CHAPTER FIVE 

When Bob reached her on the phone on his way to O.J.’s on the morning of June 13, Kris was just about to call him to share the same news. After she told him that she had been scheduled to have lunch with Nicole that very morning, her ex-husband uttered the words that would stay with her:

“I hope O.J. didn’t do it.”

When he arrived at the gates of his friend’s Rockingham home minutes later, he informed a cop that he was a friend of O.J.’s, “one of his closest friends.” He was told that Simpson had not yet arrived. Bob could not enter. Moments later, O.J.’s longtime attorney, Howard Weitzman—the man who had won an acquittal for auto magnate John De Lorean on drug-dealing charges ten years earlier—drove up. He was also the lawyer who had represented O.J. when he was accused of assaulting Nicole in 1989. But Weitzman was all business, and Bob was left standing at the gate until O.J. arrived in the black Cadillac of his business adviser Skip Taft. He got out of the car carrying a duffel bag but ignored Bob, who was still standing there. Next, Bob’s former assistant Cathy Randa got out of the car carrying a Louis Vuitton garment bag that belonged to O.J. He offered to take the bag from her. Slinging it over his shoulder, he approached the police guard and told him that he had O.J.’s luggage, believing this would be his entree.

In the deposition he later gave for the Goldman family’s civil suit against O.J., Bob described what happened next. “The bag was sitting at our feet. I walked over to the police officer, and I said, ‘Mr. Simpson’s bag is sitting here. You should take it. It’s his luggage.’ And he says, ‘You can’t bring it in.’ I said, ‘But it’s his luggage. You should take it.’ And he said, ‘No, you can’t come in.’ ”

Meanwhile, he looked over and saw that O.J. had been handcuffed by police.

He realized that he wasn’t getting through the gate. So Bob threw the bag into the trunk of his Mercedes and gave Randa a lift to O.J.’s office, Orenthal Enterprises, two miles away.

There, he spent the afternoon answering phone calls from well-wishers and business associates, all clamoring to find out what was going on. Meanwhile, O.J. had gone downtown to police headquarters to answer questions. Around 4:00 p.m., he returned to the office. Upon arriving, he hugged Bob but was noncommittal about what he had told the police and sat down to watch the TV news coverage. Just after 6:00 p.m., he asked Bob to drive him home. When they arrived, they found police tearing the place apart. When O.J. took Bob upstairs to find out if anything was missing, he told Bob that he had eight thousand dollars in gambling winnings in his closet. There was no sign of the money, but O.J.’s gun collection—nine weapons in all, including an Uzi—was still there.

The place was chaos. At one point Bob saw O.J.’s surfer houseguest, Kato Kaelin, wandering around, and then he saw O.J.’s sister Shirley. He confided that he was worried about his friend’s state of mind. “Stay near your brother tonight,” he told her. “Don’t leave him.” Then he went home.

The next morning, he headed back to the house in his Rolls Royce. Before he left, he remembered O.J.’s garment bag from the day before and switched it from the trunk of the Mercedes to the trunk of the Rolls. Finding a swarm of media plaguing his beleaguered friend, he suggested that O.J. stay at his house for a couple of days until the frenzy “blows over.” But it would be almost impossible to leave undetected. The media would simply follow. He suggested that O.J. cut through the tennis court of his neighbor’s adjoining property and Bob would swing around and pick him up down the street.

Minutes later, with the press none the wiser, the two men headed to O.J.’s office. On the ride over, the decision was made to shelve Weitzman as the lead attorney and bring on Robert Shapiro to head the defense team. Shapiro had been suggested by O.J.’s friend Roger King, the owner of the TV conglomerate Kingworld Productions, which owned Inside Edition. King insisted that O.J. needed the best criminal defense attorney that money could buy and offered to bankroll Shapiro, whose legal bill would almost certainly run into the millions.

When Shapiro arrived at the office less than an hour later, one of the first things he did was take Bob aside and confess that he needed his help with the case. He didn’t know O.J., and he needed someone on board that the former football star could trust. Bob had stopped practicing law two years earlier to devote himself full-time to his various business enterprises. Now Shapiro was asking him to reactivate his license and join the defense team. Ron Goldman’s family and others would later openly speculate that Kardashian was merely added to the defense team so that he couldn’t be called as a witness, because attorneys are governed by lawyer-client privilege.

