Witness Tells Simpson Jury of Hearing Dog

After an 11-day hiatus, the jury in the trial of O.J. Simpson returned Monday to the courtroom to hear another witness testify about a dog barking persistently and alarmingly about 10:20 p.m. on the night of the two murders, roughly the time that prosecutors believe the crimes were committed.

“It was very persistent,” Mark Storfer, a neighbor of Nicole Brown Simpson, said of the barking. “The dog continued to bark and stopped just long enough to take a breath and bark some more.”

“Had you ever heard barking like that coming from that area?” Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark asked.

“No,” Storfer responded, “I had not.”

Storfer--who took the stand out of order because he no longer lives in California and prosecutors wanted to call him while he was in town--became the seventh prosecution witness to testify about seeing or hearing a barking dog on the evening of June 12, the night that Nicole Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were killed. All of those witnesses have, with varying degrees of certainty, essentially corroborated one another.

None of them, however, saw the murders committed or heard the sounds of a struggle, which defense attorneys have seized upon to suggest that a single assailant could not have committed the crimes.

Simpson attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. subtly raised that notion again Monday and floated a number of other theories that the defense has pressed since before opening statements--suggesting, for instance, that drugs could have been tied to a motive for the killings or that Goldman, not Nicole Simpson, could have been the intended target.

For the most part, Cochran focused those questions on Detective Tom Lange, one of the lead investigators in the case, who retook the witness stand Monday after a long interruption. Lange has spent roughly six days on the stand undergoing unusually close questioning by Cochran. Interrupted repeatedly, his testimony has stretched from mid-February and still is incomplete.

But while Cochran’s most piercing questions were aimed at Lange, he also took aim at some of the specifics of Storfer’s brief testimony. Storfer spoke with confidence about his recollections on the night of the murders, crisply answering questions put to him by lawyers from both sides, but Cochran raised a number of questions about the accuracy of his recollections.

Storfer was unusually precise in recalling the times of various observations--testifying, for instance, that he glanced at his television clock about three minutes after he heard the dog and noted that it showed a time of 10:28 p.m. Storfer added that he and his wife set their clocks about five minutes fast, thus concluding that he first heard the dog about 10:20 p.m.

But another one of Storfer’s times came under close questioning by Cochran. Storfer said he had seen three police cars and police tape around the crime scene at 12:15 a.m. on June 13. That would not jibe with previous testimony, as the first officer on the scene, Robert Riske, said he had not gotten there until 12:13 a.m., and it was some time after that before he found the bodies, got backup and secured the crime scene.

Spotting the possibility that Storfer’s testimony about seeing the police cars might cast doubt on his earlier observations, Clark asked him whether some parts of his testimony were more precise than others. He said they were and insisted that while some of the times he testified about were merely estimates, he has a specific memory of looking at the clock when it displayed 10:28 p.m.

Storfer’s testimony was brief, and he was followed by Lange.

A veteran police officer who has investigated more than 250 homicides, Lange last testified on Feb. 23, before the trial was interrupted for the videotaped testimony of Rosa Lopez, the Salvadoran housekeeper whose threats to leave the country and whose hotly contested recollections occupied the Simpson trial all last week.

Lange had barely resumed testifying Monday when he was interrupted yet again, this time by a bomb scare. During the lunch hour, police were called to the courthouse to respond to what a department spokeswoman described as a “suspicious briefcase.”

Three floors were evacuated and elevators in the building shut down while police removed the briefcase and took it outside, where they blew it up--only to discover that it contained papers, not a bomb.

During the break, hundreds of jurors from other trials were locked outside, and some of the participants in the Simpson trial were unable to make it back after lunch. Once the threat was removed, the proceedings resumed, but the episode set back the trial by about an hour.

“Things were going so well,” Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito told the jurors, apologizing for the latest delay. “Naturally, something had to happen.”

Although his cross-examination of Lange was interrupted first by the Lopez testimony and then by the bomb scare, Cochran took up where he had left off, briefly welcoming the detective back to the stand and then bluntly suggesting that he and his colleagues failed to follow up leads that might have led them to suspects other than Simpson.

“Did you ever consider any other theory than that O.J. Simpson was the only perpetrator in this case?” Cochran asked.

“Any other theory?” Lange responded.

“Yes,” said Cochran, who has accused police of a rush to judgment against his client. “Any other theory, any other possibility?”

“I had absolutely no other evidence that would point me in any other direction,” the detective answered.

“Did you ever consider that Mr. Goldman could have been a person followed to that location?” Cochran then asked. “Did you ever consider that at all?”

