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Los Angeles Times

March 3, 1995, Friday, Home Edition
BYLINE: By JIM NEWTON and ANDREA FORD, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

SECTION: Part A; Page 1; Metro Desk

LENGTH: 2085 words

Rosa Lopez, the Salvadoran housekeeper whose testimony has occupied the mur-der trial of O.J. Simpson for nearly a week, admitted under cross-examination Thursday that she has given contradictory statements and that her recollections of some times, dates, conversations and other events are cloudy.

Lopez — who mostly remained calm on the stand but who fidgeted at times, twitching one leg and glancing around the courtroom under a persistent cross-examination by Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden — also acknowledged that she is not sure at exactly what time she saw Simpson’s car outside his house, only that she saw it sometime shortly after 10 p.m. on June 12.

In fact, Lopez’s recollections of times and dates were often fuzzy: About 50 times Thursday, she answered Darden’s questions with the words “no me recuerdo, senor,” Spanish for “I don’t remember, sir.”

Prosecutors pounced with particular vigor on one of the conversations that Lopez had difficulty remembering. Near the end of the court day, Darden cited a former employer of Lopez and asked whether the housekeeper told her in August that “O.J. Simpson is a great guy, and I’ll testify to anything, any time.”

“I don’t remember,” she answered.

“You’re not denying having made that statement then?” Darden continued, his voice rising slightly and his tone suggesting his disbelief.

“It’s that I don’t remember if I said that or not,” she answered.

“So you could have said that?” he asked.

“I don’t know, sir,” she said.

That testimony and other challenges to Lopez’s credibility create a quandary for defense lawyers: The jury has not been present to hear her account this week, but Simpson lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. told jurors in his opening statement that she would take the stand. If she does — or if the defense seeks to introduce the videotape of this week’s testimony — jurors will hear the questions about her truthfulness and memory. But if she does not, it may raise doubts in the minds of the jury as to why such a potentially significant witness was not called — an omission that prosecutors would surely mention in their closing argument.

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Lopez is important because she is the only person to have come forward with testimony that bolsters the defendant’s alibi. Prosecutors believe that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman were killed about 10:15 p.m. and that Simpson drove his Ford Bronco to and from the scene of the crime. Lawyers for Simpson, who has pleaded not guilty, have countered that their client was at home chipping golf balls or possibly napping at that time.

That makes Lopez’s observations on the night of murders important, particu-larly her statement that she saw Simpson’s car parked outside his house at 10:15 p.m. or 10:20 p.m. If true, that would back the defense contention that Simpson was home at that crucial time. On Thursday, however, she was less precise.

“All I said was that it was after 10,” she said.
“So you don’t know how long after 10?” Darden asked.

“No, sir,” she responded.

Darden began his long-awaited cross-examination with an aggressive attack on her credibility, but his approach alternated throughout the day, veering from pointed lines of questioning to gentle prodding. As the day progressed, he and Lopez sparred, usually without rancor but occasionally in more spirited ex-changes.

At one point, for instance, Darden asked her not to disclose an address listed on a piece of paper that he handed her. She read it silently, but then Darden mentioned the address in a question to her, prompting Lopez to scold him.

“See, you mention all over the world,” she said, speaking in English. “You’re so bad.”

A chastened Darden slapped himself on the hand.

Later, when Darden asked her to provide the court with her true name, Lopez balked.

“Why do you want my correct name?” she asked.

“This is a court of law,” Darden said, speaking slowly and looking directly at her. “And I’m a lawyer, and I’m asking the questions.”

Newspapers in El Salvador have reported that Lopez has used a number of dif-ferent names, but she explained in court Thursday that the names were drawn from different sides of her family. That is not uncommon in Latin American countries, however, and many immigrants also find that their names are jumbled by officials when they enter the United States.

Although it covered an array of topics, Darden’s questioning was focused largely on ferreting out statements by Lopez that might cast doubt on her truth-fulness and on possible incentives to lie. He elicited Lopez’s acknowledgment that she liked Simpson, and that she disliked his ex-wife because Nicole Simpson once allegedly slapped her housekeeper.

Cochran and F. Lee Bailey, another of Simpson’s lawyers, told reporters out-side court that they did not consider any of the contradictions in Lopez’s tes-timony to be significant. Many of the discrepancies, they said, were attribut-able to language difficulties.

“I think she is believable and credible on all the important issues on this,” Cochran said.