The whole time that Shapiro was there, he was surprised to find O.J. repeatedly bringing up the subject of his golf clubs. He had apparently left them at LAX when he returned from a tournament in Chicago, and he seemed obsessed with getting them back. It seemed strange to everybody that O.J. was a prime suspect in the murder of his ex-wife but all he wanted to talk about was his golf clubs.

After Shapiro left, O.J. asked Bob to drive him to the airport to retrieve the clubs. After a twenty-minute ride, they left the Rolls curbside at the Arrivals area and headed to the American Airlines office. A customer-service rep informed them that the clubs could be found at the next carousel over. There, an attendant handed O.J. the black golf bag with a red Swiss Army insignia emblazoned on the carrying case. Finding the car, they tossed the clubs in the trunk alongside the Louis Vuitton garment bag and drove back to Bob’s house.

As they returned along San Vincente Boulevard in Brentwood, they just happened to stop at a red light next to Kris Jenner, who was driving with Bob’s cousin Cici. Kris recalled that they both looked at her through the window but there was no acknowledgment. They just sped off. That night, she says, she called Bob to ask him what that was about. Bob told her the story about the golf tournament and that O.J. needed to retrieve his clubs. Why couldn’t he have simply had them delivered to the house? she asked. Bob assured her that he “really needed his clubs.”

Kris exploded. “His wife is fucking dead! Why did O.J. need his golf clubs?” She was very suspicious and would remain so long afterward. Arriving home from the airport, Bob removed the clubs from the trunk and placed them in the garage, where they remained, seemingly unopened, for some time.

Asked during the civil deposition whether he ever saw O.J. remove anything from the bag, Bob recalled that the next day he had seen him remove a single club—an iron—from the bag. He then walked around the block, swinging the club. As for the garment bag, O.J. eventually brought it with him when he returned home. Bob saw it lying open in his bedroom. Both bags would end up playing a starring role in the events to follow and in the frequently leveled charge that Bob had helped his old friend cover up a murder.

O.J.’s kids Sydney and Justin had been brought to Bob’s house by Al Cowlings, also unbeknownst to the media, which were still camped out at the Rockingham estate assuming O.J. was inside. Upon his return to the house, O.J. spent hours with the children. At one point, Bob overheard him tell them that their mommy was in heaven and that he might join her there. He’d later testify that he saw his friend crying.

It had been suggested by Shapiro that O.J. submit to a polygraph test. It would be inadmissible in court, but if he passed, they could release it to the press and the DA and show that O.J. had nothing to do with the murders. Bob liked the idea. O.J. insisted he would pass the test because he had nothing to do with the slayings. They contacted the office of Dr. Edward Gelb, one of the top polygraph experts in the country, who had taught the advanced polygraph course for the FBI. But Gelb was overseas. His assistant Dennis Nellany would instead administer the test.

In 1996, Lawrence Schiller published a book about the case entitled American Tragedy—reportedly with the full cooperation of Robert Kardashian, who was rumored to have shared in the royalties. According to Schiller, Nellany reported that Simpson had scored a “minus 22” on the test, which is about the lowest score possible and indicates a strong probability that he had lied in answer to all the key questions surrounding the slayings. Hearing the results, Bob was stunned. He claims that he was still completely convinced of his friend’s innocence.

Schiller reports O.J.’s response: “What I said about Nicole, you know? Every time he said her name, my heart would beat like crazy. You guys have got to understand. I didn’t do this!” On the drive back, he kept insisting to Bob that he was “nervous.” Bob believed him. Besides, he had been on heavy anti-anxiety medication since the murders, which might have skewed the results. He offered to take the test again, but his lawyers suggested he wait a week.

When word eventually leaked out that O.J. had made a special trip to the airport to retrieve the golf bag, media speculation reached a frenzy around the idea that this was where O.J. had hidden the murder weapon—the so-called bloody knife used to kill the victims—which was never found. The bag was still in the garage, so Bob summoned Al Cowlings.

“I wanted to know if it was true,” he recalled. “I wanted to know if there was anything in there and if there was I was going to turn it in.” Together, he and Cowlings examined every square inch of the bag but failed to find either a knife or any bloodstains. The bag, however, wasn’t the only potential location where O.J. could have stashed the weapon. Media photographers had snapped numerous photos of the still-unknown Kardashian with O.J.’s Louis Vuitton bag slung over his shoulder. Once he took a prominent place on the defense team, many pundits speculated that Bob had helped his client hide the evidence. Both Kim and Fred Goldman, the sister and father of murder victim Ron, would later publicly muse about his involvement.

