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ROSS CUTLERY IS AN ODDITY in downtown Los Angeles. Housed in the 102-year-old Bradbury building, its tile floors and ceiling fans are a genteel exception to the tawdry stretch of cut-rate jewelry and electronics shops that line Broadway. The inventory includes everything from clocks to barber's razors to handcuffs. But on May 3. as co-owner Allen Wattenberg remembers it, a film crew was shooting on the street outside when O.J. Simpson, a member of the cast, walked in and spotted what he wanted in a glass case along the north side of the store. "He came in looking at an item," Wattenberg testified in a Los Angeles courtroom last week. It was a 15-inch, lock-blade Stiletto, with a brass hilt and a handle fashioned from the antlers of a stag. Simpson said he had no money with him, but salesman Jose Camacho says he returned about an hour later. The total. with tax, was $81.17. Before paying with a $100 bill, Camacho recalled under oath, Simpson had one request: "He wanted it sharpened."
By the way, O.J. Simpson wasn't on trial last week. The riveting courtroom scenes were actually nothing more than a legal scrimmage-a preliminary hearing designed to convince a judge that enough evidence exists to try Simpson for the June 12 stabbing deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. It usually doesn't take much to meet the threshold. But prosecutors from the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office, eager to establish their dominance over Simpson's "Dream Team" of defense lawyers (page 26), wasted no time in going after the defendant, attempting to place a murder weapon in his hand and strongly suggesting that he acted with premeditation.
By the end of the hearing's second day, a considerable body of physical evidence-for two weeks the stuff of fragmentary press leaks and wild rumors-began to emerge (page 23). It included a bloodstained Ford Bronco parked outside the Simpson mansion and a trail of blood leading to his front door; 34 hairs from a knit cap recovered at the murder scene, some with Negroid characteristics, others from the head of a bleached blonde like Nicole Simpson, and a brown leather glove found at Simpson's home, also with three strands of blond hair. As both sides debated the details, audiences also received a crash course in the rudiments of DNA testing (page 24).
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Lead prosecutor Marcia Clark never lost an opportunity to retail her material with theatrical flair. As she introduced-beyond the view of television cameras-a photograph of a slashed and battered Nicole Simpson, curled in a fetal position on the steps of her town house, she approached the spectator section and motioned for members of the Brown and Goldman families to look down. "I'm going to show a picture," she said, quietly mouthing the words. Simpson, at the defense table, swallowed heavily and clenched his jaw muscles.
But it was a far-from-triumphant opening for the prosecution. This week they'll face a motion from defense attorneys arguing that much of their evidence was gathered illegally by police. The dramatic testimony from Wattenberg and Camacho is also tainted by admissions that they sold their stories to the National Enquirer. And for all the apparent strength of the state's case, police have yet to produce the knife described by Wattenberg and Camacho.
That issue remained a mystery at the weekend. Friday's testimony was interrupted when Cecil Mills, supervising judge of the criminal division of Los Angeles County Superior Court, entered to confer with Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell. Ten minutes later she returned to the bench brandishing a lumpy manila envelope and announced that it contained evidence produced by the defense. Later, when Kennedy-Powell indicated she wanted to open the package, Shapiro objected and asked that it remain sealed. "It is evidence that is in possession of the defense and we have no obligation to disclose it," Shapiro said. The judge relented, and said it would remain sealed until both sides could submit briefs on the matter.
Two well-placed sources told NEWSWEEK that the envelope contained a knife. Shapiro refused to discuss its contents. "Anything we do relative to that envelope will be done in a confidential communication with the court at the appropriate time," he said. If it is the knife in question, it raises a couple of potentially explosive possibilities. Although conversations between a defense attorney and a client are confidential, any physical evidence a lawyer acquires must by law be turned over to the court. But a defense attorney is prohibited from seeking out evidence damaging to a client's case, such as a potential murder weapon. If Shapiro had sought out the knife, his only reason for doing so would have been that it bolstered-or at least didn't harm-Simpson's defense. Should the envelope contain the 15-inch Stiletto, clean of forensic evidence, it would prove a major embarrassment to the prosecution and the police, who didn't find it in their own extensive searches.
