Assistant D.A. Brian Kelberg asked Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, “If we call you Dr. Lakshmanan, you will not be offended, will you?”
With a grin, the Los Angeles County coroner replied, “No, I will not.”
The chief coroner was on the stand because the man who actually performed the autopsies on Ron and Nicole, Deputy Medical Examiner Irwin Golden, had provided inept testimony during the preliminary hearing. Dr. Lakshmanan acknowledged that Dr. Golden had made some mistakes, but insisted that they were not critical to the case.
Moving slowly toward what promised to be the most graphic evidence of the trial, Kelberg elicited basic verbal descriptions of the two victims.
Dr. Lakshmanan spent only about ninety minutes on the witness stand during this shortened Friday session. It was a prelude to next week, when the jurors—but not the courtroom audience—would be shown the autopsy photographs. Judge Ito warned the jurors, “If at any time during the presentation of this evidence you feel unusually uncomfortable or if you need to take a break, feel free to let me know.”
With the exception of the days following Ron’s death, we knew that the coming week would be the most difficult of our lives.
During a hearing on Monday, Patti and Kim heard Cochran explain to Judge Ito that when the autopsy photos were displayed for the jury the next day, his client might not be able to remain in the room. He wanted the judge to prepare an instruction to the jury in case the killer found it necessary to flee the courtroom.
The judge was unsure whether he could legally allow the defendant to waive his right to be present during the trial. The prosecution, on this rare occasion, agreed with the defense, but did not want the defendant to leave the courtroom when the jury was present. Deputy D.A. Brian Kelberg opined, “One might argue whether this is a performance by Mr. Simpson, the actor, or truly a reflection of Mr. Simpson’s alleged grief for his deceased wife.”
Marcia agreed, asking Judge Ito not to “turn this into a circus sideshow for maudlin displays by the defendant.” Hearing this, the killer rolled his eyes and glared at Marcia.
They were setting the stage for some more two-bit acting for the benefit of the jury. We could just see it coming, the quivering lip and the crocodile tears. Finally Judge Ito ruled that the defendant would either have to leave the courtroom before the photos were shown or remain for the entire session. He decided to stay. Then Cochran insisted that the victims’ families be put under the same restriction. We agreed, knowing full well that if we found it necessary to leave, we would do just that.
Both Brian Kelberg and Ken Lynch advised us not to come the next day. The autopsy photographs would be displayed in such a way that only the jurors could view them, but the testimony would be graphic. “You don’t want to remember him that way,” they insisted. Marcia and Chris also encouraged us not to attend.
We talked about it throughout the evening, weighing the pros and cons.
“I don’t know,” Kim said. “Maybe what’s in my imagination is worse than the reality. Maybe I need to hear what really happened.”
We continued to vacillate. Finally, just as earlier when photographs of the murder scene were shown, we concluded that whatever trauma we experienced would pale in comparison to what Ron had endured. We decided that the most important issue was to demonstrate to the jury our support for the prosecution. We hoped that our presence would somehow personalize Ron to the jury. If we had to flee, so be it.
On Tuesday, June 6, Patti and Kim realized there was a change in the defense team’s seating arrangements. Up until now, Robert Kardashian had been seated at the back table, in front of the rail. Now he had moved up to the defense table and seemed to be in a position to block out the TV camera’s view of the murderer.
Brian spent much of the day simply questioning Dr. Lakshmanan, building toward a dramatic visual conclusion. However, even the testimony, although often dry and technical, provoked vivid images. The coroner testified that Ron had bled so profusely that there was not enough blood left in his heart to take a sample.
Now came one of the most abhorrent moments of the trial. A large easel was set up so that the jury—and no one else—could view the photos. When the first one was displayed, one of the women jurors covered her mouth in horror. Another began to breathe very deeply.
As the coroner described the photos, the killer reacted. The Los Angeles Times reported that he “worked his jaw slowly and winced.” But that is not what Patti and Kim saw. This man whose lawyers argued that he was worried that he might have to flee the courtroom, knowing that the easel blocked him from the jury’s sight, bobbed his head to a silent, up-tempo beat. His fingers tapped out a rhythm on the table in front of him. Cochran would probably claim that he was simply trying to get the mental images out of his mind, but we would disagree. Patti and Kim were there. They saw what Kardashian blocked the TV camera from showing. This man was dancing!
On the other side of the room the jurors were reacting quite differently. Many of them cried.
Standing a few feet away from the jury and using a pointer to indicate details of the photos, Dr. Lakshmanan traced a gash from the left side of Nicole’s throat to just below her right ear. He noted that there were no marginal wounds around this cut, indicating that she did not resist, and that she may have already been unconscious when the lethal blow was delivered.
When Brian asked the coroner to demonstrate how the final, fatal blow to Nicole could have been inflicted, Dr. Lakshmanan rose, stood behind the deputy D.A., grabbed him by the hair, pulled his head back, and sliced a ruler across his neck.
