Three Faces of Evil (original) (raw)

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.

I ran 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.

I had 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:

Robert Kardashian, with his ex-girlfriend Denice Halicki in 1995.

By FRED BROWN/AFP/Getty Images.

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.

Though sources close to Simpson say he is broke, his estate in Brentwood remains as beautifully maintained as it always was.

by Vinnie Zuffante/Archive Photos/Getty Images.

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.

“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.

A young 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.