The O.J. Posts — Part Three: The Timeline
[This is Part Three of a series of posts on the O.J. Simpson trial. Part One is here; Part Two is here.]
Stop. Before you go any further, I want you to click on the word “Comments” below. Don’t look at any other comments. Now, tell me how long it takes to drive from the site of Nicole Simpson’s Bundy condo to the site of O.J.’s Rockingham mansion.
I’m talking especially to those of you who believe O.J. didn’t do it. And I’m talking especially to those of you who watched large parts (or all) of the trial.
Once you’ve left your answer, you can hit the “back” button, or simply scroll up to read the rest of this post. Don’t worry, we’ll wait. It’ll take you only a second.
To the O.J. jury, a critical factor in coming to a not guilty verdict within a few short hours appeared to be the timeline. That was one of the major issues argued by the defense, and was the subject of the one bit of readback they had: of limo driver Allan Park’s testimony. According to the defense, O.J. simply didn’t have the time to get back to his house from Nicole’s condo, get cleaned up, and be ready for the limo driver to pick him up.
Nonsense.
Not many people realize this, but the drive from Nicole’s condo (the crime scene) to O.J.’s house took only five minutes. I’ve done it many times, and it always took five minutes, give or take 30 seconds or so.
Back in the day, when visitors came to town, we used to give them our own personal “O.J. tour.” We’d go eat at Mezzaluna, where Ron Goldman worked, and where Nicole ate her last meal. We’d drive to Nicole’s Bundy condo, park, and walk up the walkway towards the tiny area where Nicole and Ron took their last breaths.
Then we’d drive to O.J.’s house — just like O.J. himself did after butchering Nicole and Ron. We usually did the drive in under five minutes. It never took us more than five and a half minutes. We once did it in under four and a half minutes. We didn’t even try to drive fast.
It just doesn’t take that long to get from Bundy to Rockingham. You can slash a woman’s throat, stab a guy to death, hop in your Bronco and jet back to Rockingham in five minutes, get rid of the bloody clothing around the corner, hop the fence near Kato’s guest house, lose the bloody glove, and shower up — all in no time flat. It’s easily done. O.J. had plenty of time.
Plenty.
Did the jury understand this? I doubt it.
Recall that the jury visited the crime scene and O.J.’s house on the same day. People have previously discussed this as a huge coup for the defense, because they managed to portray O.J. as a good family man. Down came the pictures of scantily clad women. Up went the pictures of O.J.’s mom.
The visit to the crime scenes was a huge media event. Traffic was snarled for miles in both directions. Helicopters flew overhead. A huge media contingent followed the caravan.
I can’t for the life of me imagine that the jury traveled from Nicole’s to O.J.’s house in anything like five minutes. It wouldn’t surprise me if it took 30 minutes or more.
If the jury thought it took a considerable period of time to travel from Nicole’s to O.J.’s, it’s no wonder they found themselves convinced by the timeline argument.
I once asked Bill Hodgman about this. He said that the jury had been shown a video of (if memory serves) Detective Vannatter driving between Nicole’s and O.J.’s in approximately five minutes.
Vannatter — the guy Johnnie Cochran branded as one of the Twin Devils of Deception.
It’s possible that the jury, consciously or subconsciously, discounted this video as being completely inconsistent with their own perceptions. “It took us 35 minutes to get from one place to the other, and Vanatter claimed he could do it in five. Just another lie told by the LAPD.”
The careful reader will note that there is plenty of speculation involved in all of this. I don’t know how long it took the jurors to get from Nicole’s to O.J.’s. I don’t know if they discussed this point, or it it weighed on their subconscious minds. I don’t know if this issue had anything to do with the verdict at all.
But I’d love to get a hold of one of the jurors today and ask him or her: how long do you think it took O.J. to drive from Bundy to Rockingham? I think the answer would surprise you.
Well, er, I clicked on the “Comments” and it opened the post, so I guess I’m excused from guessing
Comment by Jimmy — 8/22/2006 @ 9:07 am
It opens the post, but should take you directly down to where you can leave a comment. That’s why I said you could simply scroll up once you’ve left your comment.
Comment by Patterico — 8/22/2006 @ 9:09 am
Um, I’m thinking it was 10 to 15 minutes maximum.
Comment by Christi — 8/22/2006 @ 9:16 am
about 5 minutes. is it light traffic on sunset blvd., or rush hour, and how much do you care about not getting a ticket? as a native of pacific palisades, i’ve driven on this stretch many times.
Comment by assistant devil's advocate — 8/22/2006 @ 9:18 am
Uh what am I supposed to do here? I have no clue. I am from NorCal after all.
Comment by Joel B. — 8/22/2006 @ 9:28 am
10 - 15 minutes
Comment by worker — 8/22/2006 @ 9:33 am
ada,
If I recall, it’s about 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday night. We’ve done the drive at exactly that time.
Comment by Patterico — 8/22/2006 @ 9:37 am
Back in the day, when visitors came to town, we used to give them our own personal “O.J. tour.” We’d go eat at Mezzaluna, where Ron Goldman worked, and where Nicole ate her last meal. We’d drive to Nicole’s Bundy condo, park, and walk up the walkway towards the tiny area where Nicole and Ron took their last breaths.
Then we’d drive to O.J.’s house
Dude, that’s like, kind of creepy. What’d y’all do on Christmas?
Comment by Army Lawyer — 8/22/2006 @ 9:40 am
To the jury, the only relevant fact in the case was that the defendant was OJ Simpson. Nothing else mattered, not the timeline, not the blood analysis, not the physical evidence, not the eye wittiness testimony, not even Nicole’s written prediction OJ would not only kill her, but also get away with it.
Comment by Black Jack — 8/22/2006 @ 9:44 am
No creepier than my uncle, the first time I visited Dallas as an adult, giving me the ‘JFK’ tour.
[Hey, the JFK tour is cool! — P]
Comment by aphrael — 8/22/2006 @ 9:44 am
Patterico: Not for the first comment. Next time, leave one yourself
[Ah. Gotcha. Sorry. — P]
Comment by Jimmy — 8/22/2006 @ 9:47 am
i’ve done it at exactly that time too and it’s under five minutes, even with checking out chicks in other cars and worrying about the motorcycle cops with radar guns enforcing the 35 mph limit.
i don’t know what paul revere jr. high school (at the bottom of the canyon where rockingham drive is on top) is like now, but in the 1960’s when i was there, it sucked bigtime!
Comment by assistant devil's advocate — 8/22/2006 @ 9:58 am
You just don’t understand! O J Simpson won the Heisman trophy and rushed for over 2,000 yards in a single NFL season. You’ve got to give a guy like that a break.
Comment by Dana — 8/22/2006 @ 10:07 am
I’d guess 15 minutes, but wouldn’t want to bet anything on it.
Comment by Joel Rosenberg — 8/22/2006 @ 10:28 am
5 minutes
Comment by Pablo — 8/22/2006 @ 11:11 am
15 minutes?
Comment by AughtSix — 8/22/2006 @ 11:16 am
Nobody gets it. It takes a black man thirty minutes because we all know he gets busted for DWB at least twice on his journey. Whites do it in four minutes,
Asians sneak around the back way and make it in five and one half, Jews have to rent a limo so once inside it they make it in three, and lawyers have to stop and file at least one class action suit on the way over so it takes them a day and a half.
Comment by Howard Veit — 8/22/2006 @ 11:33 am
I don’t recall now, but I think it was five or six minutes.
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 11:36 am
OK. I was right. So what does that do to your argument, Pat?
You write, “get rid of the bloody clothing around the corner”, and yet no one found those bloody clothes. Why do you suppose that is? Were the police inept? Or where the clothes not there? Or did OJ call someone (without leaving a phone record) and have the clothes disposed of?
You’ve got two huge problems you have to overcome - where are the bloody clothes and why wasn’t the Bronco covered in blood?
Solve those and you may convince me - and the jury that some many racist comments are made about.
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 11:43 am
Patterico, maybe we should agree on the time elapsed?
IIRC, the prosecution argued it was forty minutes, but that seemed strained to me. OJ went to McDonalds with whats-his-name and returned to the house. IIRC, thirty minutes seems about the most time you would have had, but let’s give the prosecution a break and say it’s forty.
Deduct ten minutes for drive time (both directions), and you have thirty minutes to commit the murders and dispose of the evidence. Disposing of the evidence would take at least five minutes, right? Oh, and OJ has to take a shower and get dressed, ready to travel to the airport. Will you give him ten minutes for that? Oh, and he has to clean up the Bronco, which would have been covered in blood. Would you give him five minutes for that? But he has to do it before the limo driver arrives…..
So now you’re down to a 10 minute window within which both Ron and Nicole have to appear outside the condo and be killed - but Ron has to die first, then Nicole.
Are you starting to see the difficulty with the timeline? If it was thirty minutes (which I consider more likely), there’s no time at all left to kill them. But to run over to the condo after getting a panicked call from his son, see the devastation and then run home to get ready for the flight - yup - no problem with that timeline. Then he’s got the entire flight to figure out what to do, if anything.
