You're Wrong About - The O.J. Simpson Trial: Marcia Clark Part 1

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

Sarah tells Mike how Marcia Clark got the slam-dunk case that ended her career as a trial lawyer. Digressions include string cheese, "Inception" and what calling women "difficult" means in 2019. We go on the record in favor of a wide range of frivolous hobbies. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

I cannot count the number of times I have left my house because it's spattered with my own blood because I was in a hurry to get in an Uber and I didn't want my rating to get too low. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where the perm of misconception meets the flat iron of hindsight. Oh my god. Right? Wow. I had a month to make that. The perm of misconception. That sounds like something in the never-ending story. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I am Sarah Marshall and I'm a woman sitting in a closet talking about OJ Simpson asking a boy to love her. If you want to support the show, we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About. And it appears by the time we have this out that we will be selling merch. If you want more

details, just go to our Twitter page and we'll put something on there. It's Twitter slash You're Wrong About, I'm pretty sure. And yeah, thank you for coming on this ride with us. This is episode four in our series on the OJ Simpson trial. We're four hours into our telethon and we're about to go all the way. Mike, how do you feel? Very good. I am extremely excited to talk about Marsha Clark and about this period of investigating OJ, I guess, during and after the Bronco chase. Yeah, I want to start by talking about who Marsha Clark is kind of right now versus who she was maybe four years ago in the American mind because she's someone who's gone through a really interesting rehabilitation of image very recently. What's your experience of that? I mean, she was one of these

women that was sort of in the wave of recapturing 90s women who really got treated terribly, right? Like Tanya and Lorena Bobbet. And Marsha Clark was one of the main people that we've now returned to and been like, we were really mean to this lady who seemed to have been doing her best. Yeah. Did you like have a sense of who Marsha Clark was before her image kind of got rehabilitated in 2016 with the Ryan Murphy show about the OJ Simpson trial? I really didn't. I mean, I don't actually think that I had such a negative view of her at the time. I think I just thought that she was incompetent. Because you were an 11-year-old boy and you were kind of not communicating in the language of misogyny that was being spoken so fluently around

you, maybe? I mean, I think I was, but I just think that it didn't attach itself to her for whatever reason. Maybe for millennials like Marsha Clark in the same way that so many other women who had jobs in public inspired this kind of vitriol among their contemporaries that maybe kids at the time didn't get because many of us were used to have working mothers. So we were like, oh, look, it's mom. I mean, so what do you think are the big contrast between her four years ago and her now? Well, first of all, I'll tell you my first impression of Marsha Clark, which is that I started researching the OJ Simpson trial for the first time five years ago and got to the part where Marsha Clark, a prosecutor is introduced. And I was like, oh,

there's a, the prosecutor is a woman. That's neat. Like I had no, I had no memory of her. Oh, like I had no sense of her being someone who was attached to the case. Like I had no sense of her as like a legendary figure. I remember when I read Jeffrey Tubin's The Run of His Life, which is the first book I've ever read about the OJ Simpson trial and which really like opened my eyes to so much of the complexity that we had forgotten since. The sense that I got about Marsha Clark and the thing that probably immediately made me really like her and had like started my like attachment to her as a figure in the story that has has grown and blossomed to this day in which I must be open about upfront. I guess really like Marsha Clark. And I think the first

thing I liked about her was that like she was the one person who was taking all this seriously. And also that she was trying, I mean, she had, let me actually read you a quote. So Marsha Clark has a memoir called Without a Doubt co-written with Teresa Carpenter. In it, she says that one of the things she likes about court is that there are clearly delineated rules of combat, rules that follow reason, which to me kind of says a lot, right? This idea that she's drawn to work as a trial lawyer and she's like later on in her career promoted out of prosecuting and given an office job and hates it and asked to be put back in litigation. Interesting. But what she's saying is that one of the things that she loves about it is that, you know, there are rules.

There are clear rules and there are rules that are oriented toward logic and toward finding the truth. We're going to hear the phrase search for truth a lot in the next several hours of this show. So get ready. But that's what she believes trials are for and what trials are capable of and that she believes that the law is able to actually bring about justice. Like you get the sense that she is operating from sincerity and from also a belief. And, you know, we are all coming here to honor reason, basically. And that's not what this trial did. I know. I was just going to say it sounds so naive now, especially knowing what we know about the O.J. Simpson trial and then knowing what we know about the legal system generally, that the idea that it's this pure thing

and everybody follows the rules and all anybody wants is to find the truth. It's just like hopeless somehow. It's so it's very like trust the system thinking. Well, and it's not as if she went into this trial as as like a newly as what she calls a baby VA like she's she's 40 years old at the time that her involvement in this case begins, you know, she's she's been a prosecutor for over a decade at this point. She's also been in high profile media cases before like she tried a case that was featured prominently on court TV. So she already even knows what it's like to be working with kind of celebrity concerns and to have cameras on her all the time. So this is not really new for her, which I find interesting, too. Like it's not as if she's like young or green, you know, I mean,

she's she's a woman in her sexual prime, but she's not young as a lawyer. Right. I knew you were going to bring that in somehow. Well, I just I don't want to like leave there any door open to the fact to the idea that I'm, you know, that's less than complimentary about Marcia Clark's age, because I guess feeling 1995 was a really, you know, was enough. Yeah. Right. Because of course, he's like facing off against F. Lee Bailey, who's 62 years old and looks like he's 80 because of yeah, the kind of life that he's been drinking his way through. But like, she's the one who has to have thousands of words written about her under eye bags. Totally, totally. And the fucking haircut thing, which I'm still mad about.

Let's talk about that, too. What do you know about like Marcia Clark's appearance? I bet you could tell me in great detail about like what she looked like at various times. Can I admit something? Yeah. I know I'm supposed to avoid spoilers. But the other day, I was looking for a photo to include in this post and it was from an interview with Marcia Clark like a year ago or something. And it was her talking about the infamous makeover where she began. I know I always mix them up, but she began the case with a perm, right? And then she straightened it out later or was it the other way around? She began with a perm. Okay. She began with a perm and then she had like a makeover, quote, unquote, and then she had the straight hair. And so of

course this was built up at the time as like, oh, the cameras are on her and like she's trying to gussy it up and she's trying to look more professional. So in this interview that I cheated and read and I promise I won't do it again. Where is this interview that you cheated and read? It's in Vulture. Okay. They're asking her about the haircut and she says, that was a media creation. In the very beginning of the case, before opening statements, our press person said, you did a haircut. It looks kind of messy. And I did. It was kind of scraggly. So I got my haircut. That was it. And after that point, the media goes crazy with this shit. It's just so weird. There came that point in the trial when my perm grew out. I didn't have

the time to go out and get permed again. That particular morning I looked at myself and said, just blow it out and stop trying. You can't keep it up. You're never going to have time to go back to the hairdresser now and I have straight hair. So I blew it out. Thus began the media parade about the makeover. How could I have had a makeover and still looked like that? I just don't understand. Oh, Marsha. But it's just so relatable to me about the way that people make those decisions. Yeah. We all assume that people who are in the public eye do everything very deliberately. And there's always some level of calculation behind everything they're doing. But oftentimes, like, she's a person. She doesn't have time in the morning. She doesn't want to do it with her

