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Many said O.J. Simpson got away with murder. We wondered — maybe even the jury that acquitted him 29 years ago wondered.
Deep down, they had to wonder, but felt the state had not proven it beyond a reasonable doubt.
And then there was that civil trial. Simpson was found liable for the murders and was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages to Ron Goldman’s and to Nicole Brown Simpson’s families.
The gloves didn’t fit, so he walked, but he didn’t go free. Far from it.
He became a pariah, an outcast found guilty by a much larger jury of his peers. The public. For a man who lived in the limelight, being shunned was getting life without parole.
It was a few months after the not guilty verdict and Simpson was no longer welcomed at country clubs. It might not seem like a big deal, but it cut him deep. Golf was his passion, his football field as he aged.
Now, his golf buddies — men who dropped $50,000 or $100,000 in membership fees without blinking an eye — didn’t want him around anymore. The club celebrity had to go.
So, there was O.J. standing alone at the starter’s shack at a public course — Woodley Lakes Golf Course in the Sepulveda Basin — paying his $12 green fees at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning waiting for another single to show up so he could play with him.
What a comedown it had to be. Everyone recognized him, but no one asked for a picture with him or an autograph. He was just left alone, waiting for another single to arrive so he could play a round of golf.
Imagine being that guy. You show up to play on your day off and for the next four hours you’re riding in a golf cart with O.J. Simpson trying to make small talk.
I was playing in the foursome behind them with a few guys from the paper. We caught up with O.J. at the 19th hole, sitting alone at the end of the bar having a beer.
His partner had split right after the round ended. Probably couldn’t wait to tell his wife. “Honey, you’re never going to believe who I played golf with today.”
We pulled up stools next to O.J. and introduced ourselves. Politely, he said he didn’t feel like making small talk with newspaper reporters and left. It was just a small glimpse of his life in public now.
Wherever he went, it was “no comment.”
When I called Tom Lange, the former lead LAPD homicide detective who worked the Simpson case for a comment on O.J. dying, I wasn’t expecting his reply.
Lange took a lot of heat working the case. The defense hammered him hard on his handling of the evidence, and Lange had answers for all their questions, but not enough to convince the jury.
Even the civil trial in 1997 that found Simpson liable for the deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to their families — which he never did — hadn’t lessened Lange’s disappointment in the acquittal on murder charges.
He would later publish a book, “Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O.J. Simpson,” laying it all out.
“I have one comment and it’s really simple,” Lange said Thursday. “I simply don’t care. There’s nothing else to say. Everybody dies. I don’t care.”
He sounded tired, done with it all after so many years. The final chapter had just been written on the trial of the century and he just didn’t care.
Maybe that’s the way we should all look at O.J.’s death from cancer at 76. We simply don’t care anymore. The trial was a long time ago. Everybody dies.
But, we won’t, of course. This is Chinatown, Jake. We take our celebrity murders seriously. There has to be another screenplay in this one.
We haven’t heard the last of O.J. Simpson.
Dennis McCarthy can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.
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