“I have always wondered what was in his luggage bag, and if it did indeed hold the murder weapon that was used to kill my brother and Nicole,” Kim told Radar Online. “That evidence would have convicted ‘the killer,’ ” Fred Goldman later told the London Mail on Sunday.

Years later, Bob continued to deny that he had anything to do with a cover-up. “The police could have taken [the bag] at any time,” he said. “They never sought to do so, in fact when we turned it in to the court nine months later, they still never did any tests to see if there was blood. I don’t believe they really wanted to know the answer. I think it was better to leave speculation and to let the public think there was something sinister about these bags!”

Kris also counted herself among the most skeptical. In her memoir, she recalls arriving at Bob’s to pick up the kids the week of the killings. She knew O.J. had been staying there following the murders. When she found nobody home, she claims she went to the room where O.J. had been sleeping. One thought, she remembered, consumed her. She needed to search the place. She found the Louis Vuitton bag and decided to examine it. “I went through it with a fine tooth comb, trying to satisfy my own curiosity, my own doubts,” she recalled. “If there was a piece of incriminating evidence anywhere, I was determined to find it and turn it over to the prosecution. It was torturing me that there had to be something somewhere and I was determined to find it.” After ransacking the room, she had come up empty.

It’s a good story but is almost certainly apocryphal. The kids hadn’t been staying with Bob that week and definitely not while O.J. was hiding at his house. They didn’t even see their father again until after O.J. was arrested. By that time, the Louis Vuitton bag was long gone from the premises. On the other hand, Bob’s story about searching the golf bag with Al Cowlings also doesn’t ring true. It is almost impossible to believe that he would have turned over evidence against his own client, let alone a close friend.

After the trial, the most prominent O.J. watcher, Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair, would address the increasing speculation that Bob had participated in a cover-up. “Simpson’s friend Robert Kardashian,” he wrote,

will always be remembered as the person who walked off Simpson’s property the day after the murders carrying a Louis Vuitton bag that many people believed held the bloody clothes worn by the killer. I have never felt that that was so. I don’t believe that Simpson would have brought bloody clothes back to Los Angeles from Chicago, where he had gone after the murders to play in a golf tournament, knowing that he would have been met by police. I do wonder, however, if Kardashian could have played a part in the removal of the murder weapon from the golf bag that arrived at LAX the day after Simpson’s return from Chicago, when he and Simpson, in the midst of his mourning, went to the airport to pick up Simpson’s golf clubs. A knife in a golf bag might have gone through security undetected.

By June 17, police had collected enough evidence to conclude that O.J. had almost certainly killed Nicole and Ron Goldman. Shapiro called Bob at 8:30 a.m. to inform him that an arrest warrant had been issued. He had convinced authorities to allow his client to surrender himself at 11:00 that morning. The two decided to tell O.J. the news together. When Denice Halicki overheard, she suggested that they let A. J. Cowlings know. As his best friend and someone even larger than O.J., Al could stop him if he were to do “something crazy.” She also suggested that the guns be removed from Bob’s house before they gave him the bad news.

They found O.J. still in bed. They told him he was about to be charged with double homicide. Shapiro, according to Schiller, asked him if he had anything he wanted to tell them. It would be his last chance to be alone with his lawyers with no possibility of anyone eavesdropping.

“Basically, I’ve told you everything that’s transpired,” he replied. “I’ve got nothing to hide.” He asked why the police aren’t looking for other people. It’s a “setup,” he protested. His team needed to take some medical samples, including blood, urine, and skin, to prepare for his defense. A doctor and nurse were waiting to conduct the testing. Afterward, O.J. retired to his bedroom. When Bob informed him that it was time to go to police headquarters, O.J. remained motionless. “Why should I hurry? What can they do to me?” he asked. It was clear he had no intention of surrendering on schedule. O.J. was busy writing letters on a yellow legal pad to his children and to his mother. At one point, he handed Bob a sealed envelope labeled with the words To Whom It May Concern, press or public.

When Shapiro finally called at noon to explain that they were trying to get their client to the station, the authorities demanded the address where he was staying.

A while later, Bob got on his knees and took his friend’s hand, suggesting that they pray together. According to Schiller’s account, after a short prayer beseeching God for understanding and compassion, O.J. declared, “I’m gonna kill myself. I just can’t live with the pain. I just can’t go on.” Bob warned him that if he pulled the trigger he would “go to hell.” But O.J. appeared to have made up his mind.

