By June 1994, O.J. Simpson had spent decades as one of the most recognizable and well-liked figures in America. A Heisman Trophy winner, NFL superstar, broadcaster, actor and ubiquitous commercial spokesman, Simpson had built a public persona that extended far beyond football—affable, charismatic and seemingly comfortable in almost any room. His marriage to Nicole Brown Simpson had ended in divorce two years earlier, although their relationship had continued intermittently afterward, with periods of reconciliation followed by renewed separation. By 1994, Simpson was also involved with model Paula Barbieri, while his relationship with Nicole remained complicated and not entirely settled. It was against this familiar image of O.J. Simpson—the wealthy former athlete, celebrity and family man—that the events of June 12 would seem so incomprehensible. Within days, a man Americans had known primarily from football fields, movies, airports and television commercials would become the central figure in a double-murder investigation.
The basic prosecution theory of the murders has become the version of events most familiar to the public. O.J. Simpson drove his white Bronco from Rockingham to Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium on Bundy Drive, confronted Nicole outside her home and attacked her. Ronald Goldman arrived during or around the attack and became the second victim. During the struggle, prosecutors argued, Simpson cut his left hand, lost one of a pair of leather gloves, dropped a “watch cap" and left behind a trail of blood and bloody size-twelve shoeprints as he escaped through the rear of the property. According to that reconstruction, Simpson returned to Rockingham in the Bronco carrying traces of the crime with him. Blood associated with Simpson and the victims was found in or around the Bronco; Simpson-associated blood was found between the vehicle and his house; the matching glove was discovered behind the guesthouse; and a sock recovered from his bedroom later tested positive for blood associated with himself and Nicole. Prosecutors presented these discoveries as a physical trail connecting Bundy, the Bronco and Rockingham, evidence that, taken together, told the story of Simpson committing both murders and returning home before leaving for Chicago.
Rockingham property diagram, desaturated for the preview.
Beyond the familiar pieces of evidence, the gloves, the Bronco, the blood and the 911 calls, were hundreds of smaller facts, measurements, observations and assumptions that helped define what was considered possible inside the courtroom. Over time, the distinction between what the evidence actually established and what prosecutors, defense attorneys, experts and ultimately jurors believed it meant could become remarkably easy to lose.
By the time Nicole and Ron's bodies were discovered, Simpson was already en route to Chicago, having taken the late flight from Los Angeles. Police contacted him there early the following morning to tell him Nicole had been killed, and Simpson returned to Los Angeles within hours. It was in Chicago that the cut on his left hand became part of the story. Simpson would give shifting and confusing explanations for it, at times saying he had cut himself in Los Angeles and reopened the wound after breaking a glass in Chicago upon learning of Nicole's death. When he returned to Rockingham, police briefly placed him in handcuffs before releasing him, and he voluntarily accompanied Detectives Tom Lange and Philip Vannatter to Parker Center. There, without his attorney present, Simpson gave what would become a remarkably damaging and often incoherent interview, struggling to explain when and how he had injured his hand and giving investigators statements that would be examined almost word by word for years afterward.
For the next several days Simpson remained publicly free while the investigation rapidly closed around him while the media speculated. He attended Nicole's funeral on June 16 with their children, Sydney and Justin, as reports circulated that his arrest was imminent. The following day prosecutors charged him with two counts of murder and arrangements were made for him to surrender. Instead, Simpson disappeared with his longtime friend Al Cowlings, setting off the strange dispute over whether he was a fugitive, suicidal, or both. Police eventually located Cowlings driving a white Bronco with Simpson inside, reportedly holding a gun to his head. What followed was the slow-speed pursuit watched live by millions before the Bronco returned to Rockingham and Simpson finally surrendered that evening. Police recovered, a beard disguise kit, Simpson's passport and nearly $10,000 in cash from the vehicle—facts prosecutors viewed as potentially inconsistent with the claim that his disappearance had been solely a suicide crisis.
The Bronco pursuit would become perhaps the most enduring public image of Simpson's apparent flight, but the criminal jury was not simply allowed to treat the spectacle as proof of guilt. The admissibility and use of Simpson's conduct surrounding his failed surrender became a heavily contested evidentiary issue, illustrating a recurring divide between the case Americans watched unfold on television and the narrower case jurors were ultimately permitted to consider in court. By the time Simpson entered his plea, only eight days had passed since the murders, yet the image of the beloved athlete had already been replaced in much of the public imagination by something entirely different: a murder defendant whose behavior after the killings seemed, at minimum, extraordinarily difficult to explain.
