Prosecutors Zero In on Time of Killings : Simpson hearing: Testimony centers on events leading to discovery of the bodies. Also, a mysterious envelope of possible evidence is turned over to the court.

Witnesses took the stand in the O.J. Simpson murder case Friday to testify in richly textured detail about the wanderings and barking of a dog whose movements may offer clues to the exact time that Simpson’s ex-wife and a friend of hers were knifed to death in Brentwood.

Friday’s hearing was marked by mystery and surprise: The judge revealed that Simpson’s lawyer, Robert L. Shapiro, had met behind closed doors with a specially appointed jurist to turn over possible evidence in the case. The bulky Manila envelope was displayed in court, but Shapiro objected to it being opened, so it remained tantalizingly within reach but inaccessible even to prosecutors.

Nevertheless, prosecutors continued to build their case that Simpson should be forced to stand trial for the double homicide, and for the first time Friday, they displayed photographs of Nicole Brown Simpson’s bloody corpse. Her body, along with that of Ronald Lyle Goldman, was discovered outside her condominium just after 12 a.m. June 13.

As the photographs were displayed, Simpson’s chest heaved and his mouth dropped. Shapiro handed him a cup of water, and Simpson gulped it down.

Before displaying the photographs, lead prosecutor Marcia Clark leaned over the bar separating the public from the lawyers and investigators in the case and warned members of Nicole Simpson’s family to shield their eyes. They did, her mother and one sister gripping hands tightly as the photographs were displayed and then quickly put away again.

Among the developments Friday:

* As prosecutors attempted to show that the murders were committed before 11 p.m. June 12, a key time in Simpson’s alibi, one witness described hearing a dog’s bark in the Brentwood neighborhood about 10:15 p.m., a “plaintive wail” that he noticed but did not investigate. Another neighbor told of coming upon a dog near Nicole Simpson’s home and finding it agitated and with bloodstained paws. That encounter, the witness said, occurred shortly before 11 p.m.

* While testimony filled in gaps in the transfixing whodunit, Shapiro’s carefully secreted package of evidence, which he delivered to a judge early Friday, added new spice to the saga. The package remains sealed in a bulky envelope, fueling speculation that a long-sought knife may have turned up.

* Shapiro also gave prosecutors audiotapes of interviews with two potentially significant witnesses in the case: the limousine driver who took Simpson to the airport soon after the double homicide in Brentwood and Brian (Kato) Kaelin, an actor and writer who was staying in the guest house of Simpson’s estate. Shapiro did not say why he gave his adversaries those interviews. After receiving them but not getting a chance to listen to them, Clark said she could not “in good conscience” call her next witnesses until she had the chance to review the tapes. Clark also questioned why she was only receiving the tapes Friday, when at least one of the interviews was conducted June 14, one day after the bodies were discovered. Simpson was not arrested until June 17.

* Municipal Judge Ray L. Hart ordered that a court-appointed psychiatrist’s report and copies of photographs of Nicole Simpson taken in connection with O.J. Simpson’s 1989 arrest for spousal abuse should remain sealed at least until the hearing ends. NBC News had petitioned for the documents, but the defense, the prosecution and lawyers for the city had objected.

* Police continued their hunt for the missing murder weapon, mapping out storm drains across Brentwood and laboriously combing through the ritzy neighborhoods where Nicole Simpson and her ex-husband lived just two miles apart. The search and other issues in the case have consumed much of the Los Angeles Police Department’s robbery-homicide division, but officers show no signs of cutting back.

The fervid investigation goes on even as lawyers are in court arguing about whether Simpson should be bound over for trial in the double murder, a charge that could send him to the gas chamber if he is convicted. The simultaneous efforts of detectives, private investigators, prosecutors and defense attorneys have lent an additional Hollywood quality to the proceedings, with packages of evidence arriving in court even as witnesses are on the stand, slowly retelling the events of the fatal evening.

Attacking the Alibi

Friday, the court action featured a procession of witnesses who filled in details of the final night in the lives of Nicole Simpson and Goldman. Their testimony was intended to establish certain times in order to narrow the window of time in which the killings could have taken place--a key element either in bolstering or debunking the superstar athlete’s alibi during the time that the murders took place.

Simpson’s lawyers have said the football great was at home at 11 p.m. waiting for an airport limousine. They have cited a coroner’s report suggesting that Nicole Simpson was still alive about that time, maintaining that it shows Simpson could not have committed the crime. But other witnesses in the case have suggested that the killings could have taken place somewhat earlier and that Nicole Simpson was last heard from closer to 10 p.m. than 11 p.m.

Goldman’s colleagues from the Brentwood restaurant Mezzaluna said he left there about 9:50 p.m. carrying a white envelope with a pair of eyeglasses that Nicole Simpson’s mother had lost outside the restaurant.

Karen Crawford, a manager at Mezzaluna, said she put the glasses in the white envelope, wrote “Nicole Simpson, prescription glasses” on the outside, sealed it and later gave it to Goldman. That envelope--unopened, the glasses still inside--turned up at the murder scene, and Clark displayed a photograph of it Friday sitting in a pool of dried blood.

Simpson’s lawyers questioned Crawford only briefly, but they carefully picked apart statements by other witnesses, calling attention to inconsistencies between their testimony and what police officers recorded in their reports of interviews with the same people.

When Simpson attorney Gerald Uelmen asked bartender Stewart Tanner about confusion over some details in his account, Tanner conceded that he could not remember precisely what he had told police during an interview the day he and others learned of the killings. But Tanner, under questioning from Clark, defended his memory lapse as minor and understandable.

“Two people that you knew are dead,” he said. “What do you remember from that? You just remember that they are dead that day.”

A Dog Wailing in the Night

The restaurant employees established the last known sightings of Goldman, a colleague they had known for four months before he was killed by a knife-wielding assailant. Although their accounts make clear that the killings could not have taken place before about 10 p.m., both sides are more interested in nailing down the latest possible time of death because that will establish whether Simpson could have had time to carry out the crime.

To do that, prosecutors called several of Nicole Simpson’s neighbors, whose testimony turned largely on the howlings and wanderings of a dog--an Akita owned by Nicole Simpson that curiously bears the same name as a witness in the case, Kato.

One witness described the “plaintive wail” of the dog near Nicole Simpson’s home about 10:15 p.m., shortly after he had tuned in the 10 o’clock news.

“Fifteen to 20 minutes into it, I heard a dog barking,” said neighbor Pablo Fenjves, describing it as “persistent barking that wouldn’t stop.”

Fenjves was followed to the stand by the day’s most compelling witness, a neighbor of Nicole Simpson who delivered a detailed, almost minute-by-minute account of an evening walk through the community with his dog and of his encounter with the bloody, agitated white Akita in the street near her residence.

That witness, Steven Schwab, said he discovered the dog just before 11 p.m.

“As I approached the corner of Dorothy and Bundy, I saw that there was a dog at the corner,” he said. “It was a large Akita, very white. As I approached further, I saw that it wasn’t with anyone. There was no one walking the dog. The dog was just there. It was unusual for a dog to just be wandering the neighborhood by itself, and the dog seemed agitated. It was barking at the house on the corner.”

That property was where Nicole Simpson lived and where the murders occurred.

Schwab said he looked at the white dog and noticed it had blood on all four paws. He estimated the time at 10:55 p.m.

Schwab said he could remember that and other key times because he had been watching the “Dick Van Dyke Show” on TV before leaving on a half-hour walk. That show ended at 10:30 p.m., and Schwab said he then headed out for his evening walk, returning in time to catch the opening minutes of the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” at 11 p.m.

“I watch a lot of TV,” Schwab said at one point, smiling gently and explaining his meticulous memories of various times.

As with other witnesses, Schwab’s recollections of precise times were challenged by Simpson attorneys, in particular because of a police report showing that Schwab told detectives initially that he believed he might have come upon the dog after 11 p.m. But Schwab insisted that his recollection in court was more precise, partly because he was initially interviewed by detectives at 5 a.m. and was rattled when they told him the dog might figure in a double homicide.

“It was 5 a.m. in the morning, and I was very confused at that point as to what time all of this occurred,” he said. “I was trying to remember.”

Peter Arenella, a UCLA law professor who is monitoring the hearing, said Schwab’s ability to link the times to television programs strongly bolsters his testimony, making him far more credible than a witness who merely checked his watch periodically. Combined with other testimony on the barking dog, Arenella said he believed prosecutors did “an effective job at setting the time of the murders closer to 10 p.m. than 11.”

After Schwab returned home with the dog, his neighbors took care of it, he said, thinking that they would let it sleep inside and then take it to animal control authorities in the morning. But the dog, according to witness Sukru Boztepe, remained unsettled, sniffing and scratching at doors until he and his wife got up to take it for a walk.

Straining at his leash, the dog then pulled them back to Nicole Simpson’s residence, Boztepe testified. There, he and his wife became the first to spot the body of Nicole Simpson, curled at the foot of her condominium’s front gate, her throat slashed and her body splattered with blood.

“It was a woman laying down horizontally all the way to the path, face turned to me on the right side,” he said. “There was a lot of blood.”

Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen, each identified the photographs of the slain woman. Her eyes grew wide and she swallowed hard when it was presented to her, but she said she could not describe the scene in detail.

“I saw it for a half-second,” she said. “And I never looked back again.”

According to an O.J. Simpson friend, the dog, which could be seen in the driveway of the athlete-turned-broadcaster’s home just before he surrendered, is now living with Simpson’s son, Jason.

Battle of the Lawyers

Friday’s testimony brought to 10 the number of witnesses who have taken the stand as prosecutors attempt to establish that there is enough evidence for Simpson to stand trial in the double murder. Prosecutors and defense attorneys have sparred at every turn--on Friday, Shapiro unsuccessfully sought to exclude a witness’s testimony because of comments by Clark reported in The Times.

And when court reconvenes Tuesday after the Fourth of July holiday, the sparks are expected to continue flying as several pressing issues are before the judge that could dramatically shape the progress of the case.

Defense attorneys have sought to suppress evidence seized from Simpson’s home during a search hours after the murders. If successful, that motion would force prosecutors to proceed without such items as a bloody glove that matches one found at the crime scene, and bloodstains recovered from Simpson’s car, driveway, bedroom and bathroom.

Once that issue is resolved, prosecutors expect to put the limousine driver and Kaelin on the stand. Neither has been heard from in court, and they could hold important clues to nailing down Simpson’s comings and goings on the night of the murder.

Complicating their possible testimony are the tapes that Shapiro turned over to prosecutors Friday. That move raised several provocative questions: Why were investigators working for Simpson conducting tape-recorded interviews with witnesses even before he was arrested? And why did Shapiro turn them over to prosecutors when he was not apparently under any obligation to do so?

Shapiro did not supply the answers to those questions Friday, but may when court reconvenes at 9 a.m. Tuesday. The hearing is expected to continue all week.

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