Tom Lange was the lead homicide detective for the LAPD on the night of June 12, 1994. When a call came in about a double homicide on the west side of Los Angeles, Lange and his partner Phil Vannatter were the detectives the department trusted with its highest-profile cases. What they were about to work would become the most watched criminal trial in American history.
In this first of two parts, Lange walks through the night hour by hour: arriving at Bundy Drive at 4AM, assessing the crime scene, and then making an unusual decision — ordered by brass — to leave Bundy before the scene was fully processed and drive to OJ Simpson's Rockingham estate. At that point, Simpson was not a suspect. He was the estranged husband with two sleeping children. What Lange found when he got there changed that calculus entirely.
The moments Lange describes are precise and unhurried: Fuhrman scaling the estate wall, the unanswered front door, the conversation with Arnelle Simpson, Kato Kaelin's three thumps in the night, and the walk down a dark corridor behind the bungalows that ended with a right-hand leather glove in the middle of the path. A match to the one already bagged at Bundy Drive.
Then comes the detail that still sits uncomfortably even three decades later: a witness at LAX watched OJ Simpson dump items from a small duffel bag — the same one Kato tried to carry and OJ refused to let him touch — into an airport trash container at 11PM. The witness didn't come forward until nine months into the trial. The trash was long gone. The bloody clothes, the shoes, the murder weapon — none of it was ever found. Three pages of investigative evidence that never reached a jury.
Part 2 picks up with the OJ interview, the moment Lange realized he was talking to a sociopath, the Bronco chase, and why a case this strong was never going to be won.
