You're Wrong About - The O.J. Simpson Trial: Marcia Clark Part 2

Episode Date: March 9, 2020

Sarah tells Mike about a week in the life of Marcia Clark, who became America’s most famous prosecutor on June 13, 1994. Digressions include car phones, college group work and “Titanic” (as usual). In keeping with the theme of this episode, Sarah had a bad feeling about recording without her mic screen, but Mike said it would be fine. Please excuse our p-pops.This episode contains descriptions of murder and sexual violence.Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Sorry, I'm just, I want some cake. I need some cake right now. I knew you had an ulterior motive with asking me, Mike, what do you think? And then you take like three big bites of cheesecake. It's like, I see what you're doing, Sarah. Listen, I thought you was an interlocutor. Also, both things are true simultaneously. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that goes in a low-speed pursuit of historical truth. Ah, that's very good.

Because of the Bronco Chase. Yeah, I know. The best jokes are the ones you have to explain immediately afterwards. I think people got it. I trust our listeners to have understood that, but I'm happy that we're assuming no baseline of knowledge. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I am Sarah Marshall, and I am working on a book about the satanic panic. And we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About,

and we have a cute merch store and lots of other places you can find us in the description. And we are picking up our O.J. Simpson saga today, which I realized this morning what we're doing is telling a story in the O.J. Cinematic Universe. Yeah, we're like eight hours into this thing, and we've only covered like 72 hours of time, and I want more. So yeah, tell us about what has happened so far, and who have we met so far, and if someone perversely wanted to start listening to this series at Marcia Clarke, part two, part eight of the whole, like if they wanted to do that, how would we bring them up to speed? I mean, first of all, don't do that. Go back to the beginning. Secondly, we've met O.J.

and Nicole, who were in a 17-year-long, extraordinarily abusive relationship. The abuse culminated in, we believe, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson on June 13, 1994. The night of June 12, 1994. And so, so far, we have heard from Paula Barbieri, the woman who has decided to stay with O.J. despite knowing something about his abusive past at this point. We've met Kato Kalin, the house guest who had a lot of chances to save Nicole and didn't, and fell into O.J.'s trust instead. And of course, we've met Marcia Clarke, who is the prosecutor, new on the scene, and sort of watching this investigation unfold outside of her power. Yeah, and at the end of the day, you know, all of this has happened,

and she's like, well, okay, still walking free. There's all this evidence against him. The cops are being weirdly deferential. I don't understand why, but goes home and is like, I have a new case, and this is the happiest I've felt in a long time. Right. That's where we left her, this little moment of euphoria. Yeah. So I wanted to start by talking a little bit about who Marcia Clarke is as a lawyer going into this experience. And for that, I want to talk about the murder of Rebecca Schaefer. Okay. Do you know anything about that story? Literally nothing. So luckily, our friend of the show, Rachel Monroe, wrote a nice succinct description of this case in her book, Savage Appetites, which I will read you now. Rebecca Schaefer was a rising star building off

a lead role on a CBS sitcom she'd landed as a teenager. Her fan mail included letters from an Arizona man named Robert John Bardo. It soon became clear that Bardo's interest in Schaefer was excessive. He showed up at the Warner Brothers set once with a giant stuffed bear and once with a knife. Both times he was turned away by security. One of Schaefer's films, scenes from the class struggling Beverly Hills included a scene of Schaefer in bed with a man. This enraged Bardo. It proved that she was quote another Hollywood horror he explained later. Oh my god. Bardo got her home address from her DMV records, sent his sister an ominous letter, quote, I have an obsession with the unattainable. I have to eliminate what I cannot attain. Then headed to LA one more time.

On July 18, 1989, he knocked on Schaefer's door and spoke with her briefly. She told him not to come back. An hour later he returned. When she answered the door quote with a cold look on her face, as Bardo described it, he shot her in the stomach killing her. And at the time there are no anti-stocking laws in the country. This is what inspires California to enact the first anti-stocking law. 1989 is the year after I was born. Like I find it amazing that like all of the country's anti-stocking laws are younger than me. Yeah. They're just hitting their thirties. Their knees are starting to go. My knees are fine. Thank you very much because I don't run.

So when this goes to trial, Marcia prosecutes Robert John Bardo. How old is Marcia at this point? She's in her mid thirties. Okay. Here's what Marcia writes in her memoir without a doubt about prosecuting that case. Bardo was my first quote celebrity case. I didn't ask for it. It simply landed on my desk. The deputies at special trials do not as a rule clamor for big assignments like hounds after hush puppies, which is like, all right. Our office has learned from hard experience that every celebrity case carries with it the potential for disaster. Though it can be a career maker, as the Manson case was for Vincent Bulliosi, it is just as likely to be a sinkhole. And the more Titanic the celebrity, the deeper the potential

drop. When Bardo landed on my desk, I'd never really had any experience with the press. To me, the attention this case attracted only created annoying complications. The trial was covered gavel to gavel by a new cable network called Court TV. In the Bardo case, the fact that hearings were broadcast seemed to have little impact on the proceedings. The real problems began when TV and print reporters interviewed witnesses, causing several to drop out of sight before we could get to them. Journalists inevitably wound up telling their sources things about the case, which meant that the integrity of the witness's memory was compromised. Only after I sat down with each of them and did a careful remedial interview was I able to get clean statements

unencumbered by hearsay. It was my job to convict Bardo of the heinous crime of murder, well quote, lying in wait, one of several special circumstances that can put a defendant in line for the death penalty. So Marsha writes about how she receives two hours of taped interviews between Bardo and the defense psychiatrist, Park Dietz. And Marsha, by watching the tape over and over again, notices that what Bardo acts out doing is different from what he says he does. So she writes, Bardo had claimed that the gun was in his bag, and that when he pulled it out to look for something else, Rebecca panicked and grabbed the weapon. In the struggle, he claimed it discharged accidentally killing her. But in Bardo's reenactment, he kept his right hand

behind his back and drew it out as though he were holding a gun. That was the physical equivalent of a Freudian slip, something that would tip the court off to the fact that this was no accidental or impulsive shooting. It did precisely that. And so Marsha thinks that this is one of the things that allows her to win this case. That's like a real Perry Mason moment. It is, isn't it? She writes about feeling this profound sense of duty to Rebecca's parents. And especially, it seems, her mother, Dana Schaefer. And so she writes about being on the phone with her, kind of talking her through the process and through the trial, which ultimately does convict Robert John Bardo. Does she get the death penalty? No, he's given life without possibility of parole.

