The voice is by turns angry, exasperated, terrified and, finally, resigned. It is her second 911 call within 10 minutes. In the background, a man is screaming -- about children, tabloids, an old boyfriend. The words are only semi-audible, but his rage needs no amplification.
"Could you get someone over here now, to 325 Gretna Green. He's back. Please," asks Nicole Simpson.
"What does he look like?" asks the operator.
"He's O. J. Simpson. I think you know his record," she says, with a tremor of panic. Simpson, she explains, had broken down the back door of her house.
"Is he threatening you?"
She begins to sob. "He's f---ing going nuts."
The Simpson case continued to obsess the nation last week. Audiotapes of Nicole Simpson's Oct. 25, 1993, police calls, made public by authorities on Wednesday, offered harrowing proof of a relationship plagued by violence and intimidation. Less than eight months later she and Ronald Goldman were dead, brutally knifed to death, the Los Angeles district attorney alleges, at the hands of her ex-husband. By themselves, the tapes say nothing about O. J. Simpson's guilt or innocence. But they provided more disturbing evidence that his genial public persona masked a more menacing private personality. As the tapes were played nonstop on television and radio, they also galvanized a debate on the hidden ravages of domestic violence (page 26). Lawmakers began to get the message: New York and Colorado passed tough new laws against spousal abuse.
The tapes were also part of a fiercely contested trial by sound bite. The principal players, District Attorney Gil Garcetti and defense counsel Robert Shapiro, both scrambled for early public-relations advantage in what could become the most sensational criminal trial in memory. Their jousting raised questions about the real strength of the state's case, as well as Simpson's ability to get a fair day in court. Last Friday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Cecil Mills halted a grand-jury review of evidence in the case, citing concern that the torrent of pretrial publicity had prejudiced some jurors. Garcetti and Shapiro, both concerned about a tainted indictment, pushed for the ruling. But it is clearly a setback for the state. Now, a judge will decide whether Garcetti has sufficient evidence to go to trial. A preliminary hearing, scheduled to begin Thursday, is certain to be a marquee attraction for celebrity-trial junkies. It will also afford Shapiro and his defense team the tactical advantage of an early look at the state's case.
Simpson, who looked haggard and worn in his court appearances, received some other unexpected legal boosts. At the weekend, it was disclosed that two of the most famous names in criminal defense, attorneys F. Lee Bailey and Alan Dershowitz, were advising the defense. Their exact roles remain unclear, but their years of big-time trial experience will bolster Shapiro, a plea-bargain specialist. A canny veteran at defending celebrities (including Bailey, whom he helped beat a 1982 drunken-driving charge), Shapiro took every opportunity to shower Simpson in pathos with made-for-headlines accounts of his jailhouse misery ("He started to cry and said, "I wish I could spend Father's Day with my children'").
He brought his stagecraft into the courtroom as well. As Simpson listened to the charges against him, Shapiro massaged his shoulder, a maneuver now known among Los Angeles criminal attorneys as the "Abramson Hug." It is named after the defense lawyer Leslie Abramson, who employed it in the process of securing mistrials in the Menendez brothers murder case. At Wednesday's hearing, Shapiro embarrassed Garcetti's crack prosecutor, Marcia Clark, by forcing her to acknowledge that the infamous "bloody ski mask," cited in numerous press reports as hav-ing been recovered by po-lice from Simpson's Brentwood mansion, didn't exist. It should have been a minor point -- the D.A.'s office never said there was a ski mask. (On Friday, the state did say that a "blue knit cap" was recovered near the feet of one of the victims.) But it still left an impression that the state's case was not all it was touted to be.
Hours later, on Wednesday, L.A. police, on the advice of City Attorney James Hahn, released the tapes of Nicole Simpson's 1993 police call. The media had been demanding them for days. But the timing of the city's compliance -- just in time for the 5 p.m. newscasts in Los Angeles -- had the whiff of retaliation from officials bent on winning the news cycle back from Shapiro. Garcetti disavowed prior knowledge of the release, claiming that he disagreed with Hahn's decision to make the tapes public. He also vowed to put a lid on further publicity. "I don't want to try this case in the media," he said. A peculiar assertion from Garcetti, who cut a wide swath through weekend interview shows immediately after Simpson's arrest, and even predicted his eventual confession. It was a PR offensive designed to blunt public sympathy for the football hero turned suicidal murder suspect. But Garcetti clearly overplayed his hand. "The D.A. made a bad mistake making political hay out of this tragedy. He looks like a cheap politician on television," says Harland Braun, a defense attorney and former deputy D.A.
