The Simpson Case Just Won’t Disappear

The sight of O.J. Simpson in Manhattan last week, shamelessly making the rounds of whichever TV shows would let him plug his $9.95 Internet chat Thursday night--Step right up and log on, folks!

Just $5 a murder!--took me back to the summer of 1994, back when jury selection for Simpson’s trial had just begun and I was standing on the street not a block from Nicole Brown Simpson’s Brentwood home, interviewing her disgusted neighbor John, who didn’t want his full name published because “only bad things could happen to me.”

It wasn’t a scream, a dog’s baying, or even the whine of a getaway car’s tires that awoke John that banging on doors all the way down Bundy Drive at about 2 a.m., asking questions, explaining two people had just been found slashed dead. By dawn, the beat-beat-beat of the TV news helicopters started. Then came the news that O.J. might be involved.

Nearly three months had passed when John and I spoke. And yet, by the townhouse gate where Nicole and Ron Goldman died, an unebbing procession of cars disgorged gawkers with cameras swaying from their wrists. The day I visited, a 40-something man and three women walked down from the scene, and the man slowly ran a finger along his neck from his Adam’s apple to his left ear.

Then, delighted with himself, he laughed.

Months went by. During the unblinking media coverage of the Simpson saga, it often seemed as though the case had become almost sanitized real-life murders reduced to a surreal TV show, a whodunnit that kept everyone turning the page for more. A writer for Esquire actually termed the case another point on the continuum of “Murder as Art,” a phrase that still strikes me as an obscenity.

Two people were murdered. Two children lost a mother. Another family lost a 25-year-old brother and son. Violence left everything it touched somehow changed.

The case provoked discussion on everything from racial divide in America to domestic violence. It’s been propped up as a cautionary tale about the artifice of celebrity, the corrosive influence of money and fame.

Most of all--then and now--what the Simpson case requires is nothing less than a contemplation of evil. The disturbing way trouble slinks up on victims rather than announcing itself.

The Simpson case forced us to ask, “Can a man be pleasant company and a murderer both?” The chilling answer is of course.

Perhaps that’s why if you know the sparest details of the case--how Nicole was nearly decapitated by a single knife cut; how one of the 47 stab wounds Goldman absorbed nearly sliced off his left ear--a look into the display window at the Ross Cutlery Store just four blocks from Simpson’s courthouse could haunt you even now, six full years after the murders took place.

Court testimony indicated Simpson bought a long knife at the store a few weeks before the murders. Knowing even just that, the scores of saw-toothed knives and curved scimitars on display there suddenly seemed worse than stylized “collector’s items” with brand names like First Blood; suddenly the knives seemed capable of destructive potential, violent intent.

Similarly, it could be a little unsettling even today if you head to Brentwood at about 10:30 on a Sunday night--the same night of week, approximately the same time police believed Nicole and Goldman were killed--and, knowing what you know, you approximate in your car a path that prosecutors alleged Simpson could’ve taken home that night. What screeched through the mind of the fleeing murderer, whomever it was? How fast might someone have dared take the curving roads? Could Simpson really have not drawn attention to himself if, indeed, he had killed twice while his two children slept? Starting at Nicole Brown Simpson’s gate with your dashboard clock reading 10:31 p.m. you would find only six minutes have elapsed when the two-mile ride is through--only six minutes from the blood-covered Mexican tile steps on Bundy to Simpson’s estate on Rockingham even if you catch two red lights and your car travels no faster than 40 mph on the increasingly dark road, the tires squealing an ever-so-slight complaint on--the bends.

None of that makes Simpson guilty of murder; he was acquitted. But it makes people wonder. And that’s the hurdle he still can’t clear, the problem Thursday night’s Internet “event” won’t help.

No matter what story Simpson spins now, the reality is two people are dead, two children remain motherless. Evil continues to resonate long after a fist is landed, a knife withdrawn, two heartbeats stopped.

And murder is not a TV show, or an Internet “event,” or art just as it was only an illusion back when a visit to Nicole’s cemetery in Orange County revealed newer grass atop her (then) unmarked grave seemed to blend in nearly seamlessly with the old, as if the earth had never really opened up and swallowed her or Ron Goldman whole.