hair. So she's like, fuck it. Do you think the public's combined demeanor is a little bit like OJ the toddler, right? Where it's like, why would you do this to me? Why this thing affects me? And it's like a woman in Glendale straightens her hair and that affects your life somehow. And you have to talk about it for days. Like, what is that? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe also, in addition to that, she's trying what no one will stop calling the trial of the century. Imagine that you're prosecuting someone for murder and you're on television all day, all day. And there's this weird thing where it's like the dyrness of the consequences of your work are what make it so that you don't have the time or wherewithal to be like thinking about eyeliner. Yeah. Yeah. But

also, like, that's what has brought them to the kind of prominence that makes people want to tell you what to wear. Right. Yeah. It's also, it's like, I think it also allowed people to blame her because they're like, well, if she didn't want people to comment on her makeover, she wouldn't have had one, right? She's putting it into the public eye. If she'd wanted the jury to listen to her, she would have had a different hairstyle that would have made all of the sanctuaries of systemic racism just melt away. Yeah. Show me that hairdo. What have you been coming across in your readings about the social construction of Marsha Clark in 1994? I feel like the person who I have spent the most time reading on the subject of Marsha Clark's appearance is Marsha herself

at this point because I've really been enjoying kind of going straight to the source because it's like, wouldn't it be nice, and maybe this is it for me, wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where like Marsha Clark didn't have to be this like this very Liz Lemonish person actually who's like trying to be the rational center of this mess that is spinning out of control and is just every day showing up and is like, here's the evidence. We have so much evidence because like just doing this like be our guest of evidence, right? Just like any kind of evidence practically that you could ask for like people who are doing legal commentary on this at the time like often the remark that you hear is like, it's very weird to have a murder trial with this much

evidence like Marsha Clark has won a case previously on a single drop of blood. She's worked with that that degree of matter before so she's like just showing up with this like reasonable case that like I imagine any lawyer would feel like they would have no trouble arguing in good faith and that there shouldn't be, it shouldn't be complicated and every step that she tries to take like falls out from under her and I don't disagree with the reasons that many of those steps fell out from under her but they still did and she still believed in what she was doing and she also you know from the very beginning was furious about what happened to Nicole. So there's always good stories of almost like radicalization when you realize the institution

that you're a part of does not have the same mission as you or is not of the nature that you've been assuming it was to put all that trust in the law and then realize how easily it can be gamed and how money is so central to warping it in this way that if any of your defendants right like some random kids stealing a car if he could afford five high-priced lawyers he would probably manage to get off too. Right here's the thing too here's what I also want to like keep in the mix here as we go forward that like say this kid has all this money he gets all these he gets F. Lee Bailey and he gets off like to me that would be very justified like to me that's not like a reason why the system is invalid but like what we also can state I think with some security at this time

is that the legal system we have is not known for handing out proportional sentences especially for property crimes and so if that kid was going to get maybe like 25 years in prison for a nonviolent offense then it's like if the choice is between a disproportionate sentence and an acquittal then I don't see how a disproportionate sentence is just simply because it is a sentence and because it validates that a crime happened like that's not that's not justice. The phrase is beyond a reasonable doubt it's not a preponderance of evidence that's civil trials you use a preponderance of evidence when you're going to be separating someone from their money not their freedom like we shouldn't live in a society where we think it's terrible when someone doesn't go to prison you

know I know that this is a complicated area and in this case like I believe that Marcia was on a righteous quest to put him in prison but also my righteous quest isn't putting people in prison so I feel many ways about this all at once. One of the other things I really believe about the OJ Simpson trial is that people tend to regard it as unfair because it was so unfamiliar to us as a trial that was unusually fair where like the defendant had a chance and where there was significant evidence against the defendant and where a lot of the public was poison against him through a lot of high-profile media coverage and where there was still the possibility of a reasonable doubt as that jury was sequestered I mean that's actually what you're supposed to have right right

but so how how does Marcia get involved in this case we'll take take us back to the the Bronco Chase I don't know what happens we're going back pre-Bronco Chase we might not even get to the Bronco Chase at the end of this episode I feel like the Bronco Chase might be a looming horizon for us and this whole thing could be not really but like wouldn't it be great if this is like a Tristram Shandy type podcast series and I finally got to use my my English degree I keep thinking about inception where like the third level down an hour is like one minute in time on the first level and that's what it's like in Sarah time yeah we go in we do another two hour podcast and we're like and we've covered one day of the OJ Simpson trial yeah that's my

dream so this is awesome so so rewind us where are we rewinding to okay well speaking of inception time and Sarah time and you're wrong about time let's talk about Marcia standard time okay it's June 13th 1994 okay the day after the murder the day after the murders but Marcia doesn't know that yet okay all Marcia knows is that she is a 40 year old prosecutor in as we have already mentioned her sexual prime with two young boys who she's taken care of wait wait two young sons that she's taken care of you said sexual prime and then you said two young boys oh god with two young sons who she's taken care of and three days prior she has filed for divorce from her husband Gordon okay Marcia and her husband have been separated for about six months Gordon moved out of what she

calls their dilapidated tract home in January and it's only at the urging of her friend Lynn that Marcia has finally bitten the bullet and filed for divorce who does that sound like yeah so December 1993 is when she asks her husband Gordon to leave and it's also at this time that she asks for her old job as a prosecutor after she's been given a promotion and a desk job that this is like a turning point for her she's like I can't go on with this marriage anymore I can't go on with this job anymore and I'm just gonna plunge into the abyss basically because one of the things she also writes about in her memoirs is that she had a first husband who she met when she was quite young and then went straight from her first husband to Gordon

and so she writes I spent most of my life with a man under the same roof I was constantly terrified and I remember reading this for the first time and being surprised and then surprised that I was surprised which is an always an interesting thing because I was like oh like I didn't think Marcia Clark was scared of stuff I thought she was like very tough and brave and a grown up and wasn't having the experience of being like a vulnerable new single mom new single person who was really going through a lot of what Nicole was going through at the same time just in different neighborhoods of the same city of like fuck like I have to call a repair person I don't know what to do about the plumbing I don't know how to get the mold out of my bedroom wall like I

don't know how to take care of my house I'm afraid to be living on my own like I've never that I didn't plan to do this is she hinting that there was abuse in the marriage why was she scared no she doesn't she doesn't say that she I mean in this passing she's saying she was terrified I think because she's used to having a man around just generally and also because this is like just a brand new life I mean I think you could see this as as physical and or existential terror right and what she says about her marriage to Gordon is quote I will not go into particulars because they are no one's business but our own so it's not our business okay that's fair but it's June 13th Marcia drives into work she's running on what her friends call Marcia's standard time which

means she's always a little bit late but this is like a quiet day and she writes I had no court appearances no witness interviews a short skirt day no need for a believe me suit that's great wording yeah so she goes into her office and she notices that her desk is like almost clean which is just like imagine I just like to think about this detail imagine that you're like you're looking at your inbox you know and you're like wow I've only got like 13 emails in here and it just feels like things are in order and I filed for divorce against Gordon and I just feel like I'm getting like things have been crazy but I'm getting my life under control things are calming down just like savor this moment with Marcia because it will not ever come again so Marcia's desk is

