What we need at this very moment in history is OJ Simpson back in the news
Knife Found on O.J. Simpson Estate Slices into News Cycle
In the annals of criminal trials, I cannot recall one as infamous as the O.J. Simpson criminal trial for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.
In a shocking new twist to this case, a knife that had been located by a construction worker at O.J. Simpon’s estate four years after the slaughter is only now in the hands of the Los Angeles Police Department.
A construction worker found a knife buried at OJ Simpson’s California estate, but the cop he turned it over to framed it and kept it as a sick souvenir for years, according to a new report.
Los Angeles police confirmed to the Daily News Friday that a knife has been recovered from the site of Simpson’s former Brentwood mansion, which was demolished in 1998, but provided no further details.
Investigators only recently learned about the weapon— nearly 22 years after the murders of Simpson’s Simpson’s ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman — when the now-retired cop asked about the record for the Simpson murder case, so he could engrave the number on the knife’s frame, sources told TMZ.
The knife is now being tested using forensic techniques that have been substantially improved since the conclusion of the trial in October, 1995, which saw Simpson acquitted of murder (in part, because the jury had been persuaded by Simpson’s defense team that the DNA testing was invalid because of contamination).
Law enforcement sources told TMZ that the blade is a folding buck knife, which is now being tested for hair and fingerprints after being handed over to the L.A.P.D.’s Robbery Homicide Division.
It will be tested for DNA and other biological evidence at the department’s Serology Unit next week, sources told the site.
Cops who saw the weapon said it appeared to have blood residue on it, but it’s extremely rusted and stained, so further testing is needed.
I was one of many Americans who followed the trial closely. In fact, my current conservatism stems from the talk radio pundits I began listening to regularly while waiting for trial updates (especially Tammy Bruce, who was the head of the local N.O.W. at the time and an activist for the protection of abused women).
Memories of key moments came flooding back to me today. Perhaps the most chilling was standing at the magazine rack at a grocery store, listing to a black mother try and keep her child quite as he kept yelling “O.J. is innocent” in response to the numerous magazine covers featuring stories of the trial.
It seems there has been very little racial healing in the intervening 21 years.
I was devastated by the verdict in the criminal trial. Two books helped me process the result are Outrage: The Five Reasons Why O. J. Simpson Got Away with Murder by Vincent Bugliosi and Triumph of Justice : Closing the Book On the Simpson Saga by the man who successfully prosecuted the civil case against Simpson, Daniel Petrocelli.
I clipped a picture of Petrocelli and taped it to my office wall, where it hung for several years as an example of professional excellence. In fact, I broke open a bottle of champagne when the verdict in the civil case came down.
The Goldman and Brown families then sued him in civil court, and that jury unanimously found Simpson liable for the murders. He was ordered to pay a total of $33.5 million, made up of $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the Goldmans and $25 million in punitive damages to be split between the Goldmans and Nicole’s children.
“The dollar amount meant nothing to us,” Kim Goldman told CNBC. “We were just thrilled that 12 people unanimously determined that he was the killer of Ron and Nicole. The rest was just paper.”
It appears that the book on the case has been opened again. There is some speculation that the sudden discovery of the knife is a hoax, to promote the new T.V. series.
Part of me hopes this theory is true, as the complete miscarriage of justice may have been prevented if such a critical piece of evidence had been located in the initial search.
In December 2008, a Nevada court sentenced Simpson to a maximum of 33 years in prison in connection with the armed robbery and kidnapping of two sports memorabilia dealers.
“We are thrilled, and it’s a bittersweet moment,” Fred Goldman, Ronald Goldman’s father, told reporters after Simpson’s sentencing. “It was satisfying seeing him in shackles like he belongs.”
(Featured Image: ABC News Video)
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Comments
Cheer up. If a construction worker found it during the demolition of the house, then it was so thoroughly hidden that police could never have found it.
If it is the knife can it be used in SImpson parole hearings?
I find it fascinating that someone can be acquitted of murder 21 yrs ago and we still talk about this case. Still do investigations.
Meanwhile, Baretta kills his wife. Is found not guilty of murder,yet we move on. No new investigations. No documentaries. No The People vs Baretta,etc
You mean Robert Blake, the actor that played the fictional character of Baretta?
Baretta works for me. I get better reactions when I say Baretta. March 17 will be the 11th yr of Baretta being acquitted of killing his wife. Bonnie Lee Bakely has been forgotten,while Nicole Simpson a disgusting cokehead bisexual degenerate is lionized. No more OJ for me. Call me when the program on How Baretta got away with murder airs.
Maybe it’s because the evidence against Simpson was overwhelming, while the evidence against Blake seems, as far as I can tell, to have been completely non-existent. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but did the case really consist of nothing but evidence that he’d made two unsuccessful attempts to hire hit men to kill his wife, so we should assume that she was killed by a hypothetical third hit man who accepted the commission?! Seriously? That’s what he spent nearly a year in jail for, and that’s what a civil jury found him liable for?! Please tell me there’s more to it than that, because I can’t see how a judge could let such a case through to the jury.
Wow. Talk about a weak chain of custody.
Doesn’t matter, the worker found it long after both trials.
It could matter in that it might sink any chances at parole he has if it is found to be the murder weapon. So basically it could mean he serves the entire 33 years.
The knife probably does matter for that. Chain of custody, I think not.
I would be interested in how close the found knife was to where Kato was sleeping that night.
Who cares? There was already more than enough evidence to prove he killed them.
Last year there was a study of people – as time goes on, more and more blacks are willing to admit that yeah, OJ was guilty. It was up to around 60% of blacks believed OJ was guilty in 2015.
The problem was Cochrane did a very good job of exploiting the poor police procedures and racial tensions to get him off.
