At first, the Akita started barking hysterically, soon joined by the yelps from a little black dog across the street. Suddenly, a young man shouted, "Hey! Hey! Hey!" A fast-talking man shouted back, but his words were unintelligible, drowned out by the din of the dogs.
A metal gate slammed. And then there were no more voices, just the dogs.This is what Robert Heidstra says he heard as he walked his own dogs in a Brentwood alley the night of June 12, 1994. The commotion, he said, came from the condominium of Nicole Brown Simpson. The next day, Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were found slashed to death.
O.J. Simpson's defense suggested Tuesday that Heidstra, an auto detailer who lives in an apartment a few blocks from the murder scene, heard the sounds of murder. And, the defense suggested, the timing favored the theory that Simpson couldn't have killed his ex-wife and her friend.
Heidstra told jurors he heard the Akita start barking at 10:35 p.m., and the black dog joined in a few minutes later, long after the 10:15 p.m. time the prosecution says the murders occurred.
Under the prosecution theory, Simpson was supposed to be at his house just before 10:45 p.m., crashing into the air conditioner behind Brian "Kato" Kaelin's guest house, where a bloody glove was found.
Heidstra's testimony, which was to resume Wednesday, capped a whirlwind day of eight defense witnesses, including six who were in the neighborhood the night of the slayings. They didn't give Simpson an alibi, but they narrowed the time by which he could have killed, changed clothes, driven five minutes to his house and caught a limousine to the airport for a flight to Chicago.
Two people on a blind date said they walked by Nicole Simpson's condominium about 10:25 p.m. and didn't see any bodies or hear any dogs barking, and one of Nicole Simpson's neighbors told jurors she was certain she didn't hear a dog barking until 10:35 p.m. The witnesses relied on a number of ways to pin times in their minds: the flossing of teeth, the time on a car's clock, the time stamp on a restaurant receipt.
"I think clearly, the prosecution theory that the murders took place at 10:15, allowing a window of opportunity, no longer is a viable theory," defense attorney Robert Shapiro said outside of court.
Law professor Laurie Levenson of Loyola University said the testimony was "enough to start raising questions - when exactly did this murder take place?"
"The defense is really trying to hit at the heart of the prosecution's case, which is the time period," she said. "I would term the testimony more perplexing. It raises the question, `Did they miss the murder by just a matter or minutes, or is the prosecution off on their time frame?' "
Heidstra testified that he was out walking his two dogs near Nicole Simpson's Bundy Drive condominium when he heard an Akita barking "like crazy." Nicole Simpson owned an Akita.
"I was a little confused," he said. "I didn't know what was going on there, and I was afraid for my dogs because the Akita is a big dog."