Did I mention he took a cell phone call from his son during the early part of that time frame? Wonder what that was about?
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 11:52 am
Oh, and he has to clean up the Bronco, which would have been covered in blood.
It would have?
You keep repeating this as if it is fact yet present no indication as to why.
I note you ran from this question in the other thread…
Comment by The Ace — 8/22/2006 @ 12:04 pm
Though it has been 10 years since the trial, I still remembered it was only 5 minutes.
OJ=guilty as sin
Comment by Kat — 8/22/2006 @ 12:37 pm
8 minutes.
Comment by X_LA_Native — 8/22/2006 @ 12:43 pm
Has anyone in this thread ever killed someone with a knife? (Any military guys here - especially special forces types?) Anyone ever worked a crime scene where a murder was committed with a knife?
Ace, I’m mystified by your “ran from it” comment. Perhaps I missed the question.
There would have been blood all over the murderer - pants, shirt, underwear, socks, shoes, hands, face, arms, everywhere. You don’t cut both carotid arteries without having tons of blood spewing everywhere. Goldman was stabbed in the neck, cutting open his jugular vein and in the chest, cutting open his aorta. Both cuts would have produced copious amounts of blood before he died.
How do you explain the absence of blood in the Bronco? Think about it. If OJ committed the murders, he was covered in blood from head to toe. He then gets in the Bronco and rushes back to his house. Yet a microscopic amount of blood was found in the Bronco. Where did all the rest of the blood go?
If you’re a juror, you want the answer to that question. The prosecution never explained it. Did OJ clean up the car? Then more time is needed on the timeline. Evidence of cleaning fluids would have been found. It simply doesn’t add up.
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 12:50 pm
A well planned crime would have eleminated all of the evidence the nuts are still looking for. No problem, a stupid jury turned him loose, so he’s free to keep comitting more crimes, so far just no more double murders that we know of.
And yes I have worked a murder (stabbing), the worst a woman stabbed over 60 times (throat slit) with several knife blades broken off in her. Yes there was lots of blood, but believe it or not the murderer returned to the scene within minutes and was only arrested because someone (neighbor)knew him and knew he did it. The few drops of blood he still had on him did not contribute to him being reconized and arrested.
Comment by Scrapiron — 8/22/2006 @ 1:04 pm
15-20 minutes.
(and I’m in the group that thinks he did it)
Comment by Arthur — 8/22/2006 @ 1:08 pm
Goldman was stabbed in the neck, cutting open his jugular vein and in the chest, cutting open his aorta. Both cuts would have produced copious amounts of blood before he died.
Ok.
Well then does that mean it all would have splattered on OJ? No.
Further, if blood were on his clothes, that doesn’t mean it would transfer in large quantities to the bronco unless it was on his back (pressing against the seat) or the back of his legs.
That said, you would have to infer his shoes were soaked in it and they would likely transfer more to the vehicle.
Comment by The Ace — 8/22/2006 @ 1:11 pm
Antimedia wrote:
Patterico wrote:
*Dramatic music* GASP!
Something you ain’t sharing there Patrick?
Comment by Army Lawyer — 8/22/2006 @ 1:21 pm
Scrapiron writes
This wasn’t a well-planned crime. It was a crime of passion. At least that’s what the prosecution argued. Were they wrong?
Was he wearing the same clothes he committed the murder in? Did he clean up before returning? Was it a crime of passion? Or a well-planned murder as you mentioned?
Ace writes
How do you face someone, stab them repeatedly (which implies very close contact - inches) and not get any blood on you?
Regardless of where the blood is, he has to grab the outside handle to open the door, touch the gearshift and the steering wheel, grab the door to close it, handle the keys, press the foot pedals with the Bruno Maglis which were at the crime scene and stepped in the blood (according to the prosecution), put the second bloody glove somewhere (in his lap?) and do all this without getting any blood on the car.
Yet only microsoopic traces of blood were found. Sounds like a miracle. Or the wrong guy.
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 1:23 pm
I can think of a couple of scenarios where he wouldn’t get much blood in the Bronco. One would be realizing what he did, grabbing a garbage bag, stripping down and putting his clothes in it before he got into the Bronco, and then dumping them in some out of the way, never searched dumpster on the way home. That does add time, and it adds an element of at least after the fact planning. Other scenarios could be contrived.
Of course, since Mr Simpson is hot on the trail of the Real Killers, we’ll know the whole story eventually.
Comment by Dana — 8/22/2006 @ 1:38 pm
How do you face someone, stab them repeatedly (which implies very close contact - inches) and not get any blood on you?
I didn’t say any, I said all.
He could have at least had the foresight to wear a sweatshirt and taken it off before getting into the Bronco.
Further, I believe he slit his wife’s throat from behind.
Comment by The Ace — 8/22/2006 @ 1:42 pm
Dana writes
Now he has to remember to bring a garbage bag (forget the crime of passion scenario) and he has to drive home in the Bronco naked (not too likely.) And as you point out, it increases the time required, making the timeline even more strained, because he has to take time to shed the clothes and find a dumpster to put them in before returning to his house - naked.
[It wasn’t a crime of passion. He took a knife there. And he easily could have been wearing a jumpsuit and shed that. — P]
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 1:42 pm
OK, let’s try a different approach. OJ and Kato went to McDonalds for a burger about 9:30 or 9:45 IIRC. The limo was supposed to pick up OJ at 10:45 - 11PM for his flight.
So, OJ goes for a burger, goes home, looks at his watch, has about an hour to get ready for the limo pickup, so he decides, “Hey, I think I’ll run over to Nicole’s house and kill her. Let’s see….I’m going to need a knife, a jumpsuit to protect me from the blood, a bag to throw it in, something to clean my hands and face with that I can throw away, now where did I leave that knife??????”
But he forgot to remove his Bruno Magli shoes, so he had to throw them away too. Oh, and just for good measure, after all this meticulous planning, he left a bloody sock on the floor in his bedroom, where the police were sure to find it. And he killed her because he was in a jealous rage.
Does that make sense to you?
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 2:16 pm
I thought that the two sites were in walking distance of each other. 5-8 minutes.
Comment by Pat Patterson — 8/22/2006 @ 2:16 pm
30 minutes
Comment by rev — 8/22/2006 @ 2:51 pm
This sounds like a case for Horatio. He solves the Miami murders fairly easily so this one shouldn’t be so tough.
“What if, what if, what if…?”
What if Big Bird came and shit on your head?
This case boils down to who had the best lawyer. O.J. had tons of money to spend on his defense. Cochran, Shapiro and Bailey were all the non-space saga equivalent of the Emporer’s apprentice- except he made an exception to the “one master, one apprentice” rule.
It seems like Divine Justice, Kharma, or whatever your religion calls it, always gets its man- or woman in the case of Jon Benet Ramsey’s mother.
The jackhole cops in charge of the crime scene, the incompetent prosectuting attorneys and the elegant wordsmithing of the defense all worked against putting The Juice behind bars.
Frankly, I could care less about timelines, eyewitnesses and such because now they are all irrelevant. Simpson got off and two people are dead and this case will forever go down in the annuls of ‘who-done-it?’- right above Jimmy Hoffa and just below Jack the Ripper.
Comment by Trickish Knave — 8/22/2006 @ 2:59 pm
I drove the route once, and as I recall, I made the trip in nine minutes.
Comment by James Fulton — 8/22/2006 @ 3:30 pm
I’d guess 10 to 12 minutes
Comment by Ken Hahn — 8/22/2006 @ 3:49 pm
Fascinating….
Patterico is re-examining the OJ case, e.g., here. My impression at the time, from reading the newspapers, was this: He probably did it; There was a reasonable doubt; The police and prosecutors shared this doubt. So… how did I come up with (2), and e…
Trackback by Silicon Valley Redneck — 8/22/2006 @ 3:55 pm
I think it was like 7 minutes if I remember the testimony and the John and Ken commentary correctly.
Comment by chad — 8/22/2006 @ 4:39 pm
20 minutes. I really have no idea, except that they are both in L.A. (to us non-L.A. residents). Depending on traffic, that could be forever, or very short if they are close.
So far, I don’t know the point of this post, but I’ll add the following additional comment, in case it’s helpful. Obviously he is guilty. I don’t think this post is directed at me, since I’m not in the OJ might be innocent camp.
Comment by D Huff — 8/22/2006 @ 4:55 pm
How long? I don’t remember. I would think it would depend on how many traffic laws are broken.
btw: there is a difference between ‘his not doing it’ and ‘beyond proved beyond a legal reasonable doubt’
Comment by seePea — 8/22/2006 @ 6:21 pm
At 10:30 pm it is at most a 5 minute drive, perhaps less if you are speeding and hit the light at Sunset right.
Used to drive past Mezzaluna every day for work (lived at 3rd and Montana and worked at the VA) and had never heard of the place until the trial.
Was amazed at how many of my African American coworkers claimed OJ was framed etc and how they thought he was innocent. It was truly amazing how fixed they were in their beliefs. The general consensus of guilt vs innocence seemed to correlate to ethnicity. The prosecution definitely was screwed from the beginning.