Prosecutors vehemently disagreed and spent all day attempting to dismantle Lopez’s testimony. Initially, Darden questioned Lopez about testimony she gave last week in which she appeared to deny having filled out unemployment insurance forms.

“I was given the applications, but I haven’t filled them out,” Lopez said during her initial appearance on the stand Friday, adding that she understood she was not eligible for insurance because she was planning to leave the coun-try. “Because I want to leave, that is why I have not taken them in, sir.”

On Thursday, however, Darden confronted her with a completed unemployment in-surance form and asked her about the apparent discrepancy.

“When you told us last Friday that you hadn’t filled out your unemployment forms, that wasn’t true, was it?” Darden asked over objections by Cochran. “That was a lie, correct?”

Lopez said it was not, blaming the misunderstanding on the fact that she had more than one set of forms and that she had completed some forms but not others. As Darden pressed on, Lopez appeared to become confused and eventually admitted that she had in fact filed for unemployment.

*
The attack on her unemployment records was followed by a reprise of a cross-examination that Darden effectively used last week to raise questions about whether Lopez really intended to flee to El Salvador. In that session, Darden confronted Lopez with evidence that she had not booked a flight for El Salvador, as she had testified.

Eager to have her repeat that testimony in this session — which is being re-corded in case the Simpson attorneys decide they want to present Lopez’s testi-mony but cannot coax her into the country to take the stand in person — Darden returned to the subject of the phantom plane reservations Thursday. As she did last week, Lopez acknowledged that her initial testimony about making those res-ervations was false.

After those early points, Darden’s questioning drifted to a variety of top-ics, probing, for example, the conversations that Lopez had with Simpson’s law-yers and investigators. At one point, Lopez agreed with Darden that one of Simp-son’s investigators, Bill Pavelic, had suggested slightly different times for some of her observations on the night of the killings,but she denied that he had planted those ideas with her.

A transcript of Pavelic’s July 29 interview with Lopez — a copy of which was obtained by The Times — does suggest that Lopez followed the private investiga-tor through a number of leading questions, including some on the topic of what time Lopez saw Simpson’s car. At one point, Lopez told Pavelic that she took her employer’s dog for a walk at about 10:15 p.m., and Pavelic responded by suggest-ing that it could have been 10:30 p.m. Lopez agreed with his suggestion.

Darden asked Lopez repeatedly about being coached, and suggested that Simp-son’s lawyers were attempting to direct her testimony in court Thursday. On one occasion, Cochran gestured as Lopez was speaking, but he angrily denounced a television report suggesting that he was attempting to signal to the witness.

In fact, Cochran said he was trying to get the attention of the court re-porter. The reporter supported that claim when Cochran asked her about it in court.

As Darden questioned Lopez over several hours, Cochran objected repeatedly, sometimes stating the reason for his objection in open court. That too angered Darden, who accused his counterpart of using his objections to send signals to Lopez about how she should answer.

Throughout the day, Darden’s cross-examination drifted to tangential issues that may undermine her credibility. Under questioning from Cochran, for in-stance, she had insisted that she had only been visited once by police; accord-ing to her, Detective Mark Fuhrman came to her employer’s door on the morning after the murders and questioned her briefly.

Lopez testified that Fuhrman told her that another officer would return to question her further, but she said no officer had ever followed up. On Thursday, however, Darden showed her a photograph of Detective Otis Marlow, a recently re-tired LAPD veteran who the prosecutor said had interviewed Lopez on June 28, the day that police served a search warrant at Simpson’s home.

Darden said that Marlow had asked the housekeeper about her observations on the night of the murders but that she had said she neither saw nor heard any-thing of significance. Lopez denied ever speaking to the detective, but prosecu-tors are preparing to call him to counter her testimony. Marlow was waiting at the courthouse Thursday in case he was needed.

According to law enforcement sources, Marlow met Lopez by chance on June 28 when the detective came to the home of her employers to question the couple. During that session, Marlow asked Lopez a few general questions about the night of the killings, and sources said she volunteered a few details. Marlow did not ask her about Simpson’s white Bronco, nor did she mention it, the sources said.

Marlow did not file a written report on the conversation, the sources said.

In fact, they added, the veteran robbery-homicide detective forgot their meeting until he saw Lopez’s photograph during televised news reports on Coch-ran’s opening statement. Although he could no longer recall her name, the sources said, he contacted the investigating officers and told them what he re-membered concerning the meeting with Lopez.

