Accused of the gruesome murder of his ex-wife and her friend, a legend crashes down
by Steven V. Roberts, Monika Guttman, Betsy Streisand, James Popkin
______________________________________
Everywhere, the reaction was the same: Say it ain't so, Juice. Say you didn't do it. Say you didn't kill your ex-wife, with your two children asleep nearby. Say you didn't kill a 25-year-old waiter who was returning the sunglasses she had left in a restaurant. Say all those years -- all those dazzling runs and dazzling smiles -- were not a fraud. Say we still have heroes.
But by Friday, denial was harder to maintain. During a tense and tragic day of stunning surprises, Simpson fled from the house of a friend, minutes before the police arrived to arrest him on two counts of murder. For almost five hours he was missing, until police picked up the trail of a white Ford Bronco owned by his old friend Al Cowlings driving along the freeways of Orange County. Simpson was in the car, apparently threatening to shoot himself, as Cowlings drove slowly and carefully for 60 miles, trailed by police cruisers. The nation was mesmerized, united by sadness and fascination, as almost every TV station switched to live coverage of the unfolding drama. Eventually, Cowlings drove to Simpson's luxurious house in Brentwood, where fans stood outside the gates, waving signs that said, "We love the Juice." After another hour of uncertainty and negotiation, one of the most popular sports figures of his generation surrendered.
For a police department that has suffered a string of embarrassing incidents in recent years, from the beating of Rodney King to its mishandling of the 1992 riots, the episode raised disturbing questions. Authorities said Simpson was not arrested immediately because there was no eyewitness to the crime and it took time to gather the scientific evidence linking him to it. Others grumbled that police had miscalculated their suspect's agitated state of mind.
Simpson's return home came hours after his attorney, Robert Shapiro, held a news conference pleading with his client to surrender. The lawyer said Simpson seemed suicidal, and Juice's friend, Robert Kardashian, read to the press conference a letter to the public from Simpson that had all the earmarks of a suicide note: a "last wish" that his children's privacy be protected and a long list of thank-yous to his former teammates and golfing pals. Simpson denied in the note that he had killed his ex-wife, Nicole, and her waiter friend Ron Goldman. But he added: "I can't go on. No matter what the outcome, people will look and point. I can't take that." The letter concluded: "Don't feel sorry for me. I've had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person. Thanks for making my life special. I hope I helped yours. Peace and love. O.J."
For days, his friends and his fans had grasped at the hope expressed by Budd Thalman, former press agent for Juice's old team, the Buffalo Bills: "If he's arrested for this, I'll be stunned beyond belief." Gradually, however, the trap of evidence tightened around Orenthal James Simpson. Police sources connected him to a glove, a ski mask, blood stains at the murder scene and elsewhere, skin samples, a knife-like tool that could be the murder weapon. His alibi -- that he was at home, waiting for an airport limousine, at the time of the murders began to spring leaks. The charge he faces, murder under special circumstances, carries with it no bail and a possible death penalty. But no matter how the bizarre story turns out -- even if O.J. is ultimately cleared of the crime -- the Juice's life and legend have already been squeezed to pulp.
The two faces of O.J. Simpson -- the real person and the media image -- are so intertwined that it is hard to tell them apart. Is the nation mourning a man or a myth? And does it really matter? "It's so disheartening to have no heroes left," says Celinda Lake, a pollster who analyzes social trends. "It's bad for the culture, because it really feeds cynicism."
A ghetto child. O.J. the man was shaped by Connecticut Street in Potrero Hill, a poor neighborhood in San Francisco he once described as "your average black ghetto." His father Jimmy, a custodian and cook, left home when O.J. was 5; his mother, Eunice, worked long hours as a hospital orderly to support her four children. As a youth he joined gangs, stole hubcaps, picked fights, crashed dances, shot craps, snubbed school. The world of the streets was a world without a moral compass, without guidance or standards. "I was in a lot of street fights," he recalled. "Maybe because I usually won. I was proud I was a tough scrapper. We had our gangs. They were full of guys who didn't know right from wrong and couldn't have cared less.... We didn't care about anything good. We didn't know about anything good."
Even then, though, Juice showed a flair for slipping tackles and ingratiating himself with others. Childhood friend Joe Bell was quoted in a 1984 book, The Heisman: "There were guys who could have taken O.J., but he had a way of manipulating people, of making them like him, of getting them to do what he wanted. He was a natural leader." But Bell added an ominous postscript: "He's a great guy but he wasn't an angel. If circumstances had been slightly tilted, instead of a football star he could have been public enemy No. 1."
"A lot of hatred." His first wife, Marguerite, who knew him in high school, told Juice's biographer Bill Libby: "He was a terrible person in those days. Just awful. I sensed something good in him, but I don't think it really showed. He lived on the brink of disaster." Simpson himself agreed with her account in Libby's book, O.J., published in 1974: "I had a lot of hatred and defiance in me. I could easily have come to a bad end if I hadn't gotten a break."
Several breaks, actually. One was his mother, an indomitable woman who kept the family together. "There were always three meals on the table," remembers boyhood friend Jon Greenberg. "The house was kept up, and he always had a mother at home he could go to." When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, Simpson singled her out: "You just don't know what it is to be 8 years old and all your friends think you have the best mother in the world."
The second break came in 1962, when he was 15. Lefty Gordon, the supervisor of the local recreational center, saw the same spark of goodness Marguerite noticed. After a gang fight landed O.J. briefly in jail, Gordon arranged for the local sports hero, Willie Mays, to take the young man in tow. It was an ordinary day, filled with errands like picking up the laundry, but it left a lasting impression on Simpson: "To have that hero pay attention to me, it made me feel that I must be special, too. He made me realize that we all have it in ourselves to be heroes."
The third break came when the coaches at Galileo High realized that they had an exceptional sports talent on their hands -- with an exceptionally bad attitude. Coach Jack McBride remembers O.J. as "a very lazy student" but worth redeeming. When Simpson and two friends were caught shooting dice before a big game, McBride delivered a tongue lashing that O.J. never forgot: "Even though I felt bad about it at the time, and I was a little mad at him, he told me that no one was going to give me anything in the world. He said, `If you want something, you'll have to work for it and act like you deserve it. You know, if you want respect you're going to have to act respectable.'"
O.J. went to work on football. After Galileo, he didn't have the grades for a four-year school, but after two record-setting years at City College of San Francisco he was wooed by the University of Southern California. As a player and as a person he was still raw. He once said that he went to USC so he could learn which fork to use at dinner. But he had one overwhelming advantage: He could run with a football better than just about anybody. O.J. led USC to two Rose Bowls and in his senior year won the Heisman
