In L.A.’s Forensic Attic, Evidence of Famous Crimes : Courts: Bloodstained glove in Simpson case will join items, like gun that killed Robert Kennedy, in city storage<i> .</i>

Now, one bloodstained glove--brown leather, right-handed, found on the grounds of the O.J. Simpson estate quite early one June morning--will take its place in a vigilantly tended collection of dissonant objects that fall under the plain, broad heading of “evidence.”

All this week, all the week before, this glove was literally the gauntlet thrown down as defense and prosecution battled eloquently to keep it out, to get it in.

Hereafter, the glove with the ribbed back is likely to be trundled in and out of court, photographed, tested, labeled, numbered, signed in and signed out of custody for as long as it takes the law to run its course.

It joins more than a million items in Los Angeles’ forensic attic; in secured courthouse evidence rooms, in police warehouses, freezers, vaults and specialized labs across Downtown are catalogued paraphernalia and ephemera from mayhem as old as the spectacular Black Dahlia dismemberment of 1947, and an unsolved murder from the last year of the Roaring ‘20s.

Through Los Angeles’ courtrooms and legal storehouses have come exhibits that have horrified and riveted and titillated: the gun that shot Robert F. Kennedy . . . an entire hotel room wall, with a peephole through which detectives said they witnessed a long-ago mayor having sex in front of a minor . . . gory Manson-abilia . . . Heidi’s black book . . . an experimental three-wheeled car called the Dale, subject of a fraud case.

The constitutional questions absorbed the week’s legal debate; there were cheers around Parker Center on Thursday morning when officers watching the preliminary hearing heard the judge rule in favor of the detectives who had entered Simpson’s estate that morning without awarrant, and found the glove and blood spots.

Before it can be stored by the rules, it has to be collected by the rules.

Getting the photos of blood spots and glove from the Rockingham Avenue estate to the 9th-floor courtroom involved what every movie and mystery fan knows as “the chain of evidence,” the steps police are supposed to take to certify that the shoe or pistol or bindle of cocaine collected in the field is the same one that shows up in court.

“Experience of the incidents where police aren’t careful teaches the importance” of this continuity, says USC constitutional law professor Erwin Chemerinsky. “My guess is there is going to be in any police department some horror story of police screwing up, losing custody of evidence, not being able to account for it for some period of time--and (having) that coming out in court as the possibility of contamination.”

One that still sends up flares at the Los Angeles Police Department is the gun used in the Manson murders. A little boy found it, turned it over to an officer (who put his own prints on it), and “we had it for months before we knew we had it”--the most sought-after murder weapon in town, said Lt. John Dunkin, a former Central division homicide detective, now an LAPD press spokesman.

Retired Assistant Chief David D. Dotson, a veteran of more than 30 years, remembers occasions when “some evidence was discovered and it was locked in the trunk of a car at the scene, never very far out of sight of the officers or for very long . . . in my mind (that) did not really break the chain of continuity, but ideally I suppose you would not want that to happen.”

Times change, techniques change.

Dunkin has to laugh at the memory of old “Dragnet” shows, Jack Webb preserving prints on a gun by poking a pencil down the barrel to lift it. Poor Sgt. Friday. Nothing could be worse--sticking something in the barrel can change the ballistics.

Detectives and criminalists have to secure each piece they collect in envelopes, or with wrapping or tags. The envelopes now are color-coded: gray for blood and saliva, brown for “debris” and pubic hair, yellow for narcotics, a specially labeled one for handguns, sealed and signed.

Bloody evidence like the brown leather glove is placed in brown paper bags to allow it to dry out. If sealed in plastic, it would putrefy, destroying its value as evidence.

Dotson, who says evidence is secured with a seal “unique” to the collector, remembers that “way back when, we used to use hot wax and fingerprints, literally.”

Parker Center’s vast property room is open and hopping 24 hours a day. A roll of brown wrapping paper is mounted on a table so officers can wrap bulky items of evidence, and racks of tags await evidence too ungainly for wrapping.

Past the secured doors, the “biohazard” storage freezer and the vaults for drugs and cash, the door labeled “poison,” is an airless storehouse of shelves sagging under the weight of the evidence of human misbehaving:

Crossbow; tennis racket; half a brick; racks of rifles and shotguns (and a violin case holding a Tommy gun that “reminds you of an Elliot Ness movie,” said a property officer); white envelopes, each containing a handgun, coming in at a clip of nearly 10,000 a year; sets of scales still white with drug residue; a papier-mache pig’s head from some anti-LAPD demonstration . . . and a suffocating smell that officers identified as the commingled remnant odors of cocaine, marijuana and PCP.

When Dotson retired two years ago, “they were attempting to use a bar code system to keep track.”

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What does happen to life-or-death evidence years after, when justice has run its string?

Notorious souvenirs of crimes that once riveted a nation have made their way to the auction block as high-priced collectibles. John Wilkes Booth’s backup Derringer, carried into Ford’s Theater the night he shot Abraham Lincoln, fetched $77,000.

Lee Harvey Oswald’s toe-tag sold for $6,600, and the .38-caliber Colt Cobra that Jack Ruby bought for $62.50 from a Dallas gun shop--the same one he used to kill Oswald--brought $220,000 from a collector.

Some of Los Angeles’ most desirable crime collectibles are reportedly well-archived. The Sirhan gun is in the custody of federal archives. Many Manson records are still in the hands of the district attorney’s office.

During trial, after trial, after appeals, the humbler objects repose in the exhibit storage, a part of the courthouse so secured “you need an Act of Congress to get into” it, said one county sage.

The inventoried objects number perhaps a quarter-million, some still in court, some long since dispensed with, an encyclopedic criminal collection from photos of child-abuse victims to mannequins exhibiting death-wounds.

There is a close-order drill for how and when to dispose of these things. Several offices may have to sign off on a disposal order; some of Superior Court exhibits custodian Ralph Stephens’ bulky files, on murder cases, for example, go back 30 and 40 years.

His “ongoing purge” of obsolete exhibits does not extend to selling them to collectors.

Even the guns, says Mike Chavarela, assistant division chief in these parts, get melted down, not sold; he heard that the last batch will go to help rebuild the Coliseum.

Some things get junked--an old brick that may have been used to clunk somebody on the head--and some, like decent old clothes, goes to a Downtown mission. “We were giving to the Salvation Army,” but it “got to the point they didn’t want it any more.”

From down here, the place people call “the dungeon,” the flow of thousands of bits from the hundreds and hundreds of criminal cases each year looks dismayingly Sisyphean.

“We kind of wish,” says Chavarela wistfully, “they wouldn’t have so much stuff.”

* ON THE SCENE: Images From the Simpson Drama