You can do better, guys. Maybe run with Wife Killer Dies Unrepentant.
Since Simpson died, jokes have abounded on social media. Hilarious. The man literally got away with two vicious murders. He died unpunished and impenitent. His second wife, Nicole Brown, had her life abruptly and violently ended, virtually decapitated at Simpson’s hands. Ron Goldman, a waiter and friend of Brown’s, also died in the frenzied attack. Simpson would go on to live a further 30 years before dying of prostate cancer.
Simpson tormented Nicole Brown throughout their marriage. Prior to her murder she confided to family members of 62 separate incidents of abuse. On one occasion he broke her arm. He physically abused her in public, in front of family and friends. She was conflicted, as many domestic violence victims are, and for the most part declined to contact police. But when she did, and there are eight recorded instances where police were summoned, on all but one occasion, the LAPD arrived and chatted amiably with Simpson, the football star before taking no action. Only once was he arrested but charges were not proceeded with.
Brown divorced Simpson citing “irreconcilable differences” but the abuse went on as it had for 17 years virtually from the moment Brown met Simpson, until the evening of June 12, 1994.
There is some evidence that Simpson was high on methamphetamine at the time of the murders. It’s probable but it offers no excuse for what happened. Simpson was driven by jealousy and had been continually stalking his ex-wife, often issuing threats.
The crime scene was a real life horror show. The alarm was first raised when Goldman’s dog was spotted uninjured but splattered in blood.
What crime scene investigators found were the bodies of Brown and Goldman without significant defensive wounds, showing few signs of resistance, revealing that Simpson had essentially ambushed his victims.
Goldman was already dead when Simpson placed his foot on Brown’s body. The woman was already mortally wounded when Simpson pulled her head back and cut her throat. By the time police arrived at the murder scene, Nicole Brown had her carotid artery and C3 vertebrae severed. Goldman sustained multiple stab wounds to his head, neck and torso.
This was not a random attack or a robbery gone wrong. The crime scene showed a rabid, furious personal attack.
Simpson then led police on a televised chase through Los Angeles – hardly the actions of an innocent man before being convinced to come in and let the lawyers fight it out in a trial that became known as the trial of the century.
I recall rousing at some ungodly hour in eastern Australia to watch the verdict but experienced no shock when he was declared not guilty. One of the jurors would later be interviewed to declare that she believed Simpson was guilty and ten or possibly nine of her associates on the jury were in agreement.
After the acquittal, the New York Times ran with this confused euphemism:
“Orenthal James Simpson, a man who overcame the spindly legs left by a childhood case of rickets to run to fame and fortune, surmounted a very different sort of obstacle today, when a jury of 10 women and two men cleared him of charges that he murdered his former wife and one of her friends.”
The Simpson trial occurred in the wake of racial tensions in Los Angeles. The LA riots in 1992 on the back of Rodney King being viciously beaten by members of the LAPD. The trigger had been the shooting of a young black girl by a Korean-American shop owner. White men, Latinos and Asian Americans were dragged from their cars and beaten, or their shops set ablaze.
I was travelling in LA about three months after the riots had ended. Driving in LA offers a rapid descent from the sublime to the outright dangerous in a very short space of time, sometimes from one intersection where the city’s upper middle classes live in large, spacious homes to a block away where some of America’s worst poverty is on full display.
I made the crucial mistake of leaving the freeway while en route from Glendale to Anaheim and became horribly lost in South Central LA, driving through Inglewood and Watts, desperately seeking the freeway entrance. Any freeway entrance would do.
I pulled into a service station for directions but the cashier sitting behind bulletproof glass was of no use. Finally, a large Latino man with his family loaded up in a service station offered to show me the way. That was my experience of South Central LA with the fires barely extinguished – an act of kindness from a man who owed me nothing but drove out of his way to point me in the right direction.
It summed up the societal divisions not just in LA but the US in one slightly scary moment.
Simpson, who had spent his life ignoring calls from black activists to become involved in black politics, exploited these racial tensions. A systemically corrupt police force that had lost the confidence of Los Angelinos contributed in no small part to Simpson walking on the two murders.
According to the Celebrity Net Worth — these sites contain spurious estimates at best, Simpson had $4 million in assets and cash at the time of his death. He was drawing an NFL pension at around $14,000 a month for life. The families of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman will be sifting through Simpson’s estate and intend to seek compensation. Previous attempts to strip Simpson of his assets on unlawful death civil actions were successful in the courts but led to virtually no drain on Simpson’s bank accounts. Simpson was free to play golf until 2008 when he was convicted of 12 counts of robbery in Las Vegas and served a nine-year jail sentence.
His last public appearance was a short video prior to the Superbowl where Simpson sported a 49ers T-shirt. He explained that he had experienced a serious illness but was expecting to be back on the golf course soon. Nice.
But we can move in from the niceties now. Put OJ Simpson’s body in a bin liner and take him out with the trash.
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On Friday morning the UK Telegraph ran with the headline, “OJ Simpson dies aged 76 surrounded by family.”