What also amazed me is how predominately African American the jury was. I have been called to JD several times in downtown LA and never participated in a jury pool that was predominately black as was OJs. They must have done a lot of weeding out with the questionnaires to get such skewed results. Any insight into how this was achieved (presumably by the defense)?
Comment by Jan — 8/22/2006 @ 6:24 pm
Patrick,
This is one reason I like your site. As much as I “don’t care” about the subject (because in my opinion the killer has gotten away with it), I am fascinated with your take on it. I’ve come to respect your arguments and opinions, and this dang thread has me hooked. Keep going!
For those of you commenting on the “keystone cops” aspects of the investigation and on the prosecutorial ineptness, remember where you first heard that meme — from the defense. They may have had a slight bias in their presentation. Don’t let the “conventional wisdom” lead you astray. It may or may not be correct; it is certainly NOT unbiased.
Comment by Bill M — 8/22/2006 @ 6:35 pm
It takes 7 minutes…but wait, I wanna know how long does is take to get to Faye Resnick’s dealers’ source house via the Rockingham crib where he dropped off an 8-ball and the glove (accidently) near Space balls’ cottage? The prosecution sucked–vergiage in/verbiage out. If I were a No.Idahoan cop with a last name the same as an all-Black University, I would carry a chip on my shoulder too. Any Atty making $105k per year is in deep vs. $105k per week hired hands.
Comment by Stokes — 8/22/2006 @ 7:02 pm
“Antimedia wrote:
*****Has anyone in this thread ever killed someone with a knife?*****”
There are probably people who would say I have. Certainly, I spent thousands of hours operating on people, many with stab wounds. When I finished my training at LA County. we had to summarize our cases for the board exams. I had 1500 stab wounds, give or take a few.
I was a doubter for a while but Petrocelli convinced me with the shoes. I know it takes only 5 minutes to make the drive but I also know how much blood is spilled when a throat is cut. I have spent many nights with someone’s belly open and had to throw my underwear away in the morning. The blood stains were the issue.
I think he was on a methamphetimine frenzy and was incredibly lucky to get off but some of the facts are not as easy to explain as advertised.
Comment by Mike K — 8/22/2006 @ 7:32 pm
Mike K, I found your comment a little hard to follow. Is the “he” on “a methamphetimine frenzy” to which you refer OJ?
Given your statements about blood and underwear, how do you explain the lack of blood on OJ and in the Bronco?
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 7:50 pm
Don’t feed the troll.
Comment by Kat — 8/22/2006 @ 8:05 pm
I have never killed anyone with a knife but I grew up on a farm. My parents butchered animals from as small as chickens to as large as three-hundred pound pigs. (With a “bleeding” stroke in the throat.) If you are positioned properly in relation to the animal, you need not get a single drop of blood on yourself.
Comment by nk — 8/22/2006 @ 8:27 pm
How long? Probably five minutes, at a guess. Not something I paid a great deal of attention to, I admit.
Comment by htom — 8/22/2006 @ 8:37 pm
nk, the pig was normally hung by the hind legs from a branch, so that the blood would drain to the ground, and you slice its throat from behind, so the blood travels away from you. Generally, when you slaughter smaller animals (like chickens or rabbits) you do it in such a way that the blood travels away from you as well.
I doubt seriously a murderer in a jealous rage considers those options, especially one born in the city and especially one committing the crime in the confined space that was the front “yard” of Nicole’s condo.
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 8:50 pm
I see we already have one participant who is only interested in debating facts that are not the subject of today’s post.
Comment by Crank — 8/22/2006 @ 9:10 pm
Patterico , your point about the distances and the travel time and how the jury was shown this only furthers the claim that the case was poorly prosecuted, poorly hardly being the adequate word.
Didn’t someone realize what was happening? How could the prosecution not gone to Judge Ito and asked for a re-do of the visit, this time at night and without the crowd? Or was everyone in the DA office too busy at night drinking wine and listening to soft music?
Comment by seePea — 8/22/2006 @ 9:17 pm
Folks:
Anybody else notice that Patterico has already suggested a very easy way for OJ not to get blood on the Bronc — and Antimedia never answered it?
I’ll quote it, just for the heck of it:
You understand the point? Since we know that OJ planned the crime — he actually took the knife with him — he would probably have been smart enough to realize that showing up at the limo covered with blood would probably excite attention.
So he puts on an old painter’s jump suit over a t-shirt and shorts, takes the knife and a plastic bag, drives over and kills them, strips off his outer clothing and shoves it in his bag, belatedly realizes he should have worn different shoes, but he puts those in the bag, too, and drives home.
Here is Antimedia’s only “response,” which isn’t even a response:
This is called the “Argument by Personal Incredulity”: Antimedia cannot imagine his hero doing anything like that — so therefore, it was all a frame.
But he won’t tell us who did the framing, because he knows we would howl with laughter to discover that he thinks it was Ron Shipp.
I suspect Antimedia has read and swallowed whole the absurdist J. Neil Schulman book “the Frame of the Century.”
Shipp gets OJ drunk in the hot tub. Then he extracts OJ’s blood, using a syringe, commits the killings, and then artfully scatters OJ’s blood around the crime scene to frame him.
Dafydd
Comment by Dafydd — 8/22/2006 @ 9:21 pm
antimedia,
it came out in the trial that OJ had been trained to use a knife in the manner in which Nicole and Ron Goldman were killed. It was done for a movie or TV project and he had been trained by an ex-SEAL.
Comment by chad — 8/22/2006 @ 9:25 pm
Actually, antimedia is not at all a bad defense attorney. Even if the timeline is irrefutable it is not dispositive. If antimedia can convince the “jury” that you cannot kill two people with a knife without getting soaked in blood that’s reasonable doubt. I’m glad he’s here. If he had four more commenters on his side it would be a sort of model of the trial. The defense was taking the case away from the prosecution every step of the way with speculation and collateral evidence.
Comment by nk — 8/22/2006 @ 9:36 pm
Daydd, I’m a bit surprised by the personal nature of your attack. It’s almost as if you have no explanation for the crime so you figure ridiculing me will do the trick.
I ain’t buying it.
First of all, get it out of your head the OJ is/was my hero. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Furthermore, I’ve never even heard of The Frame of the Century, much less read it, and judging by the title, I wouldn’t buy the book. I don’t buy the he was framed argument for one minute.
Now, let’s try looking at the evidence and the arguments and try to act like adults, shall we?
You write
We’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that you’re correct in all the details. Where’s the clothes? Where’s the knife? Why, if OJ planned this murder, did the prosecution argue that it was a crime of passion - a jealous rage? And why, if OJ planned the murder, did he give himself so little time to commit it? Why wait until he was leaving town to rush over there, commit the murders and then rush back?
And BTW, the prosecution never made the argument that you make here, so the jury never would have considered it. (I did, but rejected it for the reasons that I’ve articulated.)
I’ve seen lots of scoffing and ridicule and assertions of certainty here, but I’ve seen almost no logical argumentation. I’m especially disappointed to find you resorting to ad hominem. I’ve admired your argumentation for quite some time, and I’m pretty sure you realize it.
Instead of assuming OJ is guilty, make your arguments. Patterico asserts that the timeline is a slam dunk - “nonsense” and “plenty” (of time) he says. I say, hold on a minute. It’s not quite as cut and dried as you claim.
And you say - antimedia must be nuts or stupid.
Yeah, that convinces me fer sure.
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 10:15 pm
chad writes
First of all, Goldman wasn’t killed that way. The technique you refer to is to sneak up behind your foe and pull his head backwards while slicing his throat below the adam’s apple so that he can’t make any sound before he dies. Goldman was murdered in a mano-a-mano confrontation, face to face.
Secondly, being trained by a SEAL to perform the technique in a movie is a long way from actually doing it for real. It’s the difference between learning to drive a car in a parking lot with no distractions and actually driving the car in traffic.
The fact that OJ learned the technique is evidence that he could have committed the crime because he knew how. It doesn’t make him guilty.
Comment by antimedia — 8/22/2006 @ 10:22 pm
I, for one, admire your style, antimedia. You did not attack our host’s argument’s biggest weakness — “just what time exactly did the crime occur?” which would start the running of the timeline. I was never convinced by “car detailers”, gates slamming and dogs barking either. In fact, that offended me. You chose an even more powerful strategy — proactive not reactive. Not just trying to push back the state’s case but actually derailing it.
Comment by nk — 8/22/2006 @ 10:31 pm
antimedia, you’re right that the techniques OJ learned on the movie set do not ‘make him guilty.’
The overwhelming evidence presented in court is what makes OJ guilty.
You’re looking for a ‘perfect’ body of evidence—which only happens on “Law & Order.”
Comment by Desert Rat — 8/22/2006 @ 10:38 pm
We’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that you’re correct in all the details. Where’s the clothes? Where’s the knife?
He disposed of them.
Why, if OJ planned this murder, did the prosecution argue that it was a crime of passion - a jealous rage?