Marlow has since retired from the LAPD, and currently works as an investiga-tor for Los Angeles County’s alternate public defender.

Marlow was just one of several potential witnesses that Darden signaled are waiting in the wings to rebut Lopez’s testimony. Among others, Darden mentioned a friend of hers who may say that Lopez told her the two of them could get money if they testified to seeing Simpson’s car parked outside his house on the night of the killings.

When first asked whether she had told a friend that they could be paid $5,000 each for their testimony, Lopez said she could not remember. Pressed further, however, she acknowledged that it would be difficult to forget such a conversa-tion, and then said she was sure she had never said any such thing.

Darden also questioned Lopez’s insistence that she had never spoken to any reporters from various tabloid publications, including the National Enquirer. Time and again, Lopez denied ever speaking with the paper or ever trying to sell her story.

But David Perel, general editor of the Enquirer, disputed some of Lopez’s ac-count, saying that she did speak with reporters from the paper — first on June 13 and later in more far-ranging interviews — but adding that she never asked for money, nor was she offered any.

Lopez gave a different account to a reporter from Channel 7 who approached her that day, however. In a television clip played in court Thursday, Lopez tells the reporter that she heard either voices or noises — the exact word is difficult to discern because of her accented English — on the Simpson estate on the night of the murders.

Darden showed the clip to Lopez moments after she had testified that she had never talked to reporters about hearing voices. She said she had been trying to tell the reporter about noises, not voices.

Lopez is scheduled to return to the stand this morning, when cross-examination will continue.

Times staff writers Henry Weinstein, Tim Rutten and Tracy Wilkinson contrib-uted to this story.

LOAD-DATE: March 4, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo, (A30) Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. explains to Judge Lance A. Ito that he had signaled to court reporter, not a witness.  Pool Photo; Photo, (Southland Edition, A30) Rosa Lopez reviews her telephone bills with prosecutor Christopher Darden during O.J. Simpson trial.  Pool Photo

CBS News Transcripts
March 03, 1995, Friday

SHOW: CBS EVENING NEWS (6:30 PM ET)

ANCHORS: DAN RATHER
LENGTH: 397 words

DAN RATHER, anchor:
This was the week the murder trial of O.J. Simpson turned into the credibility trial of Rosa Lopez, the woman Simpson is counting on to provide him with an alibi. Writer Dominick Dunne of Vanity Fair magazine tells us Simpson was not at all pleased with the performance of his defense team this week. Dunne has a full-time seat in the courtroom. He joins us now as he does every Friday, our expert witness in the O.J. Simpson case.

Dominick, let’s talk about Rosa Lopez’s testimony. What do you make of it?

Mr. DOMINICK DUNNE (Vanity Fair): Well, I think Rosa Lopez has been an utterly fascinating character to watch. I mean, she has held this jury–this courtroom in the palm of her hand for over a week now. She’s been calling the shots. Judge Ito has–has–has been very deferential to her. What we have seen is a woman who took the stand and told lie after lie, or what appeared to be lie after lie. And it has caused a total breakdown, I understand, in the defense.

The other night, after it came out about the tape that Bill Pavelic said he had, after Carl Douglas said there was no tape–it is my understanding from someone on the defense team that O.J. Simpson went ballistic and he wanted to call the entire defense team together to read the riot act. He was furious that they had looked so bad by first saying that they didn’t have a tape and then later saying that they did have a tape.

RATHER: I want to talk about this investigator, Bill Pavelic. What do we know about him, the defense investigator who found the alibi provided, allegedly, supposedly, reportedly, by Ms. Lopez?
Mr. DUNNE: Well, he is a–a former member of the LAPD. And it’s my under-standing he has many, many gripes against the police department.
RATHER: What can we expect next week?
Mr. DUNNE: Well, next week, we still have to finish off with Detective Lange, and then we go into, finally, America’s most famous house guest, “Kato” Kaelin. And I think that could be very, very interesting. There’s all these stories about–in which Kato has told friends, elsewhere, that–a–a different version of the facts than what he told at the preliminary hearing.

RATHER: Interesting stuff.

Mr. DUNNE: OK.

RATHER: Thanks.

Coming up next on the CBS EVENING NEWS, the troupe of Russian ice dancers, now starring in Oklahoma?