almost clean and the phone rings and it's a detective named Philip Van Adder okay and he says according to Marcia she gives herself kind of private eye dialogue which I don't always totally buy happened word for word but like I like it so Van Adder calls he says Marcia do you have a minute she says I got two man what's up this is like Marcia's first line of dialogue in her own book isn't that great I love her hard boil she's hard boiled she's hard boiled right she is like and she like sits around reading mystery novels in her spare time and then post trial like she writes mystery novels and she you know smokes like a character in a 90s movie who's being established as a rebel so she smokes so Phil Van Adder is on the phone and she and Phil

have a connection he is in the LAPD's robbery homicide division and they had worked together on a murder case two years before this is the one where the evidence was a single drop of blood and they convicted the defendant based on the DNA from this single drop of blood foreshadowing she says they're buds basically and then he's he's getting close to retirement so they probably will work on another case together again Phil says to Marcia on this morning I got this double I need to run it by you and Marcia explains that this is a common practice for a detective to call a DA to see if they have the material for a search warrant and so he says OJ Simpson do you know who this guy is what do you think Marcia's reaction is based on the reaction of every other woman we've

seen on this show so far does she know him from the Hertz commercials she says wasn't he a naked gun or something uh okay I really love the fact that in this case where celebrity is so important and where people have this idea of where they of like such a pre-existing image of OJ Simpson in their head that they cannot wrap their mind around him committing a murder that the person who is prosecuting this trial is like who what right who's OJ Simpson is he Nordberg so Vanatter gives her the rundown basically he says that OJ Simpson's ex-wife who Marcia Clark always identifies as Nicole Brown she always identifies OJ Simpson as Simpson she never calls him OJ she doesn't like that other people do that all the time and her book is dedicated to Ron Goldman

and to Nicole Brown so she she takes this all very seriously but anyway Vanatter at the time says there are two bodies Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown and an unidentified male companion and Vanatter gives Marcia the basics which are in her words that there is a lot of blood in fact a trail of blood leading away from the bodies because of death not immediately apparent he tells her there's a blue knit ski cap found at the murder scene there was a brown leather glove found at the scene and then after investigating this scene Phil and his partner have gone to OJ Simpson's house to notify him of his wife's death when no one answers and they can't get in and they notice what looks like blood on a white Bronco outside they decide to send the

youngest and fittest detective among them over a wall and into the property and that detective's name is Mark Furman okay but I mean I want to know what you think of that I mean it just seems so fucking obvious that he did it why are we even talking about this genuinely I mean I feel like in all of the coverage especially at the time there was so much sort of hemming and hawing and back and forth and like the sheer tsunami of evidence that OJ did this crime I feel like completely got lost I mean literally a tsunami I mean it's unbelievable because of the violence of the murders like the amount of blood right is extraordinary and later on Marcia goes to to Nicole's house to look at the crime scene and is not let in because there's already a lot of

tourists and who's to say she's not one of them unbelievable so says the cop on duty a normal tourist activity visiting a crime scene super chill and she's staring in through this fence trying to get a look and what she sees is basically this river of blood oh god the thing that stands out to her too is that there are these these paw prints that have walked through oh fuck through the blood and then and then down the walkway is that Kato is that the dog that's Kato oh my god do you know the story of Kato what's what's the story of the dog there's the story of the dog I didn't even know there was a story of the dog yeah oh yeah the dog actually let me show you because I bought there's an Annie Leibovitz portfolio and an issue of the New Yorker from 1995 of

some of the principles in the OJ Simpson trial okay and the first portrait is of Kato the dog really yeah let me send it to you okay okay oh wow doesn't he look like a good boy yeah he's like a German shepherd in the front and like a zebra in the back he has like weird stripes going on he's an Akita wait what he's an Akita that's that's what he is oh I've never heard of that brand of dog it's an extremely attractive dog well I mean so after the murders there is a fair amount of commentary on the fact that Kato displayed subpar oh like he should have protected her and he didn't they people are blaming the dog yeah what yeah that seems like a weird take but like whatever you gotta fill the newspaper every day you gotta do you got like 36 inches to fill do you have to fill

it with blaming dogs on things what's with the dog oh my god and I guess Akitas are known for being pretty protective they can be pretty aggressive and one of the people that Dominic Dunne interviews says I was just at an Akita event and all of us agreed that OJ had to be the killer because there's no way that a stranger could have been like lurking around the house or invading the house and Kato wouldn't have barked at him like it had to be OJ or they would have heard Kato barking sooner I mean sure I don't know that's that's another one of those internet sleuth details where it's like we really don't know very much and we're trying to read significance into the details we can know but like I don't know you don't know their dog maybe the dog barks a lot

maybe he almost barks never and there's much better evidence that OJ did it so again it's like on the list of good evidence it's like 1032nd on the list when it's like the trail of blood is like pretty good evidence and like the long history of domestic abuse is also very good evidence like we don't we don't need to go to dog breeds that's true at the same time the first time I read that I was like huh that is persuasive like there are details that like make a scenario make sense to you suddenly or like make something easier to visualize and I was like yeah right right but Kato the dog ends up being the one who leads people to the crime scene he's the reason the crime scene is first discovered and the way this happens is that the night of June 12th a guy named

Steve Schwab is walking his dog around Brentwood and he later proves a very reliable witness because he can place the time that he discovers Kato the dog at right after he had been watching the Dick Van Dyke show between 10 and 1030 because he always walked his dog right after that so that he could get back home I think at 11 so he can watch the next show that he wants to see he has kind of like his little evening routine scheduled around reruns okay interesting and he happens to pass a white Akita barking at a house which he kind of pauses and looks at and he he goes up to the dog and looks at it and as he's looking at the collar and getting a closer look at the dog he notices that there's blood on all of his paws oh my god so he can't figure out where he

lives and he ends up walking home and the Akita follows him back to his house where he gets home at 11 as he planned and the Mary Tyler Moore show is on which just like it's funny to me that the first details of this like the first the public encountered this case were just like so mundane right it's just like this yeah this guy who's structured his evening around his his tv shows and he's like this feels so familiar right you're just like I'm gonna watch my one show and then I'm gonna walk my dog and then I'm gonna watch the Mary Tyler Moore show yeah because you know I guess I feel like things like this remind you that like this is real life like this is this is not entertainment I mean it is entertainment it became entertainment we can't say that it wasn't that

this is all part of the real world that we all live in that we watch our shows in can I ask a logistical question yeah I'm just thinking like I I am sick to my stomach thinking about like the last minutes of Nicole and Ron's lives yeah is there is there a reason people didn't hear screaming or something are these like just big houses far away from each other I don't think that they're super far away from each other it's in more of a cramped area of Brentwood than the one OJ lives in the crime scene is at the end of a long walkway and there's a lot of kind of trees and foliage so it makes it hard to see from the sidewalk one of the reasons that Nicole was able to afford the Bundy condo was because it had been on the market for a long time before she bought it because

