Simpson’s Reaction to News of Death Recalled : Trial: Officer who called him says suspect was deeply upset but sought no details. Defense protests questioning.

O.J. Simpson seemed deeply upset when police told him of his ex-wife’s death, but he never asked how, where or when she had been killed, a detective testified Thursday in the murder trial of the former football star.

“I got some bad news,” Detective Ronald Phillips recalled telling Simpson in an early morning phone call on June 13, hours after the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were found in Brentwood. “Your ex-wife, Nicole Simpson, has been killed.”

With Simpson sitting just a few feet away, his face occasionally contorted in disbelief, Phillips then described the defendant’s reaction: “I think the first words out of his mouth were something to the effect of ‘Oh my God, Nicole was killed. Oh my God, she’s dead.’ And then he got very upset on the telephone.”

Phillips said he tried to calm Simpson and told him that the police had his children at the police station, where they had been taken for safekeeping after their mother was murdered. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark then, over defense objections, asked a series of questions intended to undermine Simpson’s contention that the news of his ex-wife’s death surprised and upset him.

“Did Mr. Simpson ask you how she was killed?” Clark asked.

“No,” Phillips answered.

“Did he ask you when she was killed?” the prosecutor continued.

“No,” he responded.

“Did he ask you if you had any idea who had done it?” Clark asked.

“No,” he said again.

“Did he ask you where it had occurred?” she questioned.

“No,” the detective said.

Concluding, Clark asked: “Did he ask you anything about the circumstances of how his ex-wife had been killed?”

“No,” Phillips answered one more time.

As Clark asked those questions, Simpson glowered, his brow deeply furrowed. He leaned over to whisper to Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., his lead trial lawyer, as the string of questions continued.

Simpson’s lawyers protested the line of questioning, and said later that it implied there was only one appropriate way to respond to such devastating news.

“I don’t know,” Simpson attorney Robert L. Shapiro said outside court. “Is there an appropriate way to respond when you find out somebody’s been killed, other than shock?”

Simpson was in a Chicago hotel room when Phillips reached him. Defense lawyers have said that Simpson was so stunned by the news that he broke a glass, reopening a cut on his hand that he allegedly had initially suffered while searching for a cellular phone in his car in preparing to leave on his trip.

While Phillips held center stage in Thursday’s proceedings, outside Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito’s courtroom a defense source raised doubts about a disclosure that rocked the previous day’s session--the announcement that DNA tests of blood from Nicole Simpson’s back gate suggested a possible match with O.J. Simpson.

According to the source, the DNA tests performed so far by authorities are only preliminary. In fact, the source said the test--which has only been done on one of three bloodstains taken from the gate about three weeks after the murders--was interrupted by a fire alarm and thus needs to be done again.

In addition, the source said the preliminary findings, while consistent with O.J. Simpson’s blood, also might have come from one of his and Nicole Simpson’s young children. Prosecutors have said they intend to do more definitive DNA tests on the blood spot, and those tests should make clear who could or could not have been the source of the drop from the gate.

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Inside court, meanwhile, the detective’s testimony served several purposes for the prosecution. For one thing, it allowed government lawyers to suggest that Simpson did not react with the kinds of questions that might be expected from a person who had just lost a loved one. Just as important, however, the detective’s testimony allowed the jury to hear first about a bloody glove found at Simpson’s estate from Phillips rather than Detective Mark Fuhrman.

The glove is a potentially key piece of evidence in the prosecution case. It matches one found at the murder scene, and DNA tests of blood found on it show possible matches to both victims and to Simpson.

But Fuhrman’s role in discovering it has proved complicated for the prosecution, as defense attorneys have claimed that Fuhrman is a racist who could have planted the glove to falsely implicate Simpson in the homicide. Prosecutors say that suggestion is ludicrous and have carefully built their case in preparation for that argument, calling witnesses to testify that Fuhrman would have had little opportunity to pull off such a deception even if he had wanted to.

On Thursday, Phillips described being shown that glove by Fuhrman, and prosecutors displayed a photograph of it, offering it for the first time to the panel.

Phillips identified the glove from a series of photographs displayed for the jury. They were mounted on a blue board beneath the heading, “Glove found at 360 North Rockingham,” and they depicted an area that jurors visited on Sunday when they traveled to the scene of the crimes and to Simpson’s house.

After that tour, prosecutors said jurors had seemed especially interested in the narrow walkway where Fuhrman has said he found the glove.

The prosecution’s decision to introduce the jury to the glove through Phillips means that the panel did not first learn of the item from Fuhrman, who is expected to undergo a searing cross-examination about allegations that he has made racist comments.

Defense attorneys have produced a declaration from one woman, Kathleen Bell, who says Fuhrman made racist remarks to her in the mid-1980s, and have given prosecutors a letter from a man who spoke up for Bell’s credibility. Through his attorney, Fuhrman has denied being a racist, and prosecutors waged an unsuccessful battle to keep the defense from questioning him about his alleged use of a racial epithet.

Defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey already has signaled that he intends to grill Fuhrman ferociously--during one session, Bailey compared Fuhrman to Adolf Hitler.