LOAD-DATE: March 03, 1995, Friday

LANGUAGE: English

TYPE: Analysis

Los Angeles Times

March 2, 1995, Thursday, Home Edition

ito removes 4th juror from simpson panel

BYLINE: By ANDREA FORD and JIM NEWTON, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

SECTION: Part A; Page 1; Metro Desk

LENGTH: 1758 words

Ending weeks of investigation and anticipation, Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito excused another juror from the murder trial of O.J. Simpson on Wednesday, this time dismissing a man about whom prosecutors had expressed deep reserva-tions.

The juror, a 46-year-old Long Beach man named Michael Knox who wore a San Francisco 49ers cap during a recent jury field trip, became the fourth member of the panel to be excused since the trial began, leaving eight remaining alter-nates.

Knox, who is black, was replaced by a 38-year-old white woman from the San Gabriel Valley who described herself as a “touchy-feely” kind of person and who has complained about the confinement of serving as a sequestered juror.

On the questionnaire completed by all prospective jurors, the San Gabriel Valley woman said she was stunned when she learned that Simpson was a suspect in the June 12 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
“It seemed impossible” that Simpson could have committed the crimes, the woman said, insisting nevertheless that she had no opinion about his guilt or innocence.

Knox was ousted on a day without testimony in the Simpson trial, but the wrangling inside and outside court continued. Robert Tourtelot, a lawyer for Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman, denounced defense attorneys for suggest-ing that his client once possessed Nazi paraphernalia, and lawyers for the two sides returned to court in the afternoon to wrangle over evidence-sharing, a long-running issue in the case.

Robert L. Shapiro, the lawyer who built the highly touted defense team, took full responsibility for the defense’s failure to turn over some materials to prosecutors, but he urged Ito not to punish Simpson for the mistakes of his law-yers.

“If I have been in contempt of court, I will suffer appropriate sanctions,” Shapiro said. As he sat down, Simpson’s lead trial lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., leaned across Simpson and shook Shapiro’s hand.

The latest shift again alters the demographics of the Simpson jury both in terms of gender and race. The jury now consists of eight blacks, two whites, one Latino and one person of mixed ancestry. There are eight women and four men.

Knox was a juror whom Simpson’s defense team had eagerly welcomed on the panel. In recent weeks, he had sent several signals that he might be leaning to-ward Simpson, publicly wearing the cap of a football team for which Simpson had played and lingering over photographs in the defendant’s house despite Ito’s ad-monition to the panelists to ignore the pictures.

Ironically, Knox said after his dismissal that he thought prosecutors, who have not yet begun to present blood evidence that they say will link Simpson to the June 12 murders, were already making a powerful presentation.

“I think it’s going to be a fair verdict, and I think the prosecutor did a good job,” Knox told reporters who gathered outside his home. In meeting with journalists, Knox and his family seemed overwhelmed by their sudden fame.

“This is a very stressful situation,” said Beverly Knox, the excused juror’s wife. “I’m glad to have my husband home.”

Ito did not tell other jurors why their colleague had been excused, but sources said last week that the judge had tentatively decided to make the move after an investigation revealed that the man had failed to disclose a past alle-gation of domestic abuse on his jury questionnaire — an allegation that sources said was more than a decade old. Those sources denied a television report claim-ing that Knox had placed a bet on the outcome of the case.

The juror would not comment on the specific reason for his removal, saying that Ito asked him not to. He did say, however, that reports about him are false.

The change in jurors offered the panel its first opportunity to come to court since last week because the proceedings have been stalled by wrangling over the testimony of Rosa Lopez, a housekeeper who lived and worked next door to Simpson and who said his car was parked outside at the time that prosecutors believe the murders were committed.

Lopez’s testimony — which was interrupted earlier this week and is expected to resume today — is being taken without the jury present but is being recorded on videotape in case she leaves the country and refuses to return to testify during the defense’s case.

The jury’s appearance Wednesday was brief, but Ito used the opportunity to explain in general terms why the panel had not been called to court in recent days.

Ito apologized to the jury for the inconvenience but said he hoped the delays would be made more palatable by new entertainment being solicited for the panel. Specifically, Ito said producers of various Academy Award-nominated films would make tapes of their movies available to the Simpson jury.

As the jury has dwindled, concern has been raised about whether enough panel-ists are left to complete the trial, which is expected to last into the summer. Both sides expected to lose jurors before the case was over, but the pace and intensity of juror investigations has been more intense than the attorneys originally anticipated.

