IT’S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE--Common experience

So-called damning evidence against O.J. Simpson consists entirely of objects, circumstances and theories linked in one way or another to Mark Fuhrman. Jurors in the first trial were widely presumed to be either stupid or prejudiced in favor of Simpson because they didn’t buy it or the proposition that Fuhrman’s racial attitudes had nothing to do with it.

Race was not the issue that persuaded the jurors to be wary of anything Fuhrman had to say about the case against Simpson. The issue was credibility. What Fuhrman swore to in court about his use of a racial epithet was a valid test of his credibility in general. The sad truth of the matter is that the n-word is as American as the Stars and Bars—and the Stars and Stripes. Few Americans, including the jurors, could honestly say that they hadn’t used it in the previous 10 years. The pertinent issue was why Fuhrman alone was asked about it and why he lied if it wasn’t relevant to the way he did his job. What was so important in his use of the n-word that he would feel the need to conceal it from a jury of 12 born and bred Americans? And what did he know to make him think he could get away with it?

He knew that the media were leaning heavily on the assumption that the black members of the jury had a built-in bias in favor of Simpson. He knew that the pressure was therefore on them to prove that assumption wrong. He knew that he was being protected with all the resources of the law. He knew that most Americans were on his side, that they were angry with the defense for "playing the race card," that they didn’t want to hear the word "racism," much less think about it. He knew that those who used it would be likened to demagogues or branded as cattle if they didn’t also come out strongly in favor of the integrity of his investigation.

In short, he knew how the American system of justice, self-promotion and mass communication worked. He knew the key personalities, their established patterns and the range of possibilities. Therefore, he knew in advance how the prosecutors would argue, how the judges would rule, how reporters would report and how the American people as a whole would accept him and his testimony if they thought O.J. was guilty. He had 19 years of inside knowledge and experience to work with, he could see and hear the editorials and opinion poles, and he could monitor the way the proceedings were being reported on the evening news. He wasn’t guessing. Without iron-clad proof that he was lying, he was going to come off looking like the star he had always wanted to be, because that’s what most Americans wanted to see.

That’s why he thought he could get away with it. But why did he do it?

Fuhrman lied about his use of the n-word because it was the one loose thread that connected him to the entire fabric of his true involvement in the case. Specifically, it tied him to his taped admission of evidence planting and his obsession with Hollywood.

Major elements of his biggest case appear to have been lifted primarily from four films, counting The Naked Gun and The Naked Gun 2 1/2 as one. Those films do not include two that show how elements of one movie can be blended into another and how reality and the appearance of reality can be confused. In "A Double Life," an actor in the play Othello identifies so much with the title character that he snaps and kills a woman in real life. Shelly Winters, the actress in real life playing the part of his victim, also plays a victim in Night of the Hunter, a wife and mother whose husband slashes her throat with a knife.

This one crossover thread from movie to move to murder in Brentwood, could be dismissed as a meaningless coincidence if there weren’t ninety-seven others packed into four films: Othello, 1965; Guilty Conscience, 1985; The Naked Gun, 1988 (The Naked Gun 2 1/2, 1991); and Ricochet, 1991, where Ice T’s use of the n-word tells all.

The only way to maintain the illusion that Fuhrman or his partner Brad Roberts did not plant all of the evidence or ideas that mattered in the case against Simpson is to refuse to examine the possibility. Time after time, "irrefutable" evidence against Simpson proves, on close examination, to exculpate him and to incriminate Fuhrman and Roberts. One killer, standing over 6’ tall, had a size 12 shoe. Another man on the scene, a shorter one, had a smaller foot and a deeper voice. That’s a pretty good description of Fuhrman and Roberts.

• What about the socks in O.J.’s bedroom? Fuhrman and Roberts were there first.
• The bloody glove on Bundy? Fuhrman found the match on Rockingham.
• Blood in Bronco? Fuhrman saw it first.
• Blood on light bulb? Roberts.
• Bronco parked in a panic at a "haphazard" 2-degree angle? Fuhrman’s idea.
• Sweatsuit in dryer? Roberts.
• Empty knife box? Fuhrman and Roberts.
• Bleeding killer theory? Fuhrman.
• Blood trail leading up O.J.’s driveway? Roberts.