The state faces other potential trouble this week. The defense will attempt to suppress the trove of physical evidence it says police gathered illegally at Simpson's Brentwood mansion last month. Attorneys contend that Los Angeles detectives arrived without a search warrant at Simpson's front gate around 5 a.m. on June 13, approximately five hours after the bodies of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found outside her town house a few minutes away. Authorities say they came to inform Simpson of his ex-wife's death and the whereabouts of their children. But when police received no response by intercom or telephone, one investigator "climbed over a five-foot wall... opened the gate and admitted the remaining detectives," according to the defense motion, filed on the eve of last week's hearing. They quickly found-and improperly ejected, the defense charges-Arnelle Simpson, 25, a daughter by his first marriage, who was staying with a guest in quarters near the pool.
Shapiro will try to suppress all 34 items on a police affidavit describing evidence found at the scene. Detectives say they saw what appeared to be blood on the driver's-side door handle of Simpson's Ford Bronco, parked on the curb outside the house (a finding later confirmed by tests). A string of blood droplets led from the truck to Simpson's front door. There were other dark red stains believed to be blood-both inside the truck and in the foyer and master bathroom of the house. A bloodstained brown leather glove with blond hairs was found on the south side of the grounds. It matched one found at Goldman's feet.
Defense attorneys charge that in order to obtain the search warrant-after nearly six hours on the premises-investigators acted in bad faith by suggesting that Simpson had fled. Police told the judge who signed the warrant that Simpson left "on an unexpected flight to Chicago during the early morning hours of June 13." The same detectives, however, spoke to him several hours earlier in a call arranged by daughter Arnelle and knew that Simpson had promised to return on the next available flight. They also argue that bloodstains on the Bronco are inadmissible because the warrant covers only evidence found inside the mansion and its grounds. "The blood on the Bronco we believe will be demonstrated to be merely a drop," Shapiro told NEWSWEEK in an interview after adjournment last Friday. "Second of all, there is no way to determine in the field whether it is human blood or not... So the fact that you had a car outside with one speck of some type of blood from an unknown source is not probable cause to avoid a search warrant."
The stakes are enormous. Should Shapiro win, he'll knock out 34 pieces of evidence at the core of the state's case. While it will be up to Judge Kennedy-Powell to rule, recent case law is in the prosecution's favor. "The trend in California and in the U.S. Supreme Court is increasingly toward broad latitude for law enforcement," says Los Angeles lawyer James Bell, author of a book on search-and-seizure law. Kennedy-Powell will have to decide whether the search of Simpson's mansion falls under one of several well-established exceptions to the Fourth Amendment requirement for a warrant. One allows police to enter private property if they believe "public safety" is at risk. With Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman dead, and blood on the outside of Simpson's Bronco, the state could well argue that the police were concerned for the safety of whoever might have been inside.
Prosecutors also face the difficulty of evidence tainted by tabloid cash. After a dramatic description of Simpson's alleged purchase at Ross Cutlery, Wattenberg admitted under prosecution questioning that his brother and Camacho talked to the National Enquirer for a $12,500 fee-one in which he would also share. A look of disgust passed among members of the Brown family, seated in the second row of the small courtroom. Camacho had already told his story to the grand jury when he was besieged by reporters pressuring him to talk. Why did he relent? He says he saw others being paid for pieces of information when he had the whole story. "That's when I said, 'I'm taking all this pressure for nothing, so I'm going to get something for it'." Camacho added that a representative of the D.A.'s office told him after his testimony that it was permissible to talk to reporters, an assertion officials deny.