Did they not argue that he had purchased the knife well in advance?
And why, if OJ planned the murder, did he give himself so little time to commit it? Why wait until he was leaving town to rush over there, commit the murders and then rush back?
To give himself an alibi.
How long does it take to kill two people (one of whom, Nicole, clearly didn’t see it coming), ditch clothes and a knife, and drive five minutes to your home?
Not long.
Coincidence that the cuts — which he admitted he had cut on the night of the murders — were on Simpson’s left hand? That’s the same hand as the killer’s hand was cut, with drops on the left side of the killer’s shoe prints — which makes sense because the left-hand glove was pulled off at the scene. Of course, O.J. never owned Aris Isotoner gloves anyway, and never mind the photos that show he did. It’s like those “ugly-ass shoes” he never owned despite photographs he did.
Comment by Patterico — 8/22/2006 @ 10:40 pm
P.S.
antimedia wrote:
“The technique you refer to is to sneak up behind your foe and pull his head backwards while slicing his throat below the adam’s apple so that he can’t make any sound before he dies.”
Good, good, good. The description of the technique is mildly wrong. The Fairbairn method is to put the weak hand over the victim’s mouth and twist it backward and sideways and stab, not slice, as close as possible to the temporal-mandibular joint, at an angle so that the carotid and larynx are both pierced and for insurance you punch your knife-hand forward so that the knife will also cut whatever you may have missed with the stab. (Fairbairn’s book “Get Tough” is still available on Amazon. I bought my copy as a teenager but my mother threw it away the first minute I left it out of my sight.) So let the prosecution rebut it and help keep the jury distracted from the central evidence a little bit more.
Comment by nk — 8/22/2006 @ 10:56 pm
early on in this case, i quipped to somebody that o.j. didn’t do it, it was marcus allen. that was before a slim marcus allen connection actually emerged.
i wonder what antimedia thinks of those 911 recordings where nicole was shrieking her head off. it was a simple mistake, marcus allen and not o.j. was threatening her! as a ucla fan since childhood, all usc backs look alike to me!
Comment by assistant devil's advocate — 8/22/2006 @ 11:02 pm
About 3-5 Minutes!!! Go up Bundy, Left on San Vicente, Right on Cliffwood, JAM across sunset, then Left on Ashford - This takes you right to the Garage of OJ’s house.. How do i know this? I used to shoot for KTLA-TV, I remember making “the drive” a few times wit various Reporters.. Oh. I miss the good ‘ole days of senseless OVERTIME!!..
James
Comment by James — 8/22/2006 @ 11:52 pm
5 minutes, max.
Comment by elliott — 8/23/2006 @ 12:11 am
for the record, i did not look before guessing. it’s just that i spent a lot of time in west L.A., first at UCLA, then Loyola Law School, etc.
and i’m always fascinated by people’s inability to accurately guess lengths of time. people either completely overestimate, or completely underestimate their guesses depending entirely on their point of view regarding the subject at hand. rarely, if ever, do they hit the nail on the head.
Comment by elliott — 8/23/2006 @ 12:17 am
Yeah, people don’t have any accurate impression of time.
That’s why we measure it.
*If* Marcia Clark and company along with Lance Ito let the jurors have a half hour ride between these two scenes without also letting them do the same trip when there was no traffic, whatever it took to bring that about including a court order clearing the streets and press, then they are grossly incompetent.
Which is one of the many reasons why I hold to my original opinion that Marcia Clark and company were so damn incompetent an acquittal was likely.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 12:31 am
Chris,
is it really the Judge’s place to re-do the trip without one of the attorneys petitioning the judge to do so?
Does anyone recall the reputation Marcia Clark had before the trial started? Was it better or worse than the guy who had to bail out due to heart trouble?
Comment by seePea — 8/23/2006 @ 12:37 am
I guess you’ll get around to the DNA stuff at some point, but I wanted to pipe up with my own O.J. story.
I went to North Carolina State University from 1992 to 1996, and I was an active member of the math club there. Bruce Weir was a statistic prof there, and had been an expert witness for the prosecution regarding the probabilities in DNA matching. He flubbed something in trial, I think, but I’m not sure — I found the trial coverage ridiculous and missed most stupid details of the trial. (Here’s Prof. Weir’s webpage: http://statgen.ncsu.edu/bsw/bsw.html)
After the trial was over, the math club invited Prof. Weir to give a talk on his field, and boy, were we in for a treat. He brought the data from the Simpson trial, especially some that evidently came out after the trial was over. Oh, Prof. Weir was a very pissed off man. He also gave us advice as to if we were ever expert witnesses: if the other side asks a dumbass and/or misleading question, you don’t have to answer it. Just state that you can’t answer the question. Do not think you can finesse yourself around these things.
Anyway, the DNA tests were definitely of O.J.’s blood commingled with the victims’ (I don’t think the ID of the victims’ blood was in contention), not some other relative or random person on the street. It doesn’t answer whether the blood was planted evidence, but it does make one wonder how the cops just happened to have a sample of O.J.’s blood to put on an item that also had the victims’ blood on it.
Yeah, Prof. Weir was a very unhappy man. But I think your point about the jury was apt, and I bet that even if Weir’s evidence hadn’t been botched, it still would have made no difference. I sure hope he doesn’t think it’s his fault OJ got away with murder.
Comment by meep — 8/23/2006 @ 2:05 am
Hi SeePea,
I’d never heard of her before the trial began, but I read quite a bit of her after.
And no, in no way was it Lance Ito’s fault if the prosecution was too dumb to notice this and petition for it.
Patterico noticed this (in hindsight, sure, but these were among their “best” lawyers at the time so you’d think they might have) and I can’t think of any reason why they wouldn’t.
I’ll use an example of a woman I can’t stand: Nancy Grace.
She’s an emotionally manipulative drama queen, in my humble opinion, and seems to often be mistaken, which doesn’t stop her from pursuing her vendetta(s) against supposed wrongdoers full throttle.
Of course, they’re usually (not always) guilty, but this seems secondary to her.
However, where she excels is that she realizes juries and people are not fountains of logic and learned debate. She handles the emotional in a trial and in her interactions with people.
This is at least as persuasive as pure logic, and she at least gives enough of that to allow a person to rationalize doing what they want to do in most cases, which is “make someone pay”.
Clark seems to have missed the boat on this entirely. Crappy jury selected according to Patterico (I’m not sure if she could have done much about this), unfocused prosecution, inadequate consideration of the jury’s perceptions… as if timelimes from a somewhat discredited police force without their own experiences to match would be adequate.
It wasn’t. O.J. walked.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 2:10 am
Oooh, I looked down Prof. Weir’s publications list. He most definitely went around telling everybody about his experience (it’s in the correspondence and commentaries list).
In any case, I don’t think the DNA evidence had any sway with the jury. Even if they admitted it was OJ’s blood, it was that racist Mark Fuhrman who planted evidence about OJ. Or the glove didn’t fit so they must acquit. Something like that. I’m sure they didn’t care about the DNA evidence at all.
Comment by meep — 8/23/2006 @ 2:11 am
Mark Fuhrman, whose mind I greatly respect, had shown himself to be a racist by this time, the glove didn’t fit and the prosecution went out of there way to prove this in the trial…
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 2:15 am
To be clear, I respect Mark Furhman for his ability to reform himself of the awful disability of racism and to provide excellent crime analysis since this unfortunate trial.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 2:16 am
Forgive the multiple comments, I’m still thinking…
I would be more sympathetic to Patterico’s argument that it’s the jury’s fault if even one person on the jury had disagreed with their verdict.
Instead, they were united and some even said that they think O.J. might have did it, probably did do it, but the prosecution didn’t prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
And that’s pretty much my reading too as a lay person and from memory.
I could be wrong… I didn’t follow the trial as closely as Patterico or many of you… I just find it too convenient to blame the jury when I think there is a whole lot of blame to spread around, from racist cops investigating the case and handling blood evidence, to an off the rails prosecution designed, seemingly, to advance the prosecutor’s anti-domestic violence agenda.
A worthy cause. The wrong place for it, if you ask me. Which you didn’t.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 2:26 am
approx. 5 minutes ?
Comment by Kevin Crowley — 8/23/2006 @ 2:52 am
Whose idea was it to visit the crime scene and OJ’s home and for what purpose? When in the trial did the field trip happen and was there a lag between the time it was requested and when it happened?
So far, and it is very early in his ‘case’, Patterico has not even come close to convincing me that it was the jury’s fault but has confirmed to me that the prosecution of the case was negligent.
Are prosecutors liable for criminal negligance when totally messing up a case?
Comment by seePea — 8/23/2006 @ 4:30 am
“Mike K, I found your comment a little hard to follow. Is the “he” on “a methamphetimine frenzy” to which you refer OJ?”
Yes. I don’t think it was a planned crime. He could have done better than that. Maybe he got the idea and Goldman happened to be there or maybe Goldman was a motive.
“Given your statements about blood and underwear, how do you explain the lack of blood on OJ and in the Bronco?”
