Sunday rerun: Murder, She'd Note

It was just about this time of year, seventeen years ago, when OJ Simpson changed in the public eye from star running back, commercial spokesperson and "Nordberg" in the Police Squad! movies to murder suspect and object of a slow police chase through Los Angeles.

All evidence would seem to point to OJ in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole and her new dude, Ron Goldman, but all that counts is that a jury found him not guilty, and even though a civil trial several years later found him civilly responsible, he is still innocent of the murder charges.  He is currently a resident of the Lovelock Correctional Center in Lovelock, Nevada, as a result of his 2008 conviction on  armed robbery and kidnapping charges.  Many people regard this as karma in the purest form, as it appears to some that Simpson skated on the murder rap, but is doing a minimum of nine years for slugging and threatening some guys whom he accused of ripping off his football memorabilia.  

I learned a long long time ago that things aren't always what they seemed, and so I can't say who really killed Nicole and Ron that night.  And being a nation of laws, we have to go by the jury verdict.  And, to be honest with you, as hot a topic as all this was in the mid-to-late 90's, it has almost acquired a patina of age in the years since, and seems to be similar to one of those fabled oldtime stories, such as when Harry K. Thaw shot an architect because that architect had despoiled Thaw's young wife (Evelyn Nesbit, pictured at left) during a previous relationship. Read that story and see how these people back in the early 1900s were the original swingers...White was into a weird fetish for young girls riding on the red velvet swing in his house.

Uh huh.


Or, take the big scandal from the 1920s when Ruth Snyder went to the chair for having her husband killed.  She and her boyfriend, Judd Gray, garroted the poor man because she preferred necking with Gray. All across America, people took time out from dancing the Charleston, drinking bathtub gin and wearing raccoon coats while dancing the Charleston and drinking bathtub gin to read the papers and their accounts of the trial, which ended badly for Ruth.  She became front-page news, all right (>>>>).  But now you rarely hear her name mentioned.

So, now I see that onetime talk show host Oprah G. Winfrey wants to drag OJ onto her new OWN cable channel and get him to confess to murder.  Before our very eyes, she'd have him confessing to crimes that had baffled cops nationwide for years.  I'm no lawyer, but my advice for The Juice here would be: "Don't answer your cell phone!  It might be Oprah! And you've got enough trouble as it is!"