Simpson Says He Can’t Explain Cut, Blood on Property

O.J. Simpson struggled Monday to explain away crucial physical evidence against him, telling jurors that he has no idea how blood landed on his property and no detailed recollection of how he suffered a deep gouge on his left hand.

Testifying in a subdued, almost impassive tone, Simpson also acknowledged that his defense team wired him to a polygraph machine three days after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. He insisted that he did not take a formal polygraph test--just learned how the machine operated.

But in loud and aggressive questioning, lead plaintiff attorney Daniel M. Petrocelli suggested that Simpson had, in fact, taken a test and failed miserably with a score of minus 22, “indicating extreme deception.”

Petrocelli also read aloud excerpts from a transcript of Simpson’s cellular phone conversation with police during his flight from arrest in a friend’s white Bronco. In that conversation, Petrocelli said, Los Angeles Police Det. Tom Lange told Simpson to come home and surrender, adding: “No one’s going to be hurt.” Simpson’s reply: “I’m the only one that deserves it.”

Simpson testified that he did not remember that particular exchange. But he did acknowledge telling Lange: “You’ve been honest with me from the very beginning. . . . I know you’re doing a good job.” Later, of course, Simpson would accuse the police of framing him. During that Bronco chase, however, he never protested that the police had planted evidence and never demanded that they hunt for the real killer, as he acknowledged on Monday.

“I didn’t know what was taking place at all,” he testified. “All I could do was tell him time and time again, ‘I didn’t do this.’ ”

In his second day on the stand, Simpson looked and sounded weary as Petrocelli confronted him with most of the physical evidence, then walked him through the week that began with the murders on June 12, 1994, and ended with his arrest five days later. Simpson was acquitted on criminal charges last year; he is now defending himself in civil court as the victims’ families seek to hold him responsible for the killings. If he is found liable, Simpson could be ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages.

Simpson returns today for questioning by two more plaintiffs’ attorneys. Before the examination gets underway, Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki will dismiss a juror and select a replacement from one of the six alternates, a source close to the case said. No details were available late Monday.

On the defensive from the opening bell, Simpson spent most of his time denying documents, disputing other witnesses’ testimony, or conceding that he has no explanation for incriminating blood evidence.

He again challenged phone records. He denounced notes written by a defense expert as false. And he declared as phony a photo showing him wearing Bruno Magli shoes--the same rare, expensive Italian brand that left size 12 footprints at the crime scene. Simpson testified that the blazer, shirt and tie he is wearing in the photo are indeed his. He said he was not sure about the belt and pants, though a television clip filmed the same day as the photo was taken shows him wearing similar clothes. In any case, he insisted that the Bruno Maglis in the photo were not his.

“How can that be?” Petrocelli asked.

“I don’t know,” Simpson answered. With a rare smile, he added that he has personal experience with bogus photos. “I’ve seen a picture of me and [former LAPD Det.] Mark Fuhrman playing golf together,” he said, referring to the detective the defense has depicted as a racist cop who engineered a frame-up. “I know we didn’t play golf together.”

Attorney Aggressive

Just as he denied wearing Bruno Magli shoes, Simpson also swore that he did not own a dark sweatsuit as of June 12, 1994. House guest Brian “Kato” Kaelin had previously testified that Simpson was wearing a dark sweatsuit with a white zipper on the evening of the murders. And the plaintiffs believe Simpson wore it to commit the killings.

Petrocelli then flashed on a screen two photos of Simpson wearing a dark sweatsuit with a zipper the last week of May 1994, while he was shooting an exercise video for Playboy. That photo had not emerged in the criminal trial.

Simpson testified that the sweatsuit belonged to the video’s producers, and said he returned it after the taping. “Your testimony is that you never saw it again?” Petrocelli asked. “That’s correct,” Simpson said.

Throughout the day, Petrocelli assumed a more aggressive attitude than he had Friday. He peppered Simpson with accusing questions while standing just a few feet away, and even tapped Simpson’s scarred hand with his pen. At one point, Petrocelli got so close that Simpson’s lead defense counsel objected, asking him to back off.

