I HAD NEVER BEEN ABLE to get the real first name or last name for DeeDee. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I was spelling her nickname correctly. None of the books and articles written about O.J. and his family made reference to her, nor had her name appeared in the course of the criminal trial. Neither Dr. Kittay nor Ron Shipp could remember her full name. What I did have on her was an eight-year-old reference indicating that she, like Jennifer, had been a receptionist at an exclusive Beverly Hills beauty salon. Fortunately for me, I found the salon still open and doing business at the same location.
When I went in and introduced myself, the manager was polite, but my brief conversation with her was not encouraging. “Eight years ago is a long time in a business like ours. We must have had more than fifty different receptionists who have worked for us since then.”
“But not that many named DeeDee,” I pointed out.
The manager said she would ask the other hairdressers and see what she could come up with. The first name she came back with was that of an actress who had worked briefly at the salon around that time. No one knew much about her other than the fact that she had lived in New York and had dated Andrew Dice Clay, the comedian. The only other DeeDee anyone at the salon could remember was a former receptionist who had left to work as a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory, a popular Beverly Hills restaurant on Rodeo Drive.
I thanked the receptionist and went off in search of one or both of the DeeDees. I ruled the actress out almost immediately when I contacted her former talent agent and found out she was at least ten years older than the woman we were looking for. The other DeeDee seemed more promising. The bartender at the Cheesecake Factory in Beverly Hills remembered a DeeDee, and told me she had been transferred to the Cheesecake Factory in Irvine, California, but he was not sure if she had ever been employed at the salon.
After making a number of calls, I learned that the DeeDee who worked at the Cheesecake Factory in Irvine had taken yet another restaurant job, this time in Newport Beach, some eighty miles south of Los Angeles. This eventually led me to Flemmings, a posh steak house in the Fashion Island Shopping Center, where I made reservations for dinner. When I entered Flemmings Steakhouse, it didn’t take me long to see that DeeDee, the manager, wasn’t the woman I was looking for. This woman was older, had Irish red hair and a peaches and cream complexion. The DeeDee that Ron Shipp and others described to me was Hispanic, with an olive complexion like Jennifer’s, and much shorter. But just to be sure, when she came over to my table, I confirmed with her that indeed she was not the DeeDee I was looking for. This DeeDee had, in fact, worked at the Cheesecake Factory at one time, but had never heard of Jason Simpson, nor had she ever worked at a Beverly Hills beauty salon. “DeeDee,” I said. “I wish you were the woman I was looking for. You would have made my life a lot easier.”
“Your story sounds interesting. Keep in touch, I’d like to see what happens.”
I planned to come back. Even if she wasn’t the right DeeDee. Now I was back to square one. Disappointed and discouraged, I drove back to Los Angeles. It was a long drive, made all the longer because I didn’t know where I would find the woman I was so desperately seeking. She might not even be in California. For all I knew, she might not even be alive. I had no choice but to try my best to get a good night’s sleep, then in the morning, drive to Beverly Hills and retrace my steps. The next day I returned to the hair salon. I began interviewing anyone and everyone about DeeDee, from the young woman who shampooed hair to the stylist who specialized in perms and coloring. Eventually I spoke to a handsome and gregarious stylist named Jessie, who had been there for over ten years. He appeared to be in charge of the salon. Jessie remembered yet another girl named DeeDee. “You must mean the DeeDee who went out with Jason Simpson,” he said.
“Yes, that’s the one,” I responded, relieved to be finally on the right track.
Though Jessie couldn’t remember DeeDee’s last name, he did have quite a bit to say about her, as well as Jason, whom he had met on several different occasions. This DeeDee was Hispanic, perhaps from South America, although she spoke perfect English. She stood about five-foot-six, was strikingly beautiful, with delicate features, and had long brunette hair that had a natural curl to it. He guessed her now to be about twenty-eight years old. This had to be the DeeDee I was looking for. Jessie didn’t hold out much hope of my finding her in Los Angeles. The last he knew of her was that she had moved to New York to get away from Jason.