Was O.J.’s blood found in incriminating places? Yes. Was some of that blood missing from the police lab? Yes. Did Fuhrman or Roberts have easy access to it? Yes. Let’s take a little closer look at some "damning evidence" against Simpson, item by item:

O.J.'S "OBVIOUS LIES" proved more often than not to be demonstrable facts. He was not a wife beater. He did not say that he cut himself on his cell phone. He never did own a pair of Bruno Magli Lorenzos or a blue-black sweatsuit. He did not leave a trail of his own blood from Bundy to Rockingham. He did not park his Bronco at an odd angle or tell Allan Park that he had overslept. These facts appeared to be lies only because of the lies, the honest mistakes and the skillful misrepresentations and misinterpretations of other evidence that were not rigorously examined.  

THE CUT ON O.J.'S FINGER looks like a sure indication of his guilt until you consider the basic requirements of a frame-up. You can't frame a man without apparent evidence of his guilt. But even if you can construct a mountain of damning evidence against him, it won't work if he has a solid alibi. To insure that he doesn't have one, you have to insure that he remains isolated from the world for the time in question. To do that, you'd have to have someone in a position to see and hear everything he does and says during that time.

O.J. could not have been framed without someone observing him before, during and after the killing. An observer at the gate could have known that O.J. had a cut on his hand before O.J. realized it himself. If so, the spot of blood that Fuhrman pointed to near the Bronco door handle could have gotten there then. There is also a good chance that his blood would have been found on the handle of the golf club he said he had with him when he took the dog for a walk if anyone had thought to look for it.

DNA identified as Simpson’s in various incriminating places, was supposed to prove that he was at the murder scene and left a trail of his own blood from there to his Bronco, to the driveway of his home. The question was not how good DNA evidence is, but how it was applied in the O.J. Simpson case. The answer? Fraudulently. It was deliberately planted, mislabeled, misread and switched in the lab to create the false impression of O.J.’s guilt. Wherever blood identified as O.J.’s had to show traces of the blood preservative EDTA to prove that it came from a test tube, not from his bleeding finger, EDTA was present. Where its absence from blood collected on his driveway was needed to prove his alibi, it was absent.

The FBI agent called by the prosecution to refute the validity of the EDTA findings claimed that the amount in question could have come directly from O.J.’s cut finger. Another FBI agent who was proven to be correct after the criminal trial called that agent a liar. Before the civil trial, another FBI agent agreed with the defense expert who said that O.J.’s blood would never have clotted with that much EDTA in it. This FBI expert claimed that the chemical was "probably" on the test equipment. He did not explain how that kind of error could have been made in that kind of test, or why it showed up in O.J.’s blood found on the glove and not in Ron’s or Nicole’s. He did not explain why it appeared only in those places where chemically treated blood would prove that O.J. was framed. Nor could anyone say how "O.J.’s" blood drops from a severe cut, showing no direction of travel, went from Bundy to Rockingham. O.J. left for Chicago with a cut too small for anyone to notice—hardly anyone, that is.

All of the blood evidence against O.J. started with Fuhrman’s theory of a bleeding killer at Bundy. Then came Roberts’ false characterization of the blood-drops on O.J.’s driveway as a continuation of the Bundy blood trail leading into the compound. The blood-drops collected on O.J.’s driveway by Andrea Mazzola belonged to O.J., they came from a superficial cut, and they led out of the gate. The Bundy blood-drops identified as O.J.’s could not have come from a superficial cut so they could not have been O.J.’s. Furthermore, swatch samples of those drops went into initialed coin envelopes dry but came out of uninitialed coin envelopes showing signs that they had gone in wet.

The room in Parker Center, the main police station in L.A. where all of the blood samples were stored before testing, and where Fuhrman and Roberts had ready access, was not secure. It was not always occupied and it was safeguarded only by a locked door. During the first search of O.J.’s home, police had the same problem of restricted access with a locked door to one of O.J.’s rooms. It’s the only such problem in the case that can be traced to an interested party who solved it by literally finding the key. Guess who found the key...Yeah, Mark Fuhrman.

THE BLOODY, ARIS ISOTONER LIGHT GLOVES found by Robert Riske and Mark Fuhrman had no reasonable explanation for being where they were photographed on the 13th. The one Fuhrman said he found was wet when it should have been dry, and untouched by any wind-swept debris in the seven hours it was allegedly exposed. Unlike the rest of the blood on the right-hand glove found by Fuhrman, the blood identified as Simpson’s was loaded with EDTA. Purple-top test tubes come with EDTA in them to prevent clotting—test tubes just like the one on Colin Yamauchi’s work bench—the one with O.J.’s blood sample dripping down the outside—the one he said he spilled without getting any on the glove.