It bothered me. There are some comments about Bruce Fairbairn and knife fighting. Nicole’s head was almost cut off. There were cut marks on her vertebrae. This was definitely a rage situation. No subtlety and she should have bled like a fountain.
I have also been an expert witness many times and can second the remark about not responding to stupid questions. I was once asked about a shotgun pattern on the body of a shooting victim. The asker was an affirmative action assistant DA (Not Patrick, it was Orange County) and my reply was that I was not a ballistics expert. He had those in court. It made him look dumb, which he was. The end result was a shooter got acquitted on the grounds of self defense. The victim was naked in the shooter’s bed with his wife.
Bad lawyering like the OJ case. I agree the biggest mistake was moving it downtown.
Comment by Mike K — 8/23/2006 @ 6:45 am
Patrick, you wrote
Here you are implying calculated pre-planning. I’ll respond to that in a minute….
That depends upon the circumstances. Nicole was in the house. (We know this because she was preparing a bath.) She had to be induced to come out front for some reason - either because she heard the noise of Ron being killed (the likely scenario, I think) or because the killer convinced her to come outside and killed her first, then Ron stumbled on the scene - but why would he be there then?.
I’m not an expert, but I would think at least ten minutes would have been necessary to accomplish everything that was done at Bundy (park the car, come around the front, kill Ron and Nicole and return to the car), which would have been parked in the rear, if the prosecution is right. Then you need ten minutes driving time (both ways) and you need time to dispose of the clothes and the knife so that no one will ever find them.
This, for me, is new evidence. I don’t recall this coming out at the trial. Am I mistaken?
Basically, two scenarios have been posited. The prosecution contended that this was a rage murder induced by jealousy. You contend it was a cold, calculated murder.
If the former is true, then why would OJ have the means to dispose of the evidence with him when he went to Bundy? If the latter is true, then why would OJ drop a glove at the scene, another behind Kato’s bungalow and a bloody sock on his bedroom floor?
The problem with the evidence is you need a person with split personality - or two different people at the scene. You need a cold, calculating killer who feels no remorse and plans carefully, but you also need a sloppy, rage-filled killer who acts out of emotion.
And you need OJ to do all of this in a very tight time frame. Ten minutes driving time. Ten minutes at the scene and ten minutes to dispose of the evidence (except for two gloves and one sock, of course) without leaving a trace for anyone to find.
Did you know that Jason is the same size as OJ, wears the same shoe size and is a sous chef, with his own collection of knives? Did you know that he closed the restaurant early that night and was extremely angry because Nicole stood him up? Did you know that Jason took medication to control his rages, and that he stopped taking the medication a few weeks before the murders? Did you know that he threatened his girlfriend with a knife just days before the murders? Did you know that the police never investigated Jason?
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 7:56 am
Because he’s no Hannibal Lecter. Why do criminals ever screw up? And how did the bloody sock get into the house?
You’re putting us on, aren’t you?
Comment by Pablo — 8/23/2006 @ 8:01 am
assistant devil’s advocate writes
Of course it was OJ, but evidence came out (either at the trial or later, I don’t recall) that Nicole was the abusive one, not OJ. She threw things at him, including expensive paintings and glassware, when she would get angry. She would scream very loudly and threaten him.
I recall seeing pictues of her with bruises, but there was never any testimony that she got them from OJ. And she could easily have gotten them from Jason, who was (and probably still is) a very violent and out-of-control individual.
There seems to be a general thread here that, if you believe OJ is not guilty, you must also believe the cops were racist and they framed OJ. I believe Fuhrman was racist (that was proven at trial), but I don’t for one minute believe that the cops framed anybody. I do believe the criminalists and detectives were sloppy and inattentive (Vanatter sp? kept evidence in his trunk overnight - so much for chain of custody!), and I suspect that’s because they thought they already knew who the killer was.
But I suspect Patrick will get to that in another post, so I’ll leave it for now.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 8:04 am
pablo writes
But Patrick insists that OJ knew exactly what he was doing. I have a hard time believing someone can be a meticulous planner, thinking through every detail of a crime and then, when he drops a glove, go, “Oh well. I’ll just leave it there.”, then drop another one behind his house (talk about implicating yourself in the murder!), then drop a sock on the floor of his bedroom and just walk away.
Nope. I’m dead serious. Instead of focusing on irrelevant stuff (like whether or not I’m putting you on), focus on the evidence. Ask yourself, as a juror, do you believe that a guy could both plan a murder in advance, including disposing of the evidence and yet carelessly leave one glove at the scene and one at his house and a sock on his floor.
I have less of a hard time believing that Jason killed Ron and Nicole in a rage, called OJ, who rushed right over, saw what he had done and told him to get the hell out of there, and then went back home to figure out how to cover up his son’s crime. If Jason commmitted the murders in a rage, it makes sense that he would drop a glove at the scene and another at the house, then follow his father’s instructions to get rid of all the evidence.
Then OJ, in a hurry to leave to catch his flight, drops a sock on the floor and doesn’t realize it.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 8:31 am
And she could easily have gotten them from Jason, who was (and probably still is) a very violent and out-of-control individual.
When and where was that suppposed to have occurred? And why wouldn’t she press charges?
Comment by Gerald A — 8/23/2006 @ 9:32 am
Your hard time believing does not equate to either impossibility nor improbability. Who says OJ is meticulous? Do you think he couldn’t have committed the crime without being well practiced in post dual homicide cleanup and evidence disposal?
Criminals usually get caught because they screwed up. By your logic, anyone who screws up and gets caught can’t be guilty, because real guilty people don’t make mistakes.
I was referring to what I bolded, your suggestion that not a trace was left after mentioning the two gloves and a sock, all of which are traces that were left. You’re blatantly contradicting yourself within a single sentence, something serious people normally don’t do.
It’s entirely possible. Why wouldn’t it be? And speaking of evidence, what evidence ties Jason to the crime?
Comment by Pablo — 8/23/2006 @ 10:02 am
Gerald A asks
I’m sorry, I don’t recall the where and when, except that it seems it was a while before the murders (six months? a year?)
As to why she wouldn’t press charges, how would I know? Women often don’t press charges against abusers, for a number of reasons - fear, not wanting to get the loved one in trouble, a foolish sense that it was a one-time occurrence, etc., etc.
I can’t possibly know what was in Nicole’s mind, but if Jason, who was her step-son, hit her, there could be all sorts of familial reasons for keeping it quiet.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 10:04 am
Pablo writes
It’s a problem for the prosecution if I’m a juror!
That came out in court. He was apparently very meticulous.
Of course not. People commit crimes all the time without first having practiced them, and murderers often leave evidence of their crimes behind.
Not at all. What I’m saying is that it’s unlikely that someone who was so remorseless as to have planned such a violent crime, including wearing clothes to keep the blood off them and a means to dispose of the evidence of the crime would also “forget” a glove at the scene and another at their own house. Those are signs of a careless killer who doesn’t think through their actions - someone driven by emotion rather than reason. (I might also point out that, even wearing a jumpsuit, the killer would be unlikely to have no blood on their underwear.)
Sure. I was being a bit ironic. The point is, arguing that the killer planned everything in advance yet was careless enough to leave evidence pointing directly to themselves seems a bit of a stretch to me. I think it’s question begging.
So you think an individual can both carefully plan a crime, including how they would dispose of the evidence and, at the same time, carelessly drop evidence pointing directly to themselves after committing the crime, yet dispose of everything except those few tantilizing clues? I wonder if there are any real-life examples of that?
Tons.
Means. Jason was a sous chef and carried a set of knives in his car - very sharp knives that could easily have been the murder weapon(s) used in the crime.
Motive. Jason was known to be violent, had been off his meds for four weeks at the time of the murders and was extremely angry at Nicole for standing him up that night.
Opportunity. Jason closed the restaurant early that night yet manually filled out his time sheet to reflect leaving after the murders were committed. He knew where Nicole lived. He owned a car. He carried his knives with him in the car.
Evidence. Jason is the same size as OJ. Same DNA (almost.) Same shoe size. Same blood type. Same shoes (Jason also owned Bruno Maglis.)
It’s certainly enough to warrant investigation, but the police never did. They looked at Jason’s hand-written timesheet, saw that he clocked out at midnight and dismissed him as a suspect. They never even asked any other restaurant employee, what time did the restaurant close. The answer, which is 9:30 to 9:45, makes Jason look very suspicious and gives him ample opportunity to commit the murders and then call his dad (which cell phone records prove that he did.)
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 10:25 am
Same DNA (almost.)
What’s that word you tried to bury in the parenthetical?
I think it was “almost.”
There goes your theory. As Dafydd pointed out long ago (and you ignored), Jason is not a clone of O.J.
Comment by Patterico — 8/23/2006 @ 11:23 am
Of course Jason isn’t a clone of OJ. But my recollection of the DNA evidence is that OJ couldn’t be excluded, not that he was the exclusive donor. Jason’s DNA would be very similar to his, but that issue never came up in court. No sample of Jason’s DNA was ever compared to known samples from the crime scene. It would be very interesting to see the results of that test.