“I think it’s entirely possible he was followed,” Lange responded, but he insisted that no evidence ever surfaced suggesting that Goldman was the primary target in the murders.

“Did you ever pursue that?” Cochran asked.

“There was nothing to pursue,” the detective answered.

As he has before, Lange admitted that some aspects of the investigation were not ideal--it took more than 10 hours after the bodies were discovered for police criminalists to arrive on the scene, for instance--but he defended the overall handling of the case and downplayed the significance of issues raised by Cochran, such as the discovery of a small fruit tag found at the scene.

That label sometimes is found on bananas, and Cochran seemed to suggest that it might be connected to a shopping list found in Goldman’s apartment because the list mentions bananas. But Goldman’s stepmother and sister could barely suppress their laughter as Cochran pursued that line of questioning. Lange shrugged it off as well, saying he never had seen the list and did not consider it important.

Later, Patti Goldman told a prosecutor that the list was hers. Her daughter went to Ron Goldman’s apartment after the murders to pick up some of his things.

Members of both victims’ families have been regular fixtures in the courtroom drama unfolding in Downtown Los Angeles. Nicole Simpson’s mother, Juditha Brown, has been absent in recent days, but she returned Monday for the first time since she abruptly fled when grisly crime scene photographs were displayed for the jury in late February.

Family members were forced to leave for part of Monday’s session, however, as the testimony touched on areas in which they may be called to offer their own recollections. In each instance, Ito called the lawyers to a sidebar, conferred briefly with them, and then prosecutors asked the family members to step outside.

For months, one consistent approach of the Simpson team has been to suggest that police overlooked potentially important clues because they were so intent on proving that Simpson committed the June 12 murders.

Among the most controversial defense theories is that Faye Resnick, self-described best friend of Nicole Simpson and the author of a splashy book about the killings, was somehow linked to the murders. Simpson’s lawyers have suggested that the murderer or murderers could have come to Nicole Simpson’s condominium in search of Resnick, an admitted drug user who allegedly had briefly lived at the condo not long before the murders.

That theory has surfaced briefly in previous hearings, but never as clearly as it did Monday.

“During the course of your investigation in this case, did you ever look at the possibility that drugs were a factor in these killings?” Cochran asked Lange.

“Superficially, we looked at the possibility of drugs,” Lange responded.

After a few more questions, Cochran continued: “In that connection, did you look at the background of Faye Resnick between the period of June 3, 1994, and June 12, 1994?”

Lange responded that he had not but added that he had heard that Resnick was living with Nicole Simpson during that period. When Cochran tried to ask whether Lange knew that Resnick had entered a drug rehabilitation center shortly before the killings, Ito interjected, sustaining his own objection to the question.

Although he did not answer that question, Lange did say that no evidence of a drug connection ever panned out.

“In this particular case,” Lange said in the flat, unemotional tone of voice that has characterized all his testimony, “we had another direction to go.”

Detective Philip L. Vannatter, Lange’s partner, interviewed Resnick, but prosecutors have said they do not intend to call her as part of their case against Simpson. Defense attorneys, however, have not ruled out calling her.

As testimony before the jury resumed inside the courtroom, Monday’s developments also were marked by the coming and going of two of the trial’s important characters. Rosa Lopez, a housekeeper who occupied center stage last week, returned to her hometown in her native El Salvador, rebuffing reporters there eager to interview her.

In court, meanwhile, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lisa Kahn made her first appearance since the end of last year. Kahn, the lead DNA legal expert for the district attorney’s office, had left to begin her maternity leave and was warmly welcomed back to court Monday by colleagues on both sides.

Lange is scheduled to return to the stand today and should soon conclude his testimony. Cochran told Ito that he only has a few more minutes to go with his cross-examination of Lange, and Clark said she would only require about an hour for her next round of questioning.

Ito expressed hope that the two sides might finally complete the questioning of the detective by lunchtime. Next up on the prosecution witness list is Brian (Kato) Kaelin, the Simpson house guest whose testimony during the preliminary hearing made him a minor celebrity and whose appearance at the trial has been eagerly anticipated by the tabloid press for weeks.

Also on tap for today is a hearing on yet another defense motion attempting to gain access to the police records of Detective Mark Fuhrman. Fuhrman testified during the preliminary hearing that he found a bloody glove outside Simpson’s house, and since then, the defense has assailed the detective’s credibility and alleged that he is a racist who may have planted evidence.

Fuhrman has denied the allegations, and his lawyer, Robert Tourtelot, has accused the defense of smearing his client and invading his privacy in an unfair effort to raise doubts in the minds of jurors.