If I Did It Page 2

  Did things get volatile from time to time? Yes. Do I regret it? Yes. I loved Nicole. She was the mother of two of my kids, and the last thing I wanted was to hurt her. I only ever got truly physical with her once, and that was in 1989 – and the whole world heard about it.

  Let me take you back. It was New Year’s Eve. Nicole and I were at a party early in the evening, at the home of a producer friend, hanging out with Marcus Allen, one of my old football buddies, and his girlfriend, Kathryn. Marcus had bought some expensive earrings for Kathryn, as a little New Year’s present, and I guess Nicole got a little jealous. Kathryn couldn’t see what she was jealous about, though, since Nicole was dripping in diamonds of her own, and she spelled it out for her: “Well, look what you got, girl!” I don’t know what Nicole was thinking, but for some reason she got it into her head that a pair of earrings – just like Kathryn’s – were waiting for her back at the house. And of course there were no earrings. We got home after the party, and we were in bed, making love, and suddenly Nicole sat up and looked at me.

  “You have a little surprise for me?” she said, smiling coyly.

  “What surprise?”

  “Diamond earrings, maybe?”

  “What earrings?” I said, getting irritated.

  “Like the ones Marcus got Kathryn,” she said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Kathryn said you bought a pair of earrings just like the ones she was wearing. Where are they? If you didn’t get them for me, who’d you get them for?”

  And I said, “You’re crazy! I didn’t get nobody no damn earrings. And I’m not about to, either.” I’m sure that was the wrong thing to say, but I was angry, and my anger set her off. She took a swing at me and I grabbed her arm and literally dragged her out of bed and pulled her toward the door.

  “Where are the goddamn earrings?!” she hollered, still taking swings at me.

  “There are no earrings!” I snapped back.

  “Liar! Who’d you give the earrings to?!”

  “I didn’t give any goddamn earrings to anybody!” I said. “There are no earrings! Now get out of here. I don’t want you in my bedroom.”

  I pushed her into the corridor and locked her out, then went back to bed, still fuming. I didn’t know what the hell was going on with Nicole. She was becoming increasingly erratic. Most of the time she was a loving wife and a perfect mother, but it seemed like lately any little thing could set her off. To be honest, it worried me. There we were, two in the goddamn morning, and she was standing out in the corridor, banging on the door, hollering. It was as if she had turned into a whole different person. Finally, she gave up, and I could hear her moving off. There were plenty of other bedrooms in the house. Nicole could sleep alone if she was going to be like that.

  A minute later, she was back. Turned out she’d only gone to get the key, and there she was, coming at me all over again, fists and feet flying. So I grabbed her, again, and I threw her out, again, and this time I kept the key.

  “Let me in, you bastard!”

  “No! Go away!”

  I went back to bed and rolled on my side and pulled the covers over my head, wondering if something was wrong with my wife. We’d been together for twelve years, and in many ways they’d been the twelve best years of my life, but it seemed like most of 1989 had been torture. You never knew what was going to piss her off, and when she was pissed off she could hold onto her anger for days. I wondered how long she was going to stay angry this time. She kept pounding on the door, swearing and calling me names, and I worried that she would wake the kids, but eventually the fight went out of her and she stormed off.

  I don’t know how much time passed, because I dozed off, but suddenly she was at the door again. Only it wasn’t her. It was the housekeeper, Michele. “Mr. Simpson,” she said, trying to make herself heard through the door. “You have to come outside. The police are here.”

  The police? What the hell?

  I pulled on a pair of pants and went downstairs and out the front door and found Nicole sitting in a patrol car that was parked ill front of the house. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  I saw Nicole trying to get out of the car, and I could hear the cops telling her to sit still. Michele was standing right behind me, and she saw it, too. “Come on, Miss Nicole,” she called out. “Everything’s going to be all right. Come back inside.”

  Suddenly Nicole was crying. “My baby’s in the house,” she said. “I want my baby back.”

  “Well come on,” I said. “What’s keeping you?”

  Michele tried, too. “Please come in the house, Miss Nicole,” she said. “Everything’s fine now.”

  One of the cops turned to look at Michele, scowling. “Why don’t you mind your own business,” he said.

  “Hey,” I snapped. “You got no right to talk to my housekeeper that way!”

  “She should mind her own business,” he said.

  I couldn’t believe the guy. He was parked in front of my property, talking shit to my housekeeper, and telling me how to run my personal affairs. “Man, you don’t have a right to talk to either of us that way,” I said. I was seriously pissed by this time, and I was seriously tired, and I didn’t want to do anything stupid, so I turned to Michele and led her back into the house. I figured Nicole would come back when she was good and ready.

  But Nicole didn’t come back for several hours. She went down to the precinct with the cops and they took a statement from her and had her pose for pictures. It was three in the morning by then. She was drunk, she’d been crying, and she was under fluorescent lights without any makeup. Ask me how had she looked.