I think, back then, the DNA testing wasn’t as conclusory as it is these days IIRC.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 11:49 am
To all of those like antimedia who are talking about how long it took to kill Ron and Nicole and it can’t have been done, what with parking the car, etc., in 10 minutes.
Hogwash.
A large strong man, armed, particularly if he has any clue what he’s doing with the application of violence, but in any case, can inflict lethal injuries on two individuals in seconds.
So, by all means count the time to park the car, clean up, etc., but don’t be silly and say they couldn’t have been killed that fast.
Of course they can. It doesn’t take a whole lot of time to slash and stab people… O.J. was an athlete.
Get real.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 11:57 am
But my recollection of the DNA evidence is that OJ couldn’t be excluded, not that he was the exclusive donor.
The testimony was that there was a 1 in 170 million likelihood that it wasn’t OJ Simpson’s.
Jason’s DNA would be very similar to his, but that issue never came up in court.
I think you’re making things up or you heard wrong. Siblings’ DNA would be very similar. Children get half their DNA from each parent, so it would be a lot different.
Comment by Gerald A — 8/23/2006 @ 12:26 pm
Six minutes
Comment by Tony Ciarriocco — 8/23/2006 @ 12:26 pm
You’re presenting a false dilemma here.
Meticulous people do forget things sometimes, despite themselves. Meticulous people who have just committed a double homicide for the first time would very likely experience a huge adrenaline overload that would override their meticulous nature. So, forgetting a glove or some other small bit of evidence in the process of cleaning up other bits of evidence doesn’t rule out prior planning.
Comment by Steverino — 8/23/2006 @ 2:28 pm
Especially when that double homicide was planned as a single homicide. He planned to kill Nicole. He didn’t plan to kill Ron, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
How freaked out are you when you’re committing your very first murder and you wind up having to kill a witness in hand to hand combat? I don’t know for sure, but I’m going to guess “very freaked out”. It certainly can’t be calming.
Comment by Pablo — 8/23/2006 @ 3:34 pm
So he kills them, then he starts his cleanup - doffs his jumpsuit, dumps it in the bag, leaves the glove on his right hand, ignores the missing glove from his left hand and heads home?
Doesn’t seem very likely to me. When he’s cleaning up and disposing of the bloody clothes, the missing glove would stick out like a sore thumb. Furthermore, even if he searched for and couldn’t find the missing glove, why would he carry the other one (remember, he dropped it behind Kato’s bungalow) rather than put it in the garbage bag with all the other stuff he’s desposing off?
This is a very odd, and unlikely set of events. Even in a panicked state, one should notice the missing glove, and one should certainly take the other glove off and put it in the bag with the jumpsuit and the knife.
And where is he doing all this doffing of clothes? In the front yard? Unlikely. In the back of the house? Where’s the bloody evidence of all that work? After he gets home? Now we have the lack of the blood in the Bronco to contend with.
I still contend that the blood tells the story and what it tells us is that OJ was there but not directly involved in the murders. There’s too many gaps to eliminate reasonable doubt.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 3:51 pm
Antimedia:
I have no idea where he disposed of them. But somebody did, unless you think they’re still sitting in the house of whomever you think is the real murderer this very moment.
Is your argument actually that it would have been impossible for, say, O.J. Simpson to stuff a bag of clothing and the knife in a duffle bag, then, for a wildly speculative example, remove the bag and throw it into a trash bin at LAX? Or perhaps put them in his garment bag, check it through to Chicago, and throw them away in a trash bin somewhere in the windy city?
I mean, these scenarios really never occurred to you?
Do most murderers carry bloody clothes and the murder weapon around with them for days, or do they get rid of them?
You raise absurdist and irrelevant red herrings in order to wave away the boatload of forensic evidence. How do you explain it all? It’s not really OJ’s blood at the scene? It’s not really the victims’ blood at OJ’s house and in his Bronco?
Those weren’t actually his “ugly ass” Bruno Magli shoes — they were somebody else’s? Somebody else who carefully dripped O.J.’s blood along the trail of footprints… on the same side as Simpson’s cut finger?
Do you mean to accuse the LAPD of attempted murder? Are you impugning all those cops — and would this be, dare I say it, a personal attack on the integrity of Mark Fuhrman and the other detectives and cops on the scene?
Or is it the police lab technicians who you call criminals?
For God’s sake, Antimedia — do you honestly believe that a person in a jealous rage cannot plan a murder? That he cannot even think to bring a weapon, or think later how to dispose of it?
Are you literally sitting there, expecting us to believe that all murders by jealous ex-husbands are carried out spontaneously, spur of the moment, and that none has ever been premeditated in the history of American crime?
You don’t want to suffer attacks of a “personal nature;” you want us all to act like “adults.” Then why don’t you act like an adult and stop playing Internet Deconstructionism?
Your basic technique is to more or less explain away any one specific piece of evidence. But at some point, don’t even you begin to wonder why all these hundreds of pieces of evidence each point to one and only one person in the world — O.J. Simpson?
You clutch for straws by suggesting it was Jason Simpson who killed them. But why? What physical evidence connects him to the killings?
Was the victims’ blood found in his room? Was it found in his car, assuming he even has a car? Did he steal Daddy’s shoes to frame his own father? Was his own blood found at the murder scene?
Your only reasons for blaming Jason instead of O.J. are:
You must seriously consider the physical evidence… and that doesn’t mean you must strain your brain to find a way to dismiss it all.
Hm, that’s a toughie. Now why would Simpson want to make it look as though he had no time to commit the murders, when he could just as easily have committed them on a day when didn’t even have a partial alibi?
And on a completely unrelated note, I wonder why his defense was that he didn’t have time to commit the murders?
I’ll have to ponder that one.
Dafydd
Comment by Dafydd — 8/23/2006 @ 5:52 pm
Antimedia:
This is a perfect example of the fundamental dishonesty of your position. You pretend there are only two criminal modes:
This is a risible argument. It is laughable.
Ordinary people understand that someone can plan a murder down to the last detail… and then become very upset and careless after actually killing the victim and start making stupid mistakes (like dropping things at the scene).
Anyone of at least ordinary intelligence understands that; you are of at least ordinary intelligence; therefore you, Antimedia, understand that as well as the rest of us.
But you pretend that you don’t, just to horse us around, hoping we’ll eventually tire of responding to your nonsense and depart.
(At which point, you’ll triumphantally declare victory.)
Please stop insulting us by your over-literal misinterpretations of what everybody else says. A crime can be premeditated — yet still executed clumsily. A murderer can be very jealous and enraged — yet still take time plotting his revenge. A man shaken by killing his ex-wife, shaken enough that he drops several items on the way home, can still think to dispose of the knife and the rest of the bloody clothing that would put a rope around his neck.
This is all normal, easy stuff that happens in murder after murder after murder in this country. Stop wasting everybody’s valuable time long enough to answer the real questions: how do you get around the physical evidence? Where did it all come from?
Do you, like Chris From Victoria, believe that Mark Fuhrman was such a “racist” that he somehow planted all that evidence, just to “get” O.J. Simpson? That he customarily carried around vials of the blood of various black celebrities, on the off chance he might get an opportunity to frame one of them?
Do you believe that some evil laboratory technician substituted O.J.’s (already treated) blood for the blood evidence gathered at the scene?
Or do you believe that Jason Simpson has exactly the same DNA as his father? That is, that he’s not really the son of O.J. and his first wife, but rather is the first actual human clone in history?
Dafydd
Comment by Dafydd — 8/23/2006 @ 6:26 pm
Antimedia:
Let’s see:
Oh, yeah; in light of your earlier skepticism about the timeline, this makes much more sense. No, really.
Dafydd
Comment by Dafydd — 8/23/2006 @ 6:39 pm
Antimedia:
The human component would be fifty percent similar. Don’t you remember — 23 and 23?
O.J.’s brother would be much closer. O.J.’s nonexistent evil twin would be exact.
Do you actually believe that genetic “fingerprinting” cannot distinguish between a man and his son? Or is this yet another shuck and jive act to wish away the evidence?
Dafydd
Comment by Dafydd — 8/23/2006 @ 6:44 pm
Antimedia, I have faced extreme anxiety when faced with being late on submitting my homework, asking a girl for a date, or trying to get to work and realizing I’m running behind.
In all and any of those circumstances, I have made various bone headed mistakes. I’m sure that I could fail to account for a glove.
Under the extrme stress that I imagine a man who has murdered for the fist time in his life would feel, I don’t find it difficult to imagine he might make such a mistake.
However, I don’t expect to convince you.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 6:45 pm
*extreme
*first
(and I was under no particular stress as I typed that)
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 6:46 pm
Antimedia:
Oh, I almost forgot… where is the evidence of a second person tramping around that bloody crime scene?
Where are Jason’s footprints? If he borrowed Pop’s ugly-ass Bruno Magli shoes, then where are O.J.’s footprints? Did he wear stilts?
This nonsense is nothing but vamping up a phantom “second killer,” in the face of a mountain of evidence implicating O.J. And the only reason you have to imagine-up this second killer is that you just can’t imagine O.J. Simpson killing Ron and Nicole.