people really didn't like how much traffic noise especially you got because it was on a pretty busy road so I think that that was a big part of it people heard other stuff there's a a witness who later testifies that he was out when he heard coming from from Nicole's house a man's voice saying hey hey hey which Ron Goldman's family talked about knowing that that was exactly what Ron would say coming across a situation like you know whatever whatever he found it's just terrible to think about there might not have been time for screaming yeah or there might not have been very much I don't know right I'm glad that you feel really horrible too now yeah I know this is how you felt for months now it was such a bummer to think about yeah I used to just drive around

listening to jump for my love really sadly oh my god people do that too I think you have to start by thinking of this as like not this fascinating murder this like puzzle for us to solve which is how we like to regard our murders but it's like a woman's life that almost happened and a young man's life that kind of ended before it was beginning and just like this thing that didn't need to take place it didn't have to happen you know there were just so many moments when things could have changed and just the resources were never available to the right people at the right time right who called 911 finally or like who discovered the body so this is kind of a funny story it's slightly funny it's going to feel funnier because this has been so sad so Stephen Schwab

the unsuspecting dog walker comes home and tells his wife Linda that a dog followed him home and points to this majestic white dog that's standing outside with blood on his paws and so their neighbor sucrubo's tepe comes home at that time and sucru and his wife Bettina decide to take the dog out for a walk to see if they can maybe wind him down or find his house they take him for a walk out in the direction of where Stephen found him and the dog keeps getting more nervous and pulling them more and more and around midnight the dog stops in front of 875 Bundy Drive the house is dark enough that they wouldn't have noticed anything if the dog hadn't been pulling them toward it but they lean in and and look and see what looks at the time like Nicole lying down

and blood all around her so she's like visible almost visible from the street if you like come up to the house if you concentrate if you I mean because there's a long walkway and Nicole is at the bottom of her front steps so sucru and Bettina after seeing this go to a neighbor of Nicole's and knock on her door and the person who lives there an old lady named Elsie calls the police because she fears you know someone's knocking on her door that's weird oh right okay she calls 911 and reports an attempted burglary and so officer Robert Risk picks up the call he comes to Elsie's house and figures out what's going on and then he's the one who sucru and Bettina take to Nicole's house and then he calls the cavalry I assume and he and Officer

Risk calls the cavalry okay so after all of that because at the time that this happens Marsha Clark is sleeping soundly or maybe she has insomnia is reading a detective novel but in any case she doesn't know what's happening but in any case it's the following day that Marsha gets the call from Van Adder telling her here's what we found at OJ's house so far can we get a warrant okay so then in the call they had gone over to the house they saw the trail of blood they couldn't get in so Mark Furman jumps the fence well and what they say later on is that they come to the house of the ex husband of the victim they see a trail of blood and so they say that they send Furman over the wall based on the understanding that they might be protecting whoever lives there from a possible

assailant okay which you know my my sense of that is like yeah and also you reason to suspect that OJ Simpson is a possible victim or a possible assailant right yeah those are the options I guess and it's after Mark Furman jumps over the wall that he finds the glove that is a partner to the glove that was found at the crime scene at Nicole's house wait so they find one bloody glove at her house and one bloody glove at OJ's house yeah that's like how good the evidence of the bloody glove is that's like how open and shut it is yeah oh my god I feel like I wouldn't call anything open and shut at this point but like it's like a little puzzle you would give third graders about like this is what detective Simmons does at a crime scene the assailant cut themselves and bled all over

the place yeah and the fact that there's one glove at the crime scene and one glove at OJ's house it's like I honestly wonder if you could leave more evidence if you tried right right he's cut up his driver's license and left little shards of it lying in like a Hansel and Gretel trail from one murder location to his house yeah it's like the kind of evidence you would have in a game of clue yeah but Mark Furman found the glove and Mark Furman is a complicated guy right and this will come up yeah and so getting back to March's call um yeah so Van Adder tells her about the evidence he's like do you think this is enough for a warrant which I'm pretty sure he knows the answer to yeah seems seems good seems strong and March is like yeah yeah we've both done this before

yeah so March is like I can go out to Rockingham and supervise the cops that are serving the warrant if you like and he's like yeah that's that sounds good and I'll call you after I type it up and then he writes and it's like the warrant signed and we're all done and everything's great and March is like oh you weren't you weren't gonna read it to me before you submitted it or keep me in the loop or anything and she's like okay that's uh that feels weird but I'm not gonna bring it up because I have a history of friction with the cops and like let's not make this difficult from the start like let's be on the same team let's just play along and then everything will will work itself out okay and she's like oh Phil by the way like do you have a really good criminalist on this right

and he's like um yeah we have a we uh the guy we have is okay is he talking about Mark Furman or somebody else no the criminalist is the person who gathers evidence at the crime scene oh okay so that's obviously like one of the most exacting jobs yeah if you don't collect the evidence in the correct manner and store it in the correct manner and right you know collect and test all of the relevant evidence from a crime scene yeah and not miss anything and not inadvertently destroy anything right like that's what you need in a criminalist yeah you need somebody with like a lot of color coded post-it notes and very good binders to keep all this stuff in yeah you need you need a fiend for binders you need a binder fiend yeah this is not what marcia clark is going to

get oh and marcia talks about the fact that during a previous case she had actually been so dissatisfied by some of the forensic work that the la pd did that she went to the sheriff's department instead oh interesting and they had to basically redo the la pd's work on her case police departments don't seem to like it when that kind of thing happens it's also so interesting of that there's all these people in criminal investigations that nobody makes tv shows about like you don't have the climax of a csi episode being that somebody put a piece of evidence in the wrong binder and like a bullet casing went missing and they can't try the case now not yet it's because i'm not in charge of tv yet but you just it'll be over for all you pictures once

that happens yeah i also think of like i don't know people who clean up crime scenes crime scene photographers are really important that's some good foreshadowing mike oh wait is it oh yeah we're going to be looking at lots and lots of crime scene photographs don't worry like we're going to be talking about like could this be green and yellow leaves could it could it you know we are yeah you know i love logistics and i just love all the logistics involved in this case you're going to love the very shack episode like that's going to be the sweet spot of all this for you i just want all the project management just give me all the project management this is why you're going to fall in love with marsha clark because she is at the end of the day a constantly disappointed project

manager i've never i've never felt for someone on the show so deeply and it's not even that her standards are that high you know she's like she's talking to van aderen she's like why don't we get dory music she's a criminalist we had on this other case we did together where we had to win it based on a single drop of blood like she did great on that why don't we use her on this and he's like no we've already put someone on it and i heard he was okay oh man and marsha writes okay was not terribly reassuring yeah what's his name i asked and van adder says it's guy named denis fung which wings of a very faint bell for me that's because very shack said his name probably 500 times okay in the kind of cadence of where is it mr fung does she know that he's bad

or she just like doesn't know who he is at all well marsha knows that phil van adder says he's quote okay which is like do you really want to hear that about anyone who's working on a case that you might also be working on like if i were like mike i found someone to make tote bags for us you were like oh are they good and i'd be like um they're okay right doesn't feel great does she make a thing out of it at the time or is she just like oh man let's let's hope this isn't as bad as it sounds no because of course marsha again like you can see how this is all everything that we are going to see is going to grow out of a very old structure right we're like the da's office doesn't totally trust the cops that they're working with marsha is kind of known as being difficult