There is no record that the matching pair of gloves belonged to Simpson. We are supposed to assume that they were his based on the laws of probability that ask, rhetorically, who else could they have belonged to? If Nicole bought two pair just like them, if they had O.J.’s blood and naturally shed hand hair on them and one was found on his property how could they not have been his? One and a half clean pair of gloves just like them were found in O.J.’s home. When he tried on the bloody ones in court, they didn’t fit. The prosecution’s glove expert then came back and testified that wet gloves could shrink up to 15%.

The only fully documented, scientific tests done to prove or disprove that claim was made by Herbert MacDonell, an expert hired by the defense. The prosecutors declined to accept MacDonell's results, to challenge them scientifically or to do their own tests. Instead, they purchased a new pair of Aris Isotoner Lights, size XL, and had O.J. try them on. The new gloves slipped on easily. Perfect fit. All of which proved that anyone could have purchased similar gloves. That, in turn, meant they had to produce other evidence that showed O.J. wearing the type of gloves worn by the killer.

Within days, they had many amateur and professional photographers lined up to show their pictures of O.J., the sports announcer, wearing Aris Lights at various football games. One showed, what appeared to be a poor fit. That was supposed to support the idea that the killer’s gloves he tried on in court really did fit the way he liked to wear them, and his struggle to get them on was merely an act. But that contradicted the prosecution’s own demonstration of unsullied gloves that fit without a struggle, which contradicted their theory that the bloody gloves must have shrunk. A Caucasian hair found in the lining of the Rockingham glove was never identified—and never mentioned in Fuhrman’s book.

A matching pair of black Aires Isotoner Lights, size XL, and a single brown one were found in the first search of O.J.’s home by officers from Robbery/Homicide. All three gloves showed signs of normal use. Detective Luper found the single glove in O.J.’s bedroom after Fuhrman and Roberts had been there and left. The missing glove, no doubt with Simpson’s naturally shed hand hairs inside, was never found.

THE MURDER WEAPON that wasn’t found says as much about the crime and the man accused of committing it as the blood, the gloves, the cap, the socks, the hair, the fibers, and the bloody shoeprints that were found. It says O.J. Simpson was framed by the killer.

The wounds in the bodies delivered from mirrored angles were consistent with a left-hander using one knife and a right-hander using another. The silence of the kills, the confined space, and the 1" x 1" blunt force injury to Nicole’s skull were consistent with a single killer using both ends of a Stiletto the way a soldier would, and a Swiss Army knife the way a martial artist would. Mark Fuhrman was a marine and a martial artist. O.J. purchased a German Stiletto in view of many witnesses. A police detective found it unused in the first search of his home and returned it to where he found it. No Swiss Army knife consistent with the deep wound in Ron Goldman’s chest was ever known to be in O.J.’s possession. No records, no pictures and no witness say otherwise—except Mark Fuhrman and Brad Roberts.

BLUE/BLACK COTTON FIBERS on Goldman’s shirt, could have come from his own apartment or Nicole’s previous visitor, or a uniformed police officer. Officer Robert Riske, wearing a blue/black, cotton, LAPD uniform, bent over Goldman’s body and touched his eyeballs. To this day, no one checked to see if the fibers from his uniform matched the ones on Goldman’s shirt. That is not to say they didn’t come from the killer. They could have. But they could not have come from O.J. Simpson. No such fibers were found in his Bentley, his Bronco, his dresser drawers, his closets, his rug, his carpet, his washing machine or his bed. His maid never saw a sweatsuit of his the color of the one that was supposed to have shed them. There is zero evidence that he ever owned one.

The only dark sweatsuit he was ever known to wear in front of his house, was one with blue/gray fibers during the last day of a three-day video shoot two weekends before the murders. That could be how Kato Kaelin came to believe that he saw O.J. wearing a dark sweatsuit on the 12th of June. Right outfit, right place, wrong time.

Kato Kaelin, the only witness who testified to guessing that O.J. may have been wearing dark sweats on the night of the 12th, also gave testimony that proved he guessed wrong. He said that O.J. wore dark sweats to the airport. Several witnesses, not to mention the airport security camera, said otherwise. Kato wasn’t even close. By the same token, he said up front that he wasn’t sure.

To get the full flavor of how Kato’s characterization of O.J.’s clothes became Marcia Clark’s idea of the truth, let’s consider a similar case, the case of O.J.’s "Rolls Royce." That’s what O.J. called his Bentley the day after the murders before immediately correcting himself. What you are about to read really happened. It is also what happened with the "dark sweatsuit" that O.J. was supposed to have worn to Bundy on the 12th of June; only in the case of the sweatsuit, the mistake was never corrected:

Vannatter: What were you driving?