If I see a man stick a gun in somebody’s face, and the second guy hands over his wallet, and the guy with the gun runs away with it… well maybe the first guy just bought a new gun and was showing it to his friend; then his friend remembered that he had borrowed the first guy’s wallet, so he returned it; and then the guy with the gun suddenly remembered that he was late home to watch Law and Order, so he ran off.
But forgive me for thinking I witnessed an armed robbery instead.
Dafydd
Comment by Dafydd — 8/23/2006 @ 6:55 pm
I hardly know where to begin, Daydd. First of all, I’m not trying to find OJ innocent. I’m trying to see if I can fit the evidence to the scenario the prosecution laid out as their explanation for the murders.
If you’re going to sit on a jury and find someone guilty of murder, you’d damn sure better have more than, “Well, it sure looks like he did it, and I can’t find any other explanation, so what the hell, he’s guilty!”
Most people simply want to explain away the inconsistencies because obviously OJ is guilty, so what does it matter if a few details are oddly out of place? That is the precise mirror image of what they accuse the jury of doing. Seems rather ironic, doesn’t it? Those who believe he’s guilty accuse the jury of having predetermined the outcome. Yet, those, like myself, who have trouble with the inconsistencies in the evidence are told to stop being so picky and admit he’s guilty.
Did OJ throw a duffle bag in the trash at LAX? No, because the limo driver testified to the number of bags OJ had, and a duffle bag wasn’t one of them. So scratch that explanation.
Did OJ stuff the bloody clothes ina plastic bag, for example, fly them to Chicago and dispose of them there? The police thought of that, looked and didn’t find any evidence of that. However, broken glass and blood was found in his hotel, which comports with his explanation that he cut his hand on the glass that broke.
You claim there was a “boatload” of evidence. That’s simply false. There was a paucity of evidence connecting OJ to the crime. The blood trail that followed the footprints was “consistent” with OJ’s blood, but it’s also consistent with Jason’s blood. The blood was tested for DNA, but no comparison was ever made to Jason’s DNA. The Y chromozone passed from father to son has identical DNA, so the variation between father and son would be much less than between two strangers. (And if we have any DNA experts here, please chime in.)
There were eight drops of blood at the crime scene that could have been OJ’s or Jasons. There were blood smears in the Bronco that belonged to Ron and Nicole but no blood drops from OJ. Had he stopped bleeding?
There was a mixture of Nicole’s, Ron’s and “OJ’s” blood on the right hand glove found at Rockingham, and Nicole’s blood on the sock found in his bedroom.
You claim
Yet proponents of OJ’s guilt explain away the inconsistencies the same way. No bloody clohes? Well, obviously he must have thrown them away somewhere! No knife? Well, obviously he got rid of it, silly!
There are not “hundreds” of pieces of evidence pointing to OJ. There are precisely 11. Eight blood drops at Bundy, the right hand glove behind the bungalow, the blood in the Bronco (which was miniscule) and the bloody sock. That’s it.
You asked
Good questions, Daydd, but Jason’s room was never searched, nor was his car and his blood was never compared to samples at the crime scene. His DNA was never compared to DNA collected in the case.
Finally, you wrote
There was no evidence introduced at trial that OJ was violent. Jason, OTOH, took drugs to control his violent impulses, and a few weeks before the murders he had stopped taking those drugs. His girl friend admitted that he had become increasingly violent and threatened her with a knife, holding it to her throat, just days before the murders.
You’re wrong about me refusing to consider OJ as the murderer. I think he’s an obvious suspect and likely would have been found guilty if a different prosecution team had been in place. Furthermore, I could care less about OJ.
I just think this case is a good opportunity for people to look themselves in the eye and ask themselves if they are really being objective.
OTOH, those who believe OJ is guilty refuse to consider even the possibility that he might not be. Like you, they claim “boatloads” of evidence, literall “hundreds” of clues, when the truth is, there are very few, and those there are only place OJ at the scene.
I’ve already stated I am certain OJ was at the crime scene. I believe he came there after his son called him and told him something terrible had happened, and he helped his son conceal and dispose of evidence in a misguided attempt to protect him.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 7:12 pm
I should add something - by the end of the trial I was convinced that Jason had committed the murders and OJ was covering for him (in what amounts to an incredible gamble on his part.) So, when the verdicts were announced, I was watching Jason very closely. He was the only member of the Simpson family who was not overjoyed by the verdict. In fact, he looked oddly sullen and strangely out of place from the rest of the family.
OJ looked incredibly relieved, like he had dodged a bullet, which he had.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 7:20 pm
5 minutes
Comment by Jeremy — 8/23/2006 @ 7:23 pm
There are not “hundreds” of pieces of evidence pointing to OJ. There are precisely 11. Eight blood drops at Bundy, the right hand glove behind the bungalow, the blood in the Bronco (which was miniscule) and the bloody sock. That’s it.
His hair was on Goldman’s shirt.
The dome light in the Bronco had been removed.
Nicole’s missing keys were at O.J.’s house.
O.J. broke up with Paula Barbieri that day.
O.J. beat Nicole before.
The gloves were Simpson’s size — despite the “they don’t fit” nonsense. He had owned the same brand of gloves and had been photographed wearing them.
The bloody footprints were from a rare pair of Bruno Magli shoes, in Simpson’s size — which he lied and denied ever owning, calling them “ugly-ass shoes” that he would never wear.
Nicole said O.J. had been stalking her, and would kill her and get away with it.
He bought a knife weeks before the crime that matched the wounds.
When he was notified of Nicole’s death, he never asked how she died.
The drops of blood were from the left hand, where Simpson himself had been cut — that night, by his own admission.
He ran from police and had a getaway kit. He wrote a note that reeked of guilt.
And so on and so on and so on.
Comment by Patterico — 8/23/2006 @ 8:02 pm
No, antimedia, I consider the possibility that he might not be guilty. I don’t fault the jury for failing to convict based on what I know of the prosecution and police’s case and conduct.
I certainly feel, however, that he had the ability, motive, and time to commit this crime.
I believe he did it. Probably. Based on what I learned in the media, I would have acquitted him for the reason that reasonable doubt existed.
And I’m a strong law and order “hang ‘em high” type.
However, certainly, I wasn’t on the jury so I don’t know 100% for sure what I would have done because I didn’t hear the case they did.
If I felt guilt was proved beyond a reasonable doubt, I would have voted to convict even if it was 11-1.
While that would be frustrating, if I had been on the jury and convinced to that degree of O.J.’s guilt, a hung jury is better than an undeserved acquittal.
I’m still not getting how the jury was wrong though. Based on what Clark & co. gave them.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 8:05 pm
Of course, Patterico’s short summary was impressive. If only the court case had been made equally coherrently and cogently.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 8:07 pm
Patrick, African American hair was found on Goldman’s shirt, not OJ’s hair - unless you know something that I don’t know.
I don’t recall any testimony that OJ had ever hit Nicole. Was there any in the trial transcript? Or did you get that from the press?
WRT to his cut hand, you seem to be hedging. Are you saying that OJ stated that his cut his hand before flying to Chicago?
Everything else you listed is circumstantial. Damning? Certainly! Conclusory? No! You can place him at the crime scene, which I have already stated is obvious. You cannot put the knife in his hand. There is no question he was there. The question is, did he commit the crimes? I am unpersuaded. Sorry.
And the LA authorities have never bothered to investigate Jason. All they would have to do is take a sample from him and test the DNA. Prove it doesn’t match the crime scene. Then you’ve proven OJ committed the murders because no one else could possible have done so. Until then, you still have reasonable doubt.
I know, as a prosecuting attorney, that sticks in your craw, but those are the facts. Quite blaming the jury for the prosecution’s failure to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 8:37 pm
Circumstantial evidence is equally as powerful as direct evidence and is entitled to the same weight.
Comment by Patterico — 8/23/2006 @ 8:42 pm
how does one do quoting here? Anyway , in 108 Patterico wrote:
Circumstantial evidence is equally as powerful as direct evidence and is entitled to the same weight.
If this is the law of the land in CA, then I could never sit on a jury. If there is direct evidence that A happened and circumstantial evidence that A did not happen, there is NO WAY I would say it was a toss up.
Comment by seePea — 8/23/2006 @ 8:55 pm
In #106, Chris from Victoria, BC wrote:
Of course, Patterico’s short summary was impressive. If only the court case had been made equally coherrently and cogently.
Which is a point that many people are refusing to concede. I’m waiting for Patterico to start reviewing the actual prosecution of the case (it is his blog) but people here need to keep in mind that there is a difference between thinking/believing OJ murdered and being able to say that as a juror one would have voted for conviction based on how the case was actually mis-prosecuted.
Comment by seePea — 8/23/2006 @ 9:00 pm
I concur with your last comment and am waiting pensively for the same, seePea.
As far as circumstantial evidence being powerful and sufficient in many cases to convict, yes, totally.
As far as it being equally as powerful as direct evidence, Patterico, I believe that’s daft.