For the next fifteen minutes, the conversation centered not on talking him out of the drastic act but on where it would take place. O.J. had been staying in the room where Kourtney stayed whenever she was with her father. When he announced that he intended to kill himself where he stood, Bob protested that it was his daughter’s room. “I have my little girl in this room and every time I come in here, I’ll see your body lying there. You can’t do that.” After much discussion about other possible rooms, Bob suggested he go outside to commit the act.

Years later, Bob shared with Barbara Walters what happened next: “I said, ‘Why don’t you do it right here?,’ knowing for some reason that he probably wouldn’t. And he said—looked up at the sun and said, ‘I can’t do it here, I’ll be baking in the sun.’ I said, ‘O.J., you’re not going to be here; your spirit’s going to be gone. What do you care?’ ”

Eventually, Bob left him alone with Cowlings to talk him out of it and joined Shapiro and the doctors. The police were expected to arrive any time.

When police finally arrived to arrest the fugitive, Bob told Shapiro that he had left O.J. in a room with Cowlings. “O.J., it’s time to go!” he yelled upstairs. He led police upstairs to the room, not knowing whether he’d find a body. The room was empty.

As police scrambled to search the house, Bob’s assistant told him he was wanted on the phone. “Not now,” he barked. When she told him it was his sister calling, he took the call. The voice on the other end of the line sounded familiar. It was O.J., telling him he had shot himself in the head but “didn’t die.” He had fired his pistol, but it had malfunctioned. He claimed to be at the Bel Air Church. Bob assumed he had chosen this location to kill himself, but O.J. informed his old friend that he was headed “over to Nicole’s.”

The police never asked Bob who he had been talking to, and he was under no obligation to reveal it. Meanwhile, nobody except Bob had any idea where O.J. might be. When word leaked out, more than a thousand reporters jostled for position outside the police station. When he failed to appear by 2:00 p.m., the LAPD issued an APB and a warrant for his arrest. Nobody was sure where he was.

Shapiro suggested that Bob open the letter that O.J. had given him, in case it contained a clue to his whereabouts. They opened it. Bob told him about the earlier suicide threats. “I think he’s dead,” he told his colleague. When they read the contents of the letter, Shapiro insisted that Bob be the one to inform the media. He called a press conference for 5:00 p.m. at the downtown conference room of the Twentieth Century Fox Tower, where Bob would read O.J.’s final letter.

At the appointed time, Shapiro stepped to the microphone and introduced his colleague. “This letter was written by O.J. today,” Bob began.

To Whom It May Concern:

First, everyone understand. I have nothing to do with Nicole’s murder. I loved her; always have and always will. If we had a problem, it’s because I loved her so much.

Recently, we came to the understanding that for now we were not right for each other, at least for now. Despite our love, we were different and that’s why we mutually agreed to go our separate ways.

It was tough splitting for a second time, but we both knew it was for the best. Inside, I had no doubt that in the future we would be close friends or more. Unlike what has been written in the press, Nicole and I had a great relationship for most of our lives together. Like all long-term relationships, we had a few downs and ups.

I took the heat New Year’s 1989 because that’s what I was supposed to do. I did not plead no contest for any other reason but to protect our privacy and was advised it would end the press hype.

I don’t want to belabor knocking the press, but I can’t believe what is being said. Most of it is totally made up. I know you have a job to do, but as a last wish, please, please, please, leave my children in peace. Their lives will be tough enough.

I want to send my love and thanks to all my friends. I’m sorry I can’t name every one of you, especially A.C. Man, thanks for being in my life. The support and friendship I received from so many: Wayne Hughes, Lewis Marks, Frank Olson, Mark Packer, Bender, Bobby Kardashian. I wish we had spent more time together in recent years. My golfing buddies: Hoss, Alan Austin, Mike, Craig, Bender, Wyler, Sandy, Jay, Donnie, thanks for the fun.

All my teammates over the years: Reggie, you were the soul of my pro career. Ahmad, I never stopped being proud of you. Marcus, you’ve got a great lady in Catherine, don’t mess it up. Bobby Chandler, thanks for always being there. Skip and Kathy, I love you guys. Without you, I never would have made it through this far.