“Did she have good reason to want to get away from him?” I asked.
“I damn well think so,” Jessie said. “The guy is psycho. One minute he’s the sweetest nicest guy you ever met and the next minute he’s all angry and upset, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde type. DeeDee often came into work with bruises on her face and arms from where he would hit and shove her around.”
Jessie then related a story about how DeeDee arrived one morning in tears. “All her long beautiful hair had been chopped off,” Jessie said. “It looked to me like someone had just grabbed her by the hair and started whacking away. When I asked her what had happened, she started to cry. She said Jason had attacked her. He had taken a chef’s knife and cut off her hair.”
“DeeDee told you he had used a chef’s knife?” I asked.
“That’s right. His chef’s knife. He was a cook or worked at a restaurant.”
I was stunned. Here indeed, finally, was direct knowledge of Jason Simpson’s irrational behavior, not the kind and lovable Jason whom Jennifer Green had described. And for once, I had not described him as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Jessie had.
Jessie went on to describe how Jason would always be remorseful afterward. On the day in 1989, several hours after DeeDee had arrived at work with her hair chopped off, in walked Jason Simpson.
“I wouldn’t let him come in,” Jessie said. “I told him he had no business doing what he did to DeeDee, and that I wanted him to get out of my place of business and to leave her alone. ‘But I want to apologize. I want to tell her I’m sorry,’ he kept telling me. I said, ‘I don’t care what you have to say to her. You have no right doing what you did. Get out and stay out.’”
What Jason had done was typical of intermittent rage disorder. You hurt the one you love and then are sorry afterward. But in Nicole’s case if he was guilty, it was now too late to say, I’m sorry.
Jessie went on to say this incident wasn’t the first. “There were other places and times when Jason and DeeDee were together when I saw him go from being a nice guy one minute to flying into a jealous rage the next.”
It wasn’t long after the haircutting incident in 1989, Jessie said, that DeeDee left for New York. Unfortunately for me, he didn’t know what became of her after that. He thought that Ralph, another veteran stylist, might know.
“Hey Ralph . . .” Jessie suddenly called out. “Who was the hairstylist who was with us when DeeDee was here back in 1989? DeeDee and she went to New York together.”
“I don’t know,” Ralph replied. “Mary . . . do you know?”
Another stylist popped her head out from behind a curtain. “You must be talking about Terry. Her last name was Shaw.”
“Yes,” said Jessie. “That’s the one, Terry Shaw. She was older than DeeDee. They both left together for New York. I know Terry is back in town because I saw her two years ago. Now let me think for a minute. I must know someone who knows Terry.” Jessie then called out so loudly everyone in the salon could hear him. “Anyone know where Terry Shaw is working now?”
“Last time I heard, she was working at Bruno’s,” Ralph said.
“Yes,” said Jessie. “That’s it. Bruno’s. It’s right up the street. Ask for Karen.”
I thanked Jessie for his time, and then asked him to step outside for a moment. We walked into the courtyard.
“Jessie,” I said. “There’s more to this than just DeeDee.”
“I suspected there must be,” he replied.
“I’m really interested in Jason Simpson. You’ve been a big help so far. But I need to know anything else you might know about him.”
Jessie didn’t mince his words. “Bill, I didn’t like him. I certainly didn’t trust him. In fact, I thought there was something wrong with him. It was the way he acted. That split personality of his. The last time I saw him was on television, the day the police arrested his father. I told the people around me that day, and I’ll say it again. I never believed for an instant that O.J. committed those murders. I felt right from the start they arrested the wrong man. To me, Jason committed those murders. He had to be the one.”
Up to this point in our conversation, I hadn’t told Jessie anything at all about my investigation of Jason or that my search for DeeDee had anything to do with the murders. And yet, even without knowledge of police and medical history, Jessie had come to the same conclusion I had. Except he had reached it just days after the murders.
Perhaps I was reading more into Jessie’s remark than was warranted, but as I looked into his eyes, I realized he was the kind of person who knew how to read people. In his line of work, he met and talked to people from early in the morning until late at night. Experience was the best teacher, and Jessie had a lot of experience. He had read Jason correctly right from the start, without the benefit of my investigation.