O.J.: My Rolls Royce—my Bentley, rather.

Here we have the equivalent of someone writing the wrong date on a check, starting over and putting in the right one. The mistake is clear. So is the correction. Why then go with the mistake? Why did so many people do the same thing when the simple truth of the matter was staring them in the face?

Kato was the first prosecution witness to identify O.J.’s Bentley as a Rolls Royce. That happened in the grand jury hearing a few days after O.J.’s arrest. For months thereafter, Phil Vannatter and Marcia Clark, with positive proof to the contrary, referred to it as a Rolls Royce. Marcia Clark did it throughout the grand jury hearings and the preliminary hearings. Where she led, others followed. Allan Park, the limo driver, is a case in point. He also called the Bentley a Rolls Royce.

Marcia Clark, Kato Kaelin and Allan Park happen to be the only people directly linked to the idea that O.J. drove to Bundy in his Bronco wearing a blue/black sweatsuit. Only after Marcia’s contention that the blue/black fibers implicated O.J. became an article of faith for OJG’s at large did the blue/black fibers show up on O.J.’s socks.

Marcia Clark’s creation of the O.J.-in-a-dark-sweatsuit image was not a case of planting false ideas to implicate an innocent man. It was a selective interpretation of evidence, the result of planted ideas that O.J. was guilty. Lange and Vannatter’s book is riddled with similar examples of that kind of thinking. It earned them the title of "Dumb and Dumber" among OJI’s because there seemed to be no limit to their willingness to dumb-down in order to see "evidence" of O.J.’s guilt. They were not unique. All of us see what we do through the eyes of our convictions. It’s called being human.

O.J.’S BRONCO was not parked "haphazardly at an odd angle" as Fuhrman described it. On the contrary, the 2-degree angle to the curb at which it was parked gives strong backing to O.J.’s story that he last drove it from around the sharp corner of his driveway. That parking angle is precisely what you would expect given the Bronco’s wheelbase and the width of the Rockingham gate. The importance of the 2-degree parking angle in O.J.’s defense cannot be overemphasized. Either he drove around that sharp corner as he said he did, or he drove from Bundy as Fuhrman said he did. The slight angle says that he came from the drive.

Where is the evidence that he drove the Bronco from Bundy?

Not the blood inside (less than a quarter of a drop spread out over a wide area). The police photo shown to the defense in August displayed the stains with a card that said, June 14. However, the tow truck driver who took the Bronco to Virtels garage, a thief who broke into it, a cop who investigated the theft, and two buyers of impounded vehicles who sat inside and checked for blood, all said that they saw none as late as June 21.

Not the bloody shoeprint in the carpet (the bloody shoeprints at Bundy had faded to nothing before they reached the back gate). No vehicles were parked in the alley where the back gate led during the crime. The spare key to the Bronco had been stolen, the interior light removed. When the Bronco was in police custody, security was also removed. The shoeprint could have been left by anyone at any time.

Not the rare Bronco carpet fibers (LAPD criminalist, Susan Brockbank, testified that a patch cut out of the carpet was kept in the same box as all of the evidence recovered from Bundy). The only thing proved by the Bronco fibers found on the gloves, the cap, Ron’s shirt, etc., is what the criminalist admitted about how those pieces of evidence were stored.

Not the witnesses (Chris Darden said that Robert Heidstra saw a white Bronco; Heidstra didn’t). The description of the vehicle he saw was a better match for Mark Fuhrman’s International Harvester Scout.

THE WITNESSES all support O.J.'s alibi and incriminate two men whose voices were unfamiliar to them. O.J. had one of the most recognizable voices in the world, and one of those witnesses was his daughter.

Allan Park saw Kato Kaelin walking away from him en route to the south path of O.J.'s Rockingham estate where Fuhrman found the bloody glove. He saw Kato before he saw O.J.walking east to his front door. How could Park have seen O.J. before Kato did? If Kato was walking directly toward the path that O.J. was supposed to have been walking directly away from, he couldn't have. O.J. could only have come from his house when Park was momentarily distracted.

During the grand jury hearing Park stated flatly that the Bronco wasn’t there when he arrived or when he left. When Marcia Clark suggested that it might have been there when he left but that he didn’t notice because he wasn’t paying attention, he agreed with her. During the criminal trial, she took the first part of his testimony to say that the Bronco wasn’t there when he arrived. When Johnnie Cochran paraphrased Marcia Clark’s question in the grand jury hearing to say that Park didn’t notice the Bronco when he arrived because he wasn’t paying attention, Park agreed with him.

