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

victim’s next of kin in person if possible, but Lange learned from Arnelle that Lou and Juditha Brown lived in Orange County, about seventy-five miles away. Lange knew the media would soon learn about the murders and suspected that if he didn’t speak to Nicole’s parents immediately, they would learn of their daughter’s death from television news reports.
    Lou Brown answered the telephone at 6:21 A.M. He took the news quietly. Lange did not know that Nicole’s sister Denise, the oldest of the four Brown daughters, lived at the family home and that she had picked up the phone on another extension.
    Denise began screaming, “He killed her! He finally killed her!”
    “Who?” asked Lange.
    “
O.J.!
” said Denise.
    Meanwhile, behind the house, Fuhrman quickly appreciated the significance of what he had found. The detective later recalled in testimony that “when I found the glove back here on this pathway, I will have to—I have to admit to you that the adrenaline started pumping because I didn’t really know what was going on.… When I found the glove and actually realized this glove was very close in description and color to the glove at the crime scene, my heartstarted pounding and I realized what I had probably found.” One by one, Fuhrman took each of the other three detectives down the narrow pathway to study the glove without touching it. They all agreed that based on what they remembered, this right-hand glove looked like a match for the one at Bundy, but Vannatter sent Phillips and Fuhrman back to the murder scene to make a closer comparison. Lange would go back, too, to begin examining the evidence there, while Vannatter would await the criminalist at Rockingham.
    The evidence stacked up quickly and led to a plausible theory of events: It appeared that the killer had dropped a left glove in a struggle at the murder scene and then suffered a cut on his exposed left hand. Bleeding, the killer then walked to a car in the back alley—very possibly Simpson’s Bronco. He then traveled to Rockingham where, perhaps in an effort to hide his clothes on the narrow path behind Kato’s room, he had dropped the other glove. “This is a crime scene,” Vannatter declared at Rockingham.
    After the other three detectives left for Bundy, Vannatter decided to take a look around O.J. Simpson’s property. He stepped out the front door and onto the driveway, near the two parked cars. The sun was coming up at this point, and in the spreading daylight, Vannatter noticed what appeared to be a drop of blood on the ground. Then he found another … and another. The drops were all more or less in a row heading from the Rockingham gate to the front door. Vannatter opened that gate and took another look at the Bronco parked nearby. He stared in from the passenger side and noticed blood on the console between the two seats—and more blood on the inside of the driver’s door. Vannatter thought back to what he had seen at Bundy. The individual drops to the left of the bloody shoe prints leaving the two bodies resembled in size, shape, and color the drops here at Rockingham. Vannatter went back into O.J. Simpson’s home and found more blood drops in the foyer, just beyond the front door. The trail of blood now led right into Simpson’s home.
    The criminalist, Dennis Fung, arrived at Rockingham at 7:10 A.M. and did a quick test of the red stain on the exterior of the Bronco. It was only a presumptive test, and so not 100 percent definitive, but it suggested the presence of human blood. Fuhrman returned from Nicole’s condominium a few moments later. He saidthe glove at Bundy was for a left hand, and told Vannatter that it did indeed look like a match for the right glove found behind Kaelin’s room.
    That’s it, said Vannatter. We need to get a search warrant for this place. Vannatter left for the West Los Angeles station to write one up. Once there, he decided to touch base with deputy district attorney Marcia Clark.