We can handle the truth, but will we get it?

You’d be hard-pressed to find two people with more enmity for each other than Michael Goodwin and Collene Campbell.

Campbell is convinced that Goodwin orchestrated the murders of her brother, famed race car driver and promoter Mickey Thompson, and his wife Trudy, in 1988. Goodwin is equally convinced that Campbell, a former San Juan Capistrano mayor with political connections, has been the driving force behind the investigation that led authorities to charge him in December 2001. He’s been in jail without bond ever since and now is standing trial in Los Angeles County after a state appeals court in 2004 tossed out Orange County’s claim to jurisdiction.

So, it’s pretty easy speculation as to their mutual contempt. But now, each is getting what they both have said they want since Goodwin’s arrest: a trial to lay bare the facts.

But while listening to attorneys’ opening statements earlier this week in a Pasadena courthouse, I found myself wondering what kind of truths will emerge from the jury’s verdict in the weeks ahead.

Only one person in the courtroom -- Goodwin himself -- knows the truth.

For everyone else, the “truth” is going to come from whether the jury decides that Goodwin’s animosity toward Thompson, his former business partner who had won a lawsuit against him in the mid-1980s, was motive enough to kill both Mickey and his wife. And, from there, whether Goodwin’s alleged threats and incriminating statements both before and after the murders, will hold up as persuasive evidence.

Among other things, jurors will have to determine whether Goodwin would have been so idiotic as to have made threatening remarks and then acted on them. He wouldn’t be the first to do so, but the L.A. County district attorney’s version of events is that Goodwin did everything short of taking out newspaper ads revealing his intentions.

Was he someone that brazen, or were his words -- assuming the jury accepts them as solid evidence -- merely the angry remarks that people sometimes utter in the midst of heated legal battles?

For those of us wanting clarity of guilt or innocence, how can jurors make that kind of psychological analysis with certainty? How can any of us know whether someone is merely a hothead or an evil plotter? Especially when asked to assess it 18 1/2 years after the crime?

That’s a vital task for the jury, because there’s no physical evidence connecting Goodwin to the crime or the two unidentified killers who, according to witnesses in the Thompsons’ upscale Bradbury neighborhood in Los Angeles, fled on bicycles.

Adding to the jury’s burden is that some purported evidence has come late to the game. For example, a man claims to have seen Goodwin in a car in the neighborhood a few days before the murders -- clearly, powerful circumstantial evidence, if true. However, he made his formal identification 13 years after the murders and after having seen photos of Goodwin on a TV program describing the case and offering a reward.

Can a jury divine the validity of that identification?

Deputy L.A. County Dist. Atty. Alan Jackson told jurors he’d prove that Goodwin arranged the Thompsons’ killings. Yet, he only offered the thesis that Goodwin had a vendetta against Mickey. Jackson’s theory behind Trudy’s murder is that Goodwin so despised Mickey that he had his wife killed in front of him.

But Elena Saris, a deputy L.A. county public defender representing Goodwin, said there’s no evidence to suggest Trudy was killed as Mickey was forced to watch. Likewise, she said, various other alleged elements of the crime have been filtered through a Hollywoodized version of events on TV that has skewed reality.

Differing versions of a crime. We tell ourselves that’s why we have trials, to separate fact from fiction. We comfort ourselves in believing that the truth will emerge.

Collene Campbell says she wants the truth; Michael Goodwin says he wants it.

“Been a long time coming, hasn’t it?” Jackson said, as he began speaking to the jury.

But it seems to me a depressing question already hangs over this case, larded as it is with the passage of time and ultimately unknowable things:

Will a verdict either way really convince us of the truth?

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.