OJ Simpson, acquitted murder defendant and football star, dies at 76

OJ Simpson, the acquitted California murder defendant and former football star and actor, has died, his publicist confirmed to CBS News. He was 76 years old.

An affirmation posted on social media by Simpson’s family said he died of cancer on Wednesday. Simpson’s agent said he had prostate cancer.

“On April 10, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, succumbed to his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren,” the family statement said.

Simpson was famously acquitted of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman, in a case that dominated headlines and TV screens for months. He was later found responsible for their deaths by a jury in a civil trial.

David Cook, an attorney who has been seeking recovery of the civil judgment in the Goldman case since 2008, said he spoke with Fred Goldman, Ron’s father, on Thursday about Simpson’s death. Cook refused to say what Fred Goldman said or where he was.

“He died without penance,” Cook said of Simpson. “We don’t know what he has, where he is or who is in control. Let’s stay where we are and get on with it.”

Simpson gained fame, fortune and adulation through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife murders in Los Angeles.

The evidence found at the scene seemed overwhelmingly against Simpson. Drops of blood, bloody footprints and a glove were there. Another glove, stained with blood, was found in his home.

On the night of the murders, Simpson fWe left overnight for Chicago to play a golf tournament and stayed at a hotel near O’Hare Airport. While at the hotel, he claimed he had cut his hand on broken glass.

When he returned to Los Angeles, authorities said he reneged on his promise to surrender, and live TV coverage of his arrest after a high-profile low speed chase marked a stunning fall from grace for the sporting hero.

He seemed to transcend racial barriers as the Trojans’ star running back for college football powerhouse University of Southern California in the late 1960s, as a rental car salesman hustling through airports in the late 1970s, and as a husband of a blonde with blue eyes. high school homecoming queen in the 1980s.

“I’m not Black, I’m OJ,” he liked to tell his friends.

The public was mesmerized by his “trial of the century” live on TV. Her case has sparked debates about race, gender, domestic violence, celebrity justice and police misconduct.

The judgementprosecutors, defense lawyers and witnesses became household names. Watercooler conversations across the country focused on prosecutors Marcia Clark and Christopher Darden, Judge Lance Ito, Simpson’s houseguest Kato Kaelin, homicide detective Mark Fuhrman and Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys, including legendary lawyer Johnny Cochran.

Simpson did not testify, but the prosecution asked him to try on the gloves in court. He struggled to clasp them in his hands and uttered the only three words of the trial: “They are too small.”

Cochran told jurors, “If it doesn’t fit, you should acquit.”

A jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him responsible in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay US$33.5 million for family members of Brown and Goldman.

A decade later, still under the shadow of the California manslaughter trial, Simpson led five men he barely knew into a showdown with two sporting goods dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns. A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other crimes.

Arrested at age 61, he served nine years at a remote prison in northern Nevada, including a stint as a gym janitor. He was unrepentant when he was released on parole in October 2017.

The parole board heard him insist once again that he was just trying to recover sports memorabilia and family heirlooms stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.

“I’ve basically lived a conflict-free life, you know,” said Simpson, whose probation ended at the end of 2021.

Public fascination with Simpson never faded. Many debated whether he would have been punished in Las Vegas for his acquittal in Los Angeles. In 2016, he was the subject of an FX miniseries and a five-part ESPN documentary.

“I don’t think most of America believes it was me,” Simpson told The New York Times in 1995, a week after a jury determined he did not kill Brown and Goldman. “I received thousands of letters and telegrams from people who supported me.”

Twelve years later, following a wave of public outrage, Rupert Murdoch canceled a planned book by HarperCollins, owned by News Corp, in which Simpson presented his hypothetical account of the murders. The title would be “If I Did This”.

Goldman’s family, still doggedly pursuing the multimillion-dollar wrongful-death trial, gained control of the manuscript. They renamed the book “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer”.

“It’s all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,” Simpson told the Associated Press at the time. He raised $880,000 in advance for the book, paid through third parties.

“It helped me get out of debt and secure my property,” he said.

Less than two months after losing the rights to the book, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.

Simpson played 11 NFL seasons, nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, where he became known as “The Juice” on an offensive line known as “The Electric Company.” He won four NFL rushing titles, rushed for 11,236 yards in his career, scored 76 touchdowns and played in five Pro Bowls. His best season was 1973, when he ran for 2,003 yards – the first running back to break the 2,000 rushing yard mark.

“I was part of the history of the game,” he said years later, recalling that season. “If I did nothing else in my life, I would have left my mark.”

Of course, Simpson achieved other fame.

One of the artifacts from his murder trial, the carefully tailored beige suit he wore when he was acquitted, was later donated and put on display at the Newseum in Washington, DC. Simpson was told the suit would be in the Las Vegas hotel room, but it turned out it was not there.

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidized housing projects.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at City College of San Francisco for a year and a half before transferring to the University of Southern California for the spring 1967 semester.

He married his first wife, Marguerite Whitley, on June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day so he could begin preparing for his first season at USC — which, in large part because of Simpson , won the national championship that year.

Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He accepted the statue the same day his first child, Arnelle, was born.

He had two sons, Jason and Aaren, with his first wife; one of these boys, Aaren, drowned as a child in a pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.

Simpson and Brown married in 1985. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.

“We don’t need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives,” he told the AP 25 years after the double murder. “The topic of the moment is the topic I will never revisit. My family and I have moved into what we call the ‘non-negative zone’. We focus on the positives.”