For all the evidence investigators collected, some of the most important pieces were never found. The murder weapon was never recovered, nor were the shoes that made the bloody impressions at Bundy or the clothing Simpson would presumably have worn during such a bloody attack. Prosecutors argued that he had time to dispose of them, but their absence left crucial questions unanswered—including what weapon actually caused the wounds and what the missing clothing and shoes might have revealed. The case is famous for having almost too much evidence, however some of its most important evidence was missing.
Evidence photograph of a knife recovered during the investigation.
Simpson was eventually acquitted, but this basic reconstruction survived the verdict and became the commonly understood version of what happened that night. To this day, lead detective Tom Lange has maintained that there was more evidence in the Simpson case than in any other murder investigation he worked—more, he has suggested, than should ever have been necessary to obtain a conviction. He has famously described the verdict as “evidence dismissed.” Yet that raises an obvious question: if there was so much evidence, why did prosecutors have so much trouble convincing twelve jurors of what it meant?
For decades, much of the answer has been reduced to race, celebrity, money and the extraordinary abilities of Simpson's defense team. All played roles in the trial and in how Americans interpreted its verdict. But the sheer quantity of evidence may obscure a more fundamental problem for the prosecution. Quantity was never really the issue. Quality was. Simpson's attorneys meticulously attacked how evidence was discovered, collected, preserved, tested and ultimately interpreted, while exploiting an LAPD already burdened by a deeply troubled reputation. The defense did not have to prove that every piece of evidence had been planted or corrupted. It only had to make jurors question whether the people responsible for handling it deserved their confidence.
The Rampart scandal, which erupted only a few years later, would expose corruption, evidence planting, false testimony and other misconduct within parts of the LAPD on a scale that made some of the defense's broader attacks on the department seem less fantastical than they had during the Simpson trial. That does not mean the evidence against Simpson was fabricated, nor does later police corruption prove misconduct occurred in his case. But it does provide important context for understanding why attacks on LAPD credibility carried such force with a jury in 1995.
What follows, then, is not an attempt to pretend the enormous body of evidence against Simpson did not exist. It did. The more interesting question is what that evidence actually proved once each piece was separated from the larger story constructed around it. Evidence could implicate Simpson without necessarily proving every element of the prosecution's reconstruction—including when the evidence arrived, how it got there, or whether Simpson necessarily acted alone.
PROLOGUE: EVIDENCE
A BLOODY MESS
By the end of the Simpson trial, DNA had become the prosecution’s most scientifically imposing evidence. The statistics attached to some of the blood matches were staggering, reducing the probability of a coincidental match to numbers that sounded almost impossible to challenge. But those statistics answered only one question: whose genetic profile was present in the material that reached the laboratory. They could not independently establish when the blood was deposited, how it got there, or what happened to the evidence between the crime scene and the test tube.
That distinction became the foundation of Barry Scheck’s attack on the blood evidence.
Before DNA produced its extraordinary probabilities, much of the blood was examined through conventional serology. Blood groups and enzyme systems could include or exclude potential donors, but they could not identify a person with the individuality later associated with DNA. This distinction became particularly important because the three principal individuals in the case—O.J. Simpson, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman—had overlapping conventional blood characteristics. A stain consistent with Simpson was not necessarily a stain uniquely identifiable as Simpson’s. Some results were stranger still. Blood associated with the material recovered from beneath Nicole’s fingernails produced an EAP type B result. Nicole’s known EAP phenotype was BA. Simpson’s was also BA. Goldman’s was A. Taken at face value, the B result did not correspond to any of the three.
The prosecution offered degradation as the explanation. LAPD criminalist Gregory Matheson believed Nicole’s BA blood could deteriorate in such a way that components of the A band disappeared, leaving an apparent B result. Scheck challenged that conclusion. In closing, he reminded jurors that California DOJ analyst Gary Sims had testified that in his own experience he had never observed the particular four-band BA pattern deteriorate into the two-band B pattern at issue. Scheck was not arguing that blood could not degrade. He was questioning whether degradation adequately explained what had actually been observed in this particular sample.