At the same time, however, the latest move solved one logistics problem. The jury box in Ito’s courtroom is only large enough to hold 20 people, so one al-ternate juror has been forced to sit outside the box, just a few feet from the prosecution table. That has created occasional problems, contributing, for in-stance, to the inadvertent broadcast of an alternate juror’s image on televi-sion.
Since that time, Court TV, which was responsible for the juror’s picture be-ing broadcast, has installed new measures to prevent a recurrence. The removal of the latest juror should also help prevent such an incident because there will be more room between the jury and government attorneys.

Outside court, meanwhile, Fuhrman’s lawyer blasted defense attorneys for sug-gesting that his client possessed Nazi paraphernalia. Fuhrman testified during last summer’s preliminary hearing that he found a bloody glove at Simpson’s es-tate, and since then, Fuhrman has come under steady assault by the defense team, which has accused him of racism and has suggested that he may have planted the glove.

In a motion filed this week, the defense asked for any police records relat-ing to an investigation of Fuhrman for “possession of a swastika or other Nazi-like symbol while at the West Los Angeles station house.” According to Tourte-lot, however, the only Nazi logo ever in Fuhrman’s possession was part of a car-toon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Conrad that pictured the ominous rise of fas-cism in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
“Conrad’s not a Nazi,” Tourtelot said. “Neither is Mark Fuhrman.”

Police sources have said that the department looked into why Fuhrman had the cartoon on his desk and found no wrongdoing by the detective. Tourtelot said his client collected cartoons by Conrad and had about 15 of them at the time a col-league cut out the one in question and left it on his desk.

Police sources said that Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman brought the mat-ter to the Police Department’s attention, and that department officials inquired about it at his request. No action was taken against Fuhrman, they said.

Although the two sides have spent most of the last week arguing over Lopez’s testimony, Wednesday’s courtroom sessions were devoted to a longstanding dispute in the trial over whether each side is properly sharing evidence under Califor-nia law.

In recent days, defense attorneys have acknowledged failing to promptly turn over some material. They have argued that any oversights have been inadvertent, but their position came under further attack after one defense lawyer assured Ito that all reports and other material related to Lopez had been turned over, only to be contradicted the same day by a defense investigator, Bill Pavelic.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark said Wednesday that the episode illustrated contempt for Ito’s orders and asked that the judge impose a series of harsh pun-ishments on the defense for what she called “a sinister scheme.” She requested that Ito tell the jury that the defense had deliberately withheld evidence from the prosecution, and she asked for permission to argue the significance of that conduct to the jury in the government’s closing argument.

So far, Ito has imposed only one sanction against the defense, ordering Coch-ran to pay Lopez’s hotel bills. Clark dismissed that as not nearly enough. Ges-turing at the defense table, she said: “I’m sure that’s been a great burden to the defense. We’ve got four millionaires over here paying what, a hundred a night?”

Defense attorneys admitted mistakes but said they were inadvertent and asked Ito not to grant the punishments sought by the prosecution.

“We screwed up,” said Gerald F. Uelmen, one of Simpson’s lawyers who returned to the courtroom Wednesday for the first time in weeks. “We admit that. We apologize for that. The only explanation we can make is that we are human.”

After the last lengthy session on the subject of evidence-sharing, Ito or-dered Simpson’s lawyers to immediately turn over any reports they had from the experts they intend to call at trial. Among the experts was Dr. Lenore Walker, a nationally recognized expert on battered woman’s syndrome. In his opening state-ment, Cochran said Walker had conducted a “battery of tests” on Simpson and had concluded that he showed no signs of antisocial behavior.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Cheri Lewis said that if such tests have been performed, prosecutors are entitled to see them. In a ruling issued Jan. 29, Ito agreed, ordering the defense to immediately disclose reports.

Since then, Lewis said, “They have produced zero.”

According to Uelmen, however, the various defense experts either have not completed reports or have not settled on the full scope of their anticipated testimony. Until that happens, Uelmen said, it is premature to ask the defense to turn over any documents.
According to Uelmen, defense attorneys cannot be required to assist prosecu-tors by turning over evidence that would help the government’s case.

Ito did not rule on the prosecution’s demand for immediate access to notes, reports and other material compiled by the defense experts. He said he would re-view the various experts and issue his ruling in writing.

