Upholding the Letter of the Law: 28 Years in Court

Christine Olson vividly remembers the day in court 16 years ago when Richard Ramirez, on trial for 13 counts of murder, looked lasciviously at her feet and licked his lips.

“You’re sick,” the court reporter mouthed at the man called the Night Stalker, now on California’s death row.

Not all Olson’s memories from nearly three decades as an employee of the Los Angeles County court system are sick, though. During the Ramirez trial, the 55-year-old San Diego native met her husband-to-be, a bailiff assigned to security duty for the defendant.

With many farewell wishes, Olson retired last month after 28 years of being a fly on the wall at some of Los Angeles County’s most infamous criminal trials.

“I’ve just been lucky to have all these assignments,” she tearfully told a group of about 50 judges, attorneys, fellow court reporters and other court employees at her retirement party in Judge Lance A. Ito’s courtroom. “I’ve been at the right place at the right time.”

Olson’s first high-profile case was the 1982-83 trial of Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, the Hillside Stranglers, who were convicted of killing 10 girls and women in Southern California during four months in 1977 and 1978.

Olson also was the court reporter when former football star O.J. Simpson stood trial in 1994 and ’95 for the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a friend of hers, Ron Goldman.

She recently recalled that trial with fondness. The media attention created chaos, she said, but the dynamic personalities in the courtroom, particularly the attorneys, made it fun.

Her favorite was Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., the lead attorney on the Simpson defense team who died last month of an inoperable brain tumor. “He was really good to us,” she said.

The only person in the courtroom who treated her poorly, she said, was the defendant.

“I was walking out of the court with a stack of transcripts and I was walking past the defense table,” Olson remembered. She said Simpson muttered to her, “Oh well, another person that’s making money off me.”

“He was the most egotistical person,” she said.

The Simpson trial made Olson a celebrity in court-reporter circles. For two years she went on the campus speakers’ circuit, traveling “from Hawaii to Maine, from Corpus Christi to Toronto” to speak to students learning the trade.

She and the other reporter on the trial, Janet Moxham, were featured in a June 1995 People magazine article.

Though she welcomed the attention, Olson hoped as a teenager growing up in Whittier to someday be in the public eye as a television reporter.

She first laid eyes on what she calls “the little machine” -- a court reporter’s keyboard -- at a career day at her high school in 1966.

When she enrolled at San Diego State University in 1967, Olson said, her TV aspirations were stymied when then-Gov. Ronald Reagan cut higher education funding, curtailing the number of broadcast journalism courses the university offered.

Then, “I remembered the little machine,” she said. Olson left San Diego State in 1970 and enrolled at the Bryan College of Court Reporting in Los Angeles.

“I had a real flair for court reporting,” Olson said, adding that three or four years usually were needed to complete the certification process that she finished in 18 months.

By 1976, she said, after working for five years as a freelance transcriptionist, she started work at the county’s downtown criminal courthouse.

Over the next 28 years, she worked on hundreds of criminal trials, including the 1992 trial of Charles Keating, the lawyer convicted of fraud in the 1980s savings and loan scandal, and the Simi Valley trial that year that acquitted four Los Angeles police officers charged in the beating of motorist Rodney G. King.

In addition to the technological changes -- personal computers and real-time transcription were more science fiction than reality when she started -- the years have brought other new challenges to her job.

A more diverse county means more accents to interpret. Also, “everyone seems to talk faster now,” she added.

“Even the bench officers are in a hurry,” she said. Most people “think that a court reporter is just this omniscient person -- sometimes we have trouble too.”

A good court reporter must have an innate sense of patterns of speech, be a keen listener with “tremendous concentration” and be able to tune out noise in the courtroom other than the speaker, said Superior Court Commissioner Sam Bubrick, one of the first judicial officers Olson worked for.

After taking down thousands of words spoken during each court session, court reporters spend hours editing hundreds of pages of text so the transcripts will be ready the next day.

“It’s such a combination of skills,” Ito said. “It’s a very rigorous job.”

“I tell juries the court reporter is the most important person in the court because [she] protects the integrity of the judicial system,” Ito said. “Ten years, 25 years down the line, people will be able to read what happens in court verbatim, word for word.”

The judge, who presided over the Simpson and Keating trials, among others, called Olson “the best court reporter I’ve had the privilege to work with.”

Olson plans to live full time at home in eastern San Bernardino County, near the Arizona border, with her husband, Dan Sanzone. They married in 1992, when she was reporting the trial of the officers involved in the King beating. Olson has two stepchildren -- Danny, 23, and Shannon, 18 -- her husband’s children from a previous marriage.

She and Sanzone moved east two years ago because he developed respiratory problems. To continue her job, Olson stayed in the city and commuted home on weekends.

In retirement, Olson plans to work part time at the local county courthouse: “back to where I started, but at my own pace this time.” She also wants to travel the country with her husband on their Harley-Davidson motorcycles and in their restored 1934 Ford convertible roadster.

“I had a goal in mind, all these years, to retire at 55,” she said. “Now I can be happy, play with my dogs and ride in my hot rod.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

The court report

* Court reporters are among the highest-paid courtroom employees, and some earn more than judges. In 1991, Olson was the highest-paid court reporter in Los Angeles County, earning about $250,000 in base salary and transcript fees, according to a survey done by the Los Angeles Daily Journal in 1992. The following year she was No. 1 again, earning $200,575.

* Olson was a part-time reserve Los Angeles Police Department officer from 1981 to 1992. “I did it for the challenge,” Olson says, “just to see if I could get through the academy.”

* During the O.J. Simpson trial, court employees nicknamed Olson and the trial’s other court reporter, Janet Moxham, the “O.J.s.”

* Olson once was the court reporter for Clarence “Red” Stromwall, a judge who in the 1950s and ‘60s was a detective on the LAPD’s “hat squad,” a four-man team that investigated bank robberies and was distinguished by the fedoras each detective wore.