Without a Doubt by Marcia Clark

Author:Marcia Clark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: True Crime, Non-Fiction, Legal-Crts-Police-Thriller
ISBN: 9781631680687
Publisher: West 26th Street Press
Published: 1998-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

The Empty Chair

CAR TAPE. It’s now January sixth. Fifth. Something like that. It’s Thursday after New Year’s Eve. We worked all through New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day. Finally took Monday off.

We mapped out our whole trial strategy. Bill wasn’t there Saturday and we finished the whole thing. Me and Hank and Chris got through the whole map of the case, which was wonderful. Bill came in on Sunday. . . . Having Chris in there—he’s tough, he’s a fighter, he’s smart and when he gets in to do something I know he’s gonna do it perfectly.

By New Year’s, just three weeks before opening statements were set to begin, Bill Hodgman was fading before my eyes. He grew thinner and more haggard with each passing day. He wouldn’t talk to me about what was bothering him. All he would say was that he wasn’t sleeping well.

That was clear. His eyes were always bloodshot. His face was etched with fatigue. He was trying to hang in there with all the strength he could muster; I could see him struggling to get through the inhuman workload we labored under every day. But after his scuffle with the seventy-one-year-old black juror back in October, he had been out sick with the flu, or some mysterious stomach ailment, almost constantly. Bill was clearly wrestling with his own demons. Believe me, I could sympathize. Yet neither of us felt comfortable confiding our personal problems to the other. So I could only guess at what was eating him.

Bill just didn’t seem prepared to do what was required in this case: get in there and kick the shit out of the defense. Shortly after that weird episode with the juror, he got sucked into another bullshit controversy.

O. J. Simpson had been receiving jailhouse visits from Roosevelt Grier, a former NFL defensive lineman who was purportedly now a minister. Grier and the defendant met regularly in a visiting room, where they sat on either side of a glass partition. They spoke to each other by telephone. On December 14, a sheriff’s deputy who had been manning the control booth supposedly heard Simpson slam down the receiver and blurt out something that could have been interpreted as a confession. (The National Enquirer would later report an unidentified source at the jail as saying that Simpson, who was holding a Bible at the time, had exclaimed, “I did it.”)

But when all this came down, no one in the D.A.‘s office had a clue as to what Simpson had actually said. Ito had ordered the sheriffs not to say anything, and they were so scared of bad press they wouldn’t even tell us on the QT. The deputies filed a report with the court, but it was kept under seal. And so we found ourselves in a ridiculous position: the Sheriff’s Department, the judge, and the defense team all knew what Simpson had said—but we didn’t. Roosevelt Grier, of course, knew, but he wasn’t telling. He claimed that Simpson’s outburst was protected by clergyman-penitent privilege.

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