“I think you could be right, Jesse. Here’s my card, if you think of anything else, please call me. It’s important.”
I left the salon, then turned north, and walked to Bruno’s Hair Salon. My investigation was finally starting to come together.
Karen was pleasant and tried to be helpful but, like Jessie, hadn’t seen or heard from Terry Shaw in years. She did, however, suggest that I talk to Jody, who also worked at the same salon and might know Terry’s whereabouts. Jody wouldn’t be coming in to work for another hour, so I bided my time walking around Rodeo Drive, thinking about how far I had come in the last six years, and how important it was that I find DeeDee.
Like Karen, Jody was happy to help out. Though she too couldn’t give me DeeDee’s last name, she said that Terry Shaw, with whom DeeDee had gone to New York, was now definitely back in Los Angeles.
“Do you have any idea where Terry might be living now?”
“The only thing I know is what I was told. She got married, her father died, and her mother sold her their old home.” She thought that Shaw was living in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, just beneath the Griffith Park Observatory.
Our conversation was just about over when Jody suddenly remembered something else. “Terry was in a popular local play. A pretty big role. Just a few months ago, her picture appeared in the Los Angeles Times magazine supplement. I remember because I was surprised to see her photo.”
“Do you remember which issue?”
“Yes, it was the one with Susan McDougal on the cover, the woman who got into so much trouble with President Clinton.”
“Thanks, Jody. You’ve been a great help.”
My tour of Los Angeles continued, this time taking me to the Beverly Hills Public Library. Sure enough, after an hour of searching through back issues, I found Terry Shaw in a photo spread in a maternity fashion layout. According to the caption, Terry Shaw was due in June, which meant that by now, the middle of August, she had already given birth.
My next stop was at the computer, where a librarian helped me to pull up the name Terry Shaw. There was a telephone number but no address. I took out my cell phone and dialed. Shaw’s number had been disconnected, with no new listing in California.
After I got back into the car and pulled out of the library parking lot, I decided to call my new secretary Shannon Chasteen at home in Dallas. It was her day off.
“Shannon, I need you to go to the office immediately. I need you to look up on the computer, everything you can find on a Terry Shaw, from Los Angeles. That’s all the information I have on her.”
“What’s up?”
“I’ve finally got a lead on DeeDee.”
“I’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” she said.
Thirty minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Shannon. “I’ve got what you want on Terry Shaw. I have everything on her and her new husband. What do you need?”
Excitedly, I told her I needed an address.
“That I can give you.”
My excitement turned to elation as I jotted down the new address. As I drove into her neighborhood, I suddenly realized she lived just two blocks away from a member of the Dream Team, Johnnie Cochran. What a coincidence. I had come full circle.
As I parked my car in front of Terry Shaw’s home, two security cars pulled up at a distance and watched my every move. In my mind, I could picture Johnnie Cochran jogging past and my saying, “Mr. Cochran, you’re right about the murders. O.J. is innocent. You have the right church, but the wrong pew.” In other words, Cochran had the right family, but the wrong person.
The uniformed officers inside the two security cars continued to watch every movement I made as I walked up the steps and towards Terry Shaw’s front door. I knocked.
At first, no one answered. Nor was there any evidence anyone was at home. There was no car in the driveway, and an express mail package sat on the doormat. I was sure, however, that this was the correct address, because the house was exactly as Jody had described it. Terry Shaw’s house was in the shadow of the Griffith Park Observatory, which I recognized from the classic James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. I also knew it was the right place because Shaw’s married name was on the label on the package on the doormat.
I knocked a second and third time and was just about to leave and walk back to the car when the voice of a young woman called out, “What do you want?”
I looked up. There was Terry Shaw holding an infant on her hip, talking to me from an upstairs balcony. She had long, curly brunette hair, and that rosy pink complexion so becoming to new mothers. She looked exactly as she did in the picture in the Los Angeles Times, only considerably slimmer.
