True or False     False - O.J. was not seen on the driveway going into his house

In O.J.'s criminal trial Marcia Cark interpreted limo driver Allan Park's testimony to mean that he saw O.J. returning from the south path next to the garage. His testimony in that trial does not correspond to that interpretation or to the "X" he marked on a color diagram to indicate where he first saw O.J. He put the "X" on the walkway leading to the north-front door of his house, not on the driveway. He did not testify to seeing O.J. coming toward him as he sat in his limo outside of the Ashford gates looking forward. He said that he did not see O.J. on the driveway and did not see him cross the driveway. He saw him cross his line of sight from the "X" to the door.

Where, then, did so many people get the unbending impression that Allan Park witnessed O.J. coming from the south path? They got it from his earlier performance in the preliminary hearing where journalists' expectations were high that he would say and do what he did. In that hearing he indicated that he did see O.J. crossing the driveway and walking toward his limo.

He didn't necessarily commit perjury. It is more likely that he made an association error that everyone makes when trying to reconstruct an event that wasn't important when it happened -- that he made a mental composite of what he saw and what he thought at different times for different reasons. When he was at Rockingham on the night of June 12, 1994 he didn't know what things he saw would be crucially important the following morning and every day since then. He did not tell homicide detectives or county prosecutors that he witnessed O.J. returning from a bloody double homicide on Bundy. He didn't even know if the person he saw going into the house was male or female. They told him what he saw. Based on what he did see and what everyone in the civilized world heard about the case against O.J., he believed it.  

In the preliminary hearing the only relevant aspects of Park's memory involving O.J. going into his house that he was certain about were seeing Kato first and where he saw him. Park marked this sighting on the preliminary hearing diagram in the same relative position that he marked it on Marcia's criminal trial diagram.

In the preliminary hearing Park said he saw O.J. almost immediately after seeing Kato. The thin swooping line on the upper right of the driveway next to the X, on the left of the driveway and from the corner of the garage cutting across the driveway mark off the area that Park said was bright enough for him to see.  The area just inside of the thin curved line across the walkway where Park indicated the brightest light (the space between the rectangles with the circles on each end) is where Park said he saw O.J. going into the house. Kato did not see O.J. until he returned from the south path, opened the gate for Park, went back to the south path and returned again when he heard Park and O.J talking.

Park did not recall seeing Kato move from the spot on the north path where he first saw him until Kato returned from the south path and opened the gate 30 to 60 seconds after he first saw him.

On the drawing below, note the distance between the X where Park first noticed Kato and his line of sight on the north path where Kato was walking toward the driveway. This is the distance that Kato waked before Park noticed him, although Kato was wearing a white t-shirt and shining a flashlight. This distance is no more than a step or two closer to the distance from O.J.'s front door to the X he put on the criminal trial diagram to mark where he first saw O.J. going into his front door. Inside of the curved line on the preliminary hearing diagram is where he clearly recalled first seeing O.J.

Park drew the boundary line of his visibility all the way from the west pillar of the Ashford gate (the open one on the diagram) then crossed it with the line going from the north corner of the garage across the driveway to the lawn. To understand why he did this, which also gives you a good idea of how much Marcia Clark influenced his recall and how she did it, you have to know where Marcia interjected herself in the process. Park initially indicated with his vertical line that he could see the driveway down to the south corner of the garage next to the south path. Marcia interjected, as though misinterpreting him to mean the north corner of the garage. That's when he pointed to the north corner.

Marcia immediately placed her marker on the north corner. Park then drew his diagonal line of sight from the north corner that intersected the vertical line of sight on the lawn. But if you look through the bars of the gates as Park did before Kato let him in, both corners of the garage are on nearly on the same line of sight. The diagonal line from the south corner of the garage to the lawn would therefore be just below the bend in driveway, which he could not see beyond because the gate pillar was blocking his view; not because the area was too dark to see. If O.J. had come from that area when Marcia said he did, Park would have seen him walking toward him instead of appearing out of nowhere on the walkway walking into the open door of his house. 

Although neither of Marcia's diagrams was drawn to scale the fact that the sightings occurred close to intersections made it possible to plot their locations within a reasonable range of accuracy on a scale drawing. Her diagrams do not show the two entrances to the house on the south path, nor did she explain why O.J. would go past these entrances to "sneak" into his front door in front of the limo driver. --Jasper