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Although defense attorneys spent much of last week crowing about the tapes, how they obtained them is another tale altogether. McKinny, who along with her husband Daniel teaches at the North Carolina School of the Arts, insisted to PrimeTime Live last week that she has no idea how the defense found its way to her, and her lawyer concurs. As F. Lee Bailey tells it, he learned of the tapes last month through a call from a lawyer who gave him McKinny's first name and telephone number; defense investigator Patrick McKenna took it from there. McKenna says he dialed and left a message; McKinny called him about 15 minutes later. "I took a deep breath and said to her, 'I work for O.J. Simpson, and I really believe in my heart of hearts that he is innocent,'" McKenna recalls. "'Please don't hang up on me. I understand that you have some tapes, and I am begging you to let me hear them.' She said she would have to call her lawyer. I gave her all my phone numbers, my home, my office, my cellular, my dog's phone number. And her lawyer called me about a half-hour later." McKenna says McKinny did not want to come forward with the tapes, but they continued to negotiate until the defense subpoenaed the tapes.
McKinny has said she and Fuhrman first met by chance at Alice's Restaurant in Los Angeles in 1985. When he learned that she was working on a screenplay about the force, he offered his help as a technical adviser who would receive payment only if the script was bought. Over the course of the next nine years, McKinny told PrimeTime Live, she would send him questions and they would then get together to discuss them. "She is the kind of person who feels she needs to live her stories," says someone who was close to McKinny." She just would tape-record everything. She tape-recorded me." As research for a project on homelessness, another acquaintance says, McKinny once spent a month living out of cardboard boxes on the streets of Santa Monica, California.
Although McKinny appeared to be fighting hard to keep the tapes out of the Simpson trial, losing that battle earlier this month in the North Carolina courts, her motives, like those of so many people connected to this case, may not be entirely unselfish. She told PrimeTime Live that the tapes are not for sale, yet Michael Viner, owner of Dove Audio Inc., which has published a number of books about the Simpson case, says he was approached about buying them, but the price was prohibitive. Sources at the television show EXTRA, the National Enquirer and the tabloid Globe also say the tapes were offered to them, with the bidding to begin at $250,000-more than they were willing to pay. McKinny will not comment, but a friend, her boss Sam Grogg, dean of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, cannot believe she has any hidden agenda, financial or otherwise. "Laura is a person who looks for the truth," he says. "For anybody to think she's trying to leverage this, they couldn't be more wrong." Still, even Grogg says, "I'm sure she's keeping a journal."