PROLOGUE
PROLOGUE: SOMETHING IS MISSING
By June 1994, O.J. Simpson had spent decades as one of the most recognizable and well-liked figures in America. A Heisman Trophy winner, NFL superstar, broadcaster, actor and ubiquitous commercial spokesman, Simpson had built a public persona that extended far beyond football—affable, charismatic and seemingly comfortable in almost any room. His marriage to Nicole Brown Simpson had ended in divorce two years earlier, although their relationship had continued intermittently afterward, with periods of reconciliation followed by renewed separation. By 1994, Simpson was also involved with model Paula Barbieri, while his relationship with Nicole remained complicated and not entirely settled. It was against this familiar image of O.J. Simpson—the wealthy former athlete, celebrity and family man—that the events of June 12 would seem so incomprehensible. Within days, a man Americans had known primarily from football fields, movies, airports and television commercials would become the central figure in a double-murder investigation.
The basic prosecution theory of the murders has become the version of events most familiar to the public. O.J. Simpson drove his white Bronco from Rockingham to Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium on Bundy Drive, confronted Nicole outside her home and attacked her. Ronald Goldman arrived during or around the attack and became the second victim. During the struggle, prosecutors argued, Simpson cut his left hand, lost one of a pair of leather gloves, dropped a “watch cap" and left behind a trail of blood and bloody size-twelve shoeprints as he escaped through the rear of the property. According to that reconstruction, Simpson returned to Rockingham in the Bronco carrying traces of the crime with him. Blood associated with Simpson and the victims was found in or around the Bronco; Simpson-associated blood was found between the vehicle and his house; the matching glove was discovered behind the guesthouse; and a sock recovered from his bedroom later tested positive for blood associated with himself and Nicole. Prosecutors presented these discoveries as a physical trail connecting Bundy, the Bronco and Rockingham, evidence that, taken together, told the story of Simpson committing both murders and returning home before leaving for Chicago.
Beyond the familiar pieces of evidence, the gloves, the Bronco, the blood and the 911 calls, were hundreds of smaller facts, measurements, observations and assumptions that helped define what was considered possible inside the courtroom. Over time, the distinction between what the evidence actually established and what prosecutors, defense attorneys, experts and ultimately jurors believed it meant could become remarkably easy to lose.
By the time Nicole and Ron's bodies were discovered, Simpson was already en route to Chicago, having taken the late flight from Los Angeles. Police contacted him there early the following morning to tell him Nicole had been killed, and Simpson returned to Los Angeles within hours. It was in Chicago that the cut on his left hand became part of the story. Simpson would give shifting and confusing explanations for it, at times saying he had cut himself in Los Angeles and reopened the wound after breaking a glass in Chicago upon learning of Nicole's death. When he returned to Rockingham, police briefly placed him in handcuffs before releasing him, and he voluntarily accompanied Detectives Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter to Parker Center. There, without his attorney present, Simpson gave what would become a remarkably damaging and often incoherent interview, struggling to explain when and how he had injured his hand and giving investigators statements that would be examined almost word by word for years afterward.
For the next several days Simpson remained publicly free while the investigation rapidly closed around him while the media speculated. He attended Nicole's funeral on June 16 with their children, Sydney and Justin, as reports circulated that his arrest was imminent. The following day prosecutors charged him with two counts of murder and arrangements were made for him to surrender. Instead, Simpson disappeared with his longtime friend Al Cowlings, setting off the strange dispute over whether he was a fugitive, suicidal, or both. Police eventually located Cowlings driving a white Bronco with Simpson inside, reportedly holding a gun to his head. What followed was the slow-speed pursuit watched live by millions before the Bronco returned to Rockingham and Simpson finally surrendered that evening. Police recovered, a beard disguise kit, Simpson's passport and nearly $10,000 in cash from the vehicle—facts prosecutors viewed as potentially inconsistent with the claim that his disappearance had been solely a suicide crisis.
The Bronco pursuit would become perhaps the most enduring public image of Simpson's apparent flight, but the criminal jury was not simply allowed to treat the spectacle as proof of guilt. The admissibility and use of Simpson's conduct surrounding his failed surrender became a heavily contested evidentiary issue, illustrating a recurring divide between the case Americans watched unfold on television and the narrower case jurors were ultimately permitted to consider in court. By the time Simpson entered his plea, only eight days had passed since the murders, yet the image of the beloved athlete had already been replaced in much of the public imagination by something entirely different: a murder defendant whose behavior after the killings seemed, at minimum, extraordinarily difficult to explain.
For all the evidence investigators collected, some of the most important pieces were never found. The murder weapon was never recovered, nor were the shoes that made the bloody impressions at Bundy or the clothing Simpson would presumably have worn during such a bloody attack. Prosecutors argued that he had time to dispose of them, but their absence left crucial questions unanswered—including what weapon actually caused the wounds and what the missing clothing and shoes might have revealed. The case is famous for having almost too much evidence, however some of its most important evidence was missing.
Simpson was eventually acquitted, but this basic reconstruction survived the verdict and became the commonly understood version of what happened that night. To this day, lead detective Tom Lange has maintained that there was more evidence in the Simpson case than in any other murder investigation he worked—more, he has suggested, than should ever have been necessary to obtain a conviction. He has famously described the verdict as “evidence dismissed.” Yet that raises an obvious question: if there was so much evidence, why did prosecutors have so much trouble convincing twelve jurors of what it meant?
For decades, much of the answer has been reduced to race, celebrity, money and the extraordinary abilities of Simpson's defense team. All played roles in the trial and in how Americans interpreted its verdict. But the sheer quantity of evidence may obscure a more fundamental problem for the prosecution. Quantity was never really the issue. Quality was. Simpson's attorneys meticulously attacked how evidence was discovered, collected, preserved, tested and ultimately interpreted, while exploiting an LAPD already burdened by a deeply troubled reputation. The defense did not have to prove that every piece of evidence had been planted or corrupted. It only had to make jurors question whether the people responsible for handling it deserved their confidence.
The Rampart scandal, which erupted only a few years later, would expose corruption, evidence planting, false testimony and other misconduct within parts of the LAPD on a scale that made some of the defense's broader attacks on the department seem less fantastical than they had during the Simpson trial. That does not mean the evidence against Simpson was fabricated, nor does later police corruption prove misconduct occurred in his case. But it does provide important context for understanding why attacks on LAPD credibility carried such force with a jury in 1995.
What follows, then, is not an attempt to pretend the enormous body of evidence against Simpson did not exist. It did. The more interesting question is what that evidence actually proved once each piece was separated from the larger story constructed around it. Evidence could implicate Simpson without necessarily proving every element of the prosecution's reconstruction—including when the evidence arrived, how it got there, or whether Simpson necessarily acted alone.