Legal experts who attended Monday’s session said Simpson struck them as generally calm and collected despite the fierce questioning. Nevertheless, the session took a toll on his credibility, they said.

Repeatedly, Simpson said he simply did not know how blood ended up in his Ford Bronco, on his driveway, in his foyer and in his bathroom within hours of the murders. He could not explain how blood consistent with his DNA turned up at the crime scene. Or how blood consistent with the victims’ ended up smeared in his Bronco.

“You have no explanation for how the blood of Nicole was found on the carpet on the driver’s side, do you?” Petrocelli asked.

“No,” Simpson answered.

“You have no explanation as to how Ron Goldman’s blood was found in your Bronco?”

Turning to the jury, Simpson answered softly: “Me personally? No.”

Simpson’s attorneys do have explanations for all of the incriminating blood. The defense contends that the blood was either planted at the scene, tampered with in the lab, or hopelessly contaminated due to sloppy police procedure. During the defense case, Simpson’s team will call expert witnesses to try to prove that the DNA test results cannot be trusted. But when pressed to provide his own explanation for the various blood drops, Simpson repeatedly answered only, “I don’t know.”

“He just didn’t have any response,” said Loyola Law School Associate Dean Laurie Levenson, who watched some of the proceedings. “He didn’t have anything.”

By demanding an explanation for every drop of blood, Petrocelli forced Simpson to repeat his lack of knowledge again and again, a tactic deemed effective by Gerry Spence, a renowned criminal defense lawyer who sat in on the testimony. “Instead of just saying, ‘[I] can’t explain all this,’ he had to say, ‘I can’t explain this, I can’t explain that, I can’t explain something over here, I can’t explain something over there.’ Does that have an effect? Absolutely,” Spence said.

Petrocelli also pressed hard for an explanation of the three cuts and seven abrasions a defense doctor photographed on Simpson’s left hand three days after the murders. Again, he forced Simpson to repeat over and over that he could not explain most of the injuries.

Simpson insisted that he had only one of the cuts--a deep, curving gash over the knuckle of the middle finger--when he returned to Los Angeles the day after the murders. In an ironic twist, Simpson relied on detectives Lange and Philip Vannatter and jailhouse nurse Thano Peratis to corroborate his story because they all examined his hand and photographed only one injury, the gouge on the middle finger. The defense has generally portrayed Lange, Vannatter and Peratis as incompetent or even corrupt, but Simpson repeatedly cited them Monday as reliable witnesses.

Focusing on the one cut that police photographed, Petrocelli told jurors--and Simpson agreed--that it “still bears a scar to this day.” At Petrocelli’s request, Simpson held out his hand for the jurors to see, extending his scarred middle finger.

Simpson testified that he cut himself on that knuckle while cleaning up a broken glass in his Chicago hotel room after police informed him of his ex-wife’s death. He could not say, however, exactly how he broke the glass, or how he cleaned up the shards, or at what point he suffered the cut. Nor could he say how or when blood drops ended up on the sheets and pillows of the hotel bed. “You know, I really don’t recall any of it,” he said.

A Broken Glass

As Petrocelli picked away at the topic, demanding details that he could not provide, Simpson clenched his jaw, rocked his head from side to side, sighed heavily and closed his eyes.

“Tell the ladies and gentlemen exactly how the glass broke,” Petrocelli insisted.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Simpson said, facing the jurors for a prolonged moment. “I think I was very emotional. At one point, the glass broke. I couldn’t tell you if I was drinking water or if I slammed it down or knocked it over, but a glass broke.”

After a few more exchanges, Petrocelli asked: “Is that the best you can do for this jury?”

“Yes,” Simpson answered.

Simpson had told police that he originally suffered that cut at his home while he was rushing around to get ready. He only reopened it in Chicago, he told them. But on Monday, Simpson testified that he did not see any cut while he was in Los Angeles, just a mysterious dab of blood on his pinkie.