Later DNA testing detected Nicole’s genetic profile in material associated with the nail scrapings, but Scheck attacked the assumption that this necessarily resolved the earlier blood-type anomaly. EAP examined characteristics associated with red blood cells, while DNA could also come from nucleated epithelial cells naturally present beneath Nicole’s own fingernails. In Scheck’s argument, detecting Nicole’s DNA in a fingernail scraping did not necessarily establish that every component within that scraping—including the material producing the disputed EAP result—originated from Nicole. This was the larger problem Scheck repeatedly returned to: the difference between obtaining a scientifically impressive result and establishing the integrity of the sample that produced it.
There was no dispute that LAPD’s collection practices created opportunities for degradation. Wet biological swatches were temporarily placed in plastic bags, conditions capable of trapping moisture and encouraging bacterial activity. Scheck also pressed prosecution witnesses about contamination controls. Gary Sims agreed that contamination discovered in laboratory controls could raise concerns even when every individual blank did not test positive, and acknowledged the importance of incorporating contamination control into laboratory procedures. When Scheck turned to the Bundy glove, Sims acknowledged that he had not collected substrate controls from it.
Then there was Simpson’s reference blood. After Simpson voluntarily provided a blood sample at Parker Center on June 13, Detective Philip Vannatter took custody of the vial rather than immediately booking it into evidence. He personally transported it back toward the crime-scene investigation and ultimately delivered it to criminalist Dennis Fung. The prosecution maintained that there was an innocent reason for this: Vannatter wanted the reference sample placed with the other biological evidence being handled by Fung. The defense saw something entirely different. A lead detective investigating Simpson had personally carried a concentrated source of Simpson’s known blood through an investigation in which Simpson’s blood would become the central physical evidence.
That circumstance did not prove that anyone planted blood. But it created an unnecessary question that proper evidence handling was designed to prevent.
Questions also arose over how much blood had originally been drawn from Simpson and how much remained in the vial. The defense characterized the discrepancy as “missing blood,” while the prosecution challenged the premise itself, pointing out that the original quantity had been estimated rather than precisely measured. It was never established that a specific volume of Simpson’s blood had disappeared. What was established was that the uncertainty existed at precisely the moment the defense was questioning how his reference blood had been handled. The most striking anomaly, however, was waiting on the rear gate at Bundy.
Blood evidence from the walkway was collected on June 13, only hours after the murders. Three stains from the rear gate—items 115, 116 and 117—were not collected until July 3, approximately three weeks later. One might intuitively expect biological material exposed outdoors for an additional three weeks to yield poorer DNA than material collected the morning after the murders.
The testing produced almost the opposite. Using Gary Sims’s own results, Scheck demonstrated that item 117 contained approximately twenty-seven times the DNA concentration of Bundy stain 47, forty-five times stain 48, 270 times stain 49, fifty-one times stain 50 and eleven times stain 52. The other later-collected gate samples also contained substantially greater concentrations than several of the June 13 stains.
However, concentration was only part of Scheck’s argument. On recross-examination, he walked Sims through the degradation evidence one sample at a time. A June 13 sample collected near the gate showed the bacterial degradation pattern. A sample from the front gate showed it. The handrail sample showed it. Then Scheck reached the three stains collected July 3. Had Sims observed that same bacterial degradation in 115, 116 and 117? He had not. Scheck repeated the proposition to remove any ambiguity: the samples collected three weeks later from the back gate did not display the bacterial degradation pattern Sims had observed in the earlier Bundy evidence.
“That’s correct,” Sims answered.
It was effective cross-examination because Scheck did not need his own witness to establish the discrepancy. He had obtained it from the prosecution’s DNA expert.
The prosecution had explanations. The stains were deposited in different quantities and on different surfaces, and the June 13 samples had themselves been subjected to conditions during collection and packaging that could accelerate bacterial degradation. DNA concentration alone could not establish the age of a stain. Contemporary reporting on Sims’s testimony noted precisely this dispute: the defense argued that the later gate blood was suspiciously well preserved, while prosecutors attributed the poorer condition of the earlier evidence in part to bacterial contamination and the way those samples had been packaged. Those explanations mattered. The anomalous results did not prove that the gate blood had been planted. But neither did the astronomical DNA statistics make the questions surrounding the evidence disappear. This was perhaps Scheck’s most important contribution to the defense. He separated the reliability of DNA science from the reliability of the evidence being submitted to that science. A laboratory could accurately determine that a sample contained Simpson’s DNA while remaining completely incapable of determining from the genetic