What O.J. wrote in his account of "If I did it..."

SuzannePjamSuzannePjam Posts: 411
edited January 2007 in A Moving Train
I edited this down to his explaination of how he did it. For the full article click on the link.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16610772/site/newsweek/

To be sure, Simpson never explicitly admits to slicing his ex-wife's neck so savagely that he almost decapitated her. (According to the source, he told the ghostwriter that he could not have his children read such gruesome details of the slashing.) Simpson's Florida attorney, Yale Galanter, said again last week that the account is "purely hypothetical": "In the final manuscript and in the book there is a clear, concise statement disclaiming anything that is contained in the chapter as being fact or close to fact." NEWSWEEK did not obtain the book's six other chapters.

As a correspondent for this magazine, I covered the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman through the criminal trial and acquittal of O. J. Simpson in 1995. What is striking about the chapter I read, "The Night in Question," is how closely it tracks with the evidence in the case—and how clearly Simpson invokes the classic language of a wife abuser. In his crude, expletive-laced account, Simpson suggests Nicole all but drove him to kill her. He describes her as the "enemy." She is taunting him with her sexual dalliances, he says, and carrying on inappropriately in front of their two children.

On June 12, 1994, Simpson attends his daughter Sydney's dance recital. He writes that he is in a foul mood after the performance, stewing over the behavior of his ex-wife. He is due to fly to Chicago late that night. But first he races to Nicole's Bundy Drive condominium in Brentwood. He parks in the dark alley behind her condo and dons the knit wool cap and gloves he keeps handy to ward off the chill on the golf course. He also has a knife in the Bronco, protection against L.A. "crazies." He intends to scare her. He enters through a broken back gate—he's told her a "million times" to get the buzzer and latch fixed—and encounters Goldman, who is returning the glasses of Nicole's mother, Juditha. She had left them at Mezzaluna, where the Brown family dined after Sydney's recital and where Goldman is a waiter. Simpson accuses Goldman of planning a sexual encounter with Nicole, which Goldman denies. Nicole tells Simpson to leave him alone. Goldman's fate is sealed when Kato, Nicole's Akita, emerges and gives him a friendly tail wag. "You've been here before," Simpson screams at Goldman.

At Simpson's criminal trial, to explain how one man could have killed two people, the Los Angeles County coroner theorized that Simpson knocked out Nicole, then quickly slit her throat before turning to Goldman. If the book's account is true, the coroner's hypothesis was correct—almost. Simpson writes that his ex-wife came at him like a "banshee." She loses her balance and falls hard, her head cracking against the ground. Goldman assumes a karate stance, further angering Simpson. He dares the younger man to fight. Then, in the book, Simpson pulls back. He writes, "Then something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can't tell you exactly how."
Simpson writes that when he regains control of himself, he realizes he is drenched in blood and holding a bloody knife. Both Nicole and Goldman are dead. Simpson heads back to the alley but before getting into the Bronco to flee, strips down to his socks. He rolls his bloody clothes and the knife into a small pile. (That's an important detail. The police never recovered those clothes or the murder weapon, but they did find Simpson's socks—with Nicole's blood on them—at the foot of his bed at his Rockingham estate.) As he nears his house, Simpson sees the limo that will take him to the airport for his Chicago trip. He steals onto his estate via a darkened, hidden path that takes him directly behind the guesthouse where Kato Kaelin is living. Simpson describes how he stumbles into an air conditioner for Kaelin's room, making a terrific racket—just as Kaelin told police he had heard.

Simpson's account does diverge from the prosecution's theory of the case in one significant way. In his telling, a second man, a close friend he calls Charlie, is with him during the killings. Charlie is an unwilling accomplice, repeatedly urging Simpson to stop what he is doing. Does "Charlie" really exist? Perhaps. At the time, many wondered if Simpson had help, if not with the actual killings then with getting rid of evidence. The police never found sufficient evidence to charge anyone else. Fred Goldman, Ron's father, thinks the idea of a second man is absurd, but isn't surprised to hear what Simpson has written (he hasn't read it himself). "This is the guy who murdered them—of course he knows what the evidence is and how he did it," Goldman told NEWSWEEK. Denise Brown, Nicole's sister, told me in an e-mail that she agreed with my analysis. "It just goes to show you that he is guilty and that is what I have always said from the beginning ...
"Where there is sacrifice there is someone collecting the sacrificial offerings."-- Ayn Rand

"Some of my friends sit around every evening and they worry about the times ahead,
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference and the promise of an early bed..."-- Elvis Costello
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