  Then they took her to the hospital and the doctors gave her the once-over. In their report, which I only read much later, they noted that there were bruises on her face and arms. That was about it. I could have told them about the bruises. The ones on her arms – I put them there. Her face? I didn’t hit her, but it’s possible she hurt herself while we were scuffling.

  Years later, during the murder trial, I found out that one of the officers who responded that night was John Edwards. He testified that Nicole had bruises on her forehead, cuts on her nose and cheek, and a hand-print on her neck. I don’t remember any of that, and if it was there I didn’t see it. Edwards quoted Nicole as saying, “You guys come out here, you talk to him, you leave. You’ve been out here eight times, I want him arrested, and I want my kids back.”

  Eight times?What the hell was she talking about? And what was that about wanting her kids back? Back from what? From where? All I heard was, “My baby’s in the house. I want my baby back.” I wasn’t stopping her. From where I was standing, the only thing keeping her from getting out of the patrol car and marching back into the house were the damn cops.

  Edwards also said I screamed at Nicole: “I got two other women! I don’t want that woman in my bed anymore!” I don’t remember saying anything about not wanting Nicole in my bed anymore, but at that moment it was sure as hell true. I didn’t want her anywhere near me. The part about the ‘two other women’, though – Edwards got that completely wrong. I was talking about the two women in the house – the nanny and the housekeeper because Nicole seemed to be concerned about the baby, and I was just letting her know that the baby was in good hands.

  I guess she got the message, because she split and didn’t come home till just before daybreak. When she walked through the front door, I looked at her and felt lousy. “I never meant to hurt you,” I said. “I just wanted you out of the bedroom.”

  “I have a headache,” she said.

  “You want me to take you to the hospital?”

  “No. It’s probably just a hangover.”

  “Maybe it’s a concussion,” I said. “I don’t mind taking you.”

  “Just leave me alone,” she said. “I’m sick of this.”

  I was sick of it too, frankly. I went off and spent what was left of the night at a friend’s house, and in the afternoon I went to the Rose
Bowl and tried to put the bad feelings behind me.

  When I got home that evening, long after the Rose Bowl ended, Nicole was there with the kids, and neither of us said a word about the incident. We kind of walked around each other, not saying much of anything, really, and I assumed that life at Rockingham would eventually get back to normal.

  The next day, or the day after that – I can’t recall exactly – a detective came by to follow up with a few questions, and I walked the guy through it. I said I’d been drinking – that we’d both been drinking – and admitted that I’d become a little bit too physical. “I should have exercised more self-control,” I said.

  “It’s one of those things that happen in all relationships,” he said, and I agreed with him. We’d been partying a little too hard. It was late. We weren’t thinking clearly. Ilia hey, nobody got hurt. Yada yada yada.

  As for Nicole, I guess she told the cops her own version of the same story, down to that misunderstanding about the non-existent diamond earrings. I don’t know if she told them that she took a few swings at me, and that she came back for more after I locked her out, but she certainly told her mother, who went on national television and confirmed it. Still, at that point none of it seemed relevant. I had already apologized, profusely, and had even gone one better. “If I’m ever physical like that with you again, I will tear up the pre-nuptial agreement,” I told Nicole. I wanted her to know how serious I was about making things right. It didn’t matter to me that she had initiated the fight because my response was wrong, and that’s what counted – my response.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “I mean it,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  So, yeah – as far as I was concerned, it was over.

  But it wasn’t over month later, just as we were getting ready to fly to Hawaii, where had business with Hertz, I woke up and read about the whole ugly incident on the front page of the Herald Examiner. It was surreal. I thought we’d moved on long ago, then bam! – there it was for the whole world to see. The story came as a complete surprise to Nicole, too. She had no idea that the cops were going to use her statement, and those incriminating photographs, to charge me with domestic abuse.

  In the days ahead, everything became a little clearer. I found out that it’s quite common for a woman to charge her husband or boyfriend with abuse, only to call the police the next dad and ask them to drop the charges. I guess they’re afraid of what those guys will do to them when it’s all over, so they find all sorts of reasons to change their stories: It was a misunderstanding, officer. Deep down I really love him. I don’t want to hurt the kids. Now that I think about it, the whole thing was my fault. Many women kept getting victimized as a result, repeatedly, sometimes with deadly results, and the cops were trying to figure out how to deal with the problem. In fact, they were attempting to put a new law on the books that would give them the power to make the charges stick, even if the complaint was withdrawn. And I guess what happened was, someone at the L.A.P.D. decided that I would make the perfect poster boy for spousal abuse – a perfect, high-profile launch for their campaign.

  There was one glitch, however, and it was a big one. Back in those days, officers could only make an arrest if it was warranted by the situation, or if the perpetrator had a history of abuse. Our situation hadn’t warranted it – no one was getting beat up – and I didn’t have a history of abuse. Still, just in case anything had slipped though the cracks, the investigating officer sent a memo to various neighborhood precincts, asking if any officer had ever responded to a domestic disturbance at my home. Well, wouldn’t you know it – they got lucky. The Westec security guard who had stopped by during our one previous altercation, in 1984, had since become a member of the LAPD, and both he and one of his fellow officers, Mark Fuhrman, responded to the memo. In his response, Fuhrman actually claimed that he’d been at my house that night, with the guy from Westec, and that he’d talked with both me and Nicole. If Fuhrman was there, and if he actually talked to either of us, I sure as hell don’t remember it. But that didn’t matter. The LAPD had been looking for a prior incident, and they’d just found it.

