Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 2, 1994 TAG: 9407040135
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune Note: above
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
The dog wailed incessantly. It barked at houses. It followed a stranger home. It had blood on its paws and legs.
Sukru Boztepe and his wife, Bettina Rasmussen, couldn't figure out what was wrong. So they decided to let the dog show them.
They followed the Akita as it led them around the neighborhood, then stopped abruptly and turned its head to the right, toward a path.
``I turned right and looked the same direction that the dog was looking,'' Boztepe testified Friday in the O.J. Simpson preliminary hearing. ``I see a body.
``It was [a] woman lying down horizontally all the way to the path, face turned to me and on the right side,'' he said. ``It was dark. There was a lot of blood.''
Simpson threw his head back, took several deep breaths through his mouth and blinked as if he might cry when a prosecutor unveiled a color photograph of the blood-soaked body of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Then he looked and shook his head.
The emotional scene came Friday, on the second day of a hearing to determine whether Simpson will be tried in the stabbing deaths of his ex-wife and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman.
Simpson, who has pleaded not guilty, listened intently as Boztepe, Rasmussen and two of their neighbors testified about the erratic behavior of the Akita, behavior that led to the discovery of the two bodies. The Akita is believed to be Nicole Simpson's.
Though Deputy District Attorney Marcia Clark held photos of the murder scene out of the range of TV and newspaper cameras and much of the small courtroom audience, Simpson got a clear look from his seat. At one point, Simpson lifted his eyes to the ceiling and appeared to gulp air. Defense attorney Robert Shapiro put a paper cup in his hand and prompted the former football star to sip from it.
Testimony about the time of the dog's barking and unusual behavior seemed to bolster prosecutors' contention that Simpson would have had time to commit the murders and still catch an 11:45 p.m. flight to Chicago. Defense attorneys have said Simpson was at home waiting for a limousine when the slayings occurred.
Pablo Fenjves, who said his bedroom faced an alley that abutted Nicole Simpson's townhouse, testified that 15 or 20 minutes into his viewing of the 10 p.m. news, he heard ``a pretty persistent barking that wouldn't stop.'' He described it as a ``plaintive wail.''
In another in a series of unusual developments in the case, Municipal Judge Kathleen Kennedy-Powell abruptly stopped a witness's testimony at one point and left the courtroom. When she returned, she said Superior Court Judge Cecil Mills - whom she said did not appear to have jurisdiction in the case - had turned over to her a sealed, bulky envelope that apparently contained evidence gathered by the defense team.
Kennedy-Powell said Mills had directed her to open the envelope in court. But defense attorneys objected, and the judge said she would delay a decision until lawyers had filed briefs on the issue.
Meanwhile, defense attorneys gave prosecutors three audio microcassettes that they said contained interviews with two witnesses. Though the lawyers did not say whose voices were on the tapes, transcripts identified the witnesses as Brian Kaelin, Simpson's housekeeper and friend, and ``Mr. Allen,'' the limousine driver who took Simpson to the airport that night.
by CNB