival together. Dimitrius, also tall and blonde, came to the Vanity Fair Oscar party at Mortons in Beverly Hills in a strapless red satin dress on the arm of Larry King.

A few days after I ran into Kardashian, Halicki called me at my house in Connecticut.

“You had a mistake about me in your next-to-last ‘Letter from Los Angeles,’ ” she said.

“What?”

“You said I was shopping on the day of the freeway chase and wasn’t there in the house at the time.”

I had indeed written that she had left the house hours before the Bronco chase.

“Who told you that?” she asked.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Was it—?” She gave the name of a person who appeared to be a defense ally but wasn’t. She was right.

“Don’t you see what they’re trying to do? They’re trying to minimize me in the case. They’re trying to make me look like a bimbo, out shopping at the time. Do you really think, knowing me, that I’m the kind of person who would be shopping at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills when all that was going on in my house? Of course I was there.”

I laughed. She is a lady who likes to be at the center of the action.

Continued (page 6 of 6)

“Remember, that was half my house at the time. Robert and I had just moved in there a few weeks before the murders. Let me ask you something: did you also hear that I took all the furniture when I moved out on Robert?”

“And the TV sets too,” I replied.

“They spread those stories. The furniture and the TV sets were all mine from my previous house.”

When I returned to Los Angeles for the Menendez verdict, I met with Halicki at the Hotel Bel-Air. She spoke very graciously about her former fiancé. “O.J. used Robert,” she said. “Robert went over there to the house on Rockingham as soon as he heard about the murders, like any friend would, and O.J. used him from then on. It’s been terrible for Robert. His friends have left him.”

“Did Simpson stay at your house?” I asked.

“From the night after the murders to the freeway chase, he slept at our house.”

“Did Paula Barbieri sleep there?”

“Yes, except for one night.”

“Did you ever get scared?” I asked.

“No,” she replied.

When we parted, I watched a Hotel Bel-Air parking valet hold the door of her beige Rolls-Royce as she got in and waved good-bye.

Every memory is self-serving, and the occasional admission of error offers the author an opportunity to congratulate himself for his honesty and courage in mentioning it. —John Gregory Dunne in his book review of Christopher Darden’s In Contempt in the April 15, 1996, issue of The New Yorker.

Over a year ago, in April 1995, I wrote in this magazine that Christopher Darden was the person to watch in the Simpson trial. I have always admired Darden, often for just those things that his detractors criticize him for. I have rarely met a person who is as ethical as Darden. In a justice system in which truth has become a joke, his sense of truth is a beacon of light. I admired that he had the courage to cry during the press conference after he and Marcia Cross lost the case. Johnnie Cochran gave Darden a racially cruel time during the trial, and he took his lickings for the disastrous glove experiment. He has come out of this trial as a person to watch. What he has shown us is that, in the long run, losing may be more victorious than a victory without honor. As of April 7 of this year, his book, In Contempt, became No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.

Sydney smells Nicole’s presence sometimes. She said, “Mommy was just here. I can smell her perfume.” —Robin Greer, a friend of Nicole Brown Simpson’s and one of the authors of You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, discussing the Simpson children during dinner at Drai’s.

Ayoung woman named Moya Rimp, whom I met during the Simpson trial, called to tell me that she and her mother, Pauline Rimp, a prominent real-estate woman in Brentwood, had moved into Nicole Brown Simpson’s condo, the scene of the murders, in order to help the Brown family sell it. The Browns are eager to get rid of the condo, although as yet there have been no takers.

“What’s it like living there?” I asked.

“Very strange. Tourists are still coming by to look at it. When I walk the dog, I meet all these people in the neighborhood who tell me things. There’s one who swears she saw O.J. talking to Ron and Nicole before the murders, but she won’t come forward.”

Moya Rimp invited me for dinner. I went. Robert Altman, the film director, and his wife, Kathryn, were also there. Altman is a cousin of Pauline Rimp’s. With the reverence of a docent at the Getty Museum, Moya Rimp showed us through the condo. “This is where Nicole’s exercise equipment was,” she said, stopping in an area outside the master bedroom. We stared at the empty space, then moved on. “Now we’re entering Nicole’s bedroom. That was her bed, and beyond, in the bathroom, you can see her tub, which was filled with water that night and had lit candles around the edge.” We became caught up in her surreal thrall.

As many times as I had walked by the condo and looked at the pictures of the crime scene, I was still amazed at how large the place is—3,400 square feet—and how small the killing area is. I perched on the spot outside the picture window looking into the living room where Simpson would have sat when he reportedly spied on Nicole prior to the killings. It was the perfect place for a voyeur who had once watched his wife perform fellatio on another man, unseen by her—as happened with Keith Zlomsowitch. “We think he was watching Nicole through the window on the night of the murders, before she came outside,” said Moya Rimp. In the ill-lit, eerie space, I felt as if I could almost hear the scuffling of rubber-soled Bruno Magli shoes and sneakers in the dirt and on the walkway. “This is where Ron fell,” said Moya. “That’s where Nicole was. As I looked at the scene, remembering the horrifying photographs shown in court, I didn’t want to be there anymore, and we went inside.

Dominick Dunne is a best-selling author and special correspondent for Vanity Fair. His diary is a mainstay of the magazine.

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/archive/1996/06/dunne199606