The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson - [21]

Nicole collapsed against the inside of the gate and started yelling to the officers, “He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!” She pounded on the button that opened the gate and then flung herself into Edwards’s arms.

“Who’s going to kill you?” Edwards asked.

“O.J.”

“O.J. who?” Edwards asked. “Do you mean O.J. the football player?”

“Yes,” Nicole said. “O.J. Simpson the football player.”

“Does he have any weapons?”

“Yeah,” she replied, still breathless. “Lots of guns. He has lots of guns.”

Edwards shined his flashlight on Nicole’s face. Her lip was cut and bleeding. Her left eye was black-and-blue. Her forehead was bruised, and on her neck-unmistakably-was the imprint of a human hand. As Nicole calmed down, Edwards learned that O.J. Simpson had slapped her, hit her with his fist, and pulled her by the hair. Just before Edwards placed her in the squad car to warm up, Nicole turned to him and said with disgust, “You guys never do anything. You never do anything. You come out. You’ve been here eight times. And you never do anything about him.” She then agreed to sign a crime report against her husband.

As Edwards turned to the house, he noticed O.J. Simpson, wearing a bathrobe, walking toward him. Simpson was screaming, “I don’t want that woman in my bed anymore! I got two other women. I don’t want that woman in my bed!”

Edwards explained that he was going to place Simpson under arrest for beating his wife.

“I didn’t beat her,” Simpson said, still furious. “I just pushed her out of bed.” Edwards repeated that he was going to have to take him in.

Simpson was incredulous. “You’ve been out here eight times before and now you’re going to arrest me for this? This is a family matter. This is a family matter.”

Edwards requested that Simpson go back into to his house, get dressed, and return to be taken in to the station. As Simpson walked off, the housekeeper, Michelle Abudrahm, went over to Nicole, who was in the squad car, and implored, “Don’t do this, Nicole. Come inside.” The housekeeper was actually tugging on Nicole from outside the car, and Edwards came over and shooed her away. Moments later Simpson, now dressed, returned to the gate and began lecturing Edwards. “What makes you so special? Why are you doing this? You guys have been out here eight times before, and no one has ever done anything like this before.”

Edwards explained that the law required him to take Simpson in to the station. When Edwards turned to brief a second set of officers who had arrived on the scene, the officers saw a blue Bentley roar out of another gate at the property, this one on Rockingham.

Edwards got into his car and took off after Simpson-and four other police cars soon joined in the chase-but they couldn’t catch up with him. Returning to Nicole, Edwards asked what had prompted her husband’s attack. She said she had complained because there were two other women staying in their home, and O.J. had had sex with one of them earlier in the day. Edwards never saw Simpson again.

With Nicole having signed a police report, the police were obliged to bring the case against O.J. at least to the next step. The case was assigned to Officer Mike Farrell, who reached O.J. by telephone on January 3. Simpson explained that after he and Nicole had returned home from a New Year’s Eve party, where they had been drinking, they had had a verbal dispute “that got out of hand.” O.J. said it then turned into “a mutual-type wrestling match. That was basically it. Nothing more than that.” Accompanied by her two children, Nicole came into the West Los Angeles police station the next day, and she, too, minimized the dispute. She said she didn’t really want to go through with a full-fledged prosecution. Farrell mentioned the possibility of resolving the case through an informal mediation with the city attorney’s office. “I would like to have that,” the twenty-nine-year-old Nicole said. “I think that would be neat.”

Still, under the law, Farrell had to present the case to the city attorney’s office, which would have the final say over whether Simpson would be prosecuted for misdemeanor spousal abuse. The prosecutors were torn, as they so often are in domestic-violence cases. If this really was just a single drunken brawl after a New Year’s Eve party, a prosecutor told Farrell, then maybe they should just let it drop. After all, they had a reluctant victim as their only witness. Farrell was told to ask around the West L.A. station and determine whether there had been other incidents at the Simpson home. If there was a pattern, they would prosecute.

So Farrell asked around-and heard nothing. Both O.J. and Nicole had acknowledged that the police had come to the house eight times to stop O.J. from hurting Nicole, but at first Farrell couldn’t find a single cop who admitted to going to Rockingham. (O.J. had entertained about forty officers at his home at various times, and with their silence, the officers may have been repaying his hospitality.) Eventually, out of all the cops who had handled calls at the Simpson home, one spoke up. Yes, this officer said, he had been out to the house on a domestic-violence incident. Farrell asked him to write up the incident in a memo, and the officer wrote on January 18, 1989, “To whom it may concern”: