Ex-Wife’s Father Raises Doubt on Simpson Alibi : Court: He sets phone call earlier than coroner did. Prosecutors also face hurdle--they lack murder weapon.

As prosecutors and defense attorneys prepare for the first public airing of evidence in the O.J. Simpson case, both have potential problems: Prosecutors have yet to discover the whereabouts of the murder weapon, while the father of one of the victims emerged Monday to challenge an element of Simpson’s alibi.

In an interview with The Times, Louis Brown said that on the day of her death, his daughter, Nicole Brown Simpson, had spoken with her mother about 10 p.m., not 11 p.m. as a coroner’s report on the murder scene indicated.

The disclosure is important because Simpson’s attorneys argue that he was home at 11 p.m., waiting for a limousine to take him to the airport. If Nicole Simpson was alive at that time, it would support Simpson’s alibi.

That contention was bolstered when by a coroner’s report stating that Nicole Simpson had spoken to her mother by phone about 11 p.m. Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey was quick Monday to cite the report as evidence of his client’s innocence.

“We learned today from the coroner’s report that Nicole’s mother talked with her at 11 and he lives 10 minutes away,” Bailey said. “So, now you begin to have a problem saying that he was at the scene or could have been. . . . That is the defense: He was elsewhere.”

But Nicole Simpson’s father disputed the coroner’s reported findings Monday.

“Her mother called her to talk about her reading glasses that had been left behind there,” Brown, 70, said. He said he was certain that the call was made about 10 p.m., not the later time specified in the coroner’s report.

Meanwhile, sources said Monday that prosecutors are headed for court with matching gloves found at the scene and at Simpson’s home, with blood samples and potentially significant hair samples and with other evidence. But they have not found the weapon used in the June 12 killings, which could raise some problems for them, if not at this week’s preliminary hearing, then possibly at trial.

Law enforcement sources say police believe that the assailant wielded a knife under 15 inches long, very sharp on at least one side, possibly with serrations. Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti has described it as a “very substantial knife,” big enough to have slit Nicole Simpson’s throat and wielded by a person angry enough to have stabbed Ronald Lyle Goldman nearly two dozen times in his neck, back, head, hands and thigh.

But while they have been able to describe the knife from the wounds that it inflicted, investigators still do not know its whereabouts.

They have searched a vacant lot in Chicago, using metal detectors and dogs in a so-far futile hunt. Last week, they called it off, but Los Angeles Police Detective Bert Luper, who was supervising the search, said he is convinced that the weapon is in Chicago.

“Timing and corroborating evidence” suggest that the weapon is there, Luper said, adding that police concentrated on the lot near Simpson’s Chicago hotel because “it’s one of only a few places where he would have had time to dispose of anything.”

Other sources say police have speculated that the weapon was stuffed into Simpson’s golf bag and checked onto the flight that he took from Los Angeles to Chicago shortly after the slayings. According to those sources, police suspected this because Simpson took his golf clubs with him to Chicago and because they do not believe that he had time to dispose of a weapon before being driven to Los Angeles International Airport on the night of the slayings.

Police are now in possession of the golf bag.

Simpson also was carrying a duffel bag. But sources say he carried it with him on the plane and therefore would have had to pass through an airport metal detector or X-ray machine with it. Police have interviewed airport workers who operate those machines.

The search for the weapon in Chicago may have been compromised by an apparent lapse in ensuring that the area was sealed off. Police began combing the lot near the hotel even before Simpson was arrested, but they suspended that search over the weekend of June 18 and then resumed it on the following Monday. They neglected to close the area in the interim, meaning that any evidence in the lot could have been taken without police knowledge.

Police have other evidence, however, that may make the weapon less important than in some murder cases. According to sources, police have recovered bloodstained clothing, a matching pair of gloves--one from the crime scene and another from outside Simpson’s Brentwood mansion--as well as a series of blood samples from the football Hall of Famer’s Ford Bronco, from the crime scene and from his home.

In a motion filed Monday, Simpson lawyer Robert L. Shapiro said that in the material provided to him by prosecutors, there are references to blood samples, Simpson’s car, a ski cap and “certain gloves found at the premises of the residences of Mr. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson.”

But Shapiro said his experts had not been provided with blood samples to conduct their own tests--which he said were essential to prepare for Thursday’s preliminary hearing. In a sworn declaration, Shapiro’s hired forensic pathologist, Michael Baden, said he was allowed to examine evidence but not to keep or photograph it.

The evidence is needed so that Simpson’s lawyers can mount an “affirmative defense” at the preliminary hearing, meaning that they could call witnesses and present evidence in defense of Simpson. That is rare for a preliminary hearing, in part because it can expose elements of the defense trial strategy.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, asked a judge to order Simpson to provide a hair sample because black curly hairs “of African American origin” were found in the ski cap at the crime scene, according to a motion filed by the lead prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark.

