On that day in June 1994, when Los Angeles police officers brought in O.J. Simpson for questioning in the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, I was 800 miles in Durango, Colorado, working on a cheeseburger, nursing a cold beer, and watching the media frenzy play out on a wall-mounted TV in the bar where I was having lunch. The sky over downtown LA was thick with news helicopters, while reporters and photographers on the ground jockeyed for position as the grim-faced former football star emerged from LAPD headquarters after being questioned by investigators. “Thank God I’m no longer a news guy,” I remember telling my wife, “because I’d be thrown right into the middle of that mess.”
I’d recently quit my job as a staff writer for The Los Angeles Times with ambitions of writing movies in Hollywood. The last thing I wanted to do was get involved in the media circus and what soon would be dubbed “The Trial of the Century.” But then, one morning, shortly after I returned to LA (where I was still living at the time), my phone rang. It was the Los Angeles bureau chief of CBS News.
“You don’t know me,” she said, “but we know you. You covered the LAPD. We don’t have any sources in local law enforcement. Would you be willing to help us out, covering the Simpson case?”
I told her I appreciated the offer, but that I was no longer a journalist. I was a screenwriter. “That’s unfortunate,” she replied, “because here’s how much we’d be willing to pay you.”
“I can start tomorrow,” I said.
As it turned out, I was on a first-name basis with the lead investigator for Simpson’s newly formed defense team. He was a former LAPD detective who’d gotten into some kind of internal beef with the police department a few years earlier, the details of which I can no longer remember. What I do recall is that he’d apparently appreciated the even-handed way in which I had reported his side of that beef. And so, when I called to tell him that I was now working for CBS News and that I was hoping to get up to speed on Simpson, he invited me over to house.
We sat in his living room that night until well after midnight. He showed me uncensored crime scene photos of Nicole and Ron sprawled dead in the courtyard outside her condo in Brentwood, both stabbed repeatedly, blood everywhere. He also shared with me a three-ring binder detailing bits of potentially exculpable evidence and likely alibis upon which Simpson’s attorneys planned to build their case to acquit—everything but the infamous glove LAPD Detective Mark Fuhrman supposedly planted to frame O.J. That crucial part of Simpson’s defense wouldn’t surface until it was reported in the press weeks later.
I drove home that night, typed up a 16-page memo outlining everything I’d learned in my meeting with the former detective, grabbed a couple hours’ sleep, and handed in the memo that morning to my new bosses at CBS. They were thrilled. Then they proceeded to sit for days and sometimes weeks on virtually every nugget of information I’d provided. This, I was to discover, was how network news operated, at least back then, seemingly unwilling to break big scoops of their own, waiting instead for the major newspapers to validate them first.
In any case, I was soon partnered at CBS with another new hire, a salty, retired detective named Fred McKnight who’d made his bones in the LAPD working undercover narcotics investigations, busting major dealers. Freddie and I drove all over LA, digging up dirt on the accused, of which there was plenty, believe me. Not long after that, I sold a screenplay at auction to 20th Century Fox for a six-figure payday. I promptly decamped CBS, left Los Angeles and moved my family up the coast to the oasis of Santa Barbara, but not before being convinced far beyond a reasonable doubt that O.J. Simpson, his abundant outward charm to the contrary, was nothing more and nothing less than a cold-blooded butcher.
It wasn’t the first time I’d crossed paths with the Juice, in a manner of speaking. As a college sophomore while visiting relatives on the East Coast over Christmas break in 1973, I’d ventured one freezing Sunday to Shea Stadium with two of my cousins to watch O.J., then a star running back for the Buffalo Bills, break 2,000 yards rushing against the hapless New York Jets. After the game, one of my cousins snuck onto the field and stole a bag of towels from the Buffalo bench. He then sold them as souvenirs to our fellow passengers on the train ride home to Long Island, claiming O.J. had wiped his face on each towel.
All of these memories came flooding back when word broke the other day that Simpson had died of cancer in Las Vegas at age 76.
Three decades after the murders of Nicole and Ron, some people remain convinced that O.J. was innocent, a high-profile Black man framed by racist cops. Were there racists within the ranks of the LAPD back then? No question. It would be naïve to think there aren’t today, or that racism doesn’t continue to infect virtually every institution of modern American life. But facts are facts, evidence is evidence, and a wolf is still a wolf, no matter how winning his smile may be or how well he ran a football. It’s a good lesson to keep in mind when writing murder mysteries like DEEP FURY, which debuts in December.