Marguerite, thanks for the early years. We had some fun. Paula, what can I say? You are special. I’m sorry I’m not going to have, we’re not going to have, our chance. God brought you to me, I now see. As I leave, you’ll be in my thoughts.

I think of my life and feel I’ve done most of the right things. So why do I end up like this? I can’t go on. No matter what the outcome, people will look and point. I can’t take that. I can’t subject my children to that. This way, they can move on and go on with their lives.

Please, if I’ve done anything worthwhile in my life, let my kids live in peace from you, the press.

I’ve had a good life. I’m proud of how I lived. My mama taught me to do unto others. I treated people the way I wanted to be treated. I’ve always tried to be up and helpful. So why is this happening?

I’m sorry for the Goldman family. I know how much it hurts.

Nicole and I had a good life together. All this press talk about a rocky relationship was no more than what every long-term relationship experiences. All her friends will confirm that I have been totally loving and understanding of what she’s been going through.

At times, I have felt like a battered husband or boyfriend, but I loved her; make that clear to everyone. And I would take whatever it took to make it work.

Don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.

Thanks for making my life special. I hope I helped yours.

Peace and love, O.J.

By the time Bob finished reading the letter, a frenzy had erupted. The assembled reporters were shouting their queries. Many of them demanded to know how Kardashian was spelled. But Bob wasn’t taking any questions. Security helped him off the stage and out of the packed room. He had failed to inform the throng that the O in the note’s closing signature had been drawn in the form of a happy face. By the time the press conference ended, Bob and the defense team claimed that they still believed that O.J. was dead. They had even been debating who would be designated to tell his children the news.

But an hour later, around 6:20 p.m., a driver called the police to say he had spotted O.J. on an Orange County freeway, in a white Bronco being driven by a black man. Twenty-five minutes later, a police cruiser spotted the vehicle driving north on Interstate 405. Cowlings, at the wheel, shouted for the police to back off. O.J. was in the backseat, holding a gun to his head. Before long, more than twenty police cars were following the Bronco, in a low-speed chase that was soon picked up by TV news helicopters and beamed live into millions of households.

After the press conference, Bob had immediately headed to the Rockingham estate, where O.J.’s kids Jason and Arnelle were staying. To talk his way in, he lied to the police officer at the gate and claimed to be O.J.’s doctor. When he saw the kids, he immediately told them of his fear that their father had killed himself, because he loved his children more than anything and wanted to spare them a lengthy and costly trial that would deplete their financial futures.

As tears poured down Arnelle’s face, somebody turned on the TV, showing the Bronco chase under way. Bob dialed the cell number he knew by heart. O.J. answered and filled him in. He had been headed to Nicole’s grave, where he was going to kill himself, but there was a police cruiser blocking the entrance to the cemetery, he explained. “I’ve got this gun to my head,” he told his old friend. “I just want to be with Nicole. How did I get into this, Bobby?”

When the police realized whom Bob was talking to, they demanded to speak to the famous fugitive. Bob refused. A SWAT team was dispatched to the house. O.J. informed Bob that he wanted to come home and kill himself there. But Bob counseled against this, informing him of the massive police presence.

The police tried to snatch the phone from Bob’s hand, but he refused to let go. “I am talking to O.J. on the phone!” he screamed. “I am trying to bring him in.”

Finally, the Bronco approached the gates just before 8:00 p.m., with O.J. still holding a gun to his head. Surrounded by a virtual army of police, with negotiators trying to talk him out of the vehicle, he and Cowlings remained in the driveway for more than an hour as surrender negotiations proceeded. “I’m not coming out unless I have three things,” he told the police negotiator Peter Weireter. First, he demanded to speak to his mother. He wanted to talk privately with Bob Kardashian. And he insisted that the arrest happen inside the house, away from the cameras.

The negotiator accepted all three conditions, provided that O.J. agree to leave his gun inside the Bronco. All the while, his son Jason stood in the driveway pleading for his father to come out. When O.J. finally staggered out of the vehicle, he collapsed into Bob’s arms, nearly knocking the smaller man to the ground.

“Juice, thank God you’re alive,” Bob said. “It’s going to be okay.” O.J. told his friend that he just couldn’t bring himself to end it. Then he turned to the assembled police and apologized for putting them through the long drama. As agreed, O.J. was permitted to talk on the phone to his seventy-three-year-old mother, Eunice, who was in a San Francisco hospital. Then he was handcuffed and brought to headquarters to be booked. One drama had ended; the other had just begun.