A judge set the defense and prosecution motions for a hearing today. Earlier Monday, another judge ruled that the defense may have access to transcripts of testimony given to the grand jury before that panel’s work was abruptly cut short last week.

At the preliminary hearing Thursday, prosecutors may call witnesses to testify, though they may instead choose to rely heavily on the testimony of investigating police officers.

One possible witness, Jill Shively, told investigators that she saw a person resembling Simpson fleeing from the crime scene. But she accepted money for telling her story to the tabloid television program “Hard Copy,” a move that would undermine her credibility if she is called to testify. In addition, small claims court records in Burbank reveal that she was ordered on June 28, 1993, to pay $2,000 in a court action after she was accused of peddling a script that she did not own.

Brian Patrick Clarke, a television actor who was the plaintiff in the small claims court suit, said Shively had duped him in 1992 after posing as a budding screenwriter and asking him to read her latest script--a heartwarming drama entitled “Remember When,” about a man with a pregnant wife and terminal cancer.

Shively, he said, later told him that she had struck a deal to sell the script to a production company for $250,000 and to cast him as the star. But three weeks before the payment was due, Clarke said, she told him she needed $6,000, and he offered a loan against her script advance.

Clarke said he later discovered that the script was not Shively’s, but was for a film entitled “My Life” that was in pre-production starring Nicole Kidman and Michael Keaton. According to Clarke, she refused to repay his loan, prompting him to sue her.

When Clarke saw her televised interview last week, he called authorities to let them know about his experience with Shively. His doubts about her credibility were shared by her own attorney.

“The minute I saw her on ‘Hard Copy,’ I looked up and said, ‘If that’s the best witness they’ve got against O.J. Simpson, they’re in trouble,” ’ said Cheryl Korchak, a part-time lawyer who represented Shively in the small claims court case.

With the preliminary hearing fast approaching, legal experts said authorities’ inability to find the murder weapon is not likely to be fatal to the prosecution case but does provide Simpson’s lawyers with a weakness to exploit.

“It’s a hole in their case,” said Donald Re, one of Los Angeles’ most respected criminal defense attorneys and the lawyer for Simpson’s close friend Al Cowlings. “Obviously, what they would like to do is put the weapon in the defendant’s hand before the time of the murder. Without the weapon, they can’t do that.”

Laurie Levenson, a Loyola law school professor and former federal prosecutor, said defense attorneys could exploit the absence of a weapon to suggest that the case against Simpson is not airtight.

“The thing about not having the murder weapon is that it raises questions,” she said. “And in a criminal case, all you have to do is raise a reasonable doubt.”

Still, prosecutors have convicted criminal defendants in many cases where no weapon was found. The success of those cases generally depends on producing other compelling evidence, such as scientific samples or eyewitness accounts of a crime.

“The weapon by itself is not the key to this,” Barry Tarlow, a prominent defense attorney in Los Angeles, said of the Simpson case. “I think it’s a sideshow unless they find a weapon and definitively tie it to Simpson.”

In other developments Monday:

* Defense attorney Bailey laid the groundwork for challenging blood tests from samples taken at the scene of the crime as well as from Simpson’s car, residence and belongings. Police are conducting DNA tests, and sources say that preliminary findings continue to point to Simpson. But Bailey said DNA tests are not necessarily conclusive and could be contested in court. Said Bailey: “Some experts would say it shows one thing, some experts could say no, it doesn’t show that, and away we go.”

* Municipal Judge Ray L. Hart heard arguments on NBC’s request to unseal records related to the 1989 spousal battery case against Simpson. The records include two letters from Simpson’s court-appointed psychiatrist, reports attached to the arrest warrant and copies of photographs. NBC’s lawyer asked for release of the material, while attorneys for Simpson, the city and the district attorney opposed the motion, arguing that the contents could taint potential jurors and prevent a fair trial. A court clerk said the judge would rule on the motion later this week.

* Psychiatrist Saul Faerstein visited Simpson for two hours in jail and said afterward: “O.J. wanted me to say to the people that he’s very encouraged by the letters he’s receiving. He feels a lot of love in his heart from all of the people who support him and know him. He’s getting stronger and he looks forward to his day in court.”

* Time magazine, which published a controversial photographic “illustration” of Simpson’s mug shot on its cover last week, ran a long explanation for that decision. “I have looked at thousands of covers over the years and chosen hundreds,” Managing Editor James R. Gaines wrote. “I have never been so wrong about how one would be received.”

Times staff writers Andrea Ford, Shawn Hubler, Greg Krikorian and Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this report.