Times staff writer Duke Helfand contributed to this article.

* INTO THE SPOTLIGHT: Former detective is a harsh critic of the LAPD. B1

LOAD-DATE: March 3, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo, Just the Facts: Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito excused an-other juror from the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. The juror, a black man, is the fourth to be excused since the trial began, leaving eight alternates. He was replaced by a 38-year-old white woman. Above, Ito talks to the jury about what happened.  Pool Photo; Photo, COLOR, (Orange County Edition, A1) Ex-Simpson ju-ror Michael Knox at Long Beach home. ; Photo, Michael Knox says Judge Lance Ito asked him not to reveal why he was removed from jury.  BARRETT STINSON / Los An-geles Times

Los Angeles Times
March 1, 1995, Wednesday, Home Edition

BYLINE: By JIM NEWTON and ANDREA FORD, TIMES STAFF WRITERS
SECTION: Part A; Page 1; Metro Desk
LENGTH: 2343 words

The potentially crucial testimony of Rosa Lopez, a housekeeper who could bolster O.J. Simpson’s alibi but whose credibility is in question, was interrupted Tuesday by disclosure of the contents of a tape-recording that prosecutors say casts new doubt on Lopez’s truthfulness.

Superior Court Judge Lance A. Ito, who has won Lopez’s repeated assurances that she will not leave the country until her testimony is completed, extracted yet another promise of cooperation from her Tuesday afternoon. But Lopez has grown increasingly assertive in the courtroom, and her latest pledge was delivered grudgingly and conditionally.

“I am very tired,” she told the judge. “I want to rest, sir. I don’t want any more questions.”

With that, Lopez wheeled and started to leave the courtroom, even though Ito had indicated that he wanted her to continue her special examination until the end of the day. Ito called her back and asked her whether she understood his order that she was to return Thursday for more testimony.

She said she did, and Ito allowed her to leave for the day, canceling the remainder of the session while the jury and alternates whiled away the afternoon at their hotel — where they probably will remain for the rest of the week.

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., Simpson’s lead trial attorney, is expected to resume his questioning of Lopez on Thursday morning, to be followed by Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden’s cross-examination, a session that could last all day.

In part, the lengthy arguments and questioning reflect the potentially great significance of Lopez’s testimony. She is the only witness to emerge so far who claims to be able to support Simpson’s alibi in the June 12 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, to which Simpson has pleaded not guilty.

Lopez testified Monday that she saw Simpson’s vehicle outside his house shortly after 10 p.m. on June 12, roughly the time that prosecutors believe the murders were committed.

If true, that would cast grave doubt on the prosecution’s theory that Simpson committed the murders, then drove from the murder scene to his Brentwood estate in his Ford Bronco, which would account for bloodstains found inside that vehicle.

By contrast, if prosecutors can show that Lopez is lying, it would deprive the defense of Simpson’s only known alibi witness and could make the defense team appear desperate in its efforts to defend the former football star.

With the stakes so high over Lopez’s testimony, Ito has been unusually accommodating of her in the face of her threats to leave the country and become unavailable to testify. Some legal experts were particularly surprised to see Ito call off Tuesday’s session early just because Lopez said she was too tired to continue.

“This was so bizarre,” said USC law professor Erwin Chemerinksy. “When was the last time you saw a witness say to the judge, ‘I’m tired, I’m not answering any more questions,’ and leave the courtroom? Imagine if (Los Angeles Police Detective) Mark Fuhrman said at 3 o’clock on a Tuesday, ‘I’m tired, I’m not testifying any more today.’ ”

Chemerinksy added: “She is a material witness. She doesn’t get to dictate the court schedule.”

Lopez’s truthfulness has been the central preoccupation of the Simpson trial since she took the stand Friday, asking for permission to be questioned as soon as possible so that she could leave the country for her native El Salvador. In her initial appearance, prosecutors leaped on a number of inconsistencies in her claims that she was preparing to leave and not return.

Since then, they have accused Lopez of telling different stories about her observations on the night of the murders, and they have contended that the defense team coached her answers and covered up discrepancies by failing to turn over reports and tapes until the last minute.

Just before Lopez took the stand Monday, defense attorneys turned over a statement given to their investigator July 29 but not previously shared with the prosecution. Prosecutors were angered by the late disclosure, but defense lawyer Carl A. Douglas promised that the report marked the last of their material related to Lopez, who lived and worked next door to O.J. Simpson.