It would be a full four months before the trial got under way, but even before O.J. set foot in the courtroom for the first time, it was clear that the case had the potential to shatter the tenuous peace between Kris and Bob that had taken hold over the previous two years.

“We ended up being really, really good friends,” Kris told E!. It even became a family tradition for Bob to come over for dinner with Kris, Bruce, and the kids, a near miracle considering the animosity that had existed only a couple of years earlier. The real challenge, however, became ensuring that the case didn’t tear apart the family.

“Right before the trial started,” Kris later recalled, “Robert sat us down and wrote us a handwritten letter and said, ‘I know you don’t agree but this is what I have to do for my friend.’ It was very stressful on Robert. He believed in what he was doing and he was asking us for his support.”

But Kris had already privately made it clear to her ex-husband that he would not have her support. Things came to a head when a report surfaced that Kris and Nicole’s close friend Faye Resnick had signed a book contract, agreeing to reveal that she and Nicole had been lovers. Khloé Kardashian happened to be good friends with Resnick’s twelve-year-old daughter. Faye would later cite this friendship after O.J.’s defense attorney suggested that Nicole might have accidentally been killed by drug dealers stalking Resnick.

“If they’re so worried about Colombian drug dealers,” she asked, “do you think one member of the defense team would let his daughter stay at my house?”

When O.J. heard the news of the supposed affair, he reportedly phoned Kris from jail twice in one day to ask if she knew about the alleged encounters.

When Bob heard about these calls, he showed up at Kris’s house, saying they needed to talk privately. Outside, she later revealed, Bob asked her if the rumors about Resnick were true. Kris denied any knowledge of her friends’ purported lesbianism and then warned Bob not to get “too deep” into this case. He hadn’t been close to O.J. in the past three years since the divorce and didn’t know “what O.J. does.” Bob protested that his friend was innocent.

Police investigators had found O.J.’s blood outside of Nicole’s town house and traces of Nicole’s blood inside the Bronco. When Kris asked Bob about the blood evidence at the crime scene, he assured her it was “old blood. He could have been there weeks ago.” When Kris wanted to know why he would have been bleeding at Nicole’s house, he speculated that perhaps O.J. cut himself. What about the Bronco? she demanded. He explained that Nicole had been in the Bronco many times.

But Kris later told prosecutors of at least one significant admission on Bob’s part. “We’re going to have a problem when Goldman’s blood is found inside the Bronco,” he reportedly told her, according to Los Angeles magazine.

When the trial finally got under way in January, the couple’s four children were deeply conflicted, especially the ones who were old enough to understand what had happened. At the time of the murders, Kim was thirteen and Kourtney had just turned fifteen.

“Kourtney and I would go to the trial with our dad and we’d sit on one side and I remember looking over and my mom was on the other side sitting next to Nicole’s parents and there was so much tension,” Kim recalled. “If we’re siding with this one, then my mom and Bruce were upset and if we sit here then my dad is upset.”

Khloé was not quite ten, but she too remembers being deeply conflicted. “O.J. was always my ‘Uncle O.J.’ and Nicole was always ‘Aunt Nicole,’ ” she stated. “You don’t really know what to believe or how to perceive it.”

Later, in their book Kardashian Konfidential, the older girls admitted that they “kind of believed O.J. at the time.” Kim would tell Rolling Stone, “I definitely took my dad’s side. We just always thought my dad was the smartest person in the world, and he really believed in his friend.” The girls also revealed that it was a very scary period, with bomb threats and people camped outside the house, shouting. At one point, a police officer even threatened to “hurt” Bob’s kids. Another time they remember being thrown out of a restaurant because the establishment didn’t want to serve the lawyer who was defending O.J.

Exactly one week after the murders, Bob had got together with his kids for the first time since the tragedy. It was Father’s Day, and they made plans to go for dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant, Chin Chin, in Brentwood.

The kids wanted to know how Uncle O.J. was and were eager to write him a letter, which Bob promised to deliver. “Mommy says he’s guilty,” Khloé blurted out. “Mommy and Bruce both say it.”

Livid, Bob proceeded to give his kids a civics lesson, explaining that in America a person is innocent until proven guilty. He urged them to wait until the trial was over to make up their minds. The subsequent nine-month trial would end up costing Bob more than just family harmony. To many of his friends and associates, he seemed obsessed with the case and with clearing his old friend.