The testimony of Sydney Simpson and Robert Heidstra, the two human ear-witnesses who knew O.J.'s voice and heard two men arguing angrily, agreed with each other. Sydney had heard her father in person arguing with her mother during the same incident that Heidstra, the jury, and the rest of the world heard on the 911 tape recorded in 1993. The words were indistinct, but the voice was unmistakably O.J. Simpson's. Neither Sydney nor Heidstra recognized the voice of either man arguing on the killing ground in 1994.

THE STICK that Mark Fuhrman traced from the grass beside the Bronco to an alley south of Bundy proves only that Mark Fuhrman saw The Naked Gun 2 1/2. It was his theory that the painted piece of wood got caught under the Bronco in the alley and slung forward when the vehicle came to a sudden stop. It was supposed to prove that the Bronco was at Bundy at the time of the killing. Since the window of opportunity for O.J. to have driven the Bronco north to Rockingham was only 4 minutes at best (and that’s stretching it a lot), the stick had to be planted. The only people who can be traced to where that stick came from are Mark Fuhrman and his partner Brad Roberts.

DRESS SOCKS "found" on O.J.’s rug by Mark Fuhrman and Brad Roberts had no blood on them that any of the four experts who saw them initially in the lab could detect. When they were examined months later, Nicole’s blood and O.J.’s blood were found on them, along with blue/black cotton fibers. The blood was soaked through the socks in a way that would have been impossible had O.J. been wearing them when they got wet. If he’d stepped on them, with his bare foot, he would have left a blood spot on the rug with his next step.

Blood pattern expert Herb MacDonnel demonstrated in court that the blood on the socks had to have been pressed into place. The test results on the blood were leaked to the media by more than one secret LAPD source before the tests were made. The chemical EDTA, in quantities found only in test tubes to keep blood from clotting, was found on the socks. The FBI agent who said otherwise was later proven to be a liar who routinely shaded his findings in favor of the prosecution. Not all of O.J.’s test tube blood was accounted for after the tests and not all of Nicole’s was ever accounted for.

THE # 10 ENVELOPE that held Juditha Brown’s glasses was important enough for Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola, two honorable people, to lie about. It was clear from photos taken at various times during the evidence collection process that someone on the crime scene moved it. Why would honorable people lie about something as inconsequential as that unless they were faced with a moral dilemma? I don’t think they would. If they feared the truth in this one trivial matter (Mark Fuhrman fiddling with the location of certain items to pose for pictures) would convey a false impression (that he could have found both gloves and taken one to Rockingham) they would feel morally bound to lie.

They knew that everything they saw when they arrived was still there. They knew that Fuhrman didn’t move anything by more than a few inches in their presence. By admitting the crime scene was changed before it was documented, they may have been afraid of setting a murderer free on a technicality. They did not know about the book Fuhrman must have had in mind at the time and how dramatic that picture of his pointing finger would look between the covers.

Everything about that picture is important, not the least of which is the envelope. It says that Goldman was tortured and killed only because of a forgotten pair of glasses...The envelope lies. Ron Goldman was targeted, tortured and killed because he was a Jew.

THE BLUE KNIT CAP makes no sense for O.J. to have worn as a disguise because it looks identical to the one he wore as Nordberg in The Naked Gun. It is, however, ideal as a plant because millions of people already identify him with the cap and because of the hair traceable to O.J.’s head and fibers traceable to his Bronco’s carpet. A stolen personal item or two would have been a prerequisite to a frame-up. You can’t have a frame-up without circumstantial evidence that appears on the surface to prove that an innocent person is guilty.

CRIME SCENE PHOTOS always struck me as posed. Did you see the grim but tasteful one of Nicole’s body in Fuhrman’s best-selling book? It should remind Civil War buffs of the famous Mathew Brady photo of the dead Confederate sniper in the Devil’s Den at Gettysburg. Remember that perfect, poignant, picture which said so much simply in how Brady framed his subject and the surroundings where he died. Remember the soldier’s body, his rifle and his cartridge case positioned just so—the way Brady positioned everything for that shot? Fuhrman, by the way, is a war/history buff. The power of the Marines’ flag-raising picture on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi after an heroic victory could not have escaped him. That picture was also posed.

