Although the truth is it doesn't really matter. The truth is a much bigger story, a much, MUCH bigger story, was just about to break
"Mike!...this is Barry,"
A frantic voice shouted through the ear piece of my cell phone.
"O.J. Simpson's girlfriends or his wife or something like that and some other guy just got murdered at O.J.'s house."
"Where the hell are you?!"
I recognized the jacked-up caller immediately. It was Barry Levin, chief assignment editor for the t.v. show "A Current Affair," a good guy and a good friend, and sort of a legendary figure in the early untamed days of tabloid t.v.
Barry knew his stuff. After years of working for the supermarket tabloids, he had a great contact list and very productive sources for the kinds of smut and swill that had become the stock and trade of our t.v. show, "A Current Affair."
"We're on the 10"....I said...."headed to Santa Monica."
"Get-off....go to Brentwood!" The stressed-out voice shot back.
In those early moments of what would become one of the most extraordinary murder sagas in this nation's history, Barry Levine was obviously still sorting out the specifics of the story.
It wasn't O.J.'s house and it was, of course, O.J.'s ex-wife. But other than that, as usual, Barry's tip was pretty much on target.

Two people were dead, one of them was in fact linked to O.J. Simpson. Cops were still very active at crime scene in those early morning hours and we were close. We were really close!
Call it what it was: dumb luck, but we ended being one of the first t.v. crews at the crime scene that bizarre and terrible morning, the morning they found the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman butchered in front of Nicole's Brentwood condo, a morning that now seems like an episode of the "Twilight Zone" playing in my head than it does a real life event.
It is a day that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I say that not just because of grisly nature of the double homicide, the slaughtered bodies of the two victims and that unforgettably river of human blood cascading down the walkway in front of Nicole's condo.
No. The reason that I still sometimes lose sleep all these many years after the fact is something far more personal, far more petty and far more self-serving.
Indeed the thing that continues to torment me to this today is one brief and agonizing moment of missed opportunity, one of those rare occasions in a reporter's life and career when you have the opportunity to ask precisely the right question at precisely the right time, an opportunity that presented itself to me on that bizarre day, an opportunity that I completely and utterly blew!
Don't get me wrong, there were a lot of freaky moments on that first day of what would become "trial of the century."
Like the moment a speeding car came racing up to the chaotic scene and a rather eye-catching character jumped out.
The woman was wearing her dark hair in a short, tightly-curled style reminiscent of Little Orphan Annie. Her vibe was electric, sort of pissed-off. And her wardrobe could only be described as a very short mini-skirt, with high-heals.
Hopefully my observations concerning this woman's appearance don't make me sound like too much like a sexist pig. But given the grisly setting, a double murder scene, it did strike me as a rather odd fashion statement
But hey...that was L.A!

Some of you who know the history of this story, have probably already guessed, the woman with "Little Orphan Annie" hair-do and the don't-mess-with-me demeanor was none other than Deputy L.A. County prosecutor Marcia Clark, at that very moment making her initial appearance on that crazy stage, one of many unsuspecting characters suddenly placed on a crash course with infamy that day.
Maybe it was the way she carried herself or maybe it was the fact that she was making a beeline toward the crime tape that told me she was more than just some casual passerby or some crazed crime scene stalker or lookilou.
As she went whizzing by, I was trying to light a cigarette. So I asked her if she had a match, hoping to slow her down just long enough so I could ask her some more pointed questions about what the hell was going on and what her role in all of it was.
"You got a light?" I said.
"I don't smoke" she shot back, contempt dripping from her voice.

I'm certain at that moment, like all of us, Marcia Clark had no idea where all of this was headed. How could she?
She quickly ducked under the yellow police tape to begin to confer with cops.
And there were certainly plenty of other weird moments that morning, moments when other faces destine for notoriety and infamy first appeared, the cops like Furhman and Van Atter, O.J. buddies like the Kardasian and Kato, so many characters! The circus was assembling right there before my eyes!
And on that very first day, there I was ring side. My camera crew, a couple of wacky brothers named Paul and Scott Johnson, shooting it all.