PROLOGUE: EVIDENCE
A BLOODY MESS
By the end of the Simpson trial, DNA had become the prosecution’s most scientifically imposing evidence. The statistics attached to some of the blood matches were staggering, reducing the probability of a coincidental match to numbers that sounded almost impossible to challenge. But those statistics answered only one question: whose genetic profile was present in the material that reached the laboratory. They could not independently establish when the blood was deposited, how it got there, or what happened to the evidence between the crime scene and the test tube.
That distinction became the foundation of Barry Scheck’s attack on the blood evidence.
Before DNA produced its extraordinary probabilities, much of the blood was examined through conventional serology. Blood groups and enzyme systems could include or exclude potential donors, but they could not identify a person with the individuality later associated with DNA. This distinction became particularly important because the three principal individuals in the case—O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman—had overlapping conventional blood characteristics. A stain consistent with Simpson was not necessarily a stain uniquely identifiable as Simpson’s. Some results were stranger still. Blood associated with the material recovered from beneath Nicole’s fingernails produced an EAP type B result. Nicole’s known EAP phenotype was BA. Simpson’s was also BA. Goldman’s was A. Taken at face value, the B result did not correspond to any of the three.
The prosecution offered degradation as the explanation. LAPD criminalist Gregory Matheson believed Nicole’s BA blood could deteriorate in such a way that components of the A band disappeared, leaving an apparent B result. Scheck challenged that conclusion. In closing, he reminded jurors that California DOJ analyst Gary Sims had testified that in his own experience he had never observed the particular four-band BA pattern deteriorate into the two-band B pattern at issue. Scheck was not arguing that blood could not degrade. He was questioning whether degradation adequately explained what had actually been observed in this particular sample.
Later DNA testing detected Nicole’s genetic profile in material associated with the nail scrapings, but Scheck attacked the assumption that this necessarily resolved the earlier blood-type anomaly. EAP examined characteristics associated with red blood cells, while DNA could also come from nucleated epithelial cells naturally present beneath Nicole’s own fingernails. In Scheck’s argument, detecting Nicole’s DNA in a fingernail scraping did not necessarily establish that every component within that scraping—including the material producing the disputed EAP result—originated from Nicole. This was the larger problem Scheck repeatedly returned to: the difference between obtaining a scientifically impressive result and establishing the integrity of the sample that produced it.
There was no dispute that LAPD’s collection practices created opportunities for degradation. Wet biological swatches were temporarily placed in plastic bags, conditions capable of trapping moisture and encouraging bacterial activity. Scheck also pressed prosecution witnesses about contamination controls. Gary Sims agreed that contamination discovered in laboratory controls could raise concerns even when every individual blank did not test positive, and acknowledged the importance of incorporating contamination control into laboratory procedures. When Scheck turned to the Bundy glove, Sims acknowledged that he had not collected substrate controls from it.
Then there was Simpson’s reference blood. After Simpson voluntarily provided a blood sample at Parker Center on June 13, Detective Philip Vannatter took custody of the vial rather than immediately booking it into evidence. He personally transported it back toward the crime-scene investigation and ultimately delivered it to criminalist Dennis Fung. The prosecution maintained that there was an innocent reason for this: Vannatter wanted the reference sample placed with the other biological evidence being handled by Fung. The defense saw something entirely different. A lead detective investigating Simpson had personally carried a concentrated source of Simpson’s known blood through an investigation in which Simpson’s blood would become the central physical evidence.
That circumstance did not prove that anyone planted blood. But it created an unnecessary question that proper evidence handling was designed to prevent.
Questions also arose over how much blood had originally been drawn from Simpson and how much remained in the vial. The defense characterized the discrepancy as “missing blood,” while the prosecution challenged the premise itself, pointing out that the original quantity had been estimated rather than precisely measured. It was never established that a specific volume of Simpson’s blood had disappeared. What was established was that the uncertainty existed at precisely the moment the defense was questioning how his reference blood had been handled. The most striking anomaly, however, was waiting on the rear gate at Bundy.
Blood evidence from the walkway was collected on June 13, only hours after the murders. Three stains from the rear gate—items 115, 116 and 117—were not collected until July 3, approximately three weeks later. One might intuitively expect biological material exposed outdoors for an additional three weeks to yield poorer DNA than material collected the morning after the murders.
The testing produced almost the opposite. Using Gary Sims’s own results, Scheck demonstrated that item 117 contained approximately twenty-seven times the DNA concentration of Bundy stain 47, forty-five times stain 48, 270 times stain 49, fifty-one times stain 50 and eleven times stain 52. The other later-collected gate samples also contained substantially greater concentrations than several of the June 13 stains.
However, concentration was only part of Scheck’s argument. On recross-examination, he walked Sims through the degradation evidence one sample at a time. A June 13 sample collected near the gate showed the bacterial degradation pattern. A sample from the front gate showed it. The handrail sample showed it. Then Scheck reached the three stains collected July 3. Had Sims observed that same bacterial degradation in 115, 116 and 117? He had not. Scheck repeated the proposition to remove any ambiguity: the samples collected three weeks later from the back gate did not display the bacterial degradation pattern Sims had observed in the earlier Bundy evidence.
“That’s correct,” Sims answered.
It was effective cross-examination because Scheck did not need his own witness to establish the discrepancy. He had obtained it from the prosecution’s DNA expert.
The prosecution had explanations. The stains were deposited in different quantities and on different surfaces, and the June 13 samples had themselves been subjected to conditions during collection and packaging that could accelerate bacterial degradation. DNA concentration alone could not establish the age of a stain. Contemporary reporting on Sims’s testimony noted precisely this dispute: the defense argued that the later gate blood was suspiciously well preserved, while prosecutors attributed the poorer condition of the earlier evidence in part to bacterial contamination and the way those samples had been packaged. Those explanations mattered. The anomalous results did not prove that the gate blood had been planted. But neither did the astronomical DNA statistics make the questions surrounding the evidence disappear. This was perhaps Scheck’s most important contribution to the defense. He separated the reliability of DNA science from the reliability of the evidence being submitted to that science. A laboratory could accurately determine that a sample contained Simpson’s DNA while remaining completely incapable of determining from the genetic profile alone when that blood was deposited or how it arrived on the object being tested.
The EDTA controversy ultimately pushed that question further. The defense argued that indications of the preservative used in reference blood tubes could support the possibility that certain stains originated from preserved blood rather than blood deposited naturally at the crime scene. The prosecution fiercely disputed both the testing and the conclusions the defense attempted to draw from it. EDTA never became the simple scientific proof of planting that the defense hoped it might be.
Yet viewed together, the questions were more substantial than any one of them alone: a reference vial personally transported by a lead detective; uncertainty concerning its original volume; evidence collected and stored under procedures criticized for increasing degradation and contamination risks; disputed blood beneath Nicole’s fingernails; potentially informative biological material that was not always pursued to the same degree; and, most remarkably, blood collected from the Bundy gate three weeks later that yielded dramatically greater quantities of usable DNA than several samples collected the morning after the murders.
