O.J. is innocent. Yes, innocent.
On the evening of June 13, 1994, William C. Dear and I were in the same city-- St. Louis. Dear, a private investigator, was delivering a speech at the downtown Convention Center before a group called the National Conference of Investigative Reporters and Editors. I was driving an ice cream truck in North County. The infamous event of June 12, 1994-- which is fast approaching its 20th anniversary-- was the murder of O.J. Simpson's ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and another man, Ron Goldman. Simpson led the LAPD on a slow-speed chase down the freeway the following day, with a gun pointed at his own head. I heard the news that O.J. was being arrested at his mansion in Beverly Hills as I returned my Frosty Treats truck to the company dispatcher. A little TV had been turned on in the garage, and about a dozen people were gathered around it.
William Dear spent the next 17 years investigating the double murder for which Simpson was arrested and later acquitted, and then he released a muckraking book in 2012 entitled "O.J. Is Innocent and I Can Prove It." I picked up this 500-page book at the Des Moines Public Library on Saturday morning and had it finished by Sunday afternoon. I am 100% convinced that Dear's hypothesis is correct.
Dear has determined that the real murderer was the "overlooked suspect" at the time, O.J.'s then-24-year-old son Jason, and the evidence against Jason has been laid out by Dear as clear and confidently as one could imagine. O.J., the theory goes, took the fall to protect his son. As the truth is fully revealed about the LAPD's shoddy and incomplete investigation, it is clear that Jason, who was never interviewed by police, had both motive and opportunity in the slayings. He was suffering from-- and still does-- from mental illness and a rage disorder. By 1994, he already had a string of domestic violence incidents in his past.
I hesitate to give away most of the details in Dear's book, or to deprive you of the chance to enjoy the book the same way I did, but suffice it to say, Dear's private investigation has turned out plausible explanations for why there were two sets of footprints on the scene, why O.J.'s car contained such a small amount of blood after he supposedly committed such a grisly murder by stabbing, to whom the bloody glove and the dark-colored knit stocking cap really belonged, how a cooking knife (Jason is a professional chef) was uncovered by Dear in a storage facility among Jason's abandoned possessions and how the butt of that knife matches the laceration on the top of Nicole Simpson's head, why O.J. failed a privately-administered lie detector test (not because he was the murderer, as most have assumed), and why O.J., upon his arrest, kept telling police that he was not the murderer, yet felt "he was responsible."
Trust that Dear fully indicts Los Angeles police for their initial rush to judgment and for procedures that led even O.J.'s harshest enemies to remark at the time that they had "framed a guilty man." The author and investigator also indicts the department for how it continues to subvert justice to this very day. Their one-suspect investigation twenty years ago did not lead to a conviction in court, yet today, they consider the investigation to be closed. When Dear filed a FOIA request to review the knit cap and the bloody gloves for DNA samples, the L.A. district attorney responded by letter that this famous criminal evidence could not be located. Then Dear found them all on public display a year later in Las Vegas at a police convention.
More than a decade after the Simpson verdict, which the jury indeed got correct, one of the lead prosecutors in the case, Christopher Darden, was interviewed on television. The attorney best known for his decision to have perhaps the most famous defendant in the history of United States jurisprudence try on a pair of blood-stained gloves that didn't fit, made the statement: "If anybody believes O.J. Simpson did not commit the murders of Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman, they are idiots."
Now, a private investigator has brought a mountain of evidence to light demonstrating that another man was the killer and the justice system of the city of Los Angeles refuses to act upon it.
posted by CM @ 7:25 PM
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