He gave the world the ‘Trial of the Century’ and a police chase that left Hollywood’s versions in the shade. And OJ Simpson never escaped the notoriety that most Americans felt he richly deserved.
His family announced that the former American football star, actor and jailbird had died aged 76 of cancer on Wednesday ‘surrounded by his children and grandchildren’ at his home in Las Vegas.
It offered little satisfaction to those who believe he should have died surrounded by prison guards watching his execution for the brutal stabbings in 1994 in Los Angeles that left his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman dead.
His trial — and shocking acquittal — by a majority black jury captivated America, drawing one of the biggest audiences in TV history. It reportedly made Simpson, after Princess Diana, the most famous person in the world. He was later found liable for their deaths in a civil trial brought by the victims’ families and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages, although he hardly stumped up any of it.
Instead he moved to Florida, where after struggling to cope with his pariah status he turned to crime and eventually served a prison sentence for kidnapping and armed robbery.
O.J. Simpson sits at his arraignment in Superior Court in Los Angeles on July 22, 1994
His trial — and shocking acquittal — by a majority black jury captivated America, drawing one of the biggest audiences in TV history
OJ Simpson was found liable in civil court for $33.5 million for the murders of Ron Goldman and ex-wife Nicole Simpson in 1997
His family announced yesterday that the former American football star, actor and jailbird had died aged 76 of cancer on Wednesday
In 2006, he compounded the fury that many felt over his acquittal — one that ignored a mountain of evidence — by writing a book, If I Did It: Confessions Of The Killer. Despite claiming to be a ‘hypothetical account’ of the murders he denied, it appeared to be a shameless confession of his crimes.
As for his health, it seems Simpson remained a liar until the bitter end. In February, he denied a report by a local news station in Las Vegas that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy, amid rumors that he had entered hospice care. He even filmed a video inside his car in which he laughed and said: ‘No, I’m not even in the hospital. I don’t know who put that out there.’
News of his death inevitably took Americans back to the mid-1990s and a trial of one of the country’s biggest black stars for killing two white people that was dominated by the issue of race.
Simpson was found not guilty following one of the longest trials in US legal history by a three-quarters black jury drawn from a community seething over the acquittal of LA police officers involved in the savage beating in 1991 of an African-American, Rodney King.
While a large majority of white Americans has always believed Simpson was guilty, 69 percent of black Americans considered OJ an innocent victim of racism at the time. Even today, polls show roughly half still believe that.
His huge popularity as a black role model — who seemed to have transcended America’s racial divide — goes some way to explaining the hugely contrasting attitudes towards him.
The child of a broken home, he grew up on a grim housing project in San Francisco, so poor that he developed rickets and had to wear steel braces on his skinny legs. His father was reportedly a well-known drag queen who later announced he was gay and died from AIDS.
In an astonishing reversal of fortune, Simpson went from miserable beginnings to becoming one of the country’s most celebrated American football players.
In 1973, when he was a star of the Buffalo Bills team, he was named the NFL’s most valuable player. ‘All my life I’ve been a runner,’ he boasted — prophetically — two years later.
Simpson with his arm around wife Nicole at the opening of the Harley Davidson Café
Simpson, center, appears at the Buffalo International Airport with his son, Jason, left, and father Jimmy Lee in Buffalo, N.Y
Simpson (number 32) in action against the New York Jets in the snow at Shea Stadium, New York, on December 16th, 1973
O.J. Simpson, Leslie Nielsen, and George Kennedy in ‘The Naked Gun 2 1/2
He supplemented his fortune as an actor in Hollywood films such as The Towering Inferno and Capricorn One, TV shows and in commercials, as well as lucrative sponsorship deals that played on his apparent personability.
However, his private life was less glittering — he had three children with Marguerite, the high school sweetheart who became his first wife. The youngest, a daughter, drowned in the family’s swimming pool aged just two years old.
While still married to Marguerite, he met the stunning Nicole Simpson in 1977 when she was waitressing in a Beverly Hills nightclub and they started an affair. He divorced Marguerite, and married Nicole in 1985, five years after he’d retired from professional football. The marriage lasted only seven years — during which time they had two children.
Simpson complained of his jealous rages and repeatedly called police to say he had hit her. After a particularly serious incident on New Year’s Day 1989, she was found badly beaten and half-naked, hiding in the bushes outside their home and sobbing that he was going to kill her.
Such was his celebrity that Simpson, though convicted of spousal abuse, was let off with a fine and probation. The violent confrontations continued even after they divorced in 1992.
Two years later, on June 12, 1994, Ms Simpson — then 35 — and her friend Mr Goldman, 25, were attacked outside her home. She was almost decapitated with a knife while Mr Goldman was also savagely stabbed.
The murder weapon was never found, but the police discovered a bloodied golfing glove — Simpson, 46, was a keen golfer — at the scene and various pieces of evidence such as hair, blood and fibers that pointed investigators towards Ms Simpson’s notoriously combustible ex-husband.
