Simpson Prosecution Readies for Hearing : Courts: High-level official in district attorney’s office is added to the case. Grand jurors tell of proceedings.

With less than a week to prepare, district attorney’s officials hunkered down Saturday to sift through evidence and set their strategies for the preliminary hearing that suddenly has become necessary as they proceed with their prosecution of O.J. Simpson on charges that he murdered his ex-wife and her friend.

The district attorney’s office also disclosed a change in the makeup of the prosecution team, with the naming of a high-level official, Central Operations Division Director William Hodgman, to serve as co-counsel with Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark.

An office spokeswoman said that Deputy Dist. Atty. David Conn, who has appeared at court hearings with Clark, will be returning full time to the Menendez brothers murder case. Conn, head of the district attorney’s special trials unit, serves as co-counsel in the Menendez case, in which a court motion is scheduled Monday.

Conn was the one approached by police before the controversial release last week of 911 tapes of domestic violence reports against Simpson.

His departure was not unexpected; district attorney’s spokeswoman Suzanne Childs had said Monday that Conn would leave the case at some point. Childs emphasized that his leaving the prosecution lineup was not linked to the tapes flap.

“Absolutely not,” Childs said. “It’s almost a ludicrous question as far as I’m concerned.

“David, as Marcia’s supervisor, was assisting her. He was helping her prepare the case, but never with the intent he’d always be on it.”

Hodgman, who joined the district attorney’s office in 1978, has tried more than 40 murder cases and successfully prosecuted Charles H. Keating Jr., who became a national symbol of greed and excess in the thrift industry, on securities fraud charges.

The Simpson case was forced to a preliminary hearing after a judge Friday yanked it from the county’s grand jury, saying he was fearful some of its members had been tainted by the unrelenting news coverage of the murders.

Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, dressed in jeans and a casual pink shirt with rolled-up sleeves, arrived at the Criminal Courthouse on Saturday morning to help prepare for the hearing, scheduled for Thursday.

“We’ll be ready,” said the county’s chief prosecutor, adding that his deputies were also at work at another undisclosed location.

Although prosecutors, under the speedy trial initiative, could conceivably offer a single witness, Garcetti suggested that they will go well beyond that, putting on a “skeleton” version of the full case that will be aired at trial.

One grand juror, in an interview with The Times on Saturday, spoke of being upset that the panel had not been allowed to decide whether to indict the retired football superstar.

“I was really disappointed,” said the juror, whose mind had not yet been made up on how to vote.

The juror said the grand jury had heard “almost all” of the witnesses to be presented by the district attorney, and that the group was poised to hear the prosecutor’s summation and legal advice before proceeding to deliberations.

On the first day the grand jury convened in the Simpson case, the juror said, the county coroner’s office laid out pictures of the Brentwood crime scene where Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were found stabbed to death nearly two weeks ago.

“It was shocking,” the juror said. “I couldn’t even eat dinner that night. It’s not because it was O.J. Simpson. It was just that the case was so bad. This crime was such a bloody mess.”

The juror added that the public seems to be treating the victims in a surreal manner, as if they were characters in a movie who will come back to life after the lights come up.

“The victim is not O.J.,” said the juror, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “O.J. is not dead. There are two people dead. This is the problem with the emphasis of the newspapers. There are two people who died in a very gory way.”

A second grand juror, also speaking anonymously, described the crime scene as “something out of antiquity.”

“There was blood everywhere,” the second juror said. “In today’s age, you don’t expect people to behave in such a violent way. Before, in antiquity, there was butchery. This was butchery. Absolute butchery.”

The second juror added that “the grand jury could have done the job,” but spoke of nonetheless supporting the decision by the supervising judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, Cecil J. Mills, to recuse the panel.

“Personally, I’m relieved that this case has become a public matter,” the juror said. “This should be a public matter. It’s such a major issue.”

The juror acknowledged that panel members had received outside information about the case, including hearing the 911 tapes.

