Where Are They Now?

It has been 16 months since the close of the criminal case against O.J. Simpson--time enough for the players who helped shape it to sign TV talk show deals, embark upon nationwide book tours and, in some cases, mark a return to something approaching normalcy. Here’s an update:

Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito

The 46-year-old judge in the criminal trial is still based in the downtown Criminal Courts Building. He has switched courtrooms, however, up six floors to Department 127 on the 15th floor, though there’s no indication that it’s his: His name tag on the door keeps getting stolen, apparently by souvenir hunters. Ito’s caseload tends to run to the mundane. He is now presiding over a perjury case stemming from a prior murder trial. “I’m trying jury trials,” Ito said at the close of court recently, adding a moment later: “About 40 jury trials since that case. That’s what I’m doing.”

Marcia Clark

A month after the criminal trial ended, the lead prosecutor signed a $4.2-million deal to produce a book. Called “Without a Doubt,” it is supposed to be in stores this spring. Meanwhile, Clark announced last month that she was leaving the district attorney’s office to host a TV show, “LadyLaw,” about women in law enforcement. While promoting the show at a television executives convention in New Orleans, she said the fame she gained during the Simpson case ruined her as a prosecutor. “I’ll be out of commission for some time until I can find a jury that says, Marcia who?’ ” The TV show is due to begin airing in the fall. “This is just what I’ve been looking for,” she said.

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.

The lead defense attorney appears each weeknight on Court TV, hosting a talk show with noted Atlanta prosecutor Nancy Grace. The show is called “Cochran & Grace,” and she addresses him as “Cochran,” not “Johnnie.” Though Cochran has moved to New York and is concentrating on TV--both he and Grace have three-year contracts with the network he has hardly given up on his high-profile Los Angeles-based law practice. He is seeking a new trial for convicted murderer Elmer Geronimo Pratt, and he has just been hired by jazz legend Lionel Hampton, who lost his possessions in a fire last month.

Mark Fuhrman

The detective who insisted that he had not uttered the “n-word” in a decade pleaded no contest in October in Los Angeles Superior Court to a resulting charge of perjury. He was sentenced to three years probation and fined $200 and then went back to his new home near Sandpoint, Idaho, where he works as an electrician’s apprentice. His book, “Murder in Brentwood,” is reportedly due out soon. “Mark Fuhrman’s dead,” he said in Vanity Fair magazine. “I can’t be me anymore. No matter how right or how wrong I am, it doesn’t make any difference. I can’t be what I was. What I was is dead. I’m starting over.”

Dr. Henry Lee

The renowned criminalist, whose testimony raised questions about how the LAPD handled blood evidence at the Bundy Drive crime scene--”Something’s wrong, he said in court--remains head of the Connecticut State Police forensic laboratory. He’s working on his normal complement of cases there while serving as an expert in other matters around the country. Lee, 58, also maintains a busy lecture schedule around the country; he is booked for talks on crime-scene investigations into 1999. “It’s a case we all learned from tremendously,” he says. “The positive thing that came out of this is we have a more professional outlook about the importance of the crime scene. We shouldn’t focus on who’s the fall guy.”

Barry Scheck

The fast-talking New Yorker, a specialist in forensic evidence, was given such high marks for the way he flayed LAPD criminalist Dennis Fung and other prosecution witnesses that it led to a new word in the legal lexicon. Lawyers were prone to say that a witness torn apart on the stand by a piercing examination got “Schecked.” When the trial ended, Scheck, 47, returned to New York to teach at Cardozo Law School and run the Innocence Project with Simpson co-counsel Peter Neufeld. Their work with DNA evidence has led to pardons for about three dozen defendants nationwide.

Michael Viner

The president of Dove Books of Beverly Hills became the case’s publishing mogul. In October 1994, Dove published Faye Resnick’s memoir, “Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted.” It sold about 500,000 copies, Viner said. Subsequently, Dove published five other Simpson books, including “Madame Foreman,” a joint effort by three Simpson jurors and a writer. But there won’t be any tomes following the civil trial. “We will sell no wine after its time,” quipped Viner, 52, who is making a movie about the life of writer Oscar Wilde. His next publishing venture will be a memoir from the ex-wife of basketball player Dennis Rodman. It’s titled “Worse Than He Says He Is or White Girls Don’t Bounce.”

Faye Resnick

Beverly Hills socialite. Best-selling author. And now, playmate. After baring her soul in two books, Resnick shows off the rest in the March issue of Playboy. “A liberating experience,” she calls it in the magazine. Along with her two books--the first Nicole Brown Simpson’s “diary,” the second a more personal account titled “Shattered”-- Resnick has also kept busy with various programs to combat domestic violence. A recent Holmby Hills event raised more than $200,000.

Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter

Both of the lead detectives in the murder investigation retired from the LAPD in 1996. Vannatter, 55, still maintains a home in Valencia but spends most of his time raising quarter horses on a farm in Vevay, Ind. Lange, 51, lives in Simi Valley and runs his own private investigation firm. The two are in the midst of a national tour to promote their book, “Evidence Dismissed, the Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O.J. Simpson.”

Anise Aschenbach

Criminal trial Juror No. 3, a 62-year-old retired senior clerk for the gas company, has been busy sanding walls; she’s preparing to paint her living room and kitchen. Aschenbach said she spends considerable time with her three grandchildren and volunteers for a Meals on Wheels program, delivering food and prescription medicine to the sick and elderly. “I listen to the radio a lot and I get the news blurbs about the trial, but I don’t pay close attention to it,” she said. “I try to avoid it, put it behind me... I pretty much want to return to my normal life. I don’t plan to ever serve on another jury.”

Sheila Woods

Juror No. 8 is back at work at the same job she had before the criminal trial--as an environmental health specialist for Los Angeles County. But Woods, 41, has since enrolled at the University of West Los Angeles School of Law and intends to become an attorney. “The trial had nothing to do with my decision to become a lawyer,” she said, “but it certainly strengthened my determination.”

Kato Kaelin

The onetime guest house tenant now lives in an apartment in what he describes as the “poor part of Beverly Hills,” insisting that he has not profited from the swirl of publicity--at least not much. He did land a talk radio show at a Los Angeles station, but that gig ended after six months. He says virtually none of his high-profile appearances on television shows were paying stints. A lot of people think I cashed in on the trial... [but] I didn’t write a book or anything like that. I’m always looking for work.” The 37-year-old wannabe actor said he did recently sign for a film role in a romantic comedy. And he left Sunday for London, where he will meet with advertisers for potential endorsements: “It’s tough right now... I have a lot of bills.”

Pablo Fenjves

The 43-year-old screenwriter provided one of the criminal trial’s most haunting moments when he recalled hearing the plaintive wail of a dog on the night Nicole Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were killed. A former journalist, he has turned down bids to write a screenplay about the killings; he has instead been immersed in other projects, including an ABC-TV thriller. He said of the verdicts in the Santa Monica courthouse: “I felt very good for the Goldmans and for the Browns. I think that they deserve to have closure. And I hope to hear as little about O.J. Simpson as possible for the rest of my life.”