None of it proves that Simpson’s blood was planted. It raises a different question. The prosecution repeatedly demonstrated how extraordinarily unlikely it was for the DNA profiles obtained from certain stains to belong to someone other than O.J. Simpson. But that statistical certainty addressed the identity of the biological material. It did not establish the history of the evidence itself. In a case in which that history had become part of the accusation, the distinction mattered.
THE ALLELE THAT DIDN’T FIT
There was another complication buried within the DNA evidence, one that Barry Scheck repeatedly returned to during his examination of the prosecution's own scientists.
On the Bronco steering wheel, item 29, both Cellmark and the California Department of Justice detected three DQ-Alpha alleles: 1.1, 1.2 and 4. Simpson's known DQ-Alpha type was 1.1, 1.2. Nicole's was 1.1, 1.1. Ronald Goldman's was 1.3, 4. The presence of three alleles established that the steering-wheel stain contained DNA from more than one person. But the additional 4 allele created a problem: Goldman's corresponding 1.3 allele was not detected in that sample.
If the 4 came from Goldman, where was his 1.3?
One explanation was allele dropout. The amount of Goldman's DNA could have been sufficiently small or degraded that his 4 allele appeared while the accompanying 1.3 failed to register. But if that explanation was rejected, the result raised another possibility: the 4 alleles had come from someone else.
Scheck made sure the jury understood that the unexplained allele could not simply be attributed to the people who had collected the evidence. During his cross-examination of LAPD criminalist Collin Yamauchi, Scheck established the DQ-Alpha types of Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola and then returned to the steering wheel.
Neither Fung nor Mazzola possessed a 4 allele.
“So that means that neither of them could be the source of the number 4 allele on number 29, the steering wheel; isn't that right?” Scheck asked.
“Yes, that's correct,” Yamauchi answered.
The issue was not confined to the steering wheel. During his examination of California DOJ analyst Gary Sims, Scheck returned to Bronco console stains 31 and 305 and asked about the person responsible for the 4 allele detected there. Sims acknowledged that his report characterized that individual as a minor contributor.
Scheck then connected the issue to contamination. Could contamination from handling reveal itself through the appearance of inappropriate or mixed DNA types in a sample?
“Yes,” Sims acknowledged.
That admission did not establish where the allele came from. In fact, that was precisely the problem. There were several possible explanations. It might have represented Goldman with his second allele failing to appear. It might have resulted from contamination. Or, at least theoretically, it could have represented DNA contributed by another individual.
The steering-wheel result therefore should not be described as proof that investigators discovered the DNA of an unidentified assailant. The scientific evidence never established that.
But neither was the 4 allele imaginary. It was present in the testing, while the 1.3 allele expected from Goldman was absent. Later forensic discussions of the Simpson evidence have recognized the same interpretive problem: taken literally, the steering-wheel profile excluded Goldman as the source of the 4; accepting Goldman required accepting that his 1.3 allele had dropped out.
That distinction was characteristic of Scheck's approach throughout the DNA testimony. He rarely needed to prove exactly what had happened. He needed to demonstrate that the prosecution's interpretation was not the only scientifically possible interpretation.
And once again, an anomaly in the evidence was resolved by an explanation rather than an identification.
With the blood beneath Nicole's fingernails, degradation was offered to explain a blood characteristic that did not initially correspond neatly to the three known individuals. With the Bronco, allele dropout could explain why a 4 appeared without Goldman's accompanying 1.3. With other samples, contamination was acknowledged as another possible explanation for inappropriate or mixed types.
Each explanation may have been scientifically possible.
But possibility cuts in more than one direction.
The presence of the 4 allele did not prove another person had been inside the Bronco. What it demonstrated was narrower, but still significant: not every genetic characteristic recovered from the evidence could be cleanly assigned to Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson or Ronald Goldman without interpretation.
For a case remembered for the mathematical certainty of its DNA evidence, those unresolved details deserve to remain part of the story.
The problem became particularly interesting when Goldman was considered as the source of the additional allele.
Goldman's DQ-Alpha type was 1.3, 4. The steering-wheel sample contained a 4—but not his 1.3. Taken literally, the observed result therefore did not match Goldman's complete DQ-Alpha type. To attribute the 4 to Goldman required an additional interpretation: that his DNA was present, but his 1.3 allele had failed to appear in the test.
That was scientifically possible. Low-level, degraded or mixed DNA can produce incomplete profiles. But the distinction is important. The laboratory had not simply recovered Goldman's genetic profile from the steering wheel. It had recovered one characteristic compatible with Goldman while another expected characteristic was absent.
This illustrates one of the more counterintuitive aspects of forensic DNA evidence. A DNA result can be extraordinarily powerful without every interpretation of that result being equally certain. A complete, clean single-source profile presents a very different problem from a weak or mixed sample containing additional or missing alleles. In the latter situation, scientists must sometimes determine which detected characteristics belong together, which contributor produced them, and whether something expected but absent has simply dropped out.
The missing 1.3 therefore did not prove that the 4 belonged to an unidentified person. But neither did the presence of the 4, by itself, prove that it belonged to Goldman.
Both conclusions required interpretation.
That ambiguity was exactly where Scheck worked most effectively. He repeatedly separated what the laboratory had actually detected from the explanation subsequently assigned to it. If an unexpected characteristic appeared, was it another contributor or contamination? If an expected characteristic disappeared, was it degradation or allele dropout? If a conventional blood type appeared inconsistent with the known individuals, had the blood degraded into that pattern, or had investigators encountered something they had not explained?
There were scientifically plausible answers to those questions. But a plausible explanation is not the same thing as an observed result. That distinction becomes particularly important in remembering the Simpson case because the enormous population statistics associated with its strongest DNA matches can easily migrate, in retrospect, to every piece of biological evidence in the case. They should not. The strength of a DNA conclusion depends upon the quality and nature of the particular sample being interpreted. The irony was that DNA could simultaneously produce some of the prosecution's most powerful evidence while also producing details that were considerably harder to explain. In the end, the blood evidence presented a strange contradiction. DNA produced some of the prosecution’s most powerful evidence against Simpson, yet the closer certain samples were examined, the more complicated their stories became. Unexpected alleles could be explained by dropout or contamination; missing characteristics by degradation; unusually strong later samples by differences in collection, environment or the amount originally deposited; and questionable blood types by deterioration. Each explanation may have been scientifically possible, but possibility was not proof of what actually occurred. That was the distinction Scheck repeatedly exposed: the extraordinary statistical power of DNA could tell a jury whose genetic characteristics were present in a sample, but it could not always explain the history of that sample—when the blood arrived, how it got there, what happened to it afterward, or why expected characteristics sometimes appeared while others disappeared. The irony was that the same science capable of producing the prosecution’s greatest certainty also exposed some of the evidence’s most persistent uncertainty.
ONE HAND, ONE KILLER, TWO KNIVES?