As for the other injuries, Simpson was adamant that they did not come from the broken glass in Chicago. Yet he could not say how he incurred them. Flashing photos of the marks and abrasions on a television monitor, Petrocelli demanded: “How’d you get that cut, Mr. Simpson?”

Simpson’s answer was always, “I don’t know.”

An expert witness for the plaintiffs, forensic pathologist Werner Spitz, has testified that all three cuts and some of the abrasions are fingernail gouges. Spitz speculated that one or both of the victims could have inflicted them while clawing to break free of Simpson’s lethal hold.

Asked whether the wounds were fingernail marks, Simpson said Monday: “I doubt that very seriously.” But he did not rule it out. He testified that he had wrestled with his son Justin, then 5, a few days after the murders. While he did not blame Justin for causing the marks, he told the jurors “I can’t imagine who else it would have been.”

Turning from physical evidence to alibi, Petrocelli gave Simpson a chance to explain his whereabouts between 9:35 p.m., when he returned from McDonald’s with Kaelin, and 10:55 p.m., when a limo driver saw him outside his front door. Simpson recounted the evening in far greater details than he had during his interview with police the day after the slayings.

Call to Barbieri

Petrocelli made much of the contrast between Simpson’s vague statement to police and his elaborate testimony.

“You knew exactly what you had to say to meet and defeat all the witnesses and all the evidence against you,” the attorney said.

After letting Simpson talk about chipping golf balls in the dark and searching for a golf club, Petrocelli bored in on Simpson’s cellular phone call to his girlfriend Paula Barbieri at 10:03 p.m.

In his statement to police the day after the murders, Simpson had implied that he called Barbieri from his Bronco while driving over to her house. But he now says that in his exhausted, overwrought state at the police station, he did not remember the episode correctly.

The truth, he testified Monday, is that he called her either from his front yard or just outside his gate while he was hitting golf balls and walking his dog. Although he has previously testified that he knew she was out of town, Simpson said he called her because he still hoped she might be around and might be able to drive him to the airport for his red-eye flight to Chicago.

“You have a different story now?” Petrocelli said, flinging the words at him contemptuously.

“I think it’s more accurate now,” Simpson responded calmly.

As he has from the moment Simpson took the stand, Petrocelli exploited the inconsistencies in various statements he has made about his alibi.

For example, Simpson told police that the last thing he did before leaving for Chicago shortly after 11 p.m. was to grab his cellular phone from the Bronco. Under oath in front of the jury, Simpson testified that on that last trip to the Bronco, he got just the cellular phone case and charger because he had the phone with him already and had in fact used it to call Barbieri from his lawn.

Petrocelli seized on that inconsistency to accuse Simpson of shaping an alibi only after examining phone records, reviewing other witnesses’ testimony and consulting with lawyers.

“You don’t want the phone to be in your Bronco at 11 p.m., because if it’s there at 11 p.m., it’s there at 10 p.m. . . . and then you’re in the Bronco at 10 p.m., you’re not at home, and that destroys your alibi,” Petrocelli said, almost shouting.

Before Simpson could answer, lead defense attorney Robert C. Baker registered one of the many objections he lodged Monday. “Great sound bites,” he said, “but it’s not proper questioning.” The judge sustained the objection.

Petrocelli ended his questioning as he had Friday, by accusing Simpson point-blank of committing the murders. Referring especially to Goldman, whose family he represents, Petrocelli leaned on the podium and demanded: “You cut him and you slashed him until he collapsed in your arms and died. True or untrue?” Simpson responded quietly: “Untrue.”

Barely pausing to let him answer, Petrocelli asked his final question: “And you left him there to die, Mr. Simpson, with his eyes open, looking at you, Mr. Simpson, true or untrue?” Looking straight at Petrocelli, without even a flicker toward the jury, Simpson answered again: “That’s untrue.”

Times staff writer Jim Newton contributed to this story.