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

he was wearing and what had happened to them.Even if Simpson had said he could not remember these basic facts, such a failure of recollection might have been highly incriminating. In a murder case, it is common for the police to question a suspect for many hours, but Vannatter and Lange surrendered after barely half an hour—even before Simpson himself could ask for a break.
    When the prosecutors heard the tape, they knew immediately how dreadfully the detectives had botched this opportunity. They seethed with frustration—in private. To berate Vannatter and Lange would have been futile, and might also have damaged a partnership that faced a long and difficult investigation. But among themselves the prosecutors had a nickname for the police interview of the defendant on June 13: “the fiasco.”

4. “I CANNOT PROMISE JUSTICE”
    B y noon on Monday, June 13, the media frenzy surrounding the case had begun in earnest. At about 10:00 A.M. , just ten hours after the bodies were discovered—and before the coroner had removed them—the first local news satellite trucks showed up at the Bundy crime scene. By noon, several stations were transmitting live pictures of Nicole Brown Simpson’s bloodstained walkway. Shortly after the cameras appeared at Bundy, several more were set up outside O.J.’s home. Even though nothing conspicuous was going on there, the growing corps of police officers at the Simpson house suggested that something was up, and soon there were twice as many cameras at Rockingham as at Bundy. Media people and cops gathered, watching each other. The two journalists whose actions that week would have the longest-term implications for the case never came to either scene, but Dennis Schatzman and James Gaines nevertheless studied with care the events unfolding in Brentwood.
    A forty-five-year-old black man with a salt-and-pepper beard, oversize tortoiseshell glasses, and a predilection for brightly colored African robes, Dennis Schatzman covered the Simpson case for the Los Angeles
Sentinel
, a paid-circulation weekly devoted to the city’s African-American community. His reports were syndicated to many other black papers around the country, and Schatzman was interviewed frequently on black-owned radio stations. More than anyone else, he set the black conversational agenda on the Simpson case.
    The
Sentinel
, which was founded in 1934, is a broadsheet, with a red, white, and blue logo framed by the slogans “The Largest Black-Owned Newspaper in the West” and “Education Will Lead to the Truth.” In 1994, its circulation was just short of twenty thousand, and falling; it lost many readers when, in the post–Rodney King riots of 1992, many of the small stores that sold the paper were looted and closed. The
Sentinel
is fairly typical of the bigger black papers around the country. Generally, the political views reflected in its pages are conventionally liberal; the paper’s dominant theme, not surprisingly, is pride in African-American accomplishments, but it is expressed without the ideological excesses of, say, Louis Farrakhan. In many respects, the
Sentinel
is old-fashioned, with extensive reporting about the cotillions and awards banquets of black society; the paper aims its coverage at a settled and reasonably prosperous middle-class audience—the kind of people who, among other things, tend to answer a summons for jury duty.
    A single moment from the events of June 13 stood out for Schatzman: the televised image of Simpson being handcuffed, then released. After first broadcasting Ron Edwards’s scoop exclusively, KCOP, an independent local station, later allowed its competitors to use it, and the scene was rebroadcast frequently. The handcuffing was probably not the most famous videotaped moment to come out of the case, but for one audience in particular, African-Americans in Los Angeles, it immediately linked the Simpson case to their long and tortured relationship with the LAPD. From the beginning,