Earlier, in exacting detail, Mr. Bodziak described his detective work to match the bloody honeycombed tread found at the crime scene at 875 South Bundy with a particular make of shoe. There was no such shoe print, he said, in the F.B.I.'s own extensive file, although he speculated that the shoes were expensive and made by a South American or Italian manufacturer. Letters sent to such manufacturers produced a match with the Bruno Magli model, as did a letter to the national police agency in Tokyo.

The witness -- a blunt man who used foreign pronunciations almost apologetically, as if worrying about sounding pretentious -- then described the complex procedure in which he extrapolated from tread fragments to conclude that the prints had been left by size 12 Bruno Magli shoes, with soles made by a subcontractor called Silga. Superimposing plastic transparencies of prints taken from such shoes over photographs taken at the crime scene, he said that footprint after footprint confirmed his conclusion.

A man who has focused on footwear for 22 years, Mr. Bodziak used both the language of cobblers (like the "lasts" around which "uppers" and "lowers" are stitched) and forensics (like the "squeegee effect," which takes place when blood nestled in a shoe's treads migrates beyond its original location).

For the prosecution, the talk of shoe prints provided a welcome breather after last week's debacle, when Mr. Simpson tried on the gloves that prosecutors say he wore on the night of the killings. Two prosecutors, Marcia Clark and Christopher A. Darden, said in court this morning that they would revisit that issue, presumably to prove that the gloves had shrunk or that Mr. Simpson had been acting when he said they were too tight.

"They haven't had enough of the gloves, Your Honor?" Mr. Simpson's chief lawyer, Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., asked Judge Lance A. Ito almost gloatingly. "O.K., we'll be ready."

Mr. Bodziak's testimony brought the prosecution closer to the end of its direct case, which could be rounded out this week with testimony from at least two witnesses about further instances in which they say Mr. Simpson struck Mrs. Simpson. Prosecutors will also offer testimony on the statistics involving DNA and about hair and fibers that, they say, link Mr. Simpson to the crime scene. By day's end, a buyer from Bloomingdale's, Samuel Poser, was poised to take the stand.

Seeking to defuse defense arguments that two assailants may have been involved, Mr. Bodziak said that of the shoe prints that were distinct, all were made by the same footwear, and there was nothing to suggest that the indistinct ones had been left by a second person.