Would you rather go to trial with 15 pieces of circumstantial evidence or 15 pieces of direct evidence?
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 9:26 pm
Patrick, I’ll give you a challenge. If you will promise to read it with an open mind and consider carefully what he has to say, then I will purchase and have shipped to you a copy of William Dear’s OJ is Guilty, But Not of Murder for you to read. (My copy is personally autographed by Dear, purchased at a lecture he gave at the university where I work.) Take as long as you like. Compare it with the trial transcripts, the autopsy notes and any other material you have regarding the case.
After you’re read the book, post your opinion of it here, and I will accept your verdict regarding the facts and no longer argue the case with you.
Again, it is my contention, and the results of Dear’s investigation prove it (IMNSHO), that Jason committed the murders, then called OJ in a panic. (And yes, Daydd, there is a cell phone record of that phone call.) OJ drove to the Bundy residence and yes, he took the light out of the Bronco, wore the Bruno Maglis, maybe the gloves as well (but that might have been Jason - same size hands), got blood on himself, and covered up the crime. Hell, he may have even cut himself accidentally while he was at Bundy, but without Jason’s DNA samples, we’ll never know.
But his purpose in going there was to see what his son had done, get him under control and figure out what to do with all the evidence so his son wouldn’t be caught and sentenced, perhaps, to execution.
Jason would have been covered in blood (and to those who insist these two murders could have occurred in “seconds” please read the autopsy reports. Nicole alone had eight separate stab wounds, including defensive wounds, indicating that her attacker was in front of her, not behind.) Ron had many stab wounds, many defensive wounds, bruises on the knuckles of both hands (indicating that he put up a fierce struggle) and would have left evidence of the fight on his assailant.
If you accept the challenge, send me email with the address to ship the book to. Take as long as you want. Then post the results of your analysis of Dear’s arguments. It has nothing to do with coverups, frameups, gloves that don’t fit or any of that other silliness. It has everything to do with going where the evidence leads you, using Occam’s Razor and not concocting wild theories to explain the unexplainable.
There are a lot of stupid books out there claiming OJ didn’t do it. This is not one of them. (And no, I didn’t get my theories about the crime from Dear. His book merely confirmed what I had already drawn from the trial and filled in some details about what the police missed.)
Comment by antimedia — 8/23/2006 @ 9:52 pm
I agree with antimedia, Patterico. If you don’t want to except a copy from him, I’ll send you one. I believe SOMEONE should seriously look into the possibility that Jason was involved in the murders. I cannot believe that no one in the district attorney’s office hasn’t looked into any of William Dear’s evidence. I also know for a fact that Dr. Henry Lee is “promoting” Mr. Dear’s theory, although he has not said personally that Jason did it.
Comment by sp — 8/23/2006 @ 11:12 pm
It seems to me, Patterico, that you should at least maintain an open mind and consider it. To the point of reading that book.
It’s a subject that understandably interests you… and, how shall I put this, it’s your job.
Comment by Chris from Victoria, BC — 8/23/2006 @ 11:32 pm
patterico’s short summary in #104 is, indeed, impressive.
imagine your wife has just been killed by an unknown party, perhaps a colombian drug dealer as was mentioned at the time. how likely are you to mope your way down the freeway in the back seat of a bronco, pointing a gun at your own head?
antimedia says “if you’re going to sit on a jury and find someone guilty of murder, you’d damn sure better have more than “well, it sure looks like he did it, and i can’t find any other explanation, so what the hell, he’s guilty!”
uh, no. that’s right at the threshhold of beyond a reasonable doubt, and depending on the totality of the circumstances, enough to push it over, as it did for scott peterson, correctly in my view. “beyond a reasonable doubt” isn’t the same thing as “no doubt whatsoever”, there’s a caljic instruction (standard jury instructions for criminal cases in california) explaining the difference.
antimedia disparages circumstantial evidence. g. k. chesterton had the great line for this “some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when one finds a trout in the milk.” if direct evidence were required for conviction in all cases, i could go out and murder people with impunity. real life murder cases can be complex and open-ended, they don’t all resolve in 60 minutes like law & order or csi.
one aspect of the case i’d like to see further developed: roosevelt grier visited o.j. in jail, apparently in his clergyman capacity, not his offensive lineman or needlepointer capacities, and it was reported that o.j. said something along the lines of an admission that was overheard by a third party, probably a guard at the jail, but which was suppressed due to the clergyman-penitent privilege. i don’t think the prosecution tried hard enough to break that privilege and bring the statement to light. the clergyman-penitent privilege is just a sop to christianity anyway, and it should be abolished.
Comment by assistant devil's advocate — 8/24/2006 @ 12:15 am
Patterico, the other day I believe you were prescient about this thread when you stated the following:
**************
The bottom line is this: people who don’t want to be convinced of something cannot be convinced.
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Comment by Desert Rat — 8/24/2006 @ 12:24 am
Daffydd criticizes the “Argument by Personal Incredulity.”
All rejections of a case are based on personal incredulity. Why else would you reject a case except, “I don’t believe it’? Daffydd rejects the case OJ didn’t do it based on personal incredulity.
Comment by Gene Callahan — 8/24/2006 @ 4:39 am
The Desert Rat wrote:
Antimedia (who, for those unfamiliar with his site, is not a flaming liberal) is a reasonable man — and he has been presenting what, for him, is a reasonable doubt.
He has a very valid point: where did all of the blood go? Several people have come up with ideas on his Mr Simpson could have committed the murders, and not gotten drenched in blood, and a couple have had ideas of how he could have disposed of blood-soaked clothing and not gotten the inside of the Bronco a lot bloodier, but those ideas are essentially speculation.
This is an interesting thread; while I’m certain that our esteemed host could provide us with the California legal definition of “reasonable doubt,” the commenters here have proven what we already knew: reasonable doubt means different things to different people — including the twelve different people on the jury.
In this thread, Antimedia has provided for us (and done yeoman’s work, under difficult conditions) the same service provided by Actus and Psyberian and Asinistra on other threads: made a presentation of the “other side,” and done so with diligence and a thick skin.
Comment by Dana — 8/24/2006 @ 5:30 am
antimedia, that is a nearly perfect expression of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. If it appears to a reasonable person that the accused committed the crime, and that same reasonable person cannot imagine a plausible alternate scenario that explains the evidence, that person has decided guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in precisely the manner that jurors are asked to use.
Comment by Pablo — 8/24/2006 @ 5:40 am
109 and 111: There seems to be some misapprehension about what is “direct” evidence and what is “circumstantial” evidence. “I saw seePea rob the First National Bank” is direct evidence. “The First National Bank was robbed; seePea’s fingerprints were found on the vault handle and bundles of cash with First National Bank bands were found in seePea’s house” is circumstantial evidence. Cirumstantial evidence is often more trustworthy than direct evidence. For example, volumes have been written on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Another example: Jailhouse snitches who testify about a defendant’s “confession” while awaiting trial are direct evidence. Some states have found them so unreliable that they exclude them in capital cases.
BTW: All the allegations against Jason Simpson I have read here are neither direct nor circumstantial evidence. They are speculation.
Comment by nk — 8/24/2006 @ 5:40 am
The estimable Mr ab Hugh wrote:
A recent Philadelphia murder was a case in which a 2 year old man, both drunk and stoned, thought that he had been “disrespected” by a 15 year old neighbor, at a party at around 10:00 PM. After stewing about it (aided with additional applications of drugs and alcohol), at 3:00 AM he entered the boy’s house and murdered him while the boy slept.
Yeah, rage can be sustained over time, and logic can always fly out the window.
Comment by Dana — 8/24/2006 @ 5:44 am
Re: 120 , nk wrote:
There seems to be some misapprehension about what is “direct” evidence and what is “circumstantial” evidence.
Could be.
If PlonyA is filmed being at a 7-11 at 11:30a is that considered direct evidence?
If so, I would hope that direct would trump the circumstancial evidence of TheBank being robbed at 11:30a and PlonyA’s fingerprints being on the vault door and the cash being at PlonyA’s house.
As for Jason: I really have not paid any attention to that stream of thought, such conjencture to me has nothing to do with whether or not OJ should have been convicted.
Comment by seePea — 8/24/2006 @ 6:21 am
My girlfriend has the best line so far: O.J.’s best acting perforamce was the trial, including trying to put on shrunken leather gloves from dried blood over rubber gloves. Considering some of the Oscar’s handed out recently, O.J. deserves onr for his performace at the trial, with Judge Ito also getting one as Best-Supporting Dummy.
Comment by RickZ — 8/24/2006 @ 7:15 am
In response to Patterico’s comment that circumstantial evidence is equally as powerful as direct evidence, I said:
I don’t believe Patterico will respond and acknowledge the truth of my question because he wouldn’t want his quote that circumstantial evidence is worth less than direct evidence being used against him at trial.
And that’s wise.
[The quality of evidence doesn’t depend on whether it’s circumstantial or direct. It depends on the quality of the evidence. DNA is circumstantial. Fingerprints are circumstantial. A bank robber with green dy