For Garcetti, who faces re-election in 1996, the stakes are huge. He wants to halt a humiliating string of defeats his office has suffered in the last several years, including light sentences for two of the men accused of assaulting truckdriver Reginald Denny during the 1992 riots, and the Menendez brothers murder trial, which ended in two hung juries (with a retrial in preparation). Observers say memories of the Menendez case -- in which prosecutors assumed that jurors would discount defense attempts to depict the siblings as abused by their father and fearful for their lives -- are especially raw. "Garcetti learned an important lesson from the Menendez case: don't allow the defense to sell a story to the public unchallenged," says UCLA law professor Peter Arenella.
Press coverage of the Simpson case was often frenzied and reckless. Many stories were propelled by a series of inac-curate or unconfirmed reports, attributed to a string of unnamed police or law-enforcement sources, that implicate Simpson in the murders. The officially confirmed record of the case remains scant: Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman were killed sometime before midnight on June 12. They died of "multiple sharp force injuries" caused by what Garcetti calls "a substantial knife." Police recovery of a bloodstained "military-style entrenching tool," reported by the Los Angeles Daily News on June 17 as the possible murder weapon, never happened. Reports that Nicole Simpson was nearly decapitated were rebutted last week by the defense's forensic specialist, Michael Baden, who examined coroner's photographs. Nor has there been any official confirmation of reports picked up by numerous news organizations -- including Newsweek -- that police found a bloodstained glove at Simpson's home to match one recovered at the crime scene. The attorney for Brian (Kato) Kaelin, an aspiring actor who worked at Simpson's estate, denied an NBC News report that Kaelin undermined Simpson's alibi -- that he was at home the night of the murder. And there were also the inevitable stories alleging cocaine use by Simpson, even after prosecutors said that drugs played no role in the crime.
The prosecution did some sloppy research of its own. On Tuesday, Santa Monica, Calif., resident Jill Shively told the grand jury she saw an agitated Simpson driving his white Ford Bronco near the murder scene on June 12. But earlier that day, she also told her story to "Hard Copy" for $5,000, leaving her credibility in tatters. If the state had checked more closely, they would have seen that Shively had even more serious credibility problems. Newsweek has learned that in late 1992 she attempted to swindle soap star Brian Patrick Clarke out of $6,000 by passing off a copy of the script to "My Life," the Michael Keaton film about a fatally ill man, as her own. Clarke sued her in small-claims court in January 1993 and won a $5,000 judgment. Shively denies all the charges. How could she have become a key prosecution witness? The D.A.'s office refused to comment.
Details of Nicole Simpson's troubled and violent marriage also emerged in sharper relief last week. One friend told Newsweek of an ugly incident at daughter Sydney's school around the time of the 1992 divorce in which O.J. stormed up to his wife and yanked her arm so hard that she nearly fell. Accounts of her last days suggest a woman bent on making a clean break from the volatile Simpson. Denise Brown told The New York Times her sister had broken up with Simpson a week and a half before she died. She also put her $625,000 town house up for lease in early June, just five months after she'd bought it. One news organization quoted a friend as saying she was concerned about safety -- that she'd caught O.J. looking into her window. "Drop-dead gorgeous New York style townhouse in heart of Brentwood" for $4,800 a month, said a description listed by her real-estate agent. But whatever her plans, whatever her fears, time ran out on the evening of June 12.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
");jQuery(this).remove()}) jQuery('.start-slider').owlCarousel({loop:!1,margin:10,nav:!0,items:1}).on('changed.owl.carousel',function(event){var currentItem=event.item.index;var totalItems=event.item.count;if(currentItem===0){jQuery('.owl-prev').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-prev').removeClass('disabled')} if(currentItem===totalItems-1){jQuery('.owl-next').addClass('disabled')}else{jQuery('.owl-next').removeClass('disabled')}})}})})
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7r7HWrK6enZtjsLC5jqGcrGWXpLavs4ynrK2rXWaFeoSYcQ%3D%3D