Okay. So I'm sure Marsha is disappointed, but I'm happier about that outcome. Well, this speaks to what I'm about to read to you, because Marsha talks about developing a relationship with Rebecca Schaefer's mother and then also about, you know, writing letters to her, expressing her thoughts and feelings about the case. And she quotes a letter in her memoir that says, even as I'm writing this, I'm crying again. As I feared, once you start letting yourself feel, it's an endless thing. If all goes well, the miserable, slimy piece of cow dung will be convicted of everything. I can offer only that I will do everything in my power to see that her loss is avenged. I cannot promise justice because to me, justice would mean

Rebecca is alive and her murderer is dead. What do you think about that? I mean, Marsha is kind of a carceral feminist. She's part of the movement that we've talked about in the human trafficking episodes and in the victims rights episode, these ideas of retributive justice that murderers are pieces of shit in this sort of simplistic way and we should be throwing the book at them every chance we get and that the definition of justice is this kind of eye for an eye, a woman is dead, so a man must be dead kind of framing. Yeah. And I mean, what do you think about that? I mean, it's just complicated. Like, I like Marsha, but she's part of a culture among prosecutors that I think has this framing. I mean, I don't know where people

go to prosecutor school, but like it seems like a pretty widespread belief among prosecutors that this is what the justice system is for and this is what justice as a concept is. Yeah. I think people go to prosecutor school by working for and studying under other prosecutors. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I feel like this letter embodies the crux of my complicated feelings about Marsha Clark, which is that like, I think it's very bad that we live in a society where it's considered normal behavior for a prosecutor to refer to the defendant in a trial as a slimy piece of cow dung. It's like, find me a non slimy piece of cow dung for a start. That's just overkill. You know, it's, we've accepted that in the system we have, it's normal for the system itself and

the people who therefore embody it, you know, that we consider it normal and fine for them to express this hate and this anger and this impartial, you know, often the desire for some kind of cruelty. Right. And I don't like that. And I don't like that it's normalized. And I think that it's horrifying that we live in a society that claims to be humanitarian and that has, you know, aside from every other contradiction to that theme, that for its entire existence has thrived on the assumption that there is this class called the criminal. And once we maneuver someone into it based perhaps on something that they have done and perhaps based entirely on circumstances that they cannot control, once someone is a criminal, you can do anything to them.

Right. I also think, I mean, the reason why the cow dung thing, I think rubs both of us the wrong way, isn't because the guy isn't a piece of cow dung or because he didn't do something cow dung-ish. But what's interesting is this sort of assembly line of justice where by the time something lands on Marsha's desk, it's like she only sees the cow dungs of the world, right? That like she's not involved in the earlier stages. She's not involved in looking into his past or looking at all the systemic failures or whatever else. Like her role in the assembly line is to take the pieces of shit and get the worst consequences for them. Like that's her role. So it makes perfect sense that she would describe him that way and that she would speak in this way that, frankly, if a

random person said, this stalker guy killed this woman, what a piece of shit. I'd be like, yeah, what a piece of shit. I don't mind language like that from sort of lay people. I think it's fine to have that view. But coming from a prosecutor, especially from an office that is based around reinforcing that view of crime and reinforcing that view of criminals, I hear it differently. Because like, I mean, I think this dude sucks. Like, I'm completely uncomfortable with this dude kind of sucks. But there's also deep mental illness that like there's with people that do things like this and get these fixations, there's obviously something deeper going on. Right. And then that leads you to the question of, you know, do you, who do you hold to a higher

standard? The insane man or the society that doesn't protect young women and doesn't have anti-stalking laws at this point? Right. I mean, speaking of the OJ cinematic universe, I love and hate and love that Marcia says I can offer only that I will do everything in my power to see that her loss is avenged. Yeah. You know, like that's intense. It's like, oh, that's really inappropriate for a prosecutor to be talking that way. But I understand what it's like to talk that way as a woman. And very few people did that. I mean, it's not, this isn't something that the justice system was set up for, obviously. So it is kind of like she is kind of a crusader on this issue, which is something we like. Yeah. And she's a champion. And she wants to be a champion for

for women like Rebecca Schaefer and then eventually for Nicole in ways that are like inappropriate to her job description. And also you're like, well, who else was going to do it, apparently, you know, it's just, I feel so complexly about my crash. I think it's, I think it's okay to have kombucha face about this one. Yeah. I mean, it's both. It's someone speaking publicly in a way that is very gratifying to see and also in a way where you're like, well, I'm glad someone's doing it, but like, maybe it shouldn't be you. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, yeah, that's Marsha's career, you know, a few years prior to this. Okay. So we've moved forward in time. It is the morning of Tuesday, June 14. I'm so excited, Sarah. Finally, we're finally back.

Finally, it's Tuesday. I'm so excited. I'm going to be silent for the next two hours. Just tell me what happens. I want to know so bad. Okay. So I'll give you Marsha's opening to this chapter because it's really good. So the chapter is titled, God, do we look like morons? And it opens, Marsha, it's crazy here. It was the delicate, nervous voice of Suzanne Childs on my car phone. I'm weaving in and out of lanes trying to balance the handset against my cigarette. The damned window on the driver's side won't roll up. I'm struggling to hear her over the traffic. You won't believe what's going on. Calm down, Suzanne. Just calm down. Suzanne is our conscientious and permanently agitated media relations director. This is her third call to me that morning and

everyone has been urgent. The press was hounding Guilford details about the Simpson case, she said. Please, did I have any more info I could pass along? I love all these 90s details of like the car phone. I'm imagining her in a convertible, although I'm sure that's not the case, and like a long cigarette, like a long menthol cigarette. I would guess that Marsha smoked normal length cigarettes, but what do I know? That's my own personal mental image. But yeah, I remember in the 90s understanding that like, because my mom had a beeper, which I thought was very cool and official. And I understood that like parents and movies who like didn't care sufficiently about their children had car phone. Sally Field and Mrs. Doubtfire might have