“My name is Bill Dear. I’m a private investigator from Dallas, Texas. I’m looking for DeeDee. I was hoping you could tell me her last name and whether or not she’s back from New York.”
Terry Shaw was noncommittal. “Why are you looking for her?”
“I’m doing my own investigation into the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. It’s important I speak to DeeDee about Jason Simpson. She has information that might help me.”
I was hesitant to say too much at this point because the two security guards, in separate cars, continued to watch me from two hundred feet away. For whatever reason, they were not letting me out of their sight. The security here was as tight as it was in Beverly Hills. I wondered if it was because of Johnnie Cochran living a few houses up the street.
I gave her the name of the hair salon where Karen and Jody worked and explained how it was that I came to be knocking on her door. I also told her about speaking to Jessie, and how I had been told that Jason could be violent and sometimes abuse DeeDee. “It’s vital that I speak to her as soon as possible,” I said.
Terry stood looking down at me for a few more moments, her small child cradled in her arms. I could tell she was debating whether or not she wanted to get involved in anything as sordid as the Bundy Drive murders and the family life of O. J.’s eldest son. I don’t know what it was that made her decide to help me, but I got the impression something had suddenly crossed her mind, as if she had remembered something that might be important or might justify her talking with me. She told me to hold on for a moment while she came downstairs. Minutes later she opened the front door, looked at my identification, and before I knew it, I was busy describing to her some of the cases I had worked on over the years.
“Come inside so we can talk,” she said.
A great relief came over me as I stepped inside and glanced back over my shoulder at the two security guards looking on in disbelief as I entered the home of Terry Shaw.
Terry’s house was quite lovely, though it was arranged more for the benefit of her child than for adults. There were children’s toys on the tables and chairs and a large bassinet and changing table just inside the entrance to the living room. She showed me to a seat and we launched into a discussion of Beverly Hills hair salons, how she had met DeeDee, and the so-called glamorous lifestyles of the rich and famous. As she reflected back on that period of her life, I didn’t get a sense that she was at all nostalgic but rather happy to have moved on and grateful to now have a husband and child.
“The Beverly Hills lifestyle—especially at a hair salon—seems so inviting and exciting from the outside,” Terry said. “But when you get up close you see how empty it all is. Just a parade of pretty faces.”
“Is that why you and DeeDee went to New York together?”
“Yes, that’s part of the reason,” she replied. “It just seemed like the thing to do at the time. My acting career wasn’t exactly taking off, and I needed a change. DeeDee needed one too.”
“A change of boyfriends?”
“Yes,” Terry said, without going into any details. “A change of boyfriends. Now it seems like a very long time ago. I was much older than DeeDee. I remember talking with her on a Friday about possibly going to New York, and then leaving on a plane just two weeks later. That’s how free we were in those days. DeeDee and I had nothing to tie us down.”
We chatted for a while about New York and how they had both found jobs. DeeDee was working as a waitress in a restaurant. Shaw was doing odd jobs and pursuing her acting career. They found an apartment in Greenwich Village on MacDougal Street. It was a basement apartment where, Terry said, they had problems with rats.
“I’m glad I lived there for a while, but it wasn’t a place I would want to spend the rest of my life. Fun for a time, but it gets tiring.”
I pressed Terry for more details about DeeDee’s decision to move to New York, and she confirmed the move was motivated by a desire to get as far away from Jason as possible. “It was a very unhealthy relationship,” she said. “I think DeeDee finally saw that and was willing to do something about it. But it wasn’t all that easy. Jason was following her around and doing all kinds of crazy things.”
“Like chopping off her hair?” I asked.
Terry paused, as if it pained her to have to dredge up old, unpleasant memories. “Yes, like chopping off her hair,” she finally said. “I was with her right after it happened.”
