Testimony Aimed At Moving Back Time Of Murders

LOS ANGELES - 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 dead.

O.J. Simpson's defense suggested yesterday that Heidstra, 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.

WHIRLWIND DAY FOR DEFENSE

Heidstra's testimony, which resumes today, 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.

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." She owned an Akita.

He said he led his dogs, one on a leash, one walking beside him, down an alley and behind a row of homes. Soon, a little black dog started barking. It was about 10:40 p.m., he said.

"All of a sudden, I heard two voices," Heidstra testified. He described hearing a young man say, "Hey! Hey! Hey!"

Then, he said, "I heard another voice, fast-talking back to him. I could never hear, the dogs were barking so loud. . . . It sounded like an argument."

Finally, he heard a gate slamming. "I recognized the gate immediately," he said. "That's the gate the Akita is behind."

NOTHING SEEMED AMISS

Earlier, the couple on the blind date testified that no dog wailed and nothing seemed amiss when they strolled past Nicole Simpson's condominium at 10:25 p.m., a time prosecutors say she was lying dead in a pool of blood at her front gate.

Under pointed cross-examination by Marcia Clark, both witnesses acknowledged they never made a conscious effort to look up the walkway, where the bodies were found.