had one. Yeah. So Marsha is now telling us about how last night she was watching the news and has been annoyed about how the news reports so far are already talking about quote, the football great, which is how the LA Times phrased it and also presenting information that Marsha hasn't heard yet and hasn't gotten from the police. Oh, shit. And she's apparently been calling the police has called them several times. And they're like not answering and not returning her calls. And she's like, so it's been 24 hours and I'm getting my information from the TV news. And I shouldn't be getting it directly from the cops. This feels fantastic. Yeah. So Marsha gets to the office. The DA's office guard Francis is also frazzled because the press has just been

there in full force. The Los Angeles district attorney's office isn't prepared for the amount of media attention that they're getting, which is like interesting in itself, I think. Yeah. Although nobody is I mean, the amount of media attention is unprecedented. Although I don't know. Is it is it at this point? Is it is it a huge deal yet before the Bronco Chase? So the Rebecca Schaefer case was pretty big. And then the last two big Los Angeles media trials, media criminal events, proceeding this have been the case of the Menendez brothers and the allegations of sexual abuse against Michael Jackson. Oh, both future you're wrong about topics. So no spoilers. Well, some spoilers, some spoilers. So to talk about the torch passing in terms of celebrity

cases from the Menendez brothers to OK, I'm going to read you. We're going to return to our friend Dominic Dunn. Oh, remind us who that is. I love quizzing you. I'm sorry. He's a writer, right? Yeah. Dominic Dunn started writing for Vanity Fair when he was covering the trial of the man who killed his daughter, Dominique Dunn. He had just been covering the Menendez brothers trial to that point. He's written several very long pieces about that as well. And so he starts off his coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, which by the way, I have to tell you is inside of an issue of Vanity Fair that features Brad Pitt on the cover. And the headline is Brad boy. Oh, OK. Brad boy. It's a pun. Oh, God. Oh, I didn't even get that. Oh, there it is. I was like,

where's my reaction? I'm entitled to a reaction. That's my reaction. So this issue is from February 1995. So picture it's 1995. You're like reading your Brad boy Vanity Fair. And you get to the first blockbuster coverage of the OJ Simpson trial, which is titled LA in the Age of OJ. Oh, Dominic Dunn writes, when I returned to New York last February, after seven months here covering the first Menendez trial, it never occurred to me that another cataclysmic event, another double homicide in high circles, would bring this city to a halt again so soon. But it has. And I'm back. And there's quite a lot going on, even though neither trial has started yet. Simpson is the most famous American to be

charged with a violent crime since fatty Arbuckle was tried for manslaughter back in the 20s amid rumors that he had inserted a Coca Cola bottle into a young woman's vagina during an orgy at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, thereby causing her death. Jesus fucking Christ. Speaking of episodes, Arbuckle was acquitted after three trials, but his reputation and career were ruined. In the wake of the killings of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman last June, OJ has superseded all others in history as the town's top topic, a topic that will continue to captivate until the jury arrives at a verdict if it does arrive at a verdict. The cynicism of the citizenry about the possibility of a conviction after two non verdicts in the Menendez trial makes hung jury and acquittal

the most often repeated words in the community. The late un lamented Jose Menendez about whom a decent word was scarcely uttered during the six month murder trial of the two sons who had shotguned him and his wife, Kitty, to death was once a top ranking executive at Hertz car rental. At the time, OJ Simpson was doing his extremely popular commercials for Hertz. The story goes that Lyle and Eric Menendez then preteenagers were fans of the football star, so one night Jose and Kitty invited OJ to dinner with them and their sons, and the evening was a great success. The Menendez brothers and OJ Simpson did not meet again until they were all in the celebrity section of the Los Angeles County Jail, all three charged with

double murder. OJ was briefly in the cell next to Eric's, then Eric was moved to another cell block. Subsequently, Simpson was put in an area by himself where he has an exercise machine and a private room for his visitors. Even in jail, the Menendez brothers have been upstaged by the star quality of OJ Simpson. Wow, what a weird cosmic crossover. And like maybe that story about him coming to dinner is apocryphal, but like, maybe not. It doesn't seem implausible, right? Yeah. He liked executives. That was the class of person he spent probably the most time around. I just assume that once you reach a certain level of net worth, every other rich person in your neighborhood just comes by and introduces themselves with like a tray of brownies. Like in curb your enthusiasm.

Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, at the time, you know, the Menendez brothers are going to be convicted eventually, but not at the time that OJ is first making news. Okay. And so there is the sense of like, hmm, can anyone be convicted of anything? Right. So it's before it's after their hung jury, but before their conviction. So it feels like that case is up in the air at the same time that OJ is up in the air. Okay. So here's a quote from a New York Times article about the deadlock juries in the Menendez brothers trial. Okay. So the New York Times writes, the outcome was a qualified victory for the defense and a case in which the brothers admitted the killings, but said they had acted in self defense after years of sexual and emotional abuse by their father. The prosecutors

charged that they killed their parents to inherit a $14 million estate. Okay. I mean this is what is being alleged by different sides of this trial at the time. The response to this in the media among the public is pretty varied. And it's, it's interesting to look at that response and see the kind of directions that people take that conversation. And one of the directions taken by one of those people who is a middle aged, ginger haired lawyer named Alan Dershowitz is to write a book called The Abuse Excuses about how everyone is trying to get away with everything now and saying they were abused and it's terrible. Oh dude. He's concerned about the fact that people are just going to murder each other like they want to do anyway and then say, no, I was abused. It's fine.