okay essentially because she i guess wants like people who are better than okay to do forensics yeah and so her attitude i mean the same way that like when you go to thanksgiving with like your family who in order to avoid outright conflict with you're just kind of like grit your teeth and yeah sometimes it's easier to just eat the dry turkey right marsha is like sitting there eating the dry turkey yeah and she's like if i like play along and don't make this difficult for you now then you'll come through for me later right which again like that's not a healthy dynamic like if this was a relationship between two people you'd be like i don't know marsha a constant theme for our show i don't know this isn't great yeah so marsha marsha after she gets off the phone with

phil and learns about denis fine the okay criminalist goes to or j simpson's house in brentwood and i'll read you the scene she writes there is a cruiser parked up ahead where a uniformed officer directed traffic a few civilians milled around outside an iron security gate some of them had the nervous unfed look of reporters oh my god i slipped unnoticed past the press and through the gate where i got my first look at the larger tutor style house overhung with old eucalyptus trees the manicured ground seemed to glow an unnatural shade of green in the midday light in one corner of the lawn stood a child's playhouse okay simpson might be a has been i thought but he must still be bringing in serious bucks to manage the upkeep on this place i love

that that's where her mind goes like to me that really shows that she is a relentlessly practical person like she shows up at oj simpson's house everyone else is like this is an american tragedy okay simpson the great football star and she's like this is an expensive lawn right she's like what is the lawn maintenance schedule for this home yeah because it's like she's a practical thinker like she thinks about things in terms of like functional logistics is this also when she does the description of nicole that you read to us a couple episodes back yeah yes this is so this is where she sort of quote unquote meets nicole yeah this is also where marcia finds out that oj has a framed photo of him and nicole underneath his box spring what that's weird what's the photo of

well it's of nicole and oj dressed up for some kind of formal event okay he's in late middle age and he's keeping a photo of his ex-wife and himself underneath his bed because that's what time does to us so she's like basically wandering around oj's house just sort of looking at stuff wandering is kind of an app description because she gets there and she's like where is everybody so another robbery homicide guy burt looper is there and she's like where where tom and phil tom lang and phil van adder he's like oh oj showed up at the house and so tom and phil took him to parker center to question him oh okay so that's where oj is that's where oj is okay marcia's like okay that's a good use of their time well anyway not for me to micromanage i'm sure that the

detectives are doing their job yeah she's wondering when someone's going to show up and show her around and that's when she notices some guys approaching who quote had the unmistakable swagger of detectives okay once again mark farman is entering the story okay and of him she writes he was a real straight arrow hair closely trimmed she pressed a little more neatly than the others okay the main thing she mentions about mark farman is that he is not one for small talk she calls him politely condescending sick burn marcia so mark farman is the one who gives her a grand tour of rocking him first farman takes her to the spot where he found the glove which is on the path that runs behind the guest house where kato kalin has been staying and when the cops first got to oj's house they woke

up kato and interviewed him and first thought that he was on something because he was super woozy and disoriented which like they woke him up at six in the morning i feel like i would probably yeah seem pretty disoriented then but maybe he's like super disoriented but he tells them that he was on the phone with a friend the night before and he heard thumps coming from the wall like hard enough that like a picture that was on the wall was like shaken okay and thought for a second that they were having another earthquake okay and what ferman tells marches that he thinks that's the sound of the killer basically hitting that wall or that air conditioner and dropping the glove as a result hitting it with the car with his hand no with his body like he's running and it's dark and

he like runs into the air conditioner or he jumps over faults over a wall to get back onto the property and the thumps happen that way like this is there's a couple of different scenarios for this but basically that like whatever impact happens however it was made causes the second glove to basically like fall out of the killer's hand or something so the the the theory is that oj went over there committed the murders and then sort of rushed back yeah so the car is parked at a weird angle so it looks like it was just like parked in a hurry so mark ferman tells marcia that he thinks the killer basically ran into the air conditioner and then dropped the glove without realizing and marcia asks did you pick it up and he's like no i didn't pick up a piece of evidence

i'm a real detective that's his politely condescending i think one of the one of the sad parts of this case too is that like mark ferman actually like from the standpoint of like noticing things and gathering evidence and giving a shit about details and like assessing a situation like he does like in the kind of purely deductive realm seem to have been a pretty good detective like he actually seems to have been better at his job than a lot of the other people here interesting because ferman was the first detective assigned to the case very briefly they gave it to him and then they were like actually we're giving it to robry homicide okay so you're cool just you know go back to to the bench so he was on it very briefly the other thing that marcia points out

though is that ferman also seems to be totally starstruck by oj simpson this is what she says as we walked the lawn that sloped north toward ashford we came to a bronze statue of a man in football uniform he was holding a helmet ferman stopped in front of it he got that when he won the heisman trophy he said as if it was something i should know i sneaked a look at ferman out of the corner of my eye he was staring at that statue with unguarded awe oh my god it is so weird it's the dumbest shit how so the guy has a statue of himself in his own house yeah and also one that his his son from his first marriage attacked with a bat at one point i know mark ferman is not every man but i'm just thinking of all the men that accuse women of like being frivolous for being

into fashion or like the royal family or whatever it's like oh so why do you revere oj simpson oh because he can pick up a ball and run it across a line faster than the other boys can run it across a line and also avoid other boys who are trying to tackle him and stuff yeah it's like yeah women's women's hobbies are really really silly there buddy right literally everyone's interests are stupid like we should all just we should all just admit it my interests are stupid yours are that's why they're fun we can't all be interested in serious things all the time i know makeup is frivolous sports is frivolous it's fine yeah and that mark ferman based on his taped statements like is quite racist yes even he is like wow yeah it's the fastest boy i know it's so

so this is marcia this is ha the marcia clark story like this is it this is this is the world she's in yeah and everyone's like why is marcia doing her makeup that way and it's like yes if only marcia could master whatever you want her to do with foundation right this trial would swing her way like the the detectives would be competent and celebrity wouldn't be the one force more powerful than racism and she wouldn't be locked in a weird bureaucracy where she has to not really mention to their faces the terrible behavior of the detectives that she's working with because she has to maintain a good relationship with them it's like if only if only she wore lighter colors all that would go away okay so marcia goes back to the office she wants to hear how the case is going

she wants to know if they've arrested him how has the interview gone like what are they figuring out at the crime scene she's like waiting for the detectives to call her and her boss david khan is like why don't you give them a call and she says he was right why sit here like some deb waiting for a prom date i rang parker center which i love like this is her prom date she's waiting for these detectives get to get back to her and they're like oh yeah we interviewed him and we taped it don't worry about that and she's like so where are you holding him oh no wait so this is where we we now intersect with paula that like they let him go right eventually they let him go and they interview him for slightly over half an hour oh what

