Simpson Murder Case : In ‘Just the Facts’ Tones, Detectives Woo Tough Audience

When Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell upheld a fence-jumping Los Angeles police entrance onto O.J. Simpson’s estate, she strengthened the credibility of LAPD investigators whose testimony is so important in prosecuting the football hero.

Not long ago, the believability of the cops may not have been such a big issue. As late as 1988, the Los Angeles Times Poll showed that 74% of Los Angeles residents held a positive view of the LAPD.

But in the last three years, events have soured the relationship between the cops and many Angelenos. “As soon as you have a man with a badge taking the stand, you know that instead of him having that aura of credibility, there may be one juror who (thinks) quite the opposite,” Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti recently told me.

The Rodney King beating was followed by a drop in public support for the department. A 1991 Los Angeles Time Poll showed just 34% approved. This climbed to 67% in the latest survey taken last month, much better but still below pre-King, pre-riot levels.

These public perceptions of the LAPD will be important if Simpson is ordered to stand trial for killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Lyle Goldman. Perceptions of the police, and of the preliminary hearing testimony of police detectives, are important in shaping the mind-set of potential jurors.

Public attitudes will be especially tricky if there is a Simpson trial. It would be held in the Downtown Criminal Courts Building, where the jury pool tends toward the working class, with substantial numbers of African Americans and Latinos. It’s important to note that the poll shows that blacks and Latinos are substantially more suspicious of the LAPD than are whites.

This will be a tough audience, and homicide detectives Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange will have to be persuasive salesmen if they testify at a Simpson trial.

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As I watched Vannatter and Lange on the witness stand at the preliminary hearing, I wondered who played the con man and who played the SOB when the detectives engaged in the game of good cop, bad cop.

Vannatter has a steady, sort of flat voice, a small paunch and a face that is friendly, with deep lines earned during 15 years in robbery-homicide. Lange looks more intimidating because of his thick mustache. But when he started talking, Lange spoke with the same spare, unemotional manner as his partner.

It was this manner that made them so convincing. Why did they go from the murder scene to Simpson’s nearby residence and enter it without a search warrant? In heavy detail, Vannatter explained the circumstances: They wanted to notify Simpson that his former wife was dead and that his small children were at the police station. The cops wanted to tell him, Vannatter said, “before the media got hold of it.”

In supporting the cops, Judge Kennedy-Powell picked up on Vannatter’s reference to the small kids. “The place for two small children is not at a police station, sitting in a corner drawing pictures,” the judge said. “The place for those children is with their family.” This was part of her reasoning that the cops had a legitimate reason to be on the Simpson property.

After the judge announced her decision at the opening of Thursday’s session, we got another example of why the two detectives are strong witnesses. This time it was Lange describing the death scene.

He told of Simpson lying on the walkway, Goldman nearby, the blood around the two bodies, “draining down the sidewalk in an easterly direction from Nicole Simpson.” He told of bloody shoe prints “leading away from the body, westerly. . . . She was lying more or less on her left side in what I would call a semi-fetal position.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark’s questions were as detailed as his answers. His voice was so bland, his manner so controlled that it was almost possible to forget he was taking us through a bloody, horrible scene.

The matter-of-fact presentation was so mundane that it had the effect of making Simpson one more murder suspect in a city full of them. It was a clever spin to the prosecution’s case, considering the demographic potential of jurors in the Downtown courts.

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Robert L. Shapiro, Simpson’s attorney, also seems to understand the composition of the Downtown jury pool and its high percentage of minorities, who tend to be more suspicious than whites of the Police Department.

That is why the attorney hammered away at something that appeared to be a small part of the two detectives’ testimony, their impatience with the need to follow every rule of a department notorious for its large number of regulations.

Did they fill out a form containing the narrative of their investigation? No, Vannatter said, they didn’t use the form because they were called to the scene before dawn. Instead, he said his partner, Lange, wrote the narrative on blank white paper.

Did you follow the department manual on murder investigations? Shapiro asked Lange. “I have read it,” Lange replied. “It hasn’t been updated for several years. It is not a hard-and-fast text on how to conduct a homicide investigation.”

I’m sure that’s true. But in bringing up their attitude toward regulations and manuals, Shapiro touched on something of tremendous importance to south and East Los Angeles, home to many Downtown jurors.

People in those communities want police officers to follow rules and regulations. They complain of cowboy cops breaking rules there frequently, bursting into houses, ignoring courtesy and civil rights. In South-Central, rule-breaking brings up visions of Rodney King and recollections of the 1988 Dalton Street raid, when 80 police officers burst into two apartment buildings, rendering them uninhabitable. None of the residents was charged with a crime.

Judging from the past two days, when the testimony of LAPD officers dominated the proceedings, it seems that both the prosecution and the defense appreciate the fact that times have changed, that a cop’s credibility is no longer a given.