I can do whatever I want. And that's his big concern for the direction he thinks or is claiming to think that society is going to go. Yikes. But I mean, yeah, I guess tell me what you think about that. I mean, he sucks. That's a sucky explanation. I mean the idea that people are faking a motivation related to their abuse as opposed to actual trauma based on their abuse is just completely ascientific. I think one of the big changes in media since then is that you had so many fewer survivors of abuse speaking up. There weren't ways for people to speak up back then and say like, well, actually, let's talk about trauma. Let's talk about how it's affected me. Let's talk about my own PTSD and how it manifests itself. You just didn't hear that as much anymore. And so

the media landscape, it seemed like was really dominated by people who could cast domestic abuse and child abuse and everything else as this kind of urban legend. Yeah, it feels like there's this tone of like, yes, like abuse exists, but it's very rare and it's not that serious. And you shouldn't use it as an excuse to do bad things because that just means you just wanted to do bad things and you're on you. But it's also very interesting that here he is railing against the jury's leniency for the Menendez brothers when quite soon he's going to be joining a legal team that is defending O.J. Simpson and whose argument has to encompass the territory of he didn't do it, he was framed, and if he did do it, he could have been framed. Then can we really

blame him because look at how his wife was behaving? Right, right. Excuse me, his ex-wife, but like there's this creep where like my brain is being infected by the Simpson trial rhetoric where like, oh, she like really still belongs to him and like, who could blame him for overreacting? Yeah, who could blame him for the crime for which he was framed by someone else? Yes. The defense gives jurors and the public many possible threads to hang onto in their defense of O.J. And one of them is like, well, she was having sex with other people and he, how could he possibly stand that? Which is not the abuse excuse, but it's the someone else was living their life and I couldn't handle it defense. Right. I'm not saying he did it,

but if he did, it's that kind of thing, right? Yeah, which like, I don't know if Alan Dershowitz is like spinning that kind of tail in his own personal involvement in this trial. He's more well known for advancing the theory that Nicole was targeted by a Colombian drug cartel that was attempting to take out Faye Resnick and killed her instead. I mean, I've heard LA is a hotspot for human trafficking, so it makes sense that they would have gotten caught up in that world. Right. But let's get back to Marcia. I'm on the edge of my seat. It's still like 7 a.m. on the morning after. Sure. So Marcia's calling the police. They're not calling her back. The DA's office is being mobbed. We're having another Los Angeles celebrity crime. And so Marcia goes in to have her briefing

with Gil Garcetti, the district attorney, and her coworkers, including Bill Hoggman, who most recently handled the case against Michael Jackson. Oh, okay. So Marcia briefs the rest of the DA's office on what she's learned so far. She tells them that the second victim is Ron Goldman, at least 25 years old, that he's a, quote, would-be actor who works part-time as a waiter at Metzaluna. And so Marcia writes that in this briefing she says, the night of the murders, Nicole Brown, maiden name someone interrupted? Looks like it, I replied. To me, that fact spoke volumes. A woman who has children with her ex usually doesn't choose to take back her maiden name unless she's held bent upon reasserting her own identity. David or someone put in that Nicole

and her two children had eaten dinner at Metzaluna and Goldman happened to be on duty. She'd apparently dropped her glasses or something and he went to her place to return them. And this actually turns out that her mother dropped her glasses, but this is what they've pieced together at the time. Is that all he went there for? I asked. No one had an answer. We'd have to check whether the two were lovers. How about the search? Gil wanted to know. Did we find a weapon? Nothing yet. Someone has gotten ahold of the LA Times article, which mentions the fact that O.J. has pled no contest to the charge of abuse related to the New Year's Eve beating in 1989, which is what he served ultimately probation and public service for.

And at the time this is the most recent charge they know about, so they haven't found out about the 1993 911 call yet. And Marsha writes, the fact that O.J. Simpson had beaten his wife didn't mean that he'd killed her. Not all the men who beat their wives end up killing them, but my years in law enforcement had shown me that men who killed their wives have often beaten or abused them in the past. The fact that they had been divorced for two years still bothered me. Do you carry a torch for an axe after the paperwork's done? I remembered the photo of Nicole that Brad Roberts had pulled out from under Simpson's bed, and I remembered the big glossy shots of her and the children mounted on the wall by the stairs. Yeah, I thought it could happen. Right, so she doesn't

know yet about the attempted reconciling that has just ended like three weeks ago. So she doesn't know that they were effectively in a relationship until fairly recently. Yeah. Because he's not carrying a torch for a woman who he divorced two years ago. He's carrying a torch for a woman who he dated until three weeks ago, which is a much different thing and speaks much more to motive. Yeah, and that there's a volatility coming from something that, you know, just ended. Yeah. Gil Garcetti, the DAS Marsha, she's been able to be in touch with the cops yet, and she says, no, but I'm working on it. And finally, she gets a call at noon from Phil Van Adder, who according to Marsha says, it's the brass Marsha. They don't want us talking to you. And

Marsha says she lets loose a, quote, choice expletive. Okay. It's a book, Marsha. You can just say what the expletive is. We're all adults here, Marsha. I can see myself as a child reading this book, although I did not. I would be one of the children who like, oh, a choice expletive. Why is the brass telling them not to speak with her? It seems weird. So what Marsha says she thinks it is, is that it has something to do with the Michael Jackson case because- What? Here, I'll just read it to you. So Marsha says, I had a pretty good idea what this was all about. The brass at Parker Center had gotten their knickers twisted over Michael Jackson,

which is like a slightly unfortunate way to put that. What a fiasco that had been, a case of child molestation that went nowhere after Jackson's lawyers reached a settlement in January 1994 with the father of the alleged victim. Wow. Not a surprising outcome when he considered that the father had been asking for money. But the cops blamed us thinking we'd stepped in where we didn't belong and botched a perfectly good case. Now that another celebrity suspect was in play, they were freezing us out. So what she thinks is that the cops are going in with this attitude of like, let's not involve the DA's office. There are no help to us in these situations. They'll screw it up. We'll just handle it.