wait there's blood on the there's there's a trail of blood why what i mean yeah i mean try and do you want to hear some of the interview oh yes please okay extremely the other amazing thing okay did by the way is that he already has a lawyer at this point like he's not lawyerless he's he's he's already has a lawyer on hand but he decides that he wants to talk to the police by himself without counsel what just why not and this is just my guess but my guess here is that he's like i'm okay simpson i can get out of this right i can talk my way through it and they kind of let him oh god and so when marcia gets the tape of this the way she describes it is that she like sits down in her oversized leatherette chair and she like gets ready to parse the evidence and

you know kind of settles in to listen to this long interrogation where they're gonna catch him in his inconsistencies yeah she's lit candles she's got madonna's erotica on she's in the tub she's got exactly she's in her her happy place and they kind of pleasantly chat with him for half an hour and are like well go call your girlfriend i guess i want to hear these excerpts from the interview i'm like already mad i'm like pre mad thinking about this interview how do you think marcia feels oh my god i know let me just read let me read a little bit of this to you so van adder we're investigating obviously the death of your ex-wife and another man lang says someone told us that van adder says yeah and we're gonna need to talk to you about that

god it's like an internet day it's like when you you catch your child flagrantly masturbating and you're like i'm embarrassed to i don't want you to feel bad but like i know what you're doing so van adder says yeah and we're gonna need to talk to you about that are you divorced from her now ok says yes and van adder says what was your relationship with her what was the and oj says well we tried to get back together and it just didn't work and i think we both knew it wasn't working and probably three weeks ago we said it just wasn't working and we want our separate ways what would you respond to that with i mean i guess you would ask if if if he had any reason to be angry with her like trying to feel out if he had a motive this is

with all of my background knowledge but i noticed he says probably three weeks ago or so we said it just wasn't working and we want our separate ways my first impulse is to be like oh so like was it totally mutual like you both totally because like how often do totally mutual breakups happen yeah it's kind of a conspicuously friction-free thing to describe yeah so like you said she came back about a year and four months ago about us trying to get back together and we gave it a shot and probably three weeks ago or so we said it just wasn't working and we want our separate ways and van adder says okay the two children are yours he's like all right great that's like me on this podcast just like okay okay yeah i'm acting him saying okay i don't want to talk about michael

bolden okay the two children are yours and oj says yes van adder says how is your separation and oj says for me it was big problems i loved her i didn't want us to separate and van adder says uh-huh i understand she made a couple of crime reports or something i don't think that vagueness is because he doesn't know what he's talking about i think again it's like um so this is embarrassing this also implies that he knows that there are reports of domestic abuse yeah it certainly seems that he does well let me read you the next exchange so oj says uh we have a big fight about six years ago on new years you know she made a report i didn't make a report and then we had an altercation about a year ago maybe this is the 1993 911 call where he's kicking her door in

it wasn't a physical argument i kicked her door or something oh my god van adder says and she made a police report on those two occasions and oj says mm-hmm and i stayed right there until the police came lang says were you arrested at one time for something and oj says no i mean five years ago we had a big fight six years ago i don't know i know i ended up doing community service like the way he talks about this it's like if you like spoke french as a child but you haven't since then you're like oh it's through the misty haze of time i vaguely remember i see myself doing community service but like it just feels like he hasn't integrated it as part of what he sees as his actual past yeah like he hasn't thought much about it or see he doesn't see it as significant

i wonder if they are domestic abuse illiterate to the degree that they don't see a connection between the previous charges and the possibility of him having committed the murder yeah that's what i'm wondering too yeah like seeing it as the equivalent of like a burglary charge or something that like he's got priors but like maybe that's just not super relevant i don't know credible so he says after the recital was the last time he saw nicole and her family and he claims that nicole's mom invited him to dinner but he said no i have never heard anyone else say that that happened so that's interesting right um i would find it interesting if like even in a police interrogation he's like lying about something irrelevant that just seems to be about his pride that's like oh

no nicole's mom totally wanted me to come to dinner it's like he can't not lie it's fascinating van adder says where did you go from there okay okay says ah home home for a while got my car for a while tried to find my girlfriend for a while came back to the house it's like a little poem yeah so what time do you think you got back home actually physically got home seven something van adder says seven something and then he left and and again it's like so you're leaving it was seven something you're like oh seven something yeah that's mm-hmm yes right it is mystifying right because like this is not their first time being cops like they know what they're doing and then he left and nicole says yeah i'm trying to think did i leave you know i'm always i had to

run and get my daughter some flowers i was actually doing the recital so i rushed to get her some flowers so now he's suddenly talking about before the recital he's like switched to a different period of time right and i came home and then i called paula as i was going to her house and paula wasn't home okay van adder paula is your girlfriend simpson girlfriend yeah although she had actually broken up with him by voicemail that morning so even that's a little exaggeration too he's like yeah my girlfriend that's the ticket my girlfriend who broke up with me and fled to las vegas to be with michael bolton like all girlfriends do van adder so you didn't see your last night about paula okay says no we'd been to a big affair the night before and then i came back home i was basically

at home and then they asked him if he was scheduled to play golf today he says yes in chicago he was playing with like hurts clients this is essentially a lot of his work at this point in his life involves like playing golf in some way interesting just like glad-handing various corporate people and then van adder says what time did you leave last night leave the house okay about the lemma was supposed to be there at 10 45 normally they get there a little earlier i was rushing around somewhere between there and 11 van adder so approximately 10 45 to 11 simpson 11 o'clock yeah somewhere in that area right ish i find it so interesting that they put no effort into establishing time frame during this conversation i know and also the fact that

essentially his alibi for this whole thing is like i was at home by myself yeah watching turner classic movies like is that the whole alibi even if they have like very incomplete information like even if we're as charitable as possible about like what they do and do not know like they know that the time between like 9 and 11 p.m. is extremely important right and they're just like okay next question right that's like a pretty long period of time that he hasn't accounted or where he's basically given himself these like areas of strategic wiggle room like all of these are basically holes that he and his lawyers are going to be able to squirm through later right and they're not challenging him on any of them and they're not sealing them up

they're letting them stay there on the record unbelievable imagine marcia sitting there in her chair i know i'm imagining her with a glass of red wine just like angrily smoking a cigarette and the camera zooming in slowly as she's listening to this that would be riveting so okay says of calling paula he says i called her a couple of times and she wasn't there and i left a message and then i checked my messages and there were no new messages she wasn't there and she may have to leave town then i came back and ended up sitting with kato wait so he hung out with kato at the time is that his alibi he did he came home and he hung back with he hung around with kato okay so okay says he went out and got a burger with kato and but he came home

kind of leisurely and got ready to go this is like a rare moment of the cops like seizing on something because lang says he weren't in a hurry when he came back with the bronco and okay says no and lang says the reason i asked you the cars were parked kind of at a funny angle stuck out in the street and okay says well it's parked because when i was hustling at the end of the day to get all my stuff and i was getting my phone and everything off it when i just pulled it out of the gate there it's like it's a tight turn lang so you had it inside the compound then simpson yeah lang oh okay the word okay is said 27 times in this transcript and only three of those times are oj pan adder says how did you get the inquiry on your hand now this is important because when they