“I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t watch the news,” the juror said. “I do know about the wild ride (referring to the low-speed police pursuit of Simpson’s vehicle after he failed to turn himself in to authorities June 17). I don’t think any grand juror did not hear about that.”

The 911 tapes, the juror said, “were just one component of the case.”

Elsewhere Saturday, Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams defended his department’s release of the chilling tapes.

“We consulted the city attorney. We consulted the district attorney’s staff, and we were advised (to comply),” Williams told reporters after an appearance at a South-Central Los Angeles forum on public safety and community-based policing. “We did the right thing at the direction of senior officials in the city attorney’s office.”

Garcetti has expressed surprise over the release of the tapes and said that LAPD officials did not mention the explosive audiotapes when informing Conn last week that they planned to release reports from past incidents involving O.J. and Nicole Simpson. Garcetti said Conn referred the police to the city attorney for advice.

Sources close to City Atty. James Hahn’s department said the office thought the LAPD had spoken with Garcetti’s staff and determined that the tapes were not part of the murder investigation, and could thus be released.

Williams said the LAPD has been deluged with requests from local and national media outlets for tapes and other materials.

“Los Angeles police received 50 to 100 requests for tapes dating back to the ‘70s,” he said. “Some people said, ‘Give us anything and everything related to O.J. Simpson.’ ”

Once released by the LAPD, the tapes were broadcast repeatedly in Los Angeles and nationwide.

The first grand juror who spoke to The Times on Saturday said it was virtually impossible for anyone with a TV set not to hear the tapes. But the juror added that they would not have played a role in the jury’s decision-making process.

“I didn’t get the feeling that anyone was going to be thinking about the 911 tapes when we deliberated,” said the juror, who heard them after a ballgame on TV was interrupted for a special news broadcast. “It didn’t matter. It didn’t influence me.”

The juror stressed that the grand jury members are a highly educated lot--including engineers, teachers and four Ph.Ds, who could have set aside the publicity in their deliberations.

If Simpson had been indicted by the grand jury, there would have been no need for the preliminary hearing, a forum in which prosecutors must bare evidence and the defense can cross-examine witnesses.

The defense’s demand for an immediate preliminary hearing is just one of the many unusual aspects of the extraordinary legal case. “Normally, the defense doesn’t want a preliminary hearing so quickly because they want to develop questions for cross-examination,” said Loyola Law School Prof. Stanley Goldman.

“All predictions are given with a grain of salt because I’ve never seen a case take so many twists and turns so quickly and there’s no reason to believe it’s going to stop here,” said Goldman, a criminal law expert.

Preliminary hearings in murder cases can run anywhere from a single afternoon to many months. The all-time length record--18 months--was set in the McMartin Pre-School case.

In the Simpson case, some legal experts predicted that the hearing may last only a week.

“Prosecutors will just put on a thin enough coating to get by the probable cause hurdle,” said Southwestern University School of Law Prof. Robert Pugsley. “They want to keep a lot of cards up their sleeve.”

Although it may have been easier to win an indictment, experts say the upcoming hearing before Municipal Judge Patti Jo McKay--in which certain hearsay testimony can be admitted that could not be used at trial--may not prove a picnic for Simpson either.

The prosecution “can spend a couple weeks dirtying up O.J. with their witnesses,” Goldman said, “and probably not suffer too much of a hit because it’s unlikely the defense will be calling any witnesses.”

In recent days, Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro has been assisted by a growing covey of star-studded co-counsels and investigators, including Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz, colorful veteran trial lawyer F. Lee Bailey and Santa Clara University Law School Dean Gerald Uelmen.

Shapiro did not return calls for comment Saturday. But a deputy at Men’s Central Jail, who asked to remain anonymous, said that Simpson apparently spent his first peaceful night in custody since being incarcerated a week previously.

“He wasn’t up and down and thrashing around,” said the deputy, who asked to remain anonymous.

Meanwhile, Garcetti said his prosecution team will have more than enough time to prepare by Thursday.

Times staff writers Andrea Ford, Dwayne Bray and William J. Eaton contributed to this story.