Masterful display, but to what end?

— -- Despite prodigious efforts before the trial and even now during the trial, the prosecutors in the Aaron Hernandez murder case have no murder weapon to present as evidence in court.

It is a serious problem, and they recognize it. In the absence of the weapon, lead prosecutor William McCauley spent an hour Thursday brandishing before the jury five shell casings found at the scene of the Odin Lloyd murder, and two bullets removed from Lloyd's body.

For each of the shell casings, he deliberately opened one evidence envelope and then another envelope and placed them on the rail in front of North Attleboro police Lt. Frederick DeMarco, asking each time: "Is this one of the casings you found [at the scene]?"

That was not enough. McCauley then walked across the courtroom and put the casings, one at a time, on the projector that beamed them onto the screens in front of the jurors. A less-experienced prosecutor would have put them all on the screen in a group. But McCauley made each one a feature attraction, moving the casings from flat on the screen to upright to make sure the jurors had plenty of time to see each piece of the lethal evidence from all angles.

He did it again with the next witness, former state trooper Edward Reese, who picked up the casings at the scene of the murder in June 2013 and transported them to the state crime lab in Lakeville for ballistics testing. McCauley again showed the casings, one at a time, to Reese at the rail, just a few feet from the jurors and then flashed them on the screens -- again slowly, again one at a time.

By the time McCauley had finished with his elaborate presentation of the casings, everyone in the courtroom knew the prosecution exhibits by number and had the feeling they were the most important exhibits thus far in the trial. He even had Reese describe the four manufacturers of the five casings, a detail not often discussed in trials involving guns.

McCauley was not done. He brought up two more brown evidence envelopes to Reese and slowly removed their contents -- the two bullets that had were removed in an autopsy. Reese identified one and then the other, and then prosecutor McCauley went back to the projector.

When he finished the process of placing the bullets on the projector and adjusting its focus, the bullets looked like something that had been fired from a huge howitzer.

As McCauley presented the casings and the bullets, there was nothing the Hernandez legal team could do. It is a highly skilled and talented group of lawyers, but they sat quietly, knowing that any attempt to object or to stop the process would be overruled by the judge. McCauley was totally within the rules with each question, each envelope, each casing, each bullet, and each of the images on the courtroom screens.

It may be the best that the prosecution will be able to achieve on the issue of the murder weapon. The police discovered similar ammunition in Hernandez's home during a search shortly after the murder. It would have been a powerful piece of evidence if McCauley were able to compare the bullets found in the home with the shell casings found at the scene of the murder. But Judge E. Susan Garsh barred the use of the ammunition found in Hernandez's home in a ruling before the trial began.

Even with McCauley's strong performance on Thursday, the lack of a murder weapon remains a serious problem. In a previous case involving a football star and murder, the prosecution had powerful blood and forensic evidence but no murder weapon, and O.J. Simpson was found not guilty.