The clincher for me was what Fuhrman said about a potent cartoon/commentary on the danger of a reunified Germany when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. All it took was a picture of a flag bearing a Nazi swastika rising out of a pile of rubble to conjure up all the horrors of the Third Reich. Why did he say he kept the picture on his desk at work? Because he was so impressed with the skill of his fellow artist and "the fact that a single image can provoke such subtle and disturbing thoughts...."

Has it struck you as peculiar that the photo of Fuhrman pointing to the bloody left-hand glove with 3 idle blood-drops near the opening also shows the cap, the Silga tread pattern of the shoe and the envelope, all within an 8-inch radius of his hand? And how about the blood in a line of 3 progressively larger drops? The farthest one from the glove, about 2 inches away, was double the size of the one almost touching it. A wounded left hand rising, perhaps? Could it have been O.J.’s blood? Would it have been identified as his blood if someone hadn’t screwed up?

You could ignore the posing argument if the glove hadn’t been turned around 180 degrees in another picture and blood identified in the lab as O.J.’s hadn’t been found in the opening of the other glove. Does the fact that it was the wrong glove sound like a reason to believe it was not planted (never mind the EDTA) or does the proximity of the drops to the glove in the photo and Fung’s refusal to collect them say that O.J.’s blood was planted on the wrong glove?

PHOTOGRAPHS OF O.J. WEARING BRUNO MAGLIS in Buffalo’s Rich Stadium can all be traced to four friends, Harry Scull, E. J. Flammer, Rob McCelroy, and Denny Lynch. Three were professional photographers, one was the public relations man for the Buffalo Bills. McCelroy acted as Scull’s agent and gave him $2,500 out of the $17,000 he got from the National Enquirer. When Flammer’s photos materialized late in the civil trial, and their value to the networks was easily in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, Flammer hired his friend and fellow photographer McCelroy to be his agent, too. Scull never complained about the deal he made with McCelroy. And O.J.’s housekeepers never saw the shoes he allegedly photographed.

Remember all the photographers the prosecution rounded up within 72 hours of the glove demonstration fiasco, with photos of O.J. wearing dark brown, Aris Light gloves? The amateur photos are the ones that matter since they could not have been faked. Where are the amateur photos of O.J. wearing Bruno Magli Lorenzos? They don’t exist. Everything necessary for faking the Flammer photos, which no Bills fan saw before 1996, was present in the time, expertise and motivation required for undetectable fakes. The number of photos is irrelevant if Lynch, the one man in a position to know that no one else could have taken a picture on that particular day to challenge their authenticity, controlled them all.

The photos were faked.

SPARE KEYS TO NICOLE’S CONDO were taken by O.J. shortly before her murder. His description of the keys he took and where he got them was identical to the ones Nicole’s maid said were missing—many keys—different keys on a plain ring. Faye Resnick testified that she was alone with Nicole when they discovered a set of two identical keys on a ring with a little bear was missing. Resnick said that they were the ones that Nicole took with her when she went running with Cora Fischman. She said that Nicole was looking for the spare to give it to her, Fay Resnick. Her description, minus the bear, matched the keys found in O.J.’s bag with his disguise and passport when he was arrested on the 17th. However, Cora also testified that she was alone with Nicole when Nicole discovered the keys were missing.

There was nothing sinister or surreptitious about O.J. taking Nicole’s keys. He told Detectives Vannatter and Lange that he’d taken them—the whole bunch that the maid said were missing—but that he had put them back. The detectives tried the two keys they believed were his in a replica of the lock on Nicole’s gate and concluded, that O.J. was a liar and a murderer. Of course, that was the conclusion they started with, and their test of the lock came after they had spoken to enough people to be fairly sure the key would fit. But all that proved is the fact that O.J. didn’t know they were in his bag and Faye Resnick knew that they would be.

During Nicole’s bout with pneumonia in mid-May, O.J. was in and out of her house often. It became a matter of her convenience and her housekeeper’s, as well as his, for him to take the keys she kept on the kitchen counter to let himself in and out. The trouble is, O.J. could not have had the key ring with all of Nicole’s keys on it from the middle of May without Nicole’s housekeeper learning about it before the first week in June. They were kept in the kitchen, out in the open where she would have seen them every day. Why did Faye Resnick say they were kept in a drawer? And how likely is it that Nicole would have taken two identical keys off of that key ring every day and put them on the same key chain she used when she ran with Cora Fischman? How could there not have been two sets of stolen keys that Nicole was no longer worried about when Faye checked into rehab?

