Just hours before his exwife’s murder, O.J. Simpson had a “spooky … frightening … bizarre look in his eyes” and stared repeatedly at Nicole Brown Simpson from the back of a school auditorium during their daughter’s dance recital, the victim’s sister testified Monday.
“It just didn’t look like the O.J. that we knew,” Denise Brown told jurors as she returned to the witness stand in Simpson’s double-murder trail. “It was more … like a glazed-over kind of frightening, dark eyes.”
Defense attorneys challenged Brown’s account, showing a home video of Simpson smiling, laughing and kissing Brown and her parents goodbye after the June 12 recital, about three hours before the slashing deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman.
Gently questioning Brown about her self-admitted “drinking problem,” defense lawyer Robert Shapiro also suggested that too many margaritas and shots of tequila had impaired her memory of two incidents in the 1980s in which she said Simpson had abused and humiliated her sister.
“I don’t mean to embarrass you, but on this particular evening, could you tell us how much you had to drink?” asked Shapiro, who hinted that another, sober member of the party recalled the incidents differently. “… Would you say that your state of sobriety was at least impaired?”
“Slightly,” Brown said.
Brown was followed on the witness stand by Candace Garvey, wife of former baseball great Steve Garvey, as defense and prosecution lawyers waged a long and contentious battle over Simpson’s demeanor the afternoon and early evening of the murders.
Garvey, whose daughter also danced at the recital, described Simpson as “vacant,” “nonresponsive” and “simmering” when she and her husband approached him before the 5 p.m. show - a “vast departure,” she said, from the “charismatic, gracious … happy” person she knew.
“He was not the same as I had ever seen him before,” Garvey said. “… When he stared at me, it was like he was looking right through me, and it scared me a little bit.”
Garvey said Simpson scarcely responded when she told him of the birth of her son. And she supported Brown’s account that Simpson sat off in a back corner of the auditorium at Paul Revere Middle School, away from the rest of the Brown family.
Brown said Simpson never spoke to his exwife at the recital, though he greeted other family members.
But she said, “Every time I turned around … he was staring at Nicole,” who was seated on the other side of the hall.
Brown said Simpson seemed less interested in the recital than in his ex-wife.
Defense lawyers vigorously challenged the women’s accounts. Suggesting that pictures were worth more than words, Johnnie Cochran returned over and over to the home video of a smiling, jocular Simpson, and to a still photograph of Simpson presenting his daughter with flowers after the recital.
“See that smile on Mr. Simpson’s face there?” asked Cochran as the photograph flashed on the courtroom’s giant monitor. “Does he look happy in that photograph to you?”
The courteous, even gentle cross examination of Denise Brown was a striking contrast to the defense grilling given last week to Ronald Shipp, a former police officer and longtime acquaintance of Simpson, who testified that Simpson told him he had dreamed of killing his ex-wife.
But Shapiro nonetheless managed to raise questions about Brown’s character and reliability as a witness.
In addition to establishing her as a former heavy drinker, he also noted that she had given birth to a son out of wedlock and, at 37, still lived at home.
At the end of the day, prosecutors tried to show that Nicole Simpson’s murder closely followed her final breakup with Simpson.
Cynthia Shahian, a friend and running partner of the victim, testified that Nicole Simpson was “devastated … angry” and “horrified” by a letter she received from her ex-husband on June 6, about a week before the murders.
In the formal letter, written on business stationery, Simpson advised his ex-wife that because of a “change in our circ*mstances,” she was no longer welcome to use his Rockingham Avenue address as her legal residence for tax purposes.
“What was the change in their relationship?” Darden asked Shahian.
“They were not together as a couple.”
“And did that change occur within a few weeks of Nicole Brown’s death?” Darden asked.
“Yes, it did,” she said.
