The OJ Simpson case had it all – questions of race and class, the sheen of celebrity, grisly details, snappy lines, the smudge of police misconduct, television cameras, more television cameras. Everything, that is, except a murder weapon.



All that may have changed on Friday morning, when Los Angeles police captain Andy Neiman stood before yet another bank of cameras and confirmed that the department was examining a knife allegedly discovered on the grounds of the former football player’s former estate in the wealthy Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.

The weapon had been held for years by a retired police officer who, fittingly, was moonlighting on a movie set in the 1990s when a construction worker handed the knife to him. The worker said he had found it on the athlete’s property, two miles from where Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman were stabbed to death in 1994.

Whether or not the knife is connected to the case, Simpson was acquitted of the brutal killings in 1995. Legal experts posit that he cannot be prosecuted for the crime again because the US constitution prohibits so-called double jeopardy, even if the knife really was used in the crime. That itself is a big question.

And, just like that June day in 1994 when Brown Simpson’s body was found, nearly decapitated, sprawled on the walkway steps of her condominium, audiences tuned in for news of a crime that riveted the nation and drew interest from around the world.

The LAPD news conference was televised live on Friday morning by stations that set up cameras in downtown Los Angeles long before Neiman even appeared. In between weather, traffic and headlines came the occasional peek at an empty lectern bristling with microphones.

“More people watched the OJ preliminary hearing than watched the Gulf war coverage,” said Laurie Levenson, a professor at Loyola Law School who served as legal analyst for CBS during the gavel-to-gavel televised trial.

“It was unprecedented,” Levenson added. “It contributed to the growth of cable’s 24-hour news cycle. It was celebrity. The characters were fascinating. It was a whodunnit. It was the beginning of DNA. There were other high-profile cases. But this one had a life of its own.”

People still remember where they were when Simpson led police on a nearly two-hour, low-speed chase in a white Ford Bronco through the rush hour-clogged streets of Los Angeles. When the verdict in his murder trial was announced, an estimated 150 million people tuned in, making it the most-watched event in TV history at the time. Bill Clinton watched from the White House.

“Nothing else approaches it in media magnitude since,” said Franklin E Zimring, Simon professor of law at UC Berkeley. “This was an outlier in terms of the whole of the criminal process being a media event. I think it was probably much more important for that reason than any impact it might have had on substance.”

The case spurred discussion of domestic violence – of what traps women in dangerous relationships, of when and why partners can turn deadly – but did not result in legal reform. Brown Simpson regularly called police to report abuse that she suffered at the hands of the athlete, although little came of that either. According to the Los Angeles Times, Simpson beat Brown Simpson badly enough in 1989 that she required treatment at a hospital.

It offered a window into a racially polarized America. Levenson was at the courthouse every day of the trial and recalls the crowd’s response when Simpson was acquitted.

“Literally the streets divide in half,” she said. “You see blacks on one side, whites on the other, blacks cheering, whites looking like they got hit by a meteor.”

At the end of a broadcast that day she was asked: “So, Professor Levenson, in the 10 seconds remaining, what does this tell us about justice?”

“I said, ‘That will be debated for years to come.’ OJ is just going to continue to be a fascination for people.”

It also brought into wide usage an accepted euphemism for a reviled racial epithet – “the N-word”. The actual slur rang through the courtroom during the months-long trial, with witnesses testifying that detective Mark Fuhrman used the term on a regular basis.

But recordings were played during trial of the disgraced former detective – who had been investigated before the case went trial over allegations he had picked up a bloody glove near Brown Simpson’s and Goldman’s bodies and had taken a bloody glove to Simpson’s home – spewing racist rants, boasting of police brutality and using the N-word over and over.

“‘The N-word’ [as a phrase] comes out of this trial,” recounted Jim Newton, who covered the Simpson case from crime to verdict and now teaches and edits the magazine Blueprint at UCLA. Prosecutor “Chris Darden, he recounted, made a motion that no one should be able to use the racial slur in court. “ Johnnie [Cochran, a Simpson defense attorney] argued the opposite,” said Newton. “He said it was condescending to African Americans. Johnnie prevailed.”

Although it was a showcase of deeply flawed police practices, the Simpson case was only “a minor disaster” for the LAPD, said Berkeley’s Zimring, noting that the police beating of Rodney King two years earlier was far worse. The officers were acquitted and rioting ensued.

“In the annals of homicide investigation, [the Simpson case] was problematic in the extreme,” Zimring said. “But in terms of police-community relations, this was a minor disaster given some of the major disasters that preceded it.”

In fact, the LAPD press conference about the knife discovery came 25 years and one day after the Rodney King beating. It also occurred midway through a cable mini-series on the Simpson case called The People v OJ Simpson, and a few months before ESPN plans to release a five-part Simpson documentary, which will further extend the lifespan of a tale that seems to never end.

Loyola’s Levenson, who still is amazed about the more than 1,000 credentialed journalists who descended on Los Angeles for the Simpson trial, calls the timing of the knife’s appearance “just very odd”.

“You wonder whether somebody wants his 15 minutes of fame,” she said, noting that Simpson languishes in a Nevada prison, convicted of an entirely unrelated crime. “The cop holds on to this as a souvenir?”

So much of the Simpson case “was the LAPD on trial”, Levenson said. “This latest find is a continuation of this saga.”