The prosecution's reconstruction depended upon more than proving that O.J. Simpson's blood was present at Bundy. It required that the physical evidence fit the actions of one man: Simpson attacked Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman with a knife, cut his left hand during the struggle, bled as he left the scene and returned alone to Rockingham. But several pieces of evidence made that reconstruction less certain than it first appeared. There was the injury to Simpson's hand. The prosecution regarded the cut as an obvious explanation for the drops of Simpson's blood leaving Bundy. Yet the people who encountered Simpson during the period immediately afterward did not report seeing the conspicuous injury later photographed on his return from Chicago. Kato Kaelin did not notice it. Allan Park watched Simpson handle his luggage and shook his hand without seeing blood or an obvious cut. People encountered Simpson at LAX and aboard the flight, including passengers who specifically observed his hands, without reporting the injury.
Simpson's own confused statements about the cut unquestionably complicated his defense. He initially told detectives that he had broken a glass in Chicago but also suggested that the finger might have been cut earlier and reopened. If the more serious wound was inflicted or worsened in Chicago, however, the prosecution was left with another question: what injury had produced the blood attributed to Simpson at Bundy? That question becomes more interesting when considered alongside the wounds themselves.
Dr. Irwin Golden, the deputy medical examiner who personally performed the autopsies of both Nicole and Goldman, raised the possibility at the preliminary hearing that more than one weapon had been used. Some of the wounds appeared different from others, and under questioning Golden acknowledged that the injuries could be consistent with both single- and double-edged blades.
Golden never gave that testimony before the criminal-trial jury. After significant criticism of errors in his autopsy work, the prosecution elected not to call him. Instead, his supervisor, Los Angeles County Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran, reviewed the autopsy photographs and records and testified about the wounds.
Sathyavagiswaran offered the prosecution a considerably cleaner conclusion: one single-edged knife was capable of producing all of the wounds.
But capable was not the same as certain.
Under Robert Shapiro's cross-examination, Sathyavagiswaran acknowledged that he could not medically establish that one knife had caused every injury. Two single-edged knives were possible. A single-edged and double-edged weapon were possible. Nor could the medical evidence establish with certainty that only one assailant had attacked the victims.
Even defense pathologist Michael Baden stopped short of claiming that two killers had been proven. His position was narrower: the injuries could not establish how many assailants or how many weapons had been involved.
That distinction matters.
Two knives do not necessarily mean two killers; one person can possess more than one weapon. An unexplained allele does not necessarily mean an unidentified assailant; mixtures, contamination and allele dropout can complicate DNA results. A questionable blood type beneath Nicole's fingernails does not establish another person's blood if degradation can plausibly explain it. And the failure of witnesses to notice Simpson's cut does not prove that his hand was uninjured.
But the same caution must operate in both directions. None of those explanations establishes that Simpson acted alone. The physical evidence could place Simpson within the story without necessarily identifying every person who might have been present. His blood at Bundy, even if accepted completely, establishes something very different from the proposition that his was the only blood that mattered. A knife capable of producing every wound does not establish that only one knife was used. And an injury capable of explaining a blood trail does not establish when that injury occurred.
This is where the possibility of multiple participants survives—not as proof of a second killer, but as a possibility the forensic evidence could never conclusively eliminate. The distinction is subtle but important. Evidence can implicate one person without excluding the presence of another.
BENEATH NICOLES FINGERNAILS
Perhaps the most intriguing unresolved blood evidence was found beneath Nicole Brown Simpson's fingernails. Conventional serology initially produced an EAP type B result. The problem was simple: Nicole was BA, O.J. Simpson was BA, and Ronald Goldman was A. Taken at face value, the blood type detected beneath Nicole's nails did not correspond to any of the three people known to have been at Bundy.
The prosecution explained the result through degradation. LAPD criminalist Gregory Matheson believed Nicole's own BA blood could have deteriorated until characteristics associated with the A component disappeared, leaving what appeared to be a B pattern. The defense challenged whether the particular pattern observed was consistent with that process. Barry Scheck later emphasized testimony from California DOJ analyst Gary Sims concerning the limits of what could be concluded from such degradation.
DNA testing subsequently detected Nicole's genetic profile in the fingernail material, which the prosecution regarded as further support for the conclusion that the blood was hers. But that did not necessarily answer the original question. Fingernail scrapings naturally contain the person's own skin and cellular material. Detecting Nicole's DNA beneath Nicole's fingernails therefore did not, by itself, establish that the red blood cells responsible for the earlier EAP-B result were also hers.
That left an unusual forensic mystery.
If the B result represented Nicole's degraded blood, then there was nothing unexplained beneath her fingernails. But if degradation did not account for it, the original serology had detected biological evidence that did not fit Nicole, Goldman or Simpson. The testing was never able to turn that possibility into the identification of a fourth person. It would therefore be misleading to describe the fingernail evidence as proof of an unknown assailant. But it is equally misleading to pretend the original anomaly never existed simply because an explanation was eventually offered for it. In the context of a violent struggle, blood beneath a victim's fingernails carries an obvious significance. It is precisely the kind of evidence investigators would hope might preserve something from an attacker. Here, the initial result appeared inconsistent with all three known individuals, and resolving that inconsistency depended upon accepting degradation rather than identifying the source of the anomalous result directly. Standing alone, it proves very little about another assailant. Standing beside the additional allele in the Bronco, the medical inability to exclude multiple weapons or assailants, and the other uncertainties within the biological evidence, it becomes more difficult to dismiss. Perhaps that is the fairest way to leave the fingernail evidence: it never proved that another person was at Bundy, but the blood beneath Nicole’s fingernails initially pointed to someone other than the three people investigators knew were connected to the scene. Science ultimately offered an explanation for that discrepancy, but it never identified another contributor—or conclusively established that one had not been there.
THE INJURIES THAT WEREN'T THERE
The blood beneath Nicole's fingernails raises another obvious possibility. During the attack, had she managed to scratch or claw at the person assaulting her? The evidence could never establish that she had. But when biological material recovered from beneath a murder victim's fingernails initially produces a result that does not neatly correspond to the known individuals at the scene, the possibility deserves consideration. That question becomes more interesting when the condition of Simpson's body is considered.
Ronald Goldman had clearly been involved in some form of defensive struggle. His hands and fingers showed numerous abrasions, bruises and other injuries. Detective Tom Lange acknowledged as much at trial, although he believed their location suggested Goldman had been flailing, blocking and attempting to protect himself rather than landing closed-fist punches on his attacker. The defense disputed that interpretation. Either way, Goldman's injuries documented a violent physical encounter before his death. Yet photographs taken of Simpson shortly after the murders showed remarkably little corresponding trauma. Aside from the disputed injuries to his left hand, there were no obvious scratches across his neck or face, no conspicuous bruising and no pattern of injuries that clearly reflected a struggle with a younger man desperately fighting for his life.
