The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson by Jeffrey Toobin

the Simpson home—at least a housekeeper—and there was no answer, even though lights were on. There appeared to be blood on the car outside. As Lange said later in court, “I felt that someone inside that house may be the victim of a crime, maybe bleeding or worse.” Vannatter testified, “After leaving a very violent bloody murder scene, I believed something was wrong there. I made a determination that we needed to go over—to go into the property.” Fuhrman—by far the youngest and fittest of the four detectives on the scene—volunteered. “I can go over the wall,” he said. “Okay, go,” said Lange. Fuhrman hoisted himself over the six-foot-high brick wall, then stepped to his rightand manually opened the hydraulic gate. The four detectives entered O.J. Simpson’s property.

    Simpson’s dog—a black chow—did not stir as the detectives passed it on their way to the front door. Vannatter knocked. No answer. They waited two or three minutes, knocked again, and still heard no stirring inside. The four detectives decided to take a look around, and so, still using flashlights in the moments before dawn, they walked together toward the rear of the house. There they saw a row of three guest houses, though they were really more like connected rooms, each with its own entrance. Phillips peered into one.
    “There’s—I see someone inside,” he said.
    Phillips knocked, and almost immediately a disheveled man who obviously had just awoken answered the door. Shaking his mane of blond hair out of his eyes, Kato Kaelin stared at Phillips, who identified himself and asked, “Is O.J. Simpson home?”
    The groggy Kaelin said he didn’t know, but suggested the officers knock at the adjacent guest house, where Simpson’s daughter Arnelle lived. Phillips, accompanied by Vannatter and Lange, then knocked on Arnelle’s door. Fuhrman stayed behind and asked Kaelin if he could come in. Fuhrman noticed that Kaelin seemed disoriented, even for someone who had just awakened. Fuhrman gave Kaelin a standard police test for intoxication: Holding a pen about fifteen inches in front of Kaelin’s face, he watched to see if Kaelin could follow it with his eyes. Kaelin passed—he just
looked
zonked. Fuhrman asked to look around the small suite. As Fuhrman poked around—among other things, checking the shoes in the closet for blood—the detective asked if anything unusual had happened the previous night.
    As a matter of fact, something unusual
had
happened. At about 10:45 P.M. , while he was talking on the telephone, Kaelin said, there were some loud thumps on his bedroom wall, near the air conditioner. The jolts were so dramatic that a picture on the wall was jostled. He had thought there was going to be an earthquake.
    The two men chatted a while longer, then Fuhrman walked with Kaelin into the main house, where the other three detectives werespeaking with Arnelle Simpson. Fuhrman then decided to follow up on what Kaelin had told him. He left Kaelin in the house with the other detectives, walked back outside, and tried to orient himself to see what faced the south wall of Kaelin’s bedroom—the wall where Kaelin had heard the loud noises. Fuhrman saw that the south wall faced the edge of Simpson’s property, which was marked by a Cyclone fence, and that there was a narrow passageway between the back of the guest houses and the fence.
    “I took out my flashlight and I started walking down the path trying to figure out the residence architecture to figure out where Kaelin’s wall might have been,” Fuhrman testified later. “I saw a long, dark path covered with leaves.” When Fuhrman had walked about twenty feet along the path, he saw a dark object on the ground, but it wasn’t until he was practically upon it that he realized what it was. “At some point,” Fuhrman remembered, “I could tell that it was a glove.”
    It looked out of place. There were no leaves or twigs on it, and the glove looked moist or sticky, with