But that assurance was contradicted by their own private investigator, former Los Angeles Police Detective Bill Pavelic. Called into court at the end of the day, Pavelic revealed that he had a tape-recording of a July 29 interview with her.
Prosecutors were furious to learn of that tape so late in the process, and their anger was stoked again Tuesday after listening to the tape for the first time.

“I have never heard anything like that,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Marcia Clark after listening to the 15-minute cassette. “I have never heard a witness basically coached and told what to say through every bend and turn.”

In court Tuesday, Clark pointed out two of what she said were many inconsis-tencies between the tape-recorded statement and later reports or testimony: Contrary to the investigator’s report of the interview, Lopez did not mention on the tape an acquaintance named “Sylvia” who could support her recollections; also contrary to Lopez’s testimony Monday, she claimed on the tape to have heard Simpson’s voice across the fence about 10 p.m., about when the murders were allegedly being committed.

Throughout both statements and the transcript of the tape-recording — copies of which were obtained by The Times — Lopez never wavers on the central point of her testimony, however: that she saw Simpson’s Ford Bronco outside his house about 8:30 p.m. on June 12 and that it did not appear to have been moved before the next morning, when she saw it in the same position.
When she testified Monday, Lopez said she heard Simpson’s voice from next door, but she placed the time at about 11 p.m., when Simpson was meeting a lim-ousine that took him to the airport. Lopez, who testified that she had been looking at her bedside clock throughout the evening, never said she had seen or heard Simpson about 10 p.m., when she said she went outside.
In addition, copies of the two statements prepared by Pavelic reveal that they are substantially the same, but there are discrepancies as well. Most significantly, in the report of the July interview, Lopez never explicitly refers to seeing Simpson’s vehicle outside his house about 10:15 p.m. She merely states that it did not appear to have been moved between about 8:30 p.m. that night and the next morning.

In the July statement, Pavelic wrote: “Ms. Lopez stated that at approximately (10:15 p.m. to 10:20 p.m.), she took her dog for a walk and five minutes later she returned to her residence.”

The next notation in the July 29 report refers to hearing Simpson’s voice at about 11 p.m.

But in the Aug. 18 report, Pavelic added a sentence with a more specific account of Lopez’s observations while walking the dog: “During this time,” Pavelic wrote, “Ms. Lopez again observed O.J. Simpson’s Bronco to be parked in the same position near the Rockingham gate.”

The later report, with its more helpful version of Lopez’s testimony, was the only document shared with prosecutors before the day that Lopez took the stand.

A transcript of the tape-recording of the July interview, however, backs the defense’s contention that Lopez has all along maintained that the car was parked outside at that time.

According to the transcript, which also was obtained by The Times, Pavelic asked Lopez: “So you take your dog for a walk about 10:15?

“10:15,” she responded.

“10:30, OK.” Pavelic said.

“Yeah,” Lopez said.

“Now, when you took your dog for a walk, could you still see the Bronco out-side?” Pavelic asked.

“Yes, yes,” she answered.

“The Bronco was in the same position?” the investigator continued.

“Same position, with the tires going out,” Lopez answered.

That transcript could strengthen Lopez’s credibility and head off prosecution arguments that she only remembered seeing the car in the second interview. The transcript does, however, suggest that Lopez, who speaks little English, was led through her answers by Pavelic, often merely answering yes or no as Pavelic posed detailed questions.

The July report also refers to “Sylvia,” a witness who Lopez allegedly told the investigator also saw Simpson’s Ford Bronco parked outside the house that evening. That would corroborate Lopez’s account, but prosecutors say that Sylvia Guerra disputes Lopez’s version and is prepared to testify.

Defense attorneys say the references to Sylvia, whose name does not appear in the transcript of the tape, were deleted from the Aug. 18 report at Lopez’s request because Sylvia, who is in the country illegally, did not want to be con-tacted by authorities.

Rarely at a loss for words, Clark was reduced to sputtering with anger about the late disclosure of those reports and the tape, which she said warranted se-vere sanctions against the defense for misconduct.
“To hear this tape was, was just, I’m speechless,” she said, shaking her head. “I’m speechless. To think that there was, I’m speechless. . . . I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Cochran accused Clark of overreacting to the tape’s contents and said the tape shows that Lopez was “entirely consistent,” not the coached liar that prosecutors portray her to be.

