Shoe Photo of Simpson Is a Fake, Expert Testifies

An amateur photo analyst who said he learned about fake images in the advertising trade testified Wednesday that a snapshot showing O.J. Simpson wearing Bruno Magli shoes is most likely a fraud.

“My conclusion,” Robert Groden told jurors, “is that there is a high likelihood of forgery.”

The defense has not disputed that the shoes in the photos are Bruno Maglis--the same pricey Italian brand that tracked size 12 bloody footprints away from the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman. Simpson, however, has sworn that he would have never purchased such “ugly” shoes. The photo, he declared in his testimony last month, must be a phony.

To discredit the photo, which surfaced months after Simpson was acquitted of criminal charges, the defense called Groden to the witness stand. In a subdued, scholarly tone, Groden pointed out at least 10 anomalies in the photo’s negative that he said indicated possible tampering.

The negative was positioned off-center on the contact sheet, he said, and it was slightly longer than other negatives from the same roll of film. Groden also testified that he thought the Bruno Magli shoes were reflecting the wrong color light. Furthermore, he told jurors, he observed two suspicious squiggles suggesting someone had retouched the gray pants Simpson is wearing in the photo. And Groden determined that the tinting in the photo seemed off, with hues that did not match the other negatives in the roll.

“It’s the only one that doesn’t fit visually,” he said.

To illustrate his point, Groden passed glossy prints of the photo to jurors, who studied them intently. Even with a chance for up-close examination, however, Groden acknowledged that a few of his observations were “very, very difficult to see.”

Plaintiff attorney Peter Gelblum will cross-examine Groden on Friday. In addition, the plaintiffs have their own expert witness--the retired chief of the FBI’s photo analysis division--to vouch for the snapshot, which an Associated Press freelancer claims to have taken at a football game about eight months before the murders.

Gelblum hinted at the tone of his upcoming cross-examination in a hearing, outside the jury’s presence Wednesday, when he ridiculed Groden as having “feeble qualifications” as a photo analyst.

Groden now makes his living publishing books and videos on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But he claims expertise in faked photos as well.

His qualifications, he testified, include working two decades ago as an optical technician for a film company, a job that involved inserting titles into movie frames and creating other special effects. Groden also worked for a few years altering slides by slipping products or text into photos for advertisements. And from 1976 to 1978, he helped analyze photos for a congressional committee that looked into the Kennedy assassination.

Since then, he said, he has twice been paid for analyzing photos--once by the National Enquirer and once by a Korean political party. In both cases, he determined that photos purporting to depict ghosts were frauds. He also said he has analyzed thousands of photos of the Kennedy assassination on his own.

After hearing that resume--which includes no formal training in photography--Gelblum asked the judge to ban Groden from testifying as an expert. “The fact that he simply sits around his house looking at photos and deciding whether he thinks a picture is fake or not does not qualify him as an expert,” Gelblum said.

But Superior Court Judge Hiroshi Fujisaki ruled that Groden, 51, had enough experience to qualify as an expert witness.

Wednesday’s court session opened on an equally combative note, with lead defense lawyer Robert C. Baker struggling to extract the answers he wanted from Los Angeles Police Officer Daniel Gonzalez, a junior officer who reported first to the murder scene and later to Simpson’s house in the early hours of June 13, 1994.

Throughout the trial, Baker has sought to cut down witnesses with a stinging, even sneering sarcasm. Gonzalez adopted a similar tone in his answers and insisted that the veteran defense attorney had his facts wrong. “You’re playing games with me,” he told Baker.

At one point, Baker accused Gonzalez of breaking into Simpson’s Bronco to scour it for blood drops. Furious, Gonzalez denied the charge. “I’m getting offended,” he warned Baker.

A few minutes later, Baker accused Gonzalez of changing his story to protect his fellow officers. “Is there any code [among police officers] to cover up for each other?” Baker demanded. “You want to know?” Gonzalez shot back. “You want me to tell you? You get promoted for burning each other.”

Fireworks aside, Gonzalez’s testimony served three main purposes for the defense.

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First, he contradicted three detectives’ accounts of where they informed Arnelle Simpson of her stepmother’s murder. Baker also used discrepancies between an early report Gonzalez wrote and a statement he gave months later to suggest that officers changed their stories to ward off allegations of evidence planting. Finally, Baker tried to show jurors that Gonzalez could not possibly have seen blood drops on the running board of O.J. Simpson’s Ford Bronco, as he reported, without opening the door and illegally searching the vehicle.

Gonzalez repeatedly insisted that he did not lie or embellish any of his accounts.

Court is dark today at an alternate juror’s request. The defense plans to call Simpson to the stand Friday afternoon to give him a chance to answer some friendly questions before jurors take a two-week Christmas break.

Simpson’s testimony will likely mark the midpoint of the defense case. So far, Baker and his colleagues have focused on the dual themes of police incompetence and corruption. After the Christmas hiatus, the defense will present more testimony on the physical evidence and then turn to witnesses who can offer positive assessments of Simpson’s character, in an effort to persuade jurors that he could not and did not kill anyone.