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Kaelin has, in fact, proved to be one of the minor surprises this time around. The actor-houseguest was one of Clark's biggest problems. She spent long, frustrating hours in her office and in court trying to coax coherent testimony from the loosey-goosey Kaelin. Then last week a spiffed-up, more verb-friendly Kaelin testified that Simpson was brooding, and cursing, the day before the murders over his former wife's sexual escapades, referring to an incident in which he witnessed Nicole having sex with a boyfriend, Keith Zlomsowitch. And Kaelin also mentioned last week that the three thumps he heard on his bedroom wall sounded "like someone falling back against my bedroom wall"--that is, like a human being. "Kato knew which side his bread was buttered on, but I think he had fear," says the former Simpson prosecutor. "For us, he gave up only what he had to. Now he has separated from Simpson. He also probably feels some remorse for not assisting more and for not helping Nicole more. But I tell you this: he's still not giving up all he knows."
For all the talk about blood evidence and Bronco fibers, the first jury was not all that interested in grappling with the extremely complex forensic evidence the state presented. As Michael Brewer, a lawyer for Ron Goldman's mother Sharon Rufo, told the Los Angeles Times, pre-gag order, "The jurors don't care about the minutiae; they care about the essence." That is why the moment that Simpson struggled to get the glove on was so pivotal. The plaintiffs' team has already tried to dispatch that one, bringing on a glove expert to testify that it shrank but looked like the same dark leather glove Simpson was wearing in a picture. And that is what makes the current discrepancies surrounding a pair of Italian shoes even more significant.
In the criminal trial, FBI shoe expert William Bodziak testified that bloody footprints leading away from the Bundy crime scene came from a pair of size-12, expensive, Italian-made Bruno Magli shoes, only 299 pairs of which were sold in the U.S. Simpson denied owning anything like them, going so far as to say in his January deposition that he would never wear such "ugly-ass" shoes. Then free-lance photographer Harry Scull found a photograph he had taken of Simpson walking through the end zone before a Sept. 26, 1993, Buffalo Bills game; he appears to be wearing the Bruno Magli shoes. Scull sold the picture for $2,500 to the National Enquirer, which published it in April. During a deposition in September, Simpson was forced to backpedal, saying, "I know I've had similar shoes."
Last week Bodziak again testified that the shoes appeared to be the same, but the defense is claiming the photograph was doctored. The defense also showed that Bodziak was unable to identify an assortment of other shoe prints surrounding the crime scene. Since then, though, the National Enquirer has come up with another photograph showing Simpson wearing similar shoes in 1993. "God, how we searched for those shoes," says the former Simpson prosecutor now. "We sat watching Christmas videos with the Brown family. We digitally enhanced photos of things in his closet, hoping to find an old shoe box. But we couldn't find anything."