Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 11, 1995 TAG: 9507110092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
Simpson's daughter Arnelle, sister Carmelita Simpson-Durio and mother, Eunice, recalled a sometimes tearful Simpson, who was confused and upset the day the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found.
In a moment of high drama, Simpson's 73-year-old mother, wearing a bright-yellow suit and a jaunty beret, left her wheelchair and hobbled across the courtroom.
After she was helped into the witness box, Eunice Simpson smiled adoringly as she gave jurors a brief biography of her hard life as a divorced mother of four, recounted O.J. Simpson's recovery from rickets as a child and told them how she, her son and other family members clung together the night after the killings.
``We were gripping each other,'' she said.
She also remembered one person who sat apart from the others: Ronald Shipp, who later testified for the prosecution that Simpson confided that night he had had dreams of killing his ex-wife and asked how long it would take for police to do DNA analysis of blood.
``He appeared to be spaced,'' Eunice Simpson said of Shipp, who was at the bar in the family room drinking beer.
Eunice Simpson took the stand after her daughter and granddaughter told jurors that Shipp was drinking that night and offered sympathetic portraits of O.J. Simpson's demeanor June 13, 1994.
Arnelle Simpson, 26, was led through a point-by-point rebuttal of portions of the prosecution case, countering damaging accounts by Shipp and detectives who went to Simpson's estate and woke her up early the morning the bodies were found.
Composed and soft-spoken, she used the words ``shocked,'' ``upset,'' ``emotional,'' ``out of control'' and ``distraught'' as she was asked repeatedly by defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. to describe her father's demeanor when he heard his ex-wife had been slain.
``He was very upset,'' she said of a phone conversation with him while he was in Chicago. ``He was crying. He was saying, `Arnelle, I don't understand this.'''
``Had you at any time in your 25 years heard your father sound like that?'' Cochran asked.
``No,'' she said.
Simpson rushed back to Los Angeles and that night, she said, friends and relatives gathered at the former football star's Brentwood mansion to comfort him. He sat on a sofa holding his mother's hand as TV newscasts reported the murders.
``He was crying off and on,'' Arnelle Simpson said. ``We were watching the news, and he kept talking to the TV, saying, `I can't believe this.'''
She said Shipp, who has been portrayed as a hanger-on by the defense, was never alone with her father the night after the killings.
When Simpson retired to his bedroom, his sister Shirley Baker accompanied him upstairs. Arnelle later joined them.
``He was lying down, and my Aunt Shirley was putting a cold face towel over his head,'' Arnelle Simpson said.
``How did he seem to you?'' Cochran asked.
``Very tired, lifeless,'' she said.
Simpson-Durio, who followed her niece to the stand, testified that she thought Shipp was ``high'' that night, but did say that Shipp went up to Simpson's bedroom for about two minutes.
With the start of the defense case, the tone of the trial changed from grim details of death to a happier family album of the Simpson household.
Arnelle Simpson recalled trips to New York to visit with her father during his sportscaster days, her own graduation from Howard University and her return to the family mansion where her father built living quarters for her and her brother Jason. And she told how Nicole Brown Simpson came running when she heard that a family dog had been found dead in the swimming pool. Together, she said, they buried the animal in the front yard.
Arnelle Simpson also reminded jurors of her father's glories when Cochran elicited her birth date.
``I was born the same day my dad won the Heisman Trophy,'' she said, smiling.
Arnelle Simpson's appearance clearly marked a high point for her father, who exchanged smiles with her several times.
Jurors watched her closely and began scribbling copious notes almost from the moment she took the stand.
Her testimony was seen as crucial in reconstructing the hours after detectives entered Simpson's estate and notified her of the slayings, setting in motion events that ultimately would lead to his arrest.
She said she was roused by detectives about 5:30 a.m. the day the bodies were found.
In carefully crafted questioning, Cochran led her through the moves made by the detectives who came to the house, by houseguest Brian ``Kato'' Kaelin and her own actions in the crucial hours that followed.
Although she wasn't allowed to relate Simpson's remarks because they are considered hearsay, she conveyed his distress and the fact that he called back from Chicago to ask about his two small children.
Arnelle Simpson left the stand after a gentle cross-examination by prosecutor Marcia Clark, who sought to cast doubt on her recollection of phone calls from her father.
by CNB