Yeah. Us with our high levels of competence and ethics and craft. Yeah. We are the non-problematic entity in this arrangement. And the DA's office is the one with all the problems and the only one with the problems. And as long as they're not dragging us down, we will do great. So she tells Gil about this and he says, hang back. If the evidence is as strong as it sounds, they'll have to pick them up in the next few hours. Okay. And she's like, okay, I'm hanging back. I'm going to let the police, you know, it's just, it's just painful. It's like everyone's telling her like, no, just like, let them handle it. It'll be fine. Like don't be overbearing. I know. It feels like Rose and Titanic being like,

Mr. Andrews, forgive me, but I did the sums in my head. It seems that with the number of lifeboats plus the capacity you mentioned, you know, you're just like, hmm, I have a bad feeling about this. And he's like, everyone in a position of power or everyone who would have to cooperate with you being like, no, no, it's fine. Right. Don't worry, you're pretty little head. Yeah. And you're like, in my heart, I know I'm worried and yet everyone's telling me not to worry. So I guess I won't. Yeah. It's the beginning of so many terrible stories. Yeah. And so as a result of this, and as a result of the hangback mandate, Marcia finds out that the police crime lab has gone ahead and started testing the blood samples. And she's like, oh, okay. I was hoping

that I could send those to cellmark diagnostics in Maryland to have them specially tested. Because as has been established, I'm a stickler for having acceptable to good but she writes that she's stuck in hangback mode. Right. It's not worth it to start a fight over something seemingly minor, seemingly minor at the time. Yeah. Yeah. But despite this, she gets a call later that day saying that the LAPD lab has in fact matched the blood on the walkway at the murder scene to O.J. Simpson's blood, which means of the blood there, some of it belongs to O.J. Simpson. Which is wildly slam dunk. I mean, what does the phrase slam dunk even mean? I mean, I knew you were going to correct me on that, but it's strong evidence. I'm not correcting you,

but I do feel like, I don't know, what does it mean, though? Well, it's the kind of thing that if he didn't have $2 million or $50 million or whatever it was with defense lawyers, if he was just a random abusive husband, it's the kind of thing that would make it a pretty easy case to prosecute. Yeah. I mean, I do feel like abusive husbands have a history of being less convictible than one would think. Right. But I feel like killing a stranger is taken a little bit more seriously than killing your wife or your girlfriend. And that there is this kind of mitigation that you can get of like, well, you know, of all the people that you might kill, isn't this one the most relatable? Yeah. What was Marsha's reaction to that? Did she think it was

slim dunky or? Marsha says bingo. There was the evidence the cops needed to charge. So she's saying, yeah, like this is grounds for arresting him and charging him. Okay. I grinned jubilantly at David and Gill and held my wrists together pantomiming handcuffs. Okay. I figured squad cars would be rolling toward Brentwood at any minute now. Like hell, O.J. Simpson remained at large. And so she goes home. She takes care of her kids. She breathes in her moldy wall. So yeah, so Marsha comes home, she breathes in her moldy wall, and then she shows up at work on Wednesday, June 15th, and finds that O.J. still hasn't been arrested. Also, somehow the LA Times has received and published the blood test results

matching O.J.'s blood to the blood found on the walkway at Nicole's. Someone leaked it? Quite possibly. Yeah. I mean, I can't think of a better way for it to get to the LA Times. Wow. Marsha's theory is that someone at the LAPD is leaking. Right. Yeah, because that's not the kind of thing that usually goes to the public. Yeah. And this is, you know, the LA Times has somehow gotten this information. And meanwhile, the district attorney's office hasn't received any kind of a report from the LAPD. Wow.

So that day she heads down to Parker Center, which is two blocks away, and says, you know, if they still seem to not be moving on taking O.J. in, we can threaten them with a grand jury. And she says, what I meant was this, if the cops wouldn't arrest, we could unilaterally start an investigation of our own by taking the case to a grand jury. That way, the cops couldn't stonewall us because we'd have the power to compel their testimony. Furthermore, if we took the case to a grand jury and got an indictment, the police would have no choice but to arrest Simpson. Still, going grand jury was risky. The cops would take it as an in-your-face insult. My guess was that the very mention of it would drive them crazy.

Is this the part where you explain to me what a grand jury is? Sure. Can you tell me what your understanding of it is at this point? None. I know what a jury is, but I don't understand what the modifier grand makes it. It's different. Well, it's like a jury, but everyone's wearing really nice outfits. And they all eat little cakes. No, I literally know nothing. How does this work? So a grand jury is basically a process by which it is determined whether a given individual can be charged with a crime. It is a tiny, confidential, non-adversarial version

of a regular trial, although you do have a larger jury. You have up to 23 people on a grand jury. And it's a real jury? Like it's random people chosen. It's not like professional legal people. No. Yeah. It is a jury in the same way that a jury for a trial is chosen. Okay. So if I get called for jury duty, I may end up sitting on a grand jury rather than like a jury jury. Yeah. Oh, I didn't even know this. Okay. And so basically, evidence is more easily admissible in front of a grand jury than it is in front of a trial. There's not cross-examination done. Right. Because it's not to determine if they're guilty. It's just,

is the likelihood of them being guilty high enough that like, let's go ahead and move to the next step in the trial. And are OJs defense lawyers present for this or is like a completely a government process? OJs defense lawyers aren't present. OJ isn't present. Okay. Like this is essentially between the prosecutor and the grand jury rather than between the prosecution and the defense. So this allows her to take the case away from the LAPD and take more control over it and also get a bunch of people under oath. It's like kind of like her own way of investigating it. Yeah. It allows her to run a parallel investigation and circumvent their investigation. And then if she gets a grand jury to decide to indict, then OJ has to be arrested in charge,

even if the LAPD hasn't moved on it yet. Oh, okay. So really puts her in charge? Yes. Okay. Hopefully. I'm sure everything goes fine after this. Yes. As we know. And another key thing here is that the grand jury proceedings are confidential, which means that you can get a witness under oath very early on in the game, which is especially useful to Marsha because pretty early on she's like, we need to get this Cato Kaelin guy locked in. Yeah. That's what we were saying last episode that she's been listening. Yeah. Okay. So Marsha goes to the LAPD with a possible grand jury threat in her pocket. So the police give her the reports that they've compiled so far and

she was wanting to appear not too eager, although she is itching to get her hands on those reports. And she says, we've swapped some observations about the case making nice. Nobody on the other side seemed willing to bring up the thorny issue of arrest. So I headed dead on. When do you plan to bring this for filing? We want to interview more witnesses, Tom said, slowly. We were thinking maybe the early part of next week. Oh my God. So at this point, it's June 15. All right. So it's already been two days. Yeah. And so the early part of next week, that would have them starting to interview more witnesses and kind of slowly moving forward over a week