  In the end, I was convicted of spousal abuse. I was put on probation, given a few hundred hours of community service, and ordered to pay a modest fine. I wasn’t happy about it, but I didn’t think the charges were worth fighting, and I regret it to this day. If you don’t fight the charges, they stick. And these stuck. Suddenly, I was a convicted wife-beater.

  Did I physically drag Nicole out of the bedroom and push her out into the hallway? Yes. Did I beat her? No. I never once raised my hand to her – never once – and if Nicole were alive today she’d tell you the same thing. In fact, right after the newspaper story broke, when she talked to her mother about it, she took responsibility for the whole ugly incident. And even during the divorce proceedings years later, when she had good reason to want to lie about my alleged violent nature, Nicole refused to play that game. She told her [la s] that the incident had been blown completely out of proportion – and that she’d instigated the violence, not me.

  Much later, months after the murders, I spoke about the incident with Dr. Bernard Yudowitz, a forensic psychiatrist. I remember crying as I told him about going up to San Francisco in 1986 to see my father, who was in the hospital at the time, riddled with cancer. He was tired and weak, but in good spirits, and we chatted for a while, then I took a moment to step out into the corridor to call Nicole, back in L.A. When I returned to the room, my father was dead. “I don’t understand why God gave me ten minutes with my father,” I told Dr. Yudowitz, “but not even one second with Nicole.”

  I will admit to you, as I admitted to him, that some of my arguments with Nicole did indeed deteriorate into shouting matches, and that we tended to get in each other’s faces. But most of the time we resolved our differences peacefully, without getting physical. Nicole and I were together for seventeen years, and we had our share of conflict, but by and large we were always able to work out our differences.

  During the trial, when Dr. Yudowitz took the stand – on my behalf, admittedly – he said what everyone expected him to say: That I did not fit the profile of a killer. In the days ahead, as expected, the newspapers trotted out their own experts. They said that four out of five murders were spontaneous, a result of circumstance more than intent, and that perhaps that had been the situation in my case. I also read about so-called ‘atypical’ murderers: The quiet boy next door, say, or the mousy little preacher’s wife – men and women who seemed incapable of murder, but who were driven to violence by a given situation. Some experts immediately categorized me as atypical: I seemed like a nice guy, and it was definitely out of character for me to have committed the crime, but I could have done it just the same. That didn’t strike me as particularly insightful. Given the right circumstances, I guess anyone is capable of murder.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself…

  When I think back on my marriage to Nicole, I guess I’d have to sad that 1989 was the big turning point – but mostly for her. Mc? I was the oblivious husband. For one thing, I got busy. A kw weeks after the incident, I had to go to Hawaii, for Hertz, and my business with them kept me occupied for the next few months. Then in the fall, I had NFL Live to do, with Bob Costas, and once again – like lots of guys – I lost myself in my work. I wasn’t even thinking about the incident, to be honest. I was moving forward, leaving it behind me, and in my mind that was a good thing. I thought we should put the past behind us. Cool off. Start fresh. And I figured Nicole probably felt the same way. She seemed a little removed at times, to be honest, but otherwise I thought things were fine. I didn’t realize till much later that she was having an affair, but that’s another story, and I was completely oblivious about that, too. Maybe it was self-delusion – who knows? All I know is that I thought things were solid, and that I felt we could get through anything. Plus I didn’t want the marriage to fail. We had two kids to raise, and we were at that point
in our marriage where the kids had to come first. That’s just the way it was. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Nicole, or that I her less, but that I loved her in a different way. You lose some of the passion, sure, and you lose some of the closeness. And sometimes you’re just trying to stay out of each other’s way. But so what? The center of gravity shifts. You focus on the kids. You settle down. You mellow out. And that’s what I was doing, or trying to do.

  And it was working great – or so I thought. I remember being in New York in December 1991, hanging out with Nicole, doing a little Christmas shopping and stuff, and thinking how happy she seemed. She even looked terrific. She had been struggling to get back into fighting shape ever since the kids had come along, and complaining about it every time she caught sight of herself in the mirror, but after months of hard work she was in the best shape of her life. I was amazed, and I told her so, and I remember thinking how glad I was that we’d weathered the post-1989 storm. I was proud of myself for making it through the rough parts of the marriage, and equally proud of her, and I was feeling genuinely optimistic about the future.

  A month later, in January 1992, I was in New York for the playoff games, and flew home for a long weekend. The very first day I was back, Nicole and I went to lunch at Peppone’s, right there in Brentwood, and about thirty seconds after we sat down she let me have it: “I think we should separate,” she said.