Around the time of the murders, Kris and Bruce had been starring in an infomercial for a thigh-exercising device. A Kardashian associate told Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker that he believed Bob was devoting so much time to the case to show up his ex-wife and her new husband. “It bothered him that she was on TV all the time with the Thighmaster,” said the source. “This case was his way to step over them. This was better than infomercials.”

At one point in the trial, he even placed a full-page ad in a music trade magazine with the caption JUSTICE FOR JUICE. The ad was one of the reasons his Movie Tunes executive vice president, Michael Ameen—whose name was used in the ad—resigned from the company, explaining that Kardashian had lost perspective and allowed the case to “overwhelm” him.

Once a week throughout the trial, Bob would visit O.J. in jail, and the experience was said to be taking its toll.

“I’ve never been to a jail before. It’s extremely depressing,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “It makes me sick every time I go down there. We can’t have any physical contact. I want to hug him, I want to show him that I care. It’s very difficult. We’re going 20 hours a day on this. But he’s going through worse hell than I am. I can’t complain. I sleep in a real bed at night. Look where he’s sleeping . . . he’s in a cage.”

For her part, Kris was anxious to testify about what she knew of the conflicts between Nicole and O.J. She had met more than once with Marcia Clark and other prosecutors, who had taken the details as well as the accounts of other friends who had witnessed Nicole being treated badly by her ex. In the end, however, Kris was never called to testify. Clark had decided that the jury wouldn’t be “receptive” to the domestic-violence angle. Kris was shocked by the decision. “Why aren’t I and Nicole’s other friends going to testify?” she recalls asking the lead prosecutor. “We have such valuable information.”

It was just one more staggering miscalculation on the part of the badly outgunned prosecution team, which had botched its case from start to finish. Meanwhile, Kris recalls confronting Bob numerous times during the trial and trying to drill sense into him about his unwavering belief in his client’s innocence. “Are you crazy?” she asked him more than once. He hadn’t been spending time socially with O.J. and Nicole together toward the end. He hadn’t witnessed what she had seen of their volatile relationship.

Kris remembers in vivid detail one of the pivotal moments in the trial: when prosecutor Christopher Darden had O.J. try on the bloody glove. Although she and Bruce often attended the trial in person, she was at home watching it on TV that day. She remembers screaming at the TV at the idiocy of the decision. Anybody who knows leather knows that if it gets wet it shrinks, she thought. The gloves had been soaked in blood. Of course they wouldn’t fit. As she saw the gloves on the screen, she claims she flashed back to the day that she was shopping at Bloomingdales with Nicole and her friend bought those gloves for O.J. as “a treat.” Again, it makes for a good anecdote, but one can’t help but wonder why Kris didn’t volunteer to testify to that little nugget at the trial.

On October 3, Kris received a call informing her that the jury had reached a verdict after a remarkably short four-hour deliberation. After months of trying, she and Bruce had finally conceived a child, and she was eight months’ pregnant. Both Marcia Clark and Chris Darden counseled her against being in the courtroom during the reading of the verdict because they feared chaos would erupt and the baby might be at risk. Instead, Clark suggested she watch the proceedings in her office, along with Nicole’s sisters.

The short deliberations, Kris believed, boded well for the prosecution. How could any jury seeing the evidence not come to the obvious and inescapable conclusion that O.J. had committed the murders?

At 10:00 a.m., Judge Lance Ito brought in the jurors and asked O.J. to stand. The clerk proceeded to read the verdict:

In the matter of the People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097211. We, the jury . . . find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of Penal Code Section 187A, a felony, upon Nicole Brown Simpson, a human being . . .

In the matter of the People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson. We, the jury . . . find the defendant, Orenthal James Simpson, not guilty of the crime of murder, in violation of Penal Code Section 187A, a felony, upon Ronald Lyle Goldman, a human being . . .

Kris recalls that upon hearing these words, the whole courtroom was in shock. But none more so than herself. She watched a grin break out on O.J.’s face, followed by his leaning toward her ex-husband for a hug, while sobbing emanated from Nicole’s side of the courtroom.

The whole time, she remembered the words that Nicole had said to her more than once: “He’s going to kill me and he’s going to get away with it.” Following the dramatic verdict, and the pandemonium that ensued, the defense headed back to O.J.’s Rockingham estate for a celebration that lasted most of the day. Riding to Rockingham with Bob in a white van, O.J. took his first car trip since the Bronco chase.