after the crime scene was discovered. Unbelievable. Bill David and I were silent. The cops knew that this was not what we'd wanted to hear. Well, frankly, I said, we're a little concerned about letting it go that long. I paused to make sure that they were paying attention. We've been thinking about taking it to the grand jury, gauntlet thrown. Well, that's your prerogative, Tom replied, looking to his superiors for support. We can't stop you. But we'd prefer to wait a little longer. They were not going to budge. So Marcia gets the report from the police. And after that difficult interaction, she goes to a fire escape slash little smoking veranda, where she can have her cigarettes and

look over her report. And I just like to think of her finding this private time and space to look at it for the first time. Yeah. Candles, hot tub, Freud. Yeah. And yeah, and that this is her little space where there's no one around her. There's no politicking to be done. It's just her and Nicole. Yeah, it's her and Nicole. So Marcia writes, Now I learned that Nicole upon whom death and the medical examiner had bestowed the designation decedent 9405136 had been found at the foot of the stairs at the front gate. She was in fetal position on her left side wearing a backless black dress, no shoes. Her arms were bent at the elbow close to the body. Her arms, legs and face were stained with blood. The corner had found a

quote large sharp force injury to her neck. Ron Goldman, the seed 9405135 had been found to the north. He'd fallen or been pushed backward and was slumped against the stump of a palm tree. He was wearing blue jeans and a light cotton sweater lying near his right foot was a white envelope containing a pair of eyeglasses. Goldman had injuries to the neck back had hands thighs. He'd apparently put up a fierce struggle. I absorbed the contents of these reports without emotion. Over the years, I've learned to do that. I imagine that emergency room physicians approach their work the same way. First treat the symptoms only after the bleeding stops notice the human beings. I knew with painful certainty that if I caught this case for keeps, the deaths described

in these pages would become personal. And like it or not, I would begin to grieve for the victims just as I'd written to Rebecca's mother, Dana Schaefer, once you start letting yourself feel the misery is endless. Murder weapon, no sign of one yet. The cops had checked trash receptacles and luggage lockers at LAX and we're in the process of searching the fields around O'Hare. Time of death, coroner still working on that. Suspect, I lit up a Dunhill and took a deep drag. Then on a clean, we need to get the visual. Then on a clean sheet of yellow note paper, I wrote O.J. Simpson after that alibi. So she goes through the rest of the report and then gets to the statements thus far of Cato Kalin and of Alan Park, the limo driver who shows up at

O.J.'s house at 10.25, rang the buzzer at 10.40, got no answer, called his boss when he was confused about what to do when O.J. was late coming out at 10.50 and who is therefore able to testify to the fact that there was no answer inside the house, then O.J. didn't seem to be in it. So Marsha writes, according to my rough calculation, Simpson had been off the radar for close to an hour. If Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman had been killed as early as 10.10 or even as late as 10.40, Simpson would have had time to drive the three miles or so from Bundy to Rockingham. From where I was sitting, O.J. Simpson had no alibi and still the police would not arrest. Right. I feel like thinking about the actual maneuverability that each individual person

in this kind of system has is important to all of this. Because we tend to imagine, I think because we hope that sexual reality exists, that when people make bad choices or appear to make bad choices, that something better was within their reach. And I think that if you're working within a large bureaucracy, then the choices available to you are much smaller potentially than common sense would seem to indicate. Right. And you have to maintain institutional relationships with these actors. So she can't just be like, no, fuck you, LAPD. I'm going to do what I want because she has to work with these people in the next case and the next and the next. And so she might be putting long-term health of the relationship in front of doing right by this

case, which is something we all do all the time. And it's a completely new thing to do. Yeah. And a necessary thing to do. I think this is probably also why we love these Tony Stark Iron Man characters who get to be like, I am better than everyone at everything and I'm rich. And I'm right. And I have the means to force people to recognize that I am right because I don't have to cooperate. Right. Because we all feel that same frustration in our own lives, in our own work selves all the time. Yeah. And maybe that's why we hope that like eccentric tech millionaires will save us. Won't they, Sarah? Won't they? So Thursday the 16th, Marcia gets another call from the LAPD saying that they're testing of the brown leather glove

that Mark Furman found at Rockingham behind the guest houses, quote, contain genetic markers from both victims with a strong possibility that Simpson's blood was in the mix. Ding, ding, ding. They had also found Simpson's blood on the interior of the door of his white Ford Bronco. The case was getting stronger by the hour. I'd never seen so much damning physical evidence. What were the cops waiting for, a sign from God? And so this is the day that O.J. is attending Nicole's funeral. Okay. And Marcia watches it on TV and sees footage of O.J. making what she calls a plausible show of grief. Okay. And then this is her talking about something that a lot of our listeners have been curious about, which is what happened

to the kids on the night of the murders. Marcia says, I felt a jolt of revulsion when I saw him staring his two children toward the beer. They looked so innocent, so trusting. I had a momentary vision of them upstairs sleeping while their mother struggled with her killer. In the months to come, I would flash from time to time on the image of those children sleeping. Several weeks after the murders, I finally received a report I'd been requesting from officer Joan Vasquez. She'd been assigned to escort the Simpson children out back through the garage, never allowing them close to the crime scene. Officer Vasquez reported that as the children sat in the back of the cruiser, Sidney whimpered, where's my mommy? I'm just tired and I want my

mommy. God. Sidney and Justin stayed at the West LA station for almost five hours. Officer Vasquez, a kind soul, tried to distract them with soda, candy, paper hats, paints. Over that long morning, she taught the children to spell their names and sign language and to play hangman. I like the Power Rangers because I'm a green belt and karate six-year-old Justin Holter. My mommy is going to start going with me again. Sidney knew something was terribly wrong. At one point, she turned to her brother and said, Justin, you know something happened to mommy, or she would have come for us by now. That shows what a good mom Nicole was too. She would never leave them alone for five hours. Yeah. And Marsha writes, as we know, at about 6.30,

their older stepsister Arnell picked them up and they left. When I read this, I found it hard to keep back the tears. That may have been where the misery hit me in earnest. On the day of Nicole's funeral, however, I was simply struck by how surreal it all seemed. You had Nicole's California perfect mother and sisters embracing and comforting O.K. Simpson. What was going on here? So they don't suspect him? No, at least some of them do, because as Marsha notes a few lines later, when Tom Lang called Denise Brown to tell her of her sister's murder, the first words out of her mouth were, I knew that son of a bitch was going to do it. So what do you think of that? I guess they're just being friendly with him at the funeral to kind of keep things peaceful, I suppose.