bring him in for questioning they do notice that he has a cut on one of his fingers oh my god again the evidence to move forward in time a little bit and quote from marcia she's will later say in court the bloody glove that was found at the crime scene is left-handed that's a very important fact and then she says there were bloody shoe prints leaving the crime scene and to the left of those prints were blood drops so marcia says that shows us that the killer was injured somewhere on his left side the blood on the driver's door handle of the ford bronco would logically be open with the left hand and it's no coincidence that we just happened to find the blood spot on the driver's door handle now on the day the defendant returned from chicago detective van adder makes the observation

that he saw the left-handed bloody glove left at the crime scene that clearly came off during the struggle which is what allowed him to get the cut that left the blood drops to the left of the footprints van adder sees the blood drops on the driver's hand door he sees the defendant with a bandage around his middle left finger and then he takes him down to parker center where he sees again that he has a swollen finger on the left hand with a cut that was dressed and treated at parker center no coincidence so he literally he comes into this questioning without his lawyer with a cut on his left hand which the police already can observe corresponds with evidence that they found at the crime scene and the police are the ones who dress his wound for him i mean

van adder says how did you get the injury on your hand and oh he says i don't know the first time when i was in chicago and all but at the house i was just running around not convincing okay well it's also it's like so there's a second time what like you injured your hand twice now i guess yeah you don't remember getting a deep cut on your hand or like you do remember but it was two different times somehow yeah what van adder says how did you do it in chicago okay says i broke a glass one of you guys had just called me and i was in the bathroom and i just kind of went bonkers for a little bit what is that how you cut it it was cut before but i think i just opened it again i'm not sure so it's like okay so what he's

saying is that he cut it the first time at the house getting ready to leave and then he recut it when he broke a glass in chicago unbelievable lang so do you recall bleeding at all simpson yeah i mean i knew i was bleeding but it was no big deal i bleed all the time i play golf and stuff so there's always something mixing stuff here and there and it's like yes okay you play golf so you're always getting deep cuts on your hands the rough and tumble life of a golfer they say when was the last time you were at nicole's house okay says i don't go in i won't go in her house it's like oh that's an interesting reaction from someone who had a mutual break up had a mutual break i haven't been her house in a week maybe five days i go to her house a lot i mean i'm always

dropping the kids off picking the kids up fooling around with the dog you know van adder how does that usually work do you drop them at the pork or do you go in with them simpson no i don't go in the house van adder says you haven't had any problems with her lately have you oj oj says i always have problems with her you know our relationship has been a problem relationship van adder did you talk to her last night simpson to ask to speak to my daughter to congratulate my daughter and everything van adder but you didn't have a conversation with her simpson no van adder what were you wearing last night oj okay what kind of shoes were you wearing tennis shoes tennis shoes do you know what kind probably rebock that's all i wear

and the fact that he's saying all he wears is rebock and that they're not pressing him on that either is interesting because they're like oh you only wear one kind of shoe and it's definitely not the kind of brand of shoe that was worn by the killer you go to a lot of black tie functions and so on you guess wear rebocks every single day so he's kind of making small talk with them about you know his whole life is on and off airplanes he's always flying off somewhere to play golf the hectic life of oj simpson and then kind of as the interview is winding down they start kind of getting to the point and van adder says oj we've got sort of a problem we've got some blood on and in your car we've got some blood at your house sorry to break this to you pal

we got sort of a problem tell us about the old little diddly dang old blood we found in your little truck we know oj says well take my blood test and lang says well we'd like to do that we've got of course the cut on your finger that you aren't real clear on do you recall having that cut on your finger the last time you were at nicole's house oj no it was last night and they come back to the fact that they have been trying to reconcile until about three weeks ago van adder did you ever hit her oj oj says uh one night we had a fight and she hit me and they never took my statement they never wanted to hear my side and they never wanted to hear the housekeeper side i'm the real victim perfect nicole was drunk she did her thing she started tearing up my house you know i didn't

punch her or anything but i and van adder says slapped her a couple times and oj says no no i wrestled her is what i did i didn't slap her at all i mean nicole's a strong girl she's uh one of the most conditioned women since that period of time she's hit me a few times but i've never touched her after that and i'm telling you it's five six years ago oj is like not good at saying when something happened you're like okay like when is the movie gonna start and he's like between six and eight thirty that's not helpful and then lang asks oj about taking a polygraph test for them oj says should i talk about my thoughts on that i'm sure eventually i'll do it but he's like should i talk about my yeah okay yes i'm doing it okay nicole's mom is quoted in

shila weller's book saying that if you were having a phone call with oj you could like put the phone down for five minutes and come back and he would still be in mid soliloquy i've been on dates like that where you accidentally bring up barefoot running and then you get like a 35 minute long monologue one of the sad things about this interview is that like it would suck if they had any suspect in a case where there was this much evidence and they put this little pressure on him but you also get the sense that like it's harder for him not to talk than to talk he's like should i talk about my thoughts on the polygraph well i am so yeah let's it's happening yeah it feels it almost it feels like watching someone just take a bite straight out of a string cheese

it's like why would you do that so lang says understand the reason we're talking to you is because you're the ex-husband and oj says i know i'm the number one target and now you tell me i've got blood all over the place like it's their fault god ah okay this is almost over we're getting there lang once again confirms he gets okay to say again like he gives him a chance to go back on this like let me get this straight you've never physically been inside the house and simpson says not in the last week and lang says ever and oj says oh christ i slept at the house many many many times you know i've done everything at the house you know i'm just saying you're talking in the last week or so okay and it's like i have never been inside the house and they're like so you've never been in

the house and he's like not in the last week it's not like a criminal mastermind we're interrogating here this is not like a little verbal chess game this is the last little bit of tape he says oh i'll tell you i did see her one day i don't know if this is the early part of last week i went because my son had to go and get something and he ran in and she came to the gate and the dog ran out and her friend fey and i went looking for the dog that may have been a week ago i don't know lang to van adder got a photographer coming van adder no we're going to take him up there lang we're ready to terminate this at 1407 crack work guys so they have started this interview at 135 p.m. and ended it at 207 awesome good stuff you got him alone we got a lawyer why take up

longer time than an episode of er good stuff so i mean what like what was the purpose of this what did they learn what what do you even say at this point it's like so obvious you sound you seem speechless i'm stymied tell me just like what comes to your head because i've been immersed in this for so long that like these details are pretty familiar to me like i think i've lost some of my surprise it just seems like at this point they should like arrest the guy like he doesn't have a strong alibi he just broke up with his ex-wife who he has a history of domestic abuse with and who made a 911 call about him less than a year ago exactly there's one glove at the murder scene and the other fucking glove at his house i just don't understand how they're not just like

we got him boys i mean the defense will later argue that like the sheer quantity of evidence actually supports their claim that oj was framed and it's like you know what kind of like people don't often leave this much evidence behind right when they commit a murder so i mean they can't have been confused about what any of this meant yeah but i feel like they knew what they had to do but they just like didn't do it what do you think explains this are are they just dazzled by his celebrity like what what is this marcia says they tell her that he's too famous to flee and she's like bullfucking shit who cares it doesn't matter there's more stuff you can do beside fleeing he could be intimidating witnesses he could be tampering with evidence he could be