Terry described how DeeDee had called her on the telephone, pleading and crying for her to come over to the apartment that DeeDee and Jason shared on Alta Vista Drive. “I went upstairs. The door was open, and the entire apartment was a shambles. Everything was knocked over, and there was Chinese food all over the place. Giant heaps of it. DeeDee was sobbing. Her landlord was there, and he was upset too. Jason was in a rage. He stormed out of the room when I arrived. Then DeeDee told me how he had gotten mad at her over something and then began hitting her. Finally he dragged her into the bathroom, while she was kicking and screaming, and he cut off her hair with his chef’s knife.”
“Do you remember what they had been fighting over?”
“It was probably over DeeDee’s old boyfriend, Greg. Jason was upset about Greg. He didn’t want her seeing him. But I don’t think there really was anything to it, at least with Greg. They were just friends. DeeDee wasn’t fooling around. It was just that Jason had this short fuse and he couldn’t deal with his tremendous jealousy.”
“Were there other things that Jason did to her?”
“Plenty of other things. He was always following her around and doing these crazy things. There was a dark side of him. He could be a real psycho, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Once again, Jason was being described as a Jekyll and Hyde. How many times had I heard that? How many more times would I hear it?
“Terry, did Jason follow DeeDee to New York?”
“Yes. It took Jason a little while to find us. Once he did, Jason moved into an apartment that O.J. owned in Manhattan. He wouldn’t leave DeeDee alone. He stalked her for six months.”
“Is that when Jason tried to commit suicide?”
Terry didn’t know for sure. “DeeDee told me a lot of things about her relationship with Jason, none of them good. As I said, it was years ago. And by the time Jason had shown up in New York, DeeDee and I were already heading in different directions. She couldn’t hold down a job and was still living the life of a party girl. Doing drugs. Drinking. You know—the high life.”
“Was Jason doing drugs in New York?”
“He and DeeDee were always doing drugs. I wasn’t into all that. I was determined to make a career for myself. DeeDee eventually ditched Jason—at least for the time being—and went off to live with another boyfriend. Then DeeDee and I split. DeeDee went her way and I went mine.”
“Did DeeDee stay in New York?”
“Yes. She lived there longer than I did. We both ended up returning to Los Angeles. From what DeeDee told me, Jason continued to stalk her once she came back. He would always find out where she was working. He was trying to get back together with her. DeeDee continued to change her telephone numbers and move to new apartments. She even went to South America at one point to get away from him. But I don’t think he’s bothered her since the murders.”
“Is DeeDee still using drugs?”
“No. I’m proud of her. She finally cleaned up her act when she got back to LA. Has her own apartment. Opened her own business. She’s really working hard. We’re still good friends.”
Terry said DeeDee was living in nearby Echo Park. She also said that she ran into Jason every now and again. “Last time was at a party in Silverlake, about a year or so ago. I didn’t stick around to chat about old times.”
“How did he seem to you? Had he changed?”
“No. If you are asking whether or not he was still using drugs, the answer is yes. He certainly was that night. He was hanging out with several guys, one of whom was the son of a famous actor.”
“What kind of drugs was he using?”
“Psychedelics, I think, Ecstasy.”
Ecstasy, I knew, was the latest rage in Los Angeles and elsewhere. It was a mood-enhancing chemical that worked on the nervous system—one of the most dangerous types of drugs for a person with epilepsy to take. Jason hadn’t changed. This made my concern even greater.
Terry’s baby started to cry. It was feeding time. It was also a signal to me that I had only a few minutes more to talk to her. I quickly told her about my investigation, the discoveries I had made, and my belief that Jason may have been at the Bundy Drive crime scene on the night of the murders. I also tried to impress upon Terry how imperative it was that I speak to DeeDee in person. Terry, however, was still reluctant to give me her telephone number or address.
“I don’t know if she’ll want to talk about any of this with you or not,” she said. “DeeDee has straightened her life out. No drugs or drinking. She’s happy now.”
“Terry, please. This is important. Please call her and give her my telephone number. I’ll only be in town for a couple more days. My son’s expecting his first baby and I’d like to be there. Here’s my cell phone number.”
I reached over and handed her my card. “Please tell DeeDee I just want to talk, on her own terms. I think you know how important it is that I speak with her. I don’t want anyone else getting hurt, and I know you don’t either.”