Defense investigator Pat McKenna later showed us Polaroids taken shortly after the murders. What was striking was not what appeared in them, but what did not. Simpson's exposed skin showed no obvious scratches around his neck and no conspicuous bruising or trauma across his body that suggested he had just emerged from the kind of violent encounter documented on Goldman's hands.
None of this establishes that Simpson could not have killed Goldman. An attacker armed with a knife has an enormous advantage over an unarmed victim, and Lange specifically testified that Goldman's injuries did not persuade him that Goldman had successfully struck his assailant. A violent struggle does not guarantee that both participants will emerge visibly injured. But once again, the evidence leaves a question rather than a certainty.
If Nicole fought or clawed at her attacker, the material beneath her fingernails becomes potentially important. If Goldman desperately defends himself, the absence of corresponding injuries on Simpson becomes relevant. And if Simpson's most conspicuous injury was the cut to his hand that numerous witnesses failed to notice before he reached Chicago, the physical reconstruction becomes less straightforward than simply pointing to the wound and working backward from it.
None of these observations identifies another assailant. But taken together with the unresolved fingernail serology, the additional allele in the Bronco and medical testimony that could not categorically exclude multiple weapons, they leave open the larger possibility running through the physical evidence: the evidence implicating Simpson did not necessarily account for everyone who might have been at Bundy that night.
PRINTS
Fingerprints presented another unresolved layer of the physical evidence at Bundy. LAPD fingerprint specialist Gilbert Aguilar examined seventeen usable latent prints recovered from Nicole Brown Simpson's property. None was identified as O.J. Simpson's. Several were eventually attributed to known individuals, while nine identifiable prints remained unmatched despite comparisons against Simpson, Nicole and dozens of friends, relatives, acquaintances and police personnel.
That alarming number sounds more mysterious than it necessarily was. Investigators had not obtained comparison prints from everyone who might reasonably have visited Nicole's home. Some family members and people who regularly worked around the property had never been fingerprinted for comparison. When we later met with Aguilar, he emphasized the practical limitation: an examiner can only identify or eliminate the people whose prints he has been given. An unidentified fingerprint is therefore not automatically the fingerprint of an unidentified assailant.
But it remains unidentified.
The Bronco provided an unusually revealing example of why that distinction matters. After Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola finished processing Simpson's Bronco, fingerprint examiners dusted the vehicle. On the driver's-side doorjamb they discovered an identifiable fingerprint extremely close to blood drops and smears. According to prosecutor Marcia Clark's later account, investigators initially believed the print itself might even have been deposited in blood.
It belonged to Al Cowlings. The discovery was taken seriously enough that Clark recalled discussing it with Christopher Darden. If the fingerprint proved to have been made in blood, Darden told her, they were going to seek an arrest warrant for Cowlings as an accessory to murder.
It didn't.
The print was Cowlings', but investigators could not establish that it had been deposited in blood or during the relevant period. An apparently ominous piece of physical evidence therefore acquired a potentially ordinary explanation: Cowlings was Simpson's close friend and had legitimate prior access to the Bronco. His fingerprint could have been deposited before the murders. That episode illustrates something important about forensic evidence.
Identification can establish who left a physical trace without establishing when or why it was left. A fingerprint can belong unquestionably to Cowlings while telling investigators nothing about whether he touched the Bronco hours, days or weeks before the murders. His presence in the vehicle at some earlier time could be entirely innocent. What initially made the fingerprint potentially incriminating was not its identity but its apparent relationship to the blood surrounding it. Once that relationship could not be established, its meaning changed dramatically. The same caution applies when evaluating other physical evidence.
Finding Simpson's blood at his own home establishes the source of the blood, not necessarily when it was deposited. Finding his genetic profile within a mixed sample identifies genetic material without necessarily reconstructing how every component of that mixture arrived there. Finding a shoe impression consistent with a type of shoe Simpson owned can be significant without establishing by itself who was wearing that particular pair at a particular moment. And finding an unidentified fingerprint at Bundy cannot establish that it belonged to an attacker merely because investigators never learned whose it was.
This was one of the peculiarities of the Simpson investigation. Some physical evidence was extraordinarily good at answering who, while being considerably less capable of answering when, how or why.
The unidentified Bundy fingerprints therefore should not be treated as proof that other assailants were present. There were innocent people whose fingerprints had never been obtained for comparison, and some of those people could easily account for the unresolved prints. However, the opposite conclusion was equally unavailable. Investigators could not identify those prints and therefore could not establish that all of them had innocent origins. Cowlings' fingerprint demonstrates precisely why the distinction matters. Once investigators knew whose print it was, they still needed its history before they could understand its significance. For the prints that were never identified, that history could never even be asked.
A PROBLEM WITH TIME
For all the forensic sophistication eventually brought to the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, one of the most fundamental facts was never established with comparable precision: exactly when were they killed? The question mattered enormously. The prosecution needed enough time for O.J. Simpson to commit the murders at Bundy, return to Rockingham, change clothes, deal with whatever evidence he may have carried back with him, and emerge in time to leave for the airport. The defense needed to demonstrate either that Simpson was never at Bundy or that the available window was too narrow for the prosecution's reconstruction to be credible. Eventually, the night would be broken down almost minute by minute, creating the impression of a remarkably precise timeline. In reality, there was no eyewitness to the murders themselves and no narrowly established medical time of death. The chronology was assembled from barking dogs, telephone records, limousine calls, voices heard in the darkness and witnesses trying to remember the timing of events that had seemed insignificant when they first occurred.
One of the earliest markers came from Nicole's neighborhood. Pablo Fenjves recalled persistent barking beginning at approximately 10:15 p.m., a time that became important to the prosecution's original theory of when the attack occurred. But barking was not a time of death. Nicole's Akita provided another, somewhat firmer boundary when Steven Schwab encountered the dog wandering near Dorothy and Bundy at approximately 10:55 p.m., blood already visible on its paws and legs. Whatever had occurred at Nicole's condominium had therefore progressed far enough by then for the dog to have encountered the bloody scene and wandered away from the property. The bodies themselves would not be discovered until shortly after midnight, when the dog, after being taken in by neighbors, eventually led them back toward Bundy.
At roughly the same period, Robert Heidstra heard something considerably more significant. While walking his dogs, Heidstra heard Nicole's Akita barking intensely and then what sounded like a confrontation between two men. He described a younger, clearer male voice calling, "Hey, hey, hey," followed by a second, deeper male voice speaking rapidly in what he interpreted as an argument. He then heard what sounded like a gate slamming. Heidstra placed these events at approximately 10:40 p.m., later than the prosecution's earliest reconstruction of the murders comfortably allowed. Years later, during the civil trial, the plaintiffs were able to accommodate Heidstra by shifting their reconstruction later and suggesting that the younger voice could have been Goldman confronting Simpson. The evidence itself had not changed; the interpretation of the clock had.