With each passing day, the testimony grew more ghastly. Dr. Lakshmanan, using the forensic evidence, reconstructed the sequence of events. He theorized that the killer first confronted Nicole, face to face, and inflicted four thrusting wounds to her neck. At least one of them would have been fatal without immediate medical attention. Wounds to the back of her left hand indicated that she attempted to ward off the blows, but her defensive wounds were minimal, which showed that the attacker had quickly overwhelmed her. The coroner then suggested that Nicole was knocked unconscious by a blow to the head. She fell to the ground. The killer then apparently paused in his attack. Dr. Lakshmanan testified that the fall caused a bruise on Nicole’s head, which took one minute or more to develop, and which would not have appeared if her throat had been slashed then, and her blood pressure had dropped to zero.
This was the minute of Ron’s death.
Patti and Kim continually, quietly, asked one another, “Are you okay?”
In Dr. Lakshmanan’s scenario, the killer may have been interrupted, and turned his fury upon the interloper. A minute or so later he returned to the unconscious Nicole, grabbed her by the hair, exposed her neck, and administered the vicious, maniacal coup de grâce.
Dr. Lakshmanan testified that, in his opinion, the wounds were administered by a right-handed assailant using a single-edged knife. Hearing this, the killer leaned forward and jotted a note to Carl Douglas.
Patti noted that he wrote with his right hand.
Lou Brown, acting as executor of Nicole’s estate, filed a civil suit against his former son-in-law. Now three separate cases were active: Sharon’s, ours, and the Browns’.
As we spent the weekend finalizing plans for a candlelight vigil to commemorate the first anniversary of Ron’s death, a new issue began to preoccupy us. During the past year we had been astounded by the volume of mail that poured in. Only a few people knew our address, but thousands found creative ways to get mail to us. If a letter was sent to “The Goldman Family” in Los Angeles or Agoura or Westlake Village or even Brentwood, the post office managed to get it to us. All the letters contained messages of sympathy and support. Some people sent monetary contributions to help us with unforeseen expenses, and we appreciated them very much. The most poignant letters came from a legion of people who could sincerely empathize because they, too, had lost family members to senseless acts of brutality and evil. Our anguish was in the national consciousness, but every one of these other stories was just as painful and infuriating.
An idea flickered within us. Could we begin to direct our sorrow to some useful end? We did not know where this concept would take us, but it was comforting.
We expanded the concept of our candlelight vigil to honor the memory of other victims as well. Because Ron loved tennis so much, initially we thought we would conduct the service at the high school tennis courts, but we did not want candle wax to damage the playing surface. Patti contacted Dennis Anderson at the Rancho Simi Parks and Recreation Department, and he graciously allowed us use of the facilities at Oak Canyon Park. He even offered to supply park rangers and police to direct traffic.
The service was set for 8:30 P.M.
Monday, June 12, 1995.
Ron had been gone for one year. Who could believe it?
Dr. Lakshmanan was attending an international scientific conference, and court would not convene until the afternoon.
Judge Ito, seeking to maintain “some final shred of dignity” for Ron and Nicole, had barred journalists from viewing the autopsy photos but, under pressure, he relented. This morning forty-eight reporters filed into the empty courtroom, where eight large charts containing fifty-eight photographs were set up on easels. Judge Ito, in shirtsleeves, sat in the jury box with two prosecutors and a law clerk, observing.
No one spoke above a whisper.
Andrea Ford of the Los Angeles Times described what she saw as “ugly, powerfully violent images.”
After a time, Dominick Dunne found a seat off by himself, and stared blankly toward the front of the room.
Twenty-eight minutes later a bailiff called out, “Time.”
As the journalists filed out, a CNN reporter kept asking them, “Are you all right? Are you all right?”
Kim asked Dominick Dunne if he had seen the autopsy photos. He simply turned his head; he could not look at her.
That afternoon, Dr. Lakshmananan turned his attention to the one minute that took Ron from us.
Patti, Kim, and I sat as close together as we could, gripping each other for support. One of the prosecutors handed us tissues.
Close-up photos of Ron’s head and face were displayed to the jury. One of the older jurors, a man, gagged and choked. He wiped his face with a handkerchief.
Dr. Lakshmanan told the jurors that Ron was stabbed and slashed to death, and that all of the wounds could have been caused by a single knife. Some of the wounds suggested that Ron put up a fight, but a variety of cuts to his throat, lung, and abdomen robbed him of blood pressure and vitality, rendering him helpless.
Two of the cuts appeared to have been made when the killer was holding Ron still, drawing the knife across his throat in a threatening manner. The coroner said, “You can see this type of injury when somebody is immobilized, and you are threatening to do bodily harm to them.”
He added, “Without medical treatment …” Ron “would have died within five minutes.”
I dropped my chin to my chest. Unstoppable tears streamed down my face.
A bailiff approached us, offering three small cups of water, which we accepted gratefully. Incredible, horrible phrases rebounded inside our heads: thirty wounds, five of them could have been fatal; Ron lay there, gasping for breath; he was found with one eye still open. Kim caught Marcia’s attention and mouthed the words “I’m out of here.”
Marcia, in turn, met Judge Ito’s gaze and said the same thing to him. He nodded and we rushed from the room.
All we could do was pace the halls and cry. And cry. And cry.
No family should ever have to endure such a thing.