While cross-examination of Fuhrman promises to be brutal, Phillips himself was cross-examined at length. Cochran questioned the handling of the investigation by focusing on the way officers kept a log and on the steps they could have taken to better establish the time of death. The issue of when the murders occurred is particularly important to the defense case because Simpson met a limousine driver at his house just before 11 p.m.

If the killings took place at 11 p.m., then Simpson would have an alibi. But if they took place earlier--prosecutors say the crimes were committed about 10:15 p.m.--Simpson might have had time to murder the two victims, change his clothes, return home, clean up and still meet the limousine.

But Simpson’s legal team repeatedly has suggested that sloppy police work deprived the defense of a firm time of death that could help the former football star’s case. Gently quizzing Phillips on Thursday, Cochran noted that the detective had not called the coroner’s office until nearly 7 a.m., roughly seven hours after the bodies were discovered.

Even then, Phillips testified, detectives were not ready for the coroner’s office to come for the bodies. By the time coroner’s investigators finally did arrive, it was about 9:10 a.m. on June 13, a delay that Cochran said made it much more difficult to pinpoint the time of death.

Legal experts agreed that the delays probably complicated the process of establishing the time of death and said that even though that would normally not matter greatly, it could prove significant in this case.

“The defense benefits from the lack of scientific evidence and the inability to precisely set the time of death,” said Barry Levin, a criminal defense lawyer and former Los Angeles police officer. “Most of the time the time of death is not important and most of the time the jury won’t care. But here the jury will care.”

Phillips and Cochran spent the entire afternoon lightly sparring, a veteran police officer tangling with an attorney well known for his challenges to the LAPD and its officers. But while the two men come from vastly different backgrounds, both approached the confrontation gingerly--in stark contrast to the bruising style adopted by Bailey in his cross-examination of an LAPD sergeant earlier this week.

Where Bailey was brittle and sarcastic, Cochran was conciliatory and persistent. At one point, Phillips acknowledged making a mistake when he told a coroner’s investigator that the two victims seemed to have been shot or bludgeoned.

“I made a mistake, Mr. Cochran,” Phillips said. “I should not have said that.”

“That’s OK,” Cochran responded. “This is not pick-on-you day.”

And where Bailey’s approach drew a string of objections from the prosecution and even from the judge himself, Cochran delivered his cross-examination mostly uninterrupted. In the process, Cochran elicited some admissions from the officer about mishaps, but Phillips steadfastly defended the overall conduct of the probe.

Among other things, Cochran suggested that police overlooked potentially significant pieces of evidence inside Nicole Simpson’s condominium--a partially melted cup of ice cream, for instance, and a handwritten note found in her bedroom. According to Cochran, that note included a phone number, and police did not follow up on whether that number might provide a clue.

Called Thursday, the number turned out to belong to California Pizza Kitchen, where a spokeswoman said the company had catered a party for Nicole Simpson about three weeks before the murders. That affair was held at O.J. Simpson’s house, the spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman added that Goldman had worked for the company’s Brentwood store for about a year.

Returning again and again to the theme of police incompetence, Cochran attempted to suggest that officers failed to notice a speed-dial machine attached to Nicole Simpson’s phone that would have allowed them to track down O.J. Simpson quickly, rather than having to solicit the help of a security company. That speed-dialer had a button marked “Daddy.”

In any case, Phillips said he never noticed the device and therefore did not think to use it when officers were trying to locate Simpson to notify him of his ex-wife’s death. Instead, they got a number from a home security company and eventually tracked down Simpson in Chicago. Bailey and his confrontational style will return, probably next week, when Fuhrman takes the stand for what is expected to be a central dramatic moment of the trial. Both sides already are gearing up for that confrontation, and much of Cochran’s cross-examination was intended to lay the groundwork for the questioning of Fuhrman.

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Late in the day, for instance, he sought to show that Fuhrman had been left alone by three other detectives who traveled together to the Simpson house after leaving the murder scene. That might help defense attorneys show that Fuhrman had the opportunity to plant a bloody glove on a pathway behind Simpson’s home after allegedly taking it away from the scene of the crimes.

The prosecution vehemently disputes that allegation, and has braced for it in several ways: by presenting testimony of other officers who said they saw only one glove at the crime scene, by showing that Fuhrman was not wearing a heavy coat or other clothing that would permit him to hide a bulky item such as a glove and by noting that defense lawyers have produced no evidence that Fuhrman actually did what the Simpson team has hypothesized.

The continuing assault on Fuhrman has drawn reaction outside the courtroom, as well. City Council members have taken to wearing blue ribbon pins to signify their support for the Police Department, and Police Chief Willie L. Williams assertively defended the actions of Fuhrman and his other officers to reporters on Thursday.

“I am exceedingly satisfied with the level of performance of the police officers, the detectives from West L.A., Detective Fuhrman, the homicide investigators and our laboratory people and others,” Williams said, adding that the defense has attempted to imply that officers were incompetent for failing to perform jobs that were not even their responsibility.

“The defense team has crossed the line,” the chief said. “It was just a lot of showboating at the expense of my people.”

Testimony in the Simpson trial resumes today with Phillips still on the stand, marking his third consecutive day in the national spotlight.

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein and Julie Tamaki contributed to this story.