THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : In Sound Bite Duel, Lange Has Last Word

It was a duel over inches, minutes, procedures and mistakes.

On Wednesday, two veterans of big cases, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. and Los Angeles Police Detective Tom Lange, battled in a confrontation so focused on detail that the big picture in the O.J. Simpson murder trial was occasionally obscured. But it wasn’t forgotten. The stakes were too big: Simpson’s fate, the solution to a horrifying crime, and the reputation of the Los Angeles Police Department.

The competence of the LAPD was at center stage on this day, with Cochran piling so many questions on that Lange had to spend the lunch hour poring over his notes for answers.

When Judge Lance A. Ito offered to begin the lunch recess a bit early to give Lange a break on his third day on the witness stand, Cochran insisted on asking more questions. “That’s OK, Your Honor, his lunch hour is ruined already,” Cochran said.

The attorney is just beginning his long-promised plan of putting the department on trial. He is a tough prosecutor, but the LAPD couldn’t have found a better advocate than Detective Lange.

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Lange and his partner, Philip L. Vannatter, were the main detectives investigating the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.

In the past, Lange has proved to have a good feel for a sound bite. For almost a decade, he chased the killers of a character actor, Brooklyn-born Frank Christi, who played a villain in “The Godfather,” “The Don Is Dead” and other movies.

When he and his then partner, Enoch (Mack) McClain, cracked the case, Lange commented to Times reporter Ann O’Neill, “The irony, of course, is that he was shot to death in much the same fashion as the characters he played.”

Wednesday, under heavy questioning by Cochran, the quotes weren’t as good. “Yes,” “No,” “I may have,” were the staples of the Lange replies as Cochran walked him through the crime scene.

An occasional grimace was his only change of expression. His voice was almost a monotone. He appeared emotionally uninvolved, impersonal about his investigation. His attitude toward Cochran seemed to be: “Here are the facts. I don’t give a damn whether you accept them or not.”

What were hot clues to Cochran were dismissed by Lange.

Why, demanded Cochran, weren’t fingerprints taken from the carton of partially frozen ice cream found in Ms. Simpson’s condo? Cochran says that the unmelted state of the dessert is important in the timing of the crime. “I never considered it evidence at all,” replied Lange.

In painful detail, Cochran asked Lange about tests administered to the victims to determine the time of death, including determining the temperature of their livers.

No, Lange said, he didn’t have plastic bags put on the victims’ hands. Their bodies were covered with plastic bags, which he said were just as good.

The detective was given to numerical precision. The bodies of Ms. Simpson and Goldman were 4 feet, 10 inches apart. The terra cotta tiles in the condo’s front patio were 11 1/2 inches square.

He described his walk through the condo, hearing music playing, observing candles burning in the living room, the master bedroom and the bathroom, nine candles in all.

Cochran hammered him all afternoon. He didn’t have the flamboyance of his colleague, F. Lee Bailey. Rather, his style in cross-examination is as matter-of-fact as it is over lunch.

When he slashed at Lange, it was subtle--but tough. When asking the detective about his drive to the crime scene the morning after the murder, Cochran mentioned that Lange lived in Simi Valley, the predominantly white suburb where the L.A. cops were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King.

Was Ms. Simpson’s body examined to determine if she had been raped? No, said Lange.

That may have been a weak point for Lange, but it was the technicians who really let him down.

Flecks of blood on the condo rear gate remained there until July 3. Only then were they removed for DNA testing. Lange testified he had asked coroner’s technicians to take care of it, but they didn’t do it. The same happened with his request to have blood on Ms. Simpson’s back analyzed.

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Just before court adjourned, Cochran threw his bombshell for the day--his move to capture the lead on the nightly news. He asked Lange whether Ms. Simpson might have had another male visitor the night she was killed.

The defense attorney dropped his chatty manner. He became aggressive, as if he was about to come up with secret files containing evidence of this supposed visit.

He asked again about the police failure to have the coroner examine Ms. Simpson for rape. The implication was clear: A man other than Ron Goldman came to the condo and committed rape and murder, and the incompetent cops never checked out this possibility.

Lange didn’t miss a beat. This man has investigated between 250 and 300 murders and not much surprises him. “In my opinion and experience, sex was the last thing on the mind of this attacker,” he said. “It was overkill, a brutal attack.”

Tom Lange, who had been so stolid, so monosyllabic on the witness stand, won Wednesday’s battle of the sound bites.