All of this begs the question of what usually happens to house keys when a man and woman with two kids and two dogs they both love, live together for many years, break up, get back together and break up again. O.J. and Nicole visited each other frequently to pick up the kids or the dogs or to spend the night making love. The reason Paula Barbiari broke up with O.J. on the day of the murders was because she thought that Nicole was going to eventually move back in with O.J. If O.J. had a master key to all the locks in his house, Nicole, at one time, had one, too. When she moved out, did she give it back without making a duplicate? Did O.J. change the locks to make her key useless? Did she pitch it, destroy it, or lose it? Did somebody we know "find" it?

The question is not, what was O.J. doing with keys to Nicole’s place? The question is what happened to her keys to his?

TIMELINE evidence that the murders occurred between 10:00 and 10:30 is as strong as Mark Fuhrman claims it is. 10:30 is the latest that it could have ended to give O.J. time to leave all of the evidence that Fuhrman and Roberts found against him. Nicole's Swiss Army wristwatch was broken and stopped at 10:03. An anonymous woman called a nearby police station around 10:30 to ask about two bodies on the west side. A man reported seeing a light-colored SUV at 10:20 in the alley south of Bundy where Fuhrman said he found the fence matching the wood by the Bronco. Marcia Clark's star timeline witness, Pablo Fenjves, characterized the sound of the dog he heard at 10:15 or 10:20 as "...a plaintive wail," the sound a dog would make after the death of its mistress.  None of this adds up to anything that fits the actions of the real killer, unless the real killer was creating most of it to frame O.J. Simpson.

STALKING was a key ingredient in the case Marcia Clark had to make against O.J. to fit the known psychological profile of a spouse abuser who goes on to murder his former mate. Her evidence consisted entirely of hearsay and one direct witness who took O.J. for a prowler because he didn't recognize him and felt that a black man in his neighborhood had to be up to no good. Marcia Clark knew but ignored the fact that O.J.'s promiscuity made him an unlikely stalker. It was the source of most of his fights with Nicole. O.J. fooled around a lot.

Stalkers in general and men who stalk their ex-wives in particular, are monogamous. They fix on one person and that's it. That's why they stalk them; they're stuck in a grove and can't get out of it to focus on someone else.

On the day O.J. supposedly murdered his ex because of a "dear John" call from his girlfriend, he was already on the phone setting up a date with another woman.

SPOUSE ABUSE evidence against O.J. doesn’t hold up any better under scrutiny than the DNA evidence.

How does Nicole’s combative personality comport with the sniveling punching bag in "her diary" and "her call" to a women’s abuse center? It doesn’t. It doesn’t fit what Cora Fischman or O.J.’s two housekeepers had to say about Nicole and O.J. It does fit what Mark Fuhrman, Denise Brown, Ron Shipp and Faye Resnick had to say. The best possible witnesses to "O.J.’s abuse of Nicole" —those who did not have a proprietary interest in making that charge—refuted it.

Nicole’s 911 calls could actually be evidence of O.J.’s innocence when you consider how Mark Fuhrman is connected to every one of them. Consider Fuhrman’s friendship with Ron Shipp since 1985, Shipp’s expertise in spouse abuse and forgery, and his links to O.J., Nicole, Denise Brown, and Faye "The Fake" Resnick. Ask yourself how 911 could be used as a weapon to abuse a man like O.J. Was she the kind of person who would have done that? Only if she was extremely angry.

When O.J. got angry, he got loud. He ranted and raved, snatched at things and hit things. But did he beat people with his fists? Did he beat Nicole, kick her, slap her, pull her hair, blacken her eye, cut her lip and threaten to kill her?

Conventional wisdom has it that he did all of these things to her on a fairly regular basis. Conventional wisdom says that on New Year’s day, 1989, Nicole called 911. When the police arrived at O.J.’s Ashford gate, the maid, Michelle Abudrahn, answered on the speaker, saying, "There is no trouble here." But Officer John Edwards told her that he would not leave until he spoke to the woman who called 911 and said she was being beaten. Then Nicole ran, battered, half-clothed, shivering and muddy from some bushes, into his arms screaming hysterically, "he’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!" As if that wasn’t bad enough, O.J. came out of the house, still furious after the brutal assault, completely oblivious to why the police would think he had done something wrong.

Is it possible for O.J. and the police to have had good reason to think they were right? Yes. But it sounds exactly like blaming the victim, until you stop assuming you know who the victim is. Is it possible that Nicole wasn’t nearly as hurt, as frightened or as innocent as she appeared to be? Is it possible that she was hiding from the police, not O.J., until she heard the exchange between Edwards and Michelle? When she ran to the officer screaming, "He’s going to kill me!" could she have been going on the attack?