As they headed down the freeway, thousands of people cheered and held victory signs from overpasses as they passed. “It was very exciting,” Bob told Barbara Walters later. Exhausted by the nine-month trial and the climactic verdict, Bob slipped out of the victory party early. But rather than head home, he made a detour. Kris recalls him arriving at her house in the early evening, saying that he needed to talk to her.

He knew she was upset at the acquittal but he felt it important to “put this behind us”—at least for the sake of the kids. He didn’t want the polarizing case and his role in winning an acquittal to get in the way of their friendship, because he feared it might destroy the family. Kris agreed. The encounter ended with both crying.

Bruce had been equally furious at the verdict, even though he had been closer to O.J. than to Nicole before the killings. He later shared his frustration with the Los Angeles Times.

“To see this guy walk away, you know? As soon as the verdict came down, the first thing my wife said to me was, ‘Nicole was right. Because the bonehead told her he’s going to kill her someday and get away with it, because he’s O.J. Simpson. And he did.’ She was absolutely right. The guy got away with it. He’ll pay for it some day, some way.”

But Kris was determined to move on. “We weren’t going to let O.J. Simpson eat away at us anymore,” she later wrote. Bob had successfully mended fences with his ex-wife, and he left that night confident that his family would recover from the polarizing trial. But Robert Kardashian knew as well as anybody that most of white America, despite the acquittal, was unwavering in the belief that O.J. had gotten away with murder. It wasn’t just the fact that the jurors who sat in judgment were widely considered to be twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty. It was also the fact that the jurors who rendered the verdict hadn’t seen a lot of the evidence that the tens of millions of Americans following the case had seen—evidence that led to only one inescapable conclusion. And now, returning to the real world and having to face business associates, colleagues, and friends, Bob would have to explain the central role he had played in helping a vicious wife killer get away with the heinous crime.

Rather than make excuses or try to paint his participation as an act of loyalty to an old friend, he had decided to stick to the same story he had been peddling for the past year. In an op-ed piece published in the Los Angeles Times on the day following the verdict, he explained: “O.J. Simpson never lied to me. He has told me that he did not commit these horrible crimes and I have no reason not to believe him. It was from that perspective that I came to stand by his side during his trial.” He saw the problem, not in how he had helped a killer escape but in the reaction he faced. “Who wants their life and everything they have done for the past 25 years dragged in front of the American public? Within a week, the assault began . . . The recent trend of the press to intrude into the private lives of innocent individuals in the name of ‘getting the story’ demonstrates the dwindling interest in the equally valid constitutional right to privacy. So great is society’s demand for information that we can no longer say that all the news gathered is worthy of airing. Much of it is not. In such an environment, it’s not hard to see why old family values like trust and friendship are increasingly rare. The price is too high in a society that tears apart anyone who dares to take a public stand in the midst of controversy.”

Two years after the verdict, Kardashian would give a candid interview to Barbara Walters for a 20/20 special on the eve of the civil trial, in which he indicated for the first time that he had “doubts” about his friend’s innocence.

“The blood evidence is the biggest thorn in my side,” he told her. “That causes me the greatest problems. So I struggle with the blood evidence.” However, he would still vote “not guilty” in the civil trial, he assured her.

In the same interview, he revealed that Bob Shapiro had believed O.J. to be guilty. “I overheard Mr. Shapiro at one point in the courtroom—during a break, say to Mr. Simpson, ‘We should plea bargain; you would get twelve years’ or whatever it was; and Robert Kardashian would get so much time as an accessory . . . my jaw dropped . . . I was astounded! And I was shaking! I was so mad, so upset . . . He knew that I knew nothing about any of this!”

Following Bob’s death in 2003, Kim Goldman revealed that she had been told about a mystery bag that Kardashian wished for her to have, but that she never ended up getting. “We were notified by either a lawyer or someone from the Kardashian family that they had come across this bag among Robert Kardashian’s things,” she recalled. “Robert wanted the bag to be given to me after his death. This wasn’t the Louis Vuitton garment bag that Robert took from the house the day after the murders.”

The O. J. Simpson trial is now just a remnant of history, and Robert Kardashian’s true role in the century’s greatest miscarriage of justice will likely never be resolved. The notoriety of his name, however, would eventually give rise to the ubiquitous family that would eventually, in some circles, become nearly as controversial as the verdict.