Which leads me back to "the moment," that one painful moment, more than any other moment in my 30 year career, a moment that I would give just about anything to live again.
It was late afternoon and all action had suddenly shifted to downtown Los Angeles, and to Parker Center, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, a building made famous in the opening sequence of the old t.v. show "Dragnet."
After discovering the bodies, L.A. cops had quickly put two and two together and figured out who the victims really were and who the possible players in the double homicide might be.
At which point, they promptly began looking for the murdered woman's ex-husband, to ask the well-known wife-beating movie star, and former football player what he might know about the killings.
Of course by the time cops caught up with O.J. he had already hopped a fight to Chicago and was busy in a hotel bathroom washing the blood off his hands.
Within hours, however, O.J. agreed to return to L.A. where he was questioned by investigators at Parker Center.
And it was there at the front doors of the police headquarters that my camera crew and I had camped out with about a dozen other crews, all waiting for the big shot, " the money shot," the first picture of O.J. Simpson coming out of the cop shop after being grilled by detectives.
As it turns out, however, it was not the Juice who first came out of Parker Center. No, it was well-known L.A. defense attorney Howard Weitzman.
In an industry of dirt-bags and sleaze-balls, Weitzman always struck me as a pretty stand-up guy. (And that's probably why he didn't last very long as O.J.'s lawyer ). But on that hot Southern California afternoon Wietzman had obviously been called in, on the quick, to hold O.J.'s bloody hand through his first interview with police.
"O.J. will be coming out in just a second," the attorney told the assemblage of snarling media dogs.
"But he won't be making any comments. We will have a statement later, but no comments today!"
The veteran lawyer of course knew exactly what he was doing. He was trying to run little interference for his client, hoping to throw up a little smoke to help poor old O.J. get out the door and into an awaiting car. And I am terribly sad to report that it seemed to work.
For suddenly there he was, the Juice! walking out of the police station in a white golf shirt and dark pants.
But this wasn't the mighty NFL running back bowling people over on the football field, or even the smiling pitchman sprinting through the airport, no for that one fleeting moment the great O.J. Simpson seemed like and a small and scared man.

At this point I should probably make it very clear, for the record, that I have long been thoroughly convinced that O.J. Simpson is a liar, a coward and a killer. It's an opinion I arrived at early in my coverage of this history-making story and many years before an old, pompous and pudgy O.J. Simpson penned his utterly offensive little opus "If I Did It."
Of course he did it.

But at that moment, on his way out of the cop shop, heading to an awaiting Mercedes Benz, a moment captured by a dozen t.v. camera crews and today rebroadcast every time Simpson slithers back into the headlines, O.J. Simpson was shaken and vulnerable.
The Juice had just killed two people. The cops were already on his ass. He had not yet had time summons his old swagger or even to get his story straight.
He was the proverbial "deer in the headlights," a slump-shouldered, terrified child caught breaking the rules.
And it was there with the unblinking t.v. cameras rolling on his every move, that I wish to god I would had had the balls to ask the one "right" question!
"Did you kill them?"
"DID YOU KILL THEM?"
Don't get me wrong, I don't for a moment flatter myself that I could changed the course of history or provoked some Perry Mason-like confessions from O.J. there on the patio of the police station.
But at that moment, captured in what has now become an infamous clip of video, that one moment long before Simpson surrounded himself with his legal "dream team" of sleazeballs, spin doctors and schisters , that moment when I hear myself and the other reporters pitching Simpson softball questions like: "O. J. do you have any comment?" or "do you have anything to say?" I want to hit myself over that head with a two-by-four!
What a gutless bastard!
I"M A GUTLESS BASTARD!

At this point, all of this is probably starting to sound pretty stupid and petty. But for me I was a defining moment of my career, a moment at which I learned a very important lesson.
The lesson: don't be afraid to ask the tough question even at the risk of sounding like a prick.
Me and the other reporters on that day gave O.J. the celebrity discount.
Since that day I've heard Simpson whine and cry like a baby about a "rush to judgment."
What a bunch of bullshit!
Granted he had not yet been official named a suspect and police had let him walk out of their headquarters on that first day, but even then it was pretty clear where the story was headed and very frankly even back then it was pretty clear who had committed the murders.

I cut O.J. a lot of slack that day, too afraid to throw him the zinger there in front of all those other cameras because hey it was O.J.
It was a mistake.
Now I'm sure that had I or one of the other reporters asked the tough question, O.J. probably would not have said a thing. But there with the merciless cameras tight on his face, before his supporters, his sycophants and his ego had had a chance to rallied and circle the wagons, O.J. was completely vulnerable for perhaps the one and only moment following the murders. And at that moment I would have loved to see him wince had I or somebody else asked him point blank "did you kill them?

On that extraordinary day I missed an opportunity. I regret it to this day.
And I swear to God, I'll never let something like that happen again.

Tally Ho