Imagine yourself in that position if you can. Yeah. If I thought someone was capable of murder, I'd probably be nice to them so that they didn't fucking murder me. Yeah. I can see also wanting to, not wanting to believe that he had or could have done that and not focusing on that, even if the person that he might have killed was someone that I loved. They're also on fucking TV at their daughter and sister's funeral. And I can also see the instinct not to make a scene when there's literally cameras on you at one of the worst moments of your life. Maybe you just want to get through that day and be like, we'll deal with this later. Yeah. I mean, I don't know, but imagine that you have someone who is part of your family for over 15 years. Right. And also that they knew

some of what was going on and quite a lot by the end. And we're still, as everyone was in this mindset of like, let's make it work. Right. And like appearing to believe that things could all end peacefully. So I just, you know, it's just, I don't know. Again, like I've not been in any of these positions. I have no idea what it's like. Right. But Marcia knows how she feels. Marcia also brings us up to speed about the fact that although at the time of the murders, OJ already has a lawyer named Howard Weitzman, he quickly ends that relationship. And Howard Weitzman tells the media that he resigns due to his personal friendship with OJ. And then this is when OJ brings on Bob Shapiro, celebrity lawyer. Okay. And of Weitzman, who previously had represented

Jack DeLorean, Marcia says, I'd always considered Weitzman a decent guy and a good attorney. I could never figure out why he didn't insist upon being at his client's interview with Van Adder and Lang. Much later in the case, I found myself talking to Howard at a dinner party in West LA. He told me that he'd cut out because the cops threatened not to talk to Simpson if he had an attorney present. That made no sense to me. What really happened, I suspect, is that Simpson's colossal ego combined with his confidence in his ability to sweet talk and manipulate cops had led him to dismiss his own attorney from the interview. Weitzman, of course, would have had no choice but to comply. Right. So OJ has hired Bob Shapiro and Marcia's response is like, okay,

this is really like Tina Sinatra's lawyer. That's great. Like, he's certainly not a litigator. He is not someone who inspires fear in her and perhaps not in much of anyone. And Marcia is also rather confused and amazed when Shapiro writes a letter to Van Adder and Lang saying that his client, quote, would be willing to consider taking a lie detector test. Okay. Which Marcia also will later find out is after OJ has taken a previous lie detector test that Shapiro has arranged, which he has failed completely. He scored a minus 22. Holy shit. Wait, what does that mean? I don't know what that number means. Marcia says that means he failed every single question pertaining to the murder. Oh my God. I mean, lie detector tests are bullshit, but also it's

pretty clear from other things that OJ did it. So I feel comfortable laughing about that. Well, to me, the point here is that like you have a client, you have him take a lie detector test, he fails, you then turn around and offer to the police that he can take another lie detector test for them. Is that that's going to improve life for anyone? Right. It's not like the SATs. You can't practice. It's just, yeah, it's very hubristic. So meanwhile, after Bob Shapiro swoops in, he offers a lie detector test and he also offers to bring in his own forensic scientists to aid in the investigation. Oh my God. The defense lawyers offering to bring in his own forensic scientists? What? He's just going for it. He's Bob Shapiro. Just diving in. Yeah.

He believes in having fun. So he offers his own forensic experts and he asks to have his own doctor re-autopsy the bodies. Oh my God. And according to Marsha writes to her to ask for her to get permission from Nicole's next of kin so that her alleged killers defense experts can re-autopsy her corpse. Is Marsha just like, thank you next? Marsha just does not respond, which I really think. That's good. Just ghost. Yeah. She's like, I do not, I know. Yeah. I mean, my sense from that is that she sees it as like just utterly beyond the pale or like just an attempt to like waste time or something like that. And she says that later on, Nicole's mother, Judy Brown, says that at Nicole's funeral, Bob Shapiro went up to her and asked for permission to re-autopsy

her daughter. Oh my God. At the funeral? Yeah. Ah, Jesus. David Schwimmer, tone it down. No, David Schwimmer is Bob Kardashian. Oh, who's, oh, Travolta. Travolta with two tiny little eyebrow wigs. Yeah. And by the way, Nicole's mom also doesn't really respond to Bob Shapiro because she's so shocked to be asked about that. I mean, yeah. So Thursday night, Marsha checks in with the police again and finds out that they don't have O.J. under surveillance, which she finds shocking because if he's not being arrested, shouldn't they at least be keeping kind of an eye on him? And they say lack of manpower. Besides, where's he going to go? Oh my God. He writes, this was too much even for Gil. He called us all into his office that evening and put the question

to us. Do we get to the grand jury or wait for the police to file? We all agreed the case was well past the stage of being filable. The cops were playing strictly cover your ass politics, which might have been fine if they'd had the luxury of working without the constant scrutiny of the press. But that wasn't the situation we had here. The media was broadcasting every tidbit it could get its hands on. And a lot of that information was amazingly on target. Some creep with access to documents was leaking like a rusty tub. As the evidence piled up, so did O.J. Simpson's incentive to flee. What if Simpson pulls a Polanski? I asked Gil. It's only the second time Roman Polanski has come up in this story. So it's the night of Thursday, June 16th. O.J. isn't being taken in.

He isn't under surveillance. And Marsh is thinking, not only do we have that to worry about, but what about this guy, Cato Kalin, who has spent the past four days as the most crucial potential alibi witness and also someone who's, you know, as we have seen from our Cato episodes, just sort of like palling around with O.J. and spending time with him and very much in his circle and accessible to him if he's concerned about what Cato might say. And so Gil Garcetti makes the decision to convene the grand jurors on Friday afternoon and bring in Cato Kalin and hear his testimony. And that he's going to be one of the witnesses who testifies before the grand jury. And they're going to go ahead and convene the grand jury because the police aren't moving and someone has to.

