When it was all over, the defense counsel spoke. Sad-eyed, indignation banked to a mere smolder, Robert Shapiro argued that all the accusations laid against his client were the worst kind of circumstantial evidence -- evidence that could be read as innocence as well as guilt, and the court should have "little difficulty in deciding that this certainly is not a case of any premeditated murder by anyone." In fact, he declared, there was insufficient proof that O.J. Simpson was guilty of anything.
Rising to respond, Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark, stern-faced and methodical, ticked off her evidence, piece by piece. The glove at the crime scene. Its mate on Simpson's path. The blood trails to Simpson's house. The Ford Bronco with traces of blood. That's how circumstantial evidence works. Put him on trial.
This was a preliminary hearing. It was billed as such -- a routine presentation of evidence to show probable cause that the defendant should be tried for murder. Instead, it turned out last week to be a sensational mini- trial and, in the minds of some television viewers, the unofficial conviction of Simpson.
After 21 witnesses, mind-numbing disquisitions on evidence gathering, soul- numbing descriptions of violence, the defendant wiping away tears as the coroner described in antiseptic detail the innards of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and of Ronald Goldman, and the impassioned final statements of both lawyers. Municipal Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell needed only 30 minutes or so to issue her ruling. Simpson would go to trial. There would be no bail. Legally, of course, he remains innocent until proved guilty. The real trial is still to come.
The sense that the hearing was the main event rather than just a prologue had mounted inexorably over its entire length, but crested during its peculiar second week. The prosecution had opened with the testimony of limousine driver Allan Park and Simpson houseguest Brian ("Kato") Kaelin. Park, whose ferrying of Simpson to the Los Angeles airport at around 11:15 on the night of the murder had been part of Simpson's alibi, reported that O.J. did not answer his intercom until around 10:56. Shortly before that, Park added, he had glimpsed a 6-ft. 200-lb. African-American figure rushing across the lawn into the house. Kaelin, an aspiring actor who had boarded first at the home of Nicole Simpson and now at O.J.'s place, reported being interrupted in the middle of a telephone conversation at 10:40 by a banging and shaking on the wall of his guest house.
Gradually, prosecutor Clark's direction became evident: she was clearing a large enough block out of O.J.'s June 12 schedule to accommodate a murder. Now her witnesses had established a plausible 76 minutes during which Simpson could have driven the two miles to Nicole's condominium, killed and returned; bumped into Kaelin's wall while re-entering his property via a service path; and been spotted by Park as he crossed back to the main house. The clincher in the scenario was an especially dramatic piece of evidence: a bloody glove found on the service path -- the apparent mate to one dropped near the bodies.