Heidstra was not the only person to report unusual people or activity around Nicole's neighborhood that evening. Thomas Tallarino testified during the later civil trial that while rollerblading past Nicole's condominium before 9:00 p.m., he noticed a dark-haired man crouching in bushes near the property, whom he described as possibly a light-skinned Hispanic. Nothing established that this man had anything whatsoever to do with the murders, and there were countless innocent explanations for why someone might have been in the neighborhood. What makes Tallarino worth remembering is that his observation was not merely a rumor that surfaced years later. He appeared in court and testified under oath to seeing an unidentified man behaving strangely near Nicole's property on the same evening she and Goldman were killed. The man's identity was never established.
Then there was Thomas Lang. Lang was walking his dog near Nicole's home that evening and became known to Simpson's defense during the criminal case. Contemporary accounts described him as having seen a woman he believed was Nicole near the curb with a man at approximately 10:00 p.m., while another man nearby appeared angry. Lang was announced as a potential defense witness but was never called before the criminal jury. Years later, we found Lang ourselves and spoke with him about what he remembered seeing that night. His account contained additional details that deserve a fuller examination later, because portions of what he told us potentially created problems for both sides' timelines. For now, what matters is simply that another witness reported people and activity around Nicole's property during a period investigators would eventually attempt to reconstruct almost minute by minute, yet his account never became part of the evidence the criminal jury was asked to consider.
Mary Anne Gerchas offered an even more provocative account. She came forward claiming that while driving through Brentwood she had seen several men moving rapidly away from the direction of Nicole's condominium. The defense stated that she described four men, some appearing white or Hispanic, some wearing knit caps and carrying objects before getting into a vehicle and leaving the area. If accurate, the observation would obviously have been significant, but there were serious reasons to question Gerchas's credibility. Prosecutors produced a friend who claimed Gerchas had previously said she had not even gone to Brentwood that night, and other credibility problems followed. The defense ultimately removed her from its witness list, and her account cannot responsibly be presented as proof that four men fled the murder scene. At the same time, there is a difference between acknowledging the weaknesses of a witness and erasing the witness from the history of the investigation. Gerchas did make the claim, investigators and attorneys were aware of it, and the defense at one point considered her account important enough to contemplate putting her before the jury.
None of these witnesses, individually or collectively, proves the presence of another assailant. Tallarino's unidentified man may have been entirely unrelated. Gerchas may have been mistaken or unreliable. Heidstra may have misjudged the time, and the two voices he heard could simply have been Goldman and his attacker. Lang's account raises its own complicated questions. What they demonstrate is something narrower but still important: there was more reported activity around Bundy that evening than the clean, finished reconstruction of the murders sometimes suggests.
THE OTHER CLOCKS
While witnesses around Bundy were creating one chronology, events at Rockingham were creating another. Allan Park had arrived to take Simpson to LAX and was waiting outside when no one initially answered. Kato Kaelin was in his bungalow and at some point heard the now-famous series of thumps against the wall behind his room. Unlike many eyewitness estimates from Bundy, parts of Kaelin's evening could be anchored against telephone activity. His calls with Rachel Ferrara helped narrow the period surrounding the noises, while Park's calls and observations placed additional boundaries around the time before Simpson finally appeared and departed for the airport. The importance of those anchors was obvious: the later the murders occurred at Bundy, the less time remained for everything the prosecution alleged happened afterward.
The dispute over time therefore became something more than an argument over clocks. In practical terms, the prosecution and defense were fighting over when the killings themselves could have occurred. Depending upon which witnesses were believed, meaningful activity at Bundy could be placed at various points between roughly 10:00 and 11:00 p.m., while the events unfolding at Rockingham were steadily closing the other end of the window. The prosecution needed the attack early enough to allow Simpson time to leave Bundy, drive back to Rockingham, enter the property, dispose of or conceal bloody clothing and other evidence, change, and then reappear for Allan Park. The defense had every reason to push significant activity at Bundy later, because every minute gained there was another minute taken away from the prosecution's reconstruction.
This is also where the possibility of more than one person becomes relevant without requiring Simpson to be removed from the crime. A later killing time does not necessarily give Simpson an airtight alibi; in some versions of the chronology, it leaves him close to enough time to have been involved. What it does is compress the period in which he would have had to accomplish everything attributed to the killer. If the attack occurred closer to Heidstra's approximately 10:40 estimate than the prosecution's earlier theory, Simpson would have had to participate in an extraordinarily violent confrontation involving two victims, leave the scene, return to Rockingham, deal with the blood and other evidence, change his appearance and prepare for his trip while the clock at Rockingham was already running against him. The narrower that window becomes, the more reasonable it is to ask whether the prosecution was correct not simply about Simpson's involvement, but about its assumption that one man performed every part of the crime alone.
None of the witnesses discussed here proves that proposition. In fact, that is partly what makes them interesting. Heidstra's voices, Tallarino's unidentified man, Lang's observations and even Gerchas's far more questionable account do not combine neatly into a single alternative chronology. They do not give us a second killer. What they do is repeatedly complicate the cleanest version of a single-killer timeline. If Simpson was at Bundy later than prosecutors originally argued, then the same evidence that could place him dangerously close to the murders also gives him less time to be the sole blood-covered assailant, clean himself sufficiently, transport or dispose of evidence and return to Rockingham. The contradiction may therefore be more apparent than real: a later timeline could make Simpson's presence more difficult to explain away while simultaneously making the possibility that he had help more difficult to dismiss. This created an unusual problem for both sides. A witness who placed meaningful activity at Bundy later than the prosecution wanted could undermine its reconstruction by compressing the time available for Simpson to return to Rockingham. Yet if that same witness placed a vehicle resembling Simpson's Bronco near Bundy at the later time, the observation could simultaneously be devastating to the defense. A witness did not necessarily have to help one side and hurt the other. The same witness could create difficulties for both, which becomes particularly important when we later return to what Thomas Lang told us he remembered seeing.
CLOCKS DISSOLVED
With so much ultimately depending upon minutes, one might expect investigators to have protected every available means of independently estimating when Nicole and Ron died. Instead, one of the most valuable opportunities to do so was compromised by delay. The bodies were discovered shortly after midnight, yet the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office was not officially notified until approximately 6:55 the following morning. Coroner investigator Claudine Ratcliffe arrived at Bundy at approximately 9:05 a.m., and even after arriving she was not immediately permitted to approach the bodies while police continued processing the scene. It was after 10:00 a.m. before the normal postmortem field examination could begin, more than ten hours after the bodies had been discovered.
An earlier examination would not have produced some magical exact minute of death. Body temperature, rigor, lividity and other postmortem changes are inherently imprecise and are affected by environmental temperature, clothing, body size, blood loss and numerous other variables. But delay only increases that uncertainty. By failing to promptly bring the Coroner's Office into the scene, investigators lost the opportunity to obtain those measurements when they would have been most useful. That failure became particularly consequential in a case where differences of fifteen or twenty minutes would eventually become central to arguments about whether Simpson could have physically accomplished everything the prosecution alleged.