So they're pulling the lever. They're taking it away from the LAPD. And they're just going to start this parallel process. Yeah. And the LAPD, like they still have their investigation that they're very slowly doing. It's like the thing where like, yeah, you're doing a group project and someone just is like, I will take this to the binder place. Yeah. Yes. So when is the Bronco Chase again? This is June 17th. How much time do we have till the Bronco Chase? This is the night of June 16th. Okay. So they're saying, okay, let's convene the grand jury for Friday afternoon. We're going to get Cato Kalin in here in the morning and prep him and then take his testimony Friday afternoon. Okay. The Bronco Chase is also on Friday afternoon. Convergence. Okay. So someone

on Twitter, because we mentioned that we were going to be talking about grand juries in this next episode was like, I hope you don't skip the Bronco Chase and go straight to the grand jury. And I was like, wouldn't you know it? The grand jury convened first. But Cato is the impetus, it seems, or one of the impetuses for them to deciding to convene the grand jury, because he's someone whose testimony they know is vulnerable to tampering. Right. And if they haven't testified before the grand jury, then they can get that on the record and get that locked in so that by the time they go to trial, if he tries to change what he says, then they have him on the record months before. Right. Get this Labrador in, get the information out, and then we'll have it

when we need it. It is also at this meeting, big meeting, where they decide to convene the grand jury that Marsha's colleague Frank Sinstead says, so does Marsha have the case? And Marsha's like, do I? Oh, okay. And Gil Garcetti says, Marsha has the case, but not alone. She's going to do it with someone else. And Marsha's like, oh, I'm so happy for them. Okay. And basically her response to this is that it feels to her like Gil doesn't fully trust her. And then if he thought that she could handle this case and trusted her track record as a prosecutor, and trusted her to handle something of this scale, then he would just go ahead and put her in charge of it. But instead, he's putting her on a team. Is this where we meet Chris Darden? No. Marsha's first partner in this will be Bill

Hoggman. Oh, the Michael Jackson guy. Okay. The Michael Jackson guy, which I'm sure he absolutely loves to be called. Yeah. I mean, it almost seems like they should, if anything, have more people on this. I mean, there should be like 50 people working on this case. Well, the defense team is going to have like eight million people on it at one point, including Mr. Allen, abuse, excuse, sturchowitz. Yeah. And then it turns out that once word presumably very quickly reaches the LAPD brass that the DA's office is going to go to the grand jury, they, according to Marsha, are like, oh, maybe we should bring in that Simpson guy. Yeah. And so the rumors Marsha's hearing on Thursday night is that the LAPD is negotiating with Bob Shapiro to allow OJ to surrender voluntarily.

Right. Which Marsha does not like. I'll bet. She says, on one hand, the idea of a negotiated arrest made me nuts. Once again, OJ Simpson's celebrity status had gained him a legal advantage. A negotiated voluntary surrender signals to the public and potential jury pool that the suspect is someone who deserves special privileges. I'd much rather see a righteously arrested suspect step out of a squad car and handcuffs. Still, my annoyance was all relative. Compared to the act of cutting him loose in the first place, a negotiated surrender was a minor outrage. If it worked, we'd all be happy. Right. So yeah, again, I feel like maybe this is a similar argument to, you know, when normal people get arrested, they just have to be

perp walked around. And so why does OJ Simpson get to have it better? Which speaks to my own personal philosophy once again, that we should treat everyone as a fair felicity half-man. I think that's a good stance. And also, OJ came in in the most humiliating way possible, in that he turned himself into a fucking three hour long national TV event. So it all worked out in the end. Kind of. I mean, there's a lot of talk at the time about whether the Bronco chase like, did it make him look more guilty? Yes. Did it also make him look more sympathetic? Oh, potentially yes. Okay. So it's the morning of June 17th. And Marsha begins the day by sending some detectives to serve Kato Kalin with a subpoena and bring him in to prep for his

grand jury testimony. And I'm going to leave it here for now with this clash of the Titans. Oh, okay. So she's bringing him in and she's taken her first step of independence from the LAPD. Yeah. And we're about to see Marsha and Kato face off and they will each have a very different depiction of the same interaction. Oh, okay. First time that's happened on our show. So what do you want to leave us with? What should we conclude from all this? I mean, I don't know. What do you think? We've got Marsha increasingly frustrated. We've got the LAPD increasingly incompetent. We've got OJ's defense team increasingly hubristic. And we've got Kato, who doesn't know any of this is happening, which is very on theme.

And Kato, who is being brought in after the weirdest week of his life. Yes. And is just going to do his best. And we still didn't get to the Bronco chase. Still somewhere in the distance. I mean, I don't know what everyone's complaining about. We've started it. We've gotten to like the middle of it. That's true. There's not a lack of Bronco chase. We're actually living in a timeline where the Bronco chase has been happening for months. Like our entire lives are Bronco chase. Has anyone thought of that? Listeners, we've already gotten to it. Calm your emails. You've been in the Bronco chase this entire time. You're there. Who should we go to next? I mean,

I want to pick up with Kato and Marsha. But there's also like, we haven't talked about Paula in a while. I mean, it's up to you. I'm along for this journey. I have been avoiding spoilers. My dad has actually been totally down and Marsha Clark rabbit hole. Really? He's read all of her noir detective novels and stuff. And he keeps trying to tell me about her memoir. And I keep having to shush him because I don't want any spoilers. And you're like, no, no, it's being read to me in tiny increments by a woman who lives in a closet. Yeah. Because he keeps being like, well, the most surprising part of the book is when Marsha on trial does that. And I'm like, stop, stop, stop. You're like, dad, please, I will be ready to discuss that in two years.

Yeah. No. So eventually I will be on speaking terms with my father again. But until then, I'll just have to wait for you to tell me. Welcome to your wrong about the show where families are torn apart by our inability to cover historic events in a timely fashion. Yes. So, yeah, the Bronco chase is still happening. It's always happening. Marsha's desk is not clean. Marsha's desk will never be clean. We've transcended linear time. Just do what you will with that.