destroying evidence like what are you talking about oh marcia and they talked to him for 30 minutes during which they don't really pin him down on much of anything and then he gets to go and then there's four days between the police interview and him surrendering and being arrested where he has that time to basically be ironing things out yeah with his lawyers to be potentially doing all the stuff marcia talked about he does seem to have spent a lot of time just like drugged watching turner classic movies but i mean still still but so yeah so is contemporaneously like is marcia as mad about this then as we are now like is it obvious to her how bad this was michael you know marcia and her ways i mean you know i mean think about the fact that you and i

are like very soft on crime people who also don't know how to be cops or lawyers and we're like oh this is bad yeah marcia is fucking livid so what does she do nothing she has to maintain a good relationship with the cops oh so she can't like go in their bust heads no she has to be like that was great oh no so okay here's what marcia says you ready i didn't get it simpson had spent three full hours at the station what could they have been doing all that time oh he was there for three hours he was okay i was even more disturbed by what was on the tape phil and tom both sounded exhausted that was understandable they've been up since three in the morning of june 13th but that was no reason to allow a potential suspect in a double murder to

set the program for the interview yeah any monday morning quarterback that's us can now see that simpson lied to tom and phil all through that interview of course some of the lies weren't as apparent to them at the time for instance simpson claimed that he'd been invited to dinner with the brown family after their recital which nicole's mother would later deny tom and phil couldn't have known that yet but on other more elemental points like where and when he'd parked the bronco there was plenty they could have done yeah laying what time did you last park the bronco eight something replied the suspect maybe seven eight o'clock eight nine o'clock i don't know right in that right in that area marcia says the follow-up should have come hard and fast

well what the hell was it seven seven thirty eight or nine you knew you had a flight to catch so shouldn't you have been aware of the time what time did you park what did you do then right on some fundamental level i think tom and phil wanted to hear a plausible explanation that would eliminate simpson from suspicion just when they got a big opening they'd move on to something else and then marcia is sitting there listening to this very short interview and gets to the part where they're questioning him about the 1989 beating and asked so you slapped her a couple times and he says no i wrestled her is all i did and i say oh okay and marcia thanks to herself nicole is dead his children have no mother he's talking about the time he was arrested for beating her and once

again he's whining about how he feels mistreated right as i sat listening to this crap i thought this guy is going to deny everything all the way he's never going to confess there wasn't one shred of remorse there not enough real soul for him to need to unburden it by telling the truth right that interview was one of the worst bits of police work i'd ever seen but i kept my thoughts to myself i couldn't afford to alienate my chief investigators besides it was spilt milk complaining about their ineptitude would not help me get through this case so she just swallows it she has to yeah you just have to you know you have you have to say well it's done you know we can't go back and we're gonna move forward and i'm gonna maintain relations with my detectives and she

has no power to affect things either so it's like she she's watching this like us watching a horror movie right that she's like don't go in the basement she's like don't put these ding dongs on this case we're gonna fuck it up well and think about the fact that shirley has a reputation for like being difficult because of her like past insistence on having like good forensic evidence right shirley has a reputation for having standards yeah i mean speaking of the difference between marcia four years ago and marcia now is that i think we're all much more poised to hear the word difficult in like a gendered way now yeah but it's like typically when we have women in professional positions who are considered difficult it usually means like yes they are insisting on standards

or like you know actresses that are difficult because like they complained about rampant sexual harassment on the set like it just hearing that a woman is considered difficult i just hear it so differently now than i used to they didn't want to be sexually assaulted at work so she's aware of this dynamic from day this is literally day one so she's like she's seeing this celebrity blindness take over the entire police force already yeah she knows what she has to work with she's being given kind of in many form what this entire trial is going to be for her which is that she doesn't have trustworthy allies in the la pd everything is political like she's looking at essentially like an app sampler of the next 15 months of her life yeah and god bless marcia

because you know she has had a day right she goes home to be with her two little kids and the wall behind her bed basically gets damp and moldy in spring and fall so she spends like spring and fall with respiratory infections well this is like so erin brokovich to me right she goes home to her like public servant tract home in glendale with her two little kids with her like swamp wall and finds like a spider the size of a pinball she says hanging out in her room and she's just like well i got a new case i'm pretty excited right and she writes i found to my surprise that i was in an indestructibly good mood true the cops had cut loose the suspect in a double homicide when they had a mountain of evidence to hold him true they were holding me at

arm's length but you work with what you've got the fact of the matter was i loved having a new case a new case is like a secret lover you think about it plan for it it infuses unrelated events with a sense of purpose that's how it's supposed to feel mind and heart engaged neither tripping over the other i hadn't been that happy in a long time oh it's like the letters from nicole talking about being happy with oj it's like looking at the footage from their wedding it's like everyone's so happy but you know it's gonna end in this nightmare it's like no marsha with marsha it's interesting because i feel like she's observing the arc of this for like the rest of her life so like this case destroyed her she didn't even clean out her desk after it ended like someone

else had to do it for her she like could not go back to her office she never got her desk clean you know i mean this was it for her yeah she was done this was the end of her life as a trial lawyer really maybe this is just me like over identifying with her and wanting her to be like me but i feel like i see in her kind of the thing that we saw in nancy carrigan when she skated at 1993 worlds and just like fell a bunch and just like the footage of her in that competition the camera like zooms really close on her face as her scores are coming back and you can see her feeling like she let everybody down yeah and i feel like marsha feels like she either has to nail this or let everybody down right i guess i almost wonder if like if having an experience where the entire world

watched her fail and blamed her for it was like the only thing that could like make marsha not blame herself all the time like what if you know looking at the world blaming you and being like well that's not totally true i didn't screw everything up maybe everything isn't my fault what do you think i feel like we struggle to separate the outcome from the process yeah like they lost this case it should have been a slam dunk and they lost it like that's an undeniable thing but it's also it's possible to be good at your job and still fail and it's possible to be really bad at your job and still win mic i do it every day and so i think it's like we we look at the result and then we backfill whatever like well if she lost she must have been incompetent

she must not have cared enough she must have bungled evidence she must and she must be in charge of all of the failures right all of the failures must be hers because she oversaw this big failure right like marsha is the dictator of like the entire legal system in this scenario where it was all under her control i'm sure that marsha made mistakes and i'm sure that oj's team made mistakes too right once the victory is locked in then it's like no she must have sucked and they must have been geniuses because we don't want to believe that we could be marsha we could all be marsha at any time yeah we are all one terrible project management away from just tearing our hair out in the way that she was forced to right we promised you the bronco

chase in this episode it's not happening we've been recording for five hours and it's getting dark and i was supposed to go outside today so i'm very sorry sometimes the flat iron of hindsight is slow yes what are you excited to talk about next the bronco chase i'm gonna keep saying never like the next three episodes until we get to it what if we never talk about it we never get to it we just keep doing this podcast for the rest of our lives every episode we move more slowly toward the goal yeah it's kind of it's like that math problem about if you like cut your the distance you travel in half each time will you ever reach the bronco chase no