And Cochran rhymed in his closing arguments. The prosecution didn’t have the flow.
Those fingerprints are going to be tough to lift! And after all the people that have handled it there is no there there. This is just a curiosity and nothing more. We all know the jury was a nullified one and there is nothing anyone can do about it. It was pay back to the “Man” for the past two hundred years.
There is blood.
Technically, there is DNA potentially on the weapon (folding knife=little cracks and crevices where you can’t clean it out) that could be from all *three* of the people present at the scene, since OJ had a cut on his hand. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in a few weeks when the tests are back. Until then, it’s just idle chatter.
PLus they probably only need OJ’s blood to match. Generally ME’s can match knifes to wounds, assuming they got good pictures of the wounds.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/knife-found-o-j-simpson-property-inconsistent-killings-sources-n532091
The problem was that George Maycott maybe thought it was “the” knife, and tried it toi have framed so he could display it and sell it. That was about a month ago. Of course he had no business keeping it – the construction worker n’t hand it to him personally, but because he was a Los Angeles police officer.
Hopefully this will lead to the real culprit.
Anything that will break the 24/7/ cycle of how Donald Trump is screwing or not screwing this country is a welcome relief. It is not even convention time and I am sick to death of all of the crap that is the 2016 election cycle.
You probably wouldn’t feel that way were it not for humpatrump who shat in the punchbowl just by bringing his 3-ring circus to town.
Yes he would. Because he would be watching Jeb! quietly winning.
They made an additional mistake , they sent it to Marilyn Mosby’s office . We will never see it again.
I’m waiting to see how Hildabeast or Obama ties this knife to Republicans in general, and maybe Trump in particular. C’mon, you know they want to.
Maybe it’ll be Glenn Beck.
He’s into knives these days.
There’s no way that could be “the knife”
There would not have been enough time for O.J. to hide it that night under the earth (if that is where it was found) and the grounds were searched before he got back from Chicago, and if it was still undiscovered, and he had any choice about it at all, he would not have left it there after that. He would have had someone take it away.
O.J. dumped the knife at LAX airport before he got on the plane, in the first bag of his that went missing. Nor do I think that he dumped along the route from Brentwood to Rockingham, as was one theory. No, it went whereever the bloody clothes and everything else connected with the crime went (except for two gloves)
Both gloves slipped off or were pulled off by O.J. as he struggled with Ron Goldman, (O.J. started to knife Nicole, then Ron Goldman encountered him, and he used faking tactics to trap Ron Goldman, the witness, and murder him, and then went back to Nicole.) There wasn’t time to remember the gloves or find them. O.J. was late coming back from the crime, because of Ron Goldman, and things were getting off plan.
One glove was found by Robert Kardashian (somewhere) and delivered outside the room where Kato Kaelin was in, where Robert Kardashian thought O.J. was in. He knocked to let “O.J.” know. He wanted O.J. to put it with the other bloody clothes.
Robert Kardashian then went back outside (he either missed O.J. or met him outside) and found the Bronco, which O.J. had parked in the meantime, and drove the Bronco to be washed, (that was his part) and then later drove it back but he couldn’t get back into Rockingham, because Kato Kaelin had locked the gates, and parked it outside in the middle of the night – quickly, because he didn’t want to be seen.
N.B. The Bronco was NOT there when O.J. was driven to the airport by Allan Park, the limo driver, but another unidentified car was parked in Rockingham at the time.
If Robert Kardashian met O.J. outside Rockingham and told him where he had left the glove, O.J. could not retrieve it without Kato Kaelin seeing him do that, or he could not find it, and so he left it there to be taken care of the nect day. There was no time to lose. He had to get out of Los Angeles before the time a medical expert he planned to hire would later assert was the time of death.
It had probably been pre-arranged by O.J.’s co-conspirators (who probably actually talked him into the murder in the first place, * arguing that he needed to kill Nicole to stop an IRS investigation of his unreported income from signing autographs) for the bag with the bloody clothes and all to be picked up from wherever he dropped it before boarding the plane, and disposed of. I don’t think they would leave it to chance to be undiscovered. I don’t think it was in the bag that Robert Kardashian took from O.J. after he got back. It would be completely crazy for O.J. to take it to Chicago and back.
* If O.J. had come up with the idea of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson himself, (and planned an alibi, as he did) he probably would have wanted to arrange for someone else to commit the actual murder. If other people came up with the idea, they would have been perfectly content to have O.J. do the actual killing. Kardashian became one of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers to ensure he would be questioned and to keep tabs on him. He told him that they would fix the jury, and they did. (I thought they had told that to O.J. but they were lying to O.J. about that)
O.J.’s co-conspirators planned a lot of what happened afterwards. And before. First, the murder itself, where he didn’t use any of the guns he had, but used knives, as had recently become the favored method of killing by the Outfit in Chicago, and he wore gloves so that he shouldn’t leave fingerprints, and he gave himself a very narrow margin of time. If not for the dog, Kato, he would have hired a medical examiner to testify that the time of death was after he boarded the plane. That was not possible the way things transpired.
But did you notice:
BEFORE the criminal trial ended, all the stories in the national enquirer were about how O.J. had not commited the murders. AFTER the acquittal, the National Enquirer immediately switched to running stories as to how O.J. had committed the murders
It was part of the plan to satisfy the family of Ron Goldman with something, to have O.J. lose a civil trial so they wouldn’t keep pursuing this.
In the meantime, O.J. would have no incentive to turn on anyone, and would probably need someone’s help.
Many years later, his co-conspirators probably arranged for him to be in jail. A free O.J. probably made them nervous.
They also arranged to see that Robert Kardashian’s family was well-taken care of.