Experts were divided on whether the money fatally flawed their story. "There's no way you will see that guy [Camacho] in trial, " says one former federal prosecutor. Harland Braun, a Los Angeles defense attorney, says it was still an effective opening maneuver by the state. "They put a knife in his hand, and they pointed toward premeditation. And they started with something the public didn't know anything about. So they grabbed attention," he said.
At first, television viewers hoping for a spellbinding courtroom opera had to endure several hours of procedural throat-clearing. The two sides clashed over the size of a hair sample that Simpson would surrender to the state for forensic tests. "Miss Clark, how much hair do the people need?" Judge Kennedy-Powell asked the lead prosecutor. The state wanted 100 hairs; Shapiro was willing to yield one. Kennedy-Powell ordered Simpson to provide between 40 and 100 strands. Shapiro, who wants to perform independent tests on blood and fiber evidence in the state's possession, also wrangled with a bureaucrat from the police criminal lab who seemed incapable of describing what materials would be available to the defense after the state finished its work.
By Thursday afternoon, as Wattenberg and Camacho took the stand, the proceedings grew far more compelling. On Friday the state produced neighbors of Nicole Brown, who may have punched a big hole in Simpson's alibi: that he could not possibly have committed the double homicide because he claims he was home at 11 p.m. on June 12, preparing for an 11:45 flight to Chicago. A coroner's report-since refuted by Nicole Brown's family-bolsters Simpson's claim, stating that his ex-wife spoke to her mother by phone around 11 on the evening of her death.
But neighbors raised the possibility that Simpson could have had sufficient time to kill. Pablo Fenjves, who lives in a house on the alley behind Nicole Simpson's town house, said it was about 10:15 or 10:20 p.m. on June 12 when he heard a dog's "plaintive wail," which he characterized as "a pretty persistent barking that wouldn't stop." Steven Schwab, who lives a few hundred yards away from the crime scene, says he left his house at 10:35 to take his own dog for a walk. The time is vivid in his memory-he departed after an episode of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" that had just ended on the cable channel Nick at Nite. As he approached the corner of Dorothy Street and Bundy Drive, he encountered a white Akita, which was barking incessantly. He also noticed blood on its paws. Schwab tried to walk the dog back toward Simpson's town house, but it resisted.
He later took it to the apartment of two other neighbors, Shukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen. Boztepe testified that they planned to keep the dog overnight and contact animal-control officers in the morning. But he said the dog was so agitated that they decided to take it for a walk. It was almost midnight. A few minutes later, he said, the dog led them to the crumpled bodies of Simpson and Goldman, lying in pools of blood. "I just turned around," Boztepe said, "and never looked at it again."
Outside the courtroom last week, the swarms of press and an armada of satellite trucks created a carnival midway atmosphere. Protesters, panhandlers and special pleaders from groups like the Jewish Defense League all flocked to the scene trying to grab some press attention. Fortunately, the spectacle remained at the margins. After weeks of shrill rumor and speculation, the Simpson case was where it should be-in the courts.
Defense attorney Robert Shapiro moved to suppress 34 pieces of evidence that police seized from 0. J. Simpson's home. Shapiro charged detectives with violating the defendant's constitutional rights because they had obtained items without a search warrant.
(believed to be blood) found in 12 locations in and on Simpson's white Ford Bronco.
(believed to be blood) taken from the street, driveway, chainlink fence, foyer and bathroom floor of Simpson's house.
recovered from the grass.
recovered from the street.
right hand, brown leather with red stains, recovered from the walkway.
recovered from the ground, south side of the chain link fence.
navy blue, recovered from the master bedroom.
recovered from trash can in the bathroom south of the foyer.
recovered from the bench outside the front door.
labeled "O.J. Simpson 6-13-94" received by police at 5:20 p.m.
Reebok, white.
removed from glove.
brown with red stains, recovered from the driver's-side floor of the Bronco.
with red stain resembling a partial shoe print, recovered from the driver's side.
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