This much we know: On January 1, 1989, at 3:58 A.M., Sharyn Gilbert, a 911 operator, in a room with four other operators, got a call from 360 North Rockingham. To send the appropriate response team to the address, she was required to "create an incident." All she could enter on her log was, "unknown trouble, " because no one on the other end of the line made a sound (every undisputed depiction of O.J. showing extreme anger at Nicole includes a loud, continuous stream of crude language). About three minutes later, Gilbert got excited when a woman started screaming. She updated her incident report accordingly to, "screaming woman." Then she heard the unmistakable sound of flesh slapping flesh and a low moan, the kind you would expect to hear from a woman who had just been hit.

Gilbert, understandably, interpreted what she was hearing as "a woman being beaten." She turned up the volume so the responding officers could hear what she was hearing. Unfortunately, they couldn’t see what she could see, and she could only tell them what she’d heard before the line went dead.

Edwards did hear something from a dispatcher about a "male black," and assumed that a man fitting that description was beating the woman. He didn’t know that the words about the man involved another emergency altogether. He had also assumed that the woman who made the 911 call told the operator that she was being beaten. He and his partner therefore pulled up to O.J.’s home, not knowing that it was his home, expecting to see a terrified female victim of a beating and a black, male perpetrator. To Edwards, the woman who answered the buzzer to say that there was no problem, had to be lying. He demanded to speak to the woman who made the call.

Michelle might have told him that she did make the call if Nicole had given her the chance. Not that it matters. Edwards ignored everything Michelle said that conflicted with his idea of what was going on. If she was the one being assaulted, he was there to stop it. If she was protecting the man who was beating another woman, he was there to stop him. He never considered the possibility that no one had been beaten by a man, that Michelle was the one who screamed when a bigger, stronger woman in a drunken rage attacked her.

Based on what Edwards heard from the operator, he couldn’t accept the word of the woman on the speaker with the foreign accent that there were no problems. He could not imagine her saying that there were no problems because she had made a mistake in bringing the police to O.J.’s home, that she had been able to defend herself, that the fight between her and the woman of the house was over and no harm was done. Edwards was looking for a female victim of a beating who had called 911, and a man who had beaten her—a black man.

When O.J. stormed out of the house ranting and raving, that’s what he saw.

Nicole never told him or his partner that she made the 911 call that brought them there. Everyone, including O.J., just assumed she had because she’d made so many in the past. No woman told the operator that she was being beaten. Not a single word was spoken. Nicole may have slapped Michelle or vice versa. We can’t tell by the audiotape whether the woman doing the screaming was also the one doing the slapping. We do know there was no male voice on the 911 tape during the entire 3-minute duration of the call—time for someone expecting an attacker who couldn’t be locked out. Nicole waiting for O.J.? Then why no ranting and raving; no male grunts, barks, growls or snorts; no masculine sounds of any kind? And what about that hair-pulling business? What does that sound like to you?

This we know: Edwards’ verbal descriptions of Nicole’s injuries don’t match the pictures he took of them. She had a big bruise on her forehead and mud on her pants. No cut on her lip. No black eye. No evidence that she’d been kicked or punched anywhere on her body. That is pretty strong evidence that she lied about being kicked and punched. If she had been slapped, the fingerprints had faded. If they had belonged to O.J. they would have been large enough to make note of. Edwards didn’t mention their size. The bruise on her collar that showed up later, is strong evidence in favor of O.J.'s version of events. It says that he did "wrestle her," that he grab her in a headlock—which she did not mention—and forced her out of their bedroom. Worse than hitting her with his fists, he most likely banged her head against the doorjamb without either of them realizing what had happened.

None of this is to say that Nicole was a bad person, only that she wasn’t at her best on that day and it was out of character for her to let anyone treat her with less respect than she thought she deserved. It made her angry. When she got angry, she attacked. Whatever happened between Nicole and Michelle happened after Nicole’s tussle with O.J., and partly because of it. Nicole hated Michelle. Could part of the reason have been because of a secret they shared that could hurt both of them?

In April of ’94 Nicole found a flimsy excuse to hit Michelle hard enough to knock her down and cause the whole side her face to swell up. She did it after their argument was over, without warning—and without words. That opens the question of whether or not the police would have seen scratches or bruise on the dark-skinned woman’s body if they’d looked for them in ’89. It opens the question of the mood Nicole was in before and after she was photographed with the bruise on her head. Was she traumatized, sad, reflective?