The candles burned in the living room and bathroom. New Age music filled the house. The bath was drawn. The bed sheets were ruffled.
Nicole Brown Simpson may have been planning for romance the night she was murdered, O.J. Simpson's lawyers suggested Wednesday, but police ignored these clues - and the possibility of a mysterious gentleman caller - in their investigation.Over and over, defense attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. pressed detective Tom Lange during cross-examination Wednesday. Did police check whether Nicole Simpson had a male visitor that night? Did they photograph the nine candles burning upstairs? Did they perform tests to determine if she had been raped?
The normally placid Lange, on the stand for the third day, bristled at the questions. He insisted that the only man to visit Nicole Simpson late the night of June 12 was Ronald Goldman. Sex, consensual or otherwise, never entered into the attack.
"In my observation and my experience, sex was the last thing on the mind of this attacker," Lange said, abandoning his usual dispassionate police lingo. "It was an overkill, a brutal overkill. There was no evidence of rape."
Cochran seemed taken aback by Lange's statement and tried to object in mid-sentence but was overruled. Court was recessed for the day moments later.
The cross-examination was part of a long-range defense attempt to portray the police investigation of the murders of Nicole Simpson and Goldman as sloppy and incomplete.
Lange is to return to the stand Thursday for more cross-examination.
Meanwhile, District Attorney Gil Garcetti said that he expected another juror to be dismissed next week. And a dispute was brewing over whether the defense would lose another key witness.
Prosecutors said in court papers that Kathleen Bell, the only witness the defense has to portray detective Mark Fuhrman as a racist, doesn't want to testify.
But Bell's lawyer, Taylor Daig-neault, said his client would testify if subpoenaed. Defense lawyers also said they were confident she would appear.
"So long as she is duly served with a subpoena, and I think she has, then she'll be called as a witness and she will testify," said attorney Carl Douglas.
Losing Bell would hamper one of the defense's most important lines of attack: arguing that Fuhrman was a racist who planted a bloody glove at Simpson's estate.
Two other witnesses also have run into problems.
Mary Anne Gerchas, who claimed to see four men leaving the area near the murder scene, has been arrested for allegedly defrauding a hotel out of room bills. And Rosa Lopez, a potential alibi witness, has threatened to return to her native El Salvador.
In court, meantime, Lange conceded under cross-examination that his investigation was flawed by failures to collect blood from a gate, preserve Nicole Simpson's stomach contents and test blood splattered on her back.