The contrast is difficult to ignore. Police controlled the property for hours. Detectives, photographers, criminalists and other personnel worked through the scene as evidence was photographed, collected and packaged, yet the agency specifically responsible for examining the dead and documenting the postmortem condition of the bodies had not been promptly brought in. The investigation would consequently spend months attempting to reconstruct through witnesses, telephone records and circumstantial events a period of time that might at least have been better constrained had the bodies been examined earlier.
WHEN A TIMELINE IS A THEORY
This is where the familiar Simpson timeline becomes more complicated than the sequence of times reproduced in books, documentaries and courtroom graphics. Those presentations can make it appear as though investigators possessed a series of fixed points and merely connected them. Some points were indeed relatively strong: telephone records existed, Park's limousine activity could be reconstructed, Schwab encountered the dog within a reasonably identifiable period, and Simpson had a flight he ultimately boarded. Other points were considerably less certain and depended upon witnesses estimating when they had heard barking, noticed a stranger, seen a vehicle or heard voices in the darkness.
There was nothing inherently improper about trying to reconcile those observations. That is what homicide investigators and trial attorneys do. The problem arises when the reconstruction eventually becomes so familiar that the underlying uncertainty disappears. Once a theory of the murders took shape, every new observation inevitably had to be evaluated against it. A witness who fit the theory strengthened it; one who contradicted it required explanation. The defense was doing exactly the same thing from the opposite direction, embracing evidence that created reasonable doubt while confronting evidence that placed Simpson closer to Bundy.
Thomas Lang may ultimately provide one of the clearest examples of that tension. His importance is not that his recollection necessarily proves some alternative version of the murders. It is that a witness could potentially push significant activity at Bundy later, creating difficulty for the prosecution's original timeline, while simultaneously placing something potentially damaging to Simpson near the scene at precisely the wrong time. Neither side necessarily benefited from everything such a witness had to say.
Tallarino's unidentified man may ultimately have meant nothing. Gerchas may have been unreliable. Heidstra may have been mistaken by several minutes. Lang's recollection may raise as many questions as it answers. But these witnesses remain part of the history of that night because they reveal something the finished chronology tends to obscure. Bundy was not a clock. It was a neighborhood filled with people walking dogs, driving home, hearing voices, seeing cars and noticing strangers, only later realizing that something they had considered insignificant might have occurred near one of the most scrutinized murder scenes in American history.
The witnesses did not describe a perfectly ordered sequence of events. They described fragments of a night, and investigators and attorneys subsequently tried to assemble those fragments into a timeline. The resulting timeline may have been reasonable. However, the evidence should not be understood as something itself was measured with precision.
SOMETHING IS MISSING
In the end, there was no shortage of evidence. There were stacks of it: blood, DNA, fingerprints, shoe prints, gloves, hairs, fibers, photographs, telephone records, witness statements and thousands of pages of laboratory analysis and testimony. Some of that evidence pointed powerfully toward O.J. Simpson. Other pieces were compromised by poor collection, contamination concerns, unexplained results or interpretations that changed depending upon which expert was speaking. The prosecution could point to an extraordinary accumulation of physical evidence, while the defense could point to an extraordinary accumulation of problems surrounding it. Both things could be true at the same time.
Yet more than thirty years later, for all that evidence, no one can reconstruct with certainty exactly what happened in the narrow space outside Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium. We do not know precisely when the attack began, exactly how long it lasted, which victim was attacked first, how Goldman became involved, how the struggle moved through the confined area, or precisely when Simpson's hand was injured. Even the number of weapons could not be established medically with certainty. The evidence could tell us whose blood was present, what kind of shoe made the recognizable bloody impressions and what injuries ultimately killed Nicole and Ron, but turning those individual facts into a complete sequence required interpretation.
And scattered throughout that evidence were peculiarities that never quite disappeared. Blood beneath Nicole's fingernails initially produced a conventional blood-typing result that did not correspond neatly to any of the three known individuals and had to be explained through degradation. A DNA mixture in the Bronco contained an allele requiring interpretation because one of Goldman's expected characteristics was absent. Unidentified fingerprints remained at Bundy, although investigators had never obtained comparison prints from everyone who might innocently have left them. Medical testimony could not conclusively establish that only one knife had been used. Goldman appeared to have fought desperately, yet Simpson displayed surprisingly little obvious trauma beyond the disputed injuries to his hands. Witnesses described people, voices and activity around Bundy that did not always fall comfortably into the timeline eventually presented to the jury. None of these things proves another killer was there. But neither did the investigation succeed in making every one of them disappear.
That may be what has always been so strange about the Simpson case. The evidence repeatedly seems to approach the possibility of another presence without ever identifying one. An unexplained blood type becomes degradation. An additional allele becomes dropout or contamination. An unidentified fingerprint becomes an unknown visitor. The possibility of another knife remains only a possibility. An unfamiliar man seen near the property may be irrelevant. Two voices become Goldman and Simpson. Each explanation can be reasonable on its own, and perhaps every one of them is correct. But taken together, they create the unsettling impression that investigators and attorneys spent much of the case dancing around something—or someone—they could never quite define.
This does not require Simpson to be innocent. That is perhaps the most important distinction. Evidence implicating Simpson does not necessarily establish that Simpson was alone. For much of the public discussion surrounding the case, those two propositions became almost inseparable: either Simpson committed the murders or someone else did. But there was always another possibility between them. Simpson could have been involved in what happened at Bundy without every wound, footprint, movement and unexplained trace necessarily belonging to him.
That possibility also changes the way some of the case's apparent contradictions can be viewed. The question no longer has to be whether every piece of evidence against Simpson was legitimate or whether the entire case was manufactured. It becomes whether investigators correctly understood the event they were reconstructing. Once they became convinced they had their killer, evidence pointing toward Simpson naturally strengthened that conclusion, while evidence that did not fit had to be explained, discounted or absorbed into the same theory. The defense, committed to Simpson's innocence, had an equally powerful reason to attack those anomalies without necessarily asking whether they might coexist with evidence of Simpson's involvement. Perhaps that was the piece missing from both arguments. The prosecution needed one killer. The defense needed another. Neither side had much use for an Accomplice.
If someone else was there that night, even for only part of what happened, the enormous body of evidence suddenly becomes something different. It does not vanish. It does not exonerate Simpson. It simply stops having to tell the story of one man doing everything alone. After all the blood, all the science, all the witnesses and all the certainty expressed on both sides, the central mystery may no longer be whether there was evidence against O.J. Simpson. There plainly was. The question that remains is whether investigators solved the entire crime—or only identified one of the people involved in it. Somewhere inside those stacks of evidence, something still, someone seems to be missing.
