The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson Read Online Free PDF Page A

quickly soured on the
Enquirer
and left after about a year. He has since made his living writing screenplays.
    Fenjves’s progress in the business was slow but steady. In 1986, he moved from the East Coast to an apartment in Santa Monica. There he began a long and fairly prosperous interlude in a sort of shadow Hollywood; he sold script after script, and they all languished unproduced, yet still he sold more scripts. Finally, as the 1990s began, his luck changed. The turning point came, at least in part, courtesy of the surefire topic of interracial romance. HBO Showcase bought (and made)
The Affair
, the story of a black soldier who falls in love with a white woman during World War II. Fenjves bought a BMW and a Mercedes and decided to move to Brentwood. Since Pablo Fenjves would spend “only” about half a million dollars on a home, he was pretty much limited to south of Sunset.
    Sometime after 10:00 on the night of June 12, Pablo and Jai began to hear the sound of a dog barking. The actual time, Pablo later testified, was right around 10:15. A few moments later, Pablo walked downstairs to his study to fiddle with a script called
The Last Bachelor
, a romantic comedy about an amorous baseball player. Shortly before 11:00, he walked back up to the bedroom,where his wife had been watching
Dynasty: The Reunion
. The credits on the show were rolling, and the barking had still not stopped. Fenjves remembered the sound because it was not the ordinary chatter of a neighborhood dog.
    The sound of the dog, Fenjves later testified, was like “a plaintive wail—sounded like a, you know, very unhappy animal.” Seven months before the murders, Fenjves had written a script called
Frame-Up
, a police drama that became a television movie on the USA Network. In the first scene of the screenplay, Fenjves wrote, “We hear the plaintive wail of a police siren.” In the best Hollywood tradition, Fenjves plagiarized, if only from himself, a line that had brought him a brief moment of renown.

    Pablo Fenjves was not Nicole’s only neighbor who heard her grief-stricken Akita in the moments after 10:15. The “dog witnesses,” as they came to be known, reflected the peculiar nature of the neighborhood. Almost none of the residents, for example, had what most Americans would describe as a job—that is, a place of employment where one had to appear five days a week, eight hours a day. Rather, Nicole’s neighbors made their living as freelancers, mostly in the entertainment business—screenwriters, designers, and the like—and all were prowling for the big score that would catapult them north of Sunset. Many owned dogs, and in the atomized, car-oriented culture of Los Angeles, they tended to know only those neighbors who likewise walked their dogs. Finally, virtually every person in and around 875 South Bundy on the night of June 12 answered one question the same way: What were they doing at shortly after 10:00 P.M. ? Watching television.
    Steven Schwab watched reruns of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
seven nights a week. Like Fenjves, Schwab was a screenwriter. He had enjoyed less success in the business than Fenjves, however, and so lived more modestly, in an apartment on Montana Avenue, about three blocks from Nicole. The burly and bearded Schwab spoke in an almost eerie monotone, which seemed to match the extreme regularity of his habits. As he later testified, “During the week I would walk my dog between 11:00 and 11:30 so that when I got home I was able to watch
The Dick Van Dyke Show
on TV. Onthe weekends I walked the dog between 10:30 and 11:00 because
The Dick Van Dyke Show
ends at 10:30 on the weekend.” As June 12, 1994, was a Sunday, he set out with his dog, Sherry, shortly after his favorite program ended, at 10:30 P.M.
    Schwab walked his regular route around the neighborhood, a circuit he followed as religiously as he did his television schedule. The route, he said, “is one that I designed to take about a half hour to get me