Although Cochran conceded that there were differences in the details of the reports written by Pavelic a few weeks apart, he downplayed the significance of the differences and noted that the reports were done in the investigator’s words. Only the tape is Lopez’s verbatim account, he said, adding that he is confident that it will not undermine the witness’s credibility with the jury.

“Let’s play it for the jury,” Cochran said.
Cochran said he too was surprised to learn of the existence of the tape in court Monday, and Pavelic told Ito that he had not told any of the attorneys about the tape before Monday’s hearing. Ito, however, seemed to doubt Pavelic’s truthfulness, noting that he got slightly different answers about the existence of additional reports or notes concerning Lopez before and after placing Pavelic under oath.

Although Ito acknowledged that he had not at first questioned Pavelic specifically about a tape-recording, Pavelic had not volunteered that information either, and Ito accused the investigator of not responding in the spirit of the question — which was intended to determine whether additional information existed.

Ito has asked lawyers and investigators to be in court today so that he can question them about compliance with state evidence-sharing laws. Prosecutors have asked that the defense be punished for withholding documents, reports, notes and other materials related to Lopez and to defense experts mentioned by Cochran in his opening statement.

Although few experts predict that Ito will resolve all the remaining evidence questions today, the session offers him an opportunity to grapple with the issue and to avoid wasting the day entirely.

Although Lopez is scheduled to continue her interrupted testimony Thursday, her respect for Ito and even his apologies have not softened her apparent determination to leave for El Salvador.

After Tuesday’s session, she appeared bitterly disappointed that she would not be able to leave today, as she had hoped. When the hearing concluded, she sat down on the edge of a hallway bench in the courthouse, buried her head in her hands and wept. She was comforted by Simpson’s friend Robert Kardashian and by various members of Simpson’s family.

The sight of the well-known figures hunched over the crying woman attracted a crowd of gawkers, and after a few minutes, the small contingent headed back into the courtroom. Lopez was allowed to leave the building by a special exit, avoid-ing the crowds of reporters and camera operators who have set up camp outside every day.

In another development Tuesday, a transcript released by the court offered the first official confirmation of the interest that the judge and lawyers have taken in allegations regarding one of the jurors, a 46-year-old African American man whom prosecutors want ousted from the panel. The Times reported last week that Ito had tentatively decided to excuse that juror because of a past incident of domestic abuse involving him that he did not disclose on his extensive juror questionnaire.

The lawyers have declined to comment on allegations of juror misconduct, saying Ito has asked them not to. But in the transcript of the discussion of Lopez’s testimony, Ito refers to the juror by his number and says, “We’ll worry about (him) and this other problem probably not until Wednesday.”

Prosecutors have been particularly concerned about that juror — who wore a San Francisco 49ers cap during a recent jury field trip and who paused over pho-tographs of Simpson at the former football player’s house despite Ito’s admoni-tion to jurors to ignore the pictures.

The prolonged arguing over Lopez’s testimony has left the jury out of court for several days and has delayed the long-anticipated appearance on the witness stand of Detective Fuhrman.

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Police Department sources confirmed that Deputy Dist. Atty. William Hodgman had asked the department’s Internal Affairs Division to investigate two allegations against the detective: that he had once possessed Nazi paraphernalia and that he had commented on Nicole Simpson’s anatomy and possibly suggested that he had had a relationship with her.

Police sources said those allegations were determined to be unfounded, however, and that their conclusions have been shared with the district attorney’s office.

Fuhrman’s background has been the subject of intense scrutiny for months, and his lawyer, Robert Tourtelot, wrote to the Los Angeles County Grand Jury on Tuesday asking for an investigation into how some of the detective’s personnel records had landed in the hands of journalists. There was no immediate response.

Times staff writer Henry Weinstein contributed to this article.

LOAD-DATE: March 2, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: Photo, (Southland Edition, A11) O.J. Simpson is surrounded Tuesday by attorneys Robert Kardashian, Robert L. Shapiro and F. Lee Bailey. Pool Photo; Photo, (Orange County Edition, A3) Former Los Angeles Police Detective Bill Pavelic answers questions about tape that surfaced Tuesday and angered and surprised prosecutors. Associated Press; Photo, COLOR, (Orange County Edition, A1) Housekeeper Rosa Lopez KEN LUBAS / Los Angeles Times