Simpson was acquitted of both murders on October 3, 1995. Less than two years later, a civil jury reached the opposite conclusion, finding him liable for the wrongful deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman and awarding their families $33.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The criminal case was over, but Simpson's life—and his relationship with the case—was not.
POST TRIALS: GETTING BOOKED
In the decade following the civil judgment against him, O.J. Simpson's life became something of a sideshow. With much of his former celebrity career gone, he repeatedly found ways back into the public eye: autograph conventions and memorabilia signings, paid appearances, a failed reality-show project, even a purported sex tape that proved not to be what it was advertised as. He continued to golf, travel and live comfortably while fighting to keep his income and assets beyond the reach of the Goldman judgment.
Under an increasingly unforgiving public microscope, Simpson eventually left California for Kendall, Florida, where Florida's protections for homes and certain retirement income offered advantages unavailable to him in California. Life there brought occasional brushes with police and continued controversy, including a 2001 road-rage case in which he was acquitted and a 2002 search of his home during a narcotics investigation that produced no drug charges against him. By the middle of the decade, Simpson existed in an unusual kind of American celebrity purgatory—too notorious to disappear, too disgraced to reclaim what he had once been, yet still appearing at signings, golf outings, nightclubs and events wherever his name could draw a crowd. It was from this strange second life that O.J. Simpson arrived in Las Vegas in September 2007.
2007 LAS VEGAS ROBBERY
He had come to Nevada for the wedding of his longtime friend Tom Scotto. Simpson was staying at the Palms and was scheduled to serve as Scotto's best man. It should have been an unremarkable trip by the standards of his remarkable life.Instead, before the weekend was over, Simpson would be arrested and charged with another major crime. Among the men with him was a friend from Miami named Charles Ehrlich. Earlier that day, Simpson learned that two memorabilia dealers were holding property he believed had been stolen from him. A plan developed to retrieve it. Ehrlich became involved, along with several other men Simpson gathered in Las Vegas.
That evening, Simpson and five other men entered Room 1203 at the Palace Station hotel and casino. Inside were memorabilia dealers Bruce Fromong and Alfred Beardsley. The confrontation was recorded. Voices rose. Property was taken. Two members of Simpson's group carried guns. Simpson would maintain that he had not known weapons would be brought into the room and that he was merely retrieving property that belonged to him. Whatever Simpson believed he was doing when the evening began, the encounter had become a crime.
The following day, police questioned Simpson. On September 15, as investigators began arresting members of his entourage, Simpson went ahead with the reason he had supposedly come to Las Vegas in the first place. He attended Tom Scotto's wedding and served as best man.
The next morning, September 16, police arrested Simpson at the Palms. Charles Ehrlich surrendered several days later. Both men were prosecuted for their participation in the incident. Ehrlich eventually pleaded guilty to reduced charges, testified for the prosecution and received probation. Simpson went to trial, was convicted of multiple felonies and would spend approximately nine years in prison.
There was another coincidence surrounding the events in Las Vegas. On September 13, 2007, the Goldman family's edition of If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer was released. Simpson had participated in the original project the previous year, but its planned 2006 publication was canceled following widespread public criticism. The rights eventually passed to the Goldman family, who published the manuscript themselves.
In the book, Simpson presented what he described as a hypothetical account of how the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman might have occurred had he committed them. In that account, Simpson introduced another man whom he called “Charlie.”
CHARLIE
Simpson described Charlie as a relatively new friend who usually carried a grin, however, that night he arrived at Rockingham on June 12, 1994, with information concerning Nicole and Faye Resnick. Charlie accompanied Simpson in the Bronco toward Bundy and remained part of the narrative as Simpson described the confrontation with Nicole and Ronald Goldman. After Simpson's account of the killings, Charlie was still present. Simpson described giving him the Bronco, bloody clothing and the knife, with instructions to dispose of the evidence.
There has never been established evidence identifying Simpson's Charlie as an actual participant in the murders. The character could have been fictional, an amalgamation of people Simpson knew, or based in some way upon a real person.
What makes the name relevant to this story is that a real Charles “Charlie” Ehrlich was part of Simpson's circle by 2007 and was among the men who accompanied him into Room 1203 at Palace Station. Ehrlich had his own criminal history, including a federal cocaine-trafficking conviction, and later allegations would claim that his relationship with Simpson extended much further back than publicly acknowledged.
Those allegations eventually appeared in reporting by the Miami New Times, and later in books and interviews promoting the theory that Ehrlich had been connected to Simpson in 1994. Ehrlich disputed significant portions of the story, and no established forensic or documentary evidence has placed him at Rockingham, inside Simpson's Bronco or at Bundy on the night of the murders.
For now, the significance is considerably narrower. O.J. Simpson's own hypothetical account included another man named Charlie. Thirteen years later, a real Charles Ehrlich was with Simpson during the Las Vegas incident. Whether those two facts have any connection is a question we will return to later.
THE FINAL YEARS
In October 2008, O.J. Simpson was convicted of armed robbery, kidnapping and other charges arising from the Palace Station incident. Two months later, he was sentenced to a maximum of thirty-three years in prison, with eligibility for parole after nine years. Several of the other men involved in the confrontation cooperated with prosecutors. Charles Ehrlich pleaded guilty to reduced charges, testified for the prosecution and received probation rather than a prison sentence. Simpson entered the Nevada prison system at sixty-one years old and spent most of his sentence at Lovelock Correctional Center. His imprisonment largely removed him from the public life he had maintained during the years following the murder trial and civil judgment.
In July 2017, Simpson appeared before the Nevada Board of Parole Commissioners and was granted parole. He was released shortly after midnight on October 1, 2017, after serving approximately nine years. Although Simpson had previously lived in Florida and initially expressed interest in returning there, he ultimately remained in Nevada and settled in the Las Vegas area. His parole supervision ended early in December 2021.
During his final years, Simpson maintained a relatively comfortable and considerably less public lifestyle. He continued playing golf, spent time with friends and family and remained an avid follower of professional and college sports. In 2019, he established a presence on social media, where he regularly posted short videos commenting on football, current events and other subjects. He occasionally gave interviews and continued to deny responsibility for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
In 2023, Simpson underwent treatment for prostate cancer. Reports of his declining health increased in early 2024, although Simpson publicly denied claims that he had entered hospice care. His condition subsequently worsened, and members of his family gathered around him at his Las Vegas home.
O.J. Simpson died on April 10, 2024, at the age of seventy-six.
His death came almost thirty years after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. During those three decades, Simpson had been acquitted of their murders in criminal court, found liable for their wrongful deaths in civil court, relocated from California to Florida, participated in the controversial If I Did It project, and later been convicted and imprisoned for the unrelated Las Vegas robbery.
The Las Vegas case became Simpson's final criminal prosecution. He served approximately nine years in prison and spent the remaining six and a half years of his life in Nevada. He never faced another prosecution connected to the 1994 murders and maintained his innocence in the killings until his death.
