THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : From Toiling at the Trial to Tracking the Trail of Rumors

I thought I was going to cover the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial Thursday but I ended up tracking the anatomy of a rumor.

When the trial didn’t resume Thursday afternoon after lunch it was clear something was happening. We reporters waited around the 12th-floor press room, gossiping, exchanging jokes, figuring Judge Lance A. Ito and the lawyers were having a detailed discussion about the evidence.

But as the wait approached an hour, the pressroom crew got edgy. After covering enough events, journalists sense when something isn’t right.

Finally, about 2:45 p.m., Ito cleared the courtroom, put the jurors in a waiting room and apparently began conferring with lawyers from both sides.

I hurried down to the ninth floor, where the courtroom reporters were milling around in the hallway, trying to cover the unknown events that were happening inside.

My job was to cover the reporters.

*

I’ve watched many mad scenes since being assigned to the Simpson watch early last summer, but this was among the wildest and offered a perfect little window into the media’s zany side.

One reporter was hiding in the soft drink machine room at the end of the hall, hoping to eavesdrop on the bailiffs as they walked to their nearby office.

But his colleagues saw him and some of them joined him. His clandestine watch turned into yet another case of pack journalism.

A bailiff walked out of the courtroom and the reporters begged him to tell them what was going on. “Watch the news,” he said, offering what he thought was friendly advice.

“We are the news,” the frustrated journalists replied.

Theories were flying. From the uninhibited speculation, you’d never know the reporters were supposed to be well-informed people.

“There are more theories than at a Kennedy assassination seminar,” said Steve Futterman of NBC Radio and Mutual Radio.

I watched several rumors mushroom.

The first rumor was that the hang-up was an argument over evidence and that the prosecution was winning. The support for this speculation came from smiles on some of the prosecutors’ faces as they left the courtroom briefly.

This rumor quickly changed to one that the judge and the lawyers were occupied with a “jury problem.” In the language of the Simpson trial, this means that a juror is on the way out.

The smiles were also cited for support of this rumor. The prosecutors looked happy, the rumormongers said, because a juror was going to be kicked off and replaced with an alternate. The word in the courthouse--unsupported by any evidence--is that a majority of the jury is pro-Simpson while the alternates are pro-prosecution.

I walked from group to group, listening to the speculation. I have been involved in these waits many times, standing on a marble or concrete floor, in front of a locked door, waiting for someone to come out and talk. In fact, I believe my varicose veins got their start when I had to stand for hours in state Capitol hallways earlier in my career.

A great rumor was that when the jury had gone out to lunch at California Pizza Kitchen, one of them had gone AWOL by climbing out of the bathroom window.

No, that wasn’t true. Then as the clock approached 4 p.m. and reportorial legs started to ache, the rumors grew.

No, it wasn’t a simple jury problem. It was a forthcoming book by ex-juror Michael Knox, a tell-all job that would destroy jury security.

No, that wasn’t it at all. It was bigger, much bigger. Yes, the Michael Knox book was involved. It was going to force a mistrial. That would be it. A reporter peeped into the courtroom through a slightly opened door. He said he saw the TV technicians unplugging their equipment.

Confirmation. Mistrial.

*

Luckily--or hopefully--nobody reports any of this stuff. We just bat the rumors back and forth to occupy our minds until we find out what happened.

Finally, around 6 p.m., we do find out what happened: Another juror has been dropped from the panel.

Prosecutors Marcia Clark and Chris Darden stalk out of the courtroom, looking furious and refusing comment. They get into the elevator, but their expressions are so grim that no reporter follows them on.

Instead, we wait for the defense, herded outside the courtroom by security guards. The Simpson team never shows.

We’re left with our rumors about who was dismissed and why.