In this 1973 image released by ESPN Film, football player O.J. Simpson appears with his wife Marguerite
Marguerite Simpson, OJ Simpson, Jason Simpson, Arnelle Simpson at home
Simspson poses for a portrait with his wife Marguerite Simpson, daughter Arnelle and son Jason on January 8, 1973 in Los Angeles, California
Police also found blood on his car and discovered a glove — also covered in blood — in his home that matched the one found at the scene. Simpson attended his ex-wife’s funeral with their two young children, but five days later was charged with the murders.
He went on the run in his white Ford Bronco SUV, a friend and ex-team-mate named Al Cowlings driving as Simpson sat in the back, pointing a gun at his head and vowing he would commit suicide.
The painfully slow, 60-mile chase along the highways of southern California that ensued as he was followed by a convoy of police cars was famously captured from above by news helicopters.
TV networks cancelled their usual prime time programming as more than 95 million Americans tuned in to follow the 90-minute drama. Highway bridges were crowded with spectators who turned out to watch the cavalcade. No attempt was made to stop Simpson’s car and he eventually returned home, where he was arrested.
His eleven-month trial ran from November 1994 to October 1995 and had not only the US but the wider world agog as Simpson shelled out on a ‘dream team’ of high-powered lawyers, among them his defense attorney Robert Kardashian and Johnnie Lee Cochran — who became celebrities in their own right.
He needed them. Prosecutors had compelling evidence linking everything, from blood and hair strands to shoe prints and carpet threads found at the crime scene, to either Simpson or his home. DNA tests confirmed that the bloody golf glove found at his home matched the one left at the crime scene. Prosecutors presented a list of 62 incidents in which Simpson had been allegedly abusive towards his ex-wife.
Members of the news media watch live television coverage of the O.J. Simpson slow speed chase
Simpson (R) whispers to Defense attorney F. Lee Bailey (L) during testimony of FBI special agent William Bodziak 19 June during the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles
A crowd reacts to O.J. Simpson leaving Los Angeles County Superior Court, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 1997, in Santa Monica, California
The defense, however, played heavily on this being a racially motivated prosecution and was able to bring up the history of racist remarks of one of the police investigators, Mark Fuhrman. It argued — without proof — that the detective had planted the second glove.
It also emerged that photo evidence had been lost, while DNA had been collected and stored improperly. Police admitted they had entered Simpson’s home and found the missing golf glove without a search warrant.
Simpson’s team were also helped immeasurably when, asked by the prosecution to try on the golf gloves, Simpson struggled to do so as they were apparently too small.
‘If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,’ defense lawyer Cochran memorably told the jury.
And they did, deliberating for only three hours before the trial ended with a verdict of not guilty. The verdict was so eagerly anticipated that President Clinton left the Oval Office to watch it with his secretaries. Simpson celebrated by throwing a party at his mansion where he and guests got through 40 cases of champagne.
‘I don’t think most of America believes I did it,’ he said a week later. ‘I’ve gotten thousands of letters and telegrams from people supporting me.’
After losing the civil lawsuit in 1997, he moved in 2000 with his children to Florida, where state law prevented his home and pension income being seized to pay for the $33.5 million damages. Simpson settled into early retirement, playing golf and living off a pension estimated at around $400,000 a year.
But he didn’t escape further controversy. In 2006, he was sued by Fred Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, who argued the book and TV deal for his ‘hypothetical’ murder explanation (titled ‘If I Did It’), which came with a $1 million advance, cheated the families out of damages they were owed.
Simpson reacts as he is found not guilty in October 1995
Al Cowlings, with O.J. Simpson hiding, drives a white Ford Bronco as they lead police on a two-county chase along the northbound 405 Freeway towards Simpson’s home
Ron Goldman’s father Fred (center) and his daughter Kim and wife Patty are pictured in court during trial
In this July 20, 2017 file photo, former NFL football star O.J. Simpson reacts after learning he was granted parole at Lovelock Correctional Center in Lovelock, Nevada
In 2008, he was in court again. This time, he was charged with leading five acquaintances, most of them convicted criminals and two armed with guns, to steal sports memorabilia from two dealers.
Simpson claimed he was only recovering items stolen from him but a jury convicted him of armed robbery, kidnap and other crimes after two of his accomplices testified he’d told them to bring guns.
By then 61, he served nine years in a remote prison in northern Nevada, briefly becoming the gym caretaker. Freed on parole in 2017, he returned to Florida but was only completely free of restrictions on his movement in 2021. He then moved to Las Vegas where he lived in the country-club home of a rich friend.
But he never escaped the notoriety of that double murder. Some 50 books have been written about the scandal and in 2016 alone, the story was retold in two TV shows — a dramatization of the trial in ‘The People v. O.J. Simpson, and O.J.: Made In America’, a five-part documentary series.
Some believe that, like other former American Football veterans, Simpson’s violent tendencies were rooted in brain damage he might have received while playing.
He certainly seemed to think he had radically changed over time. On the day he fled arrest in his Ford Bronco, he left a handwritten letter at home in which he said he loved Ms Simpson and hadn’t killed her. ‘Don’t feel sorry for me,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.’
Few will mourn his passing — and certainly not the many fellow African-Americans whose complaints of racism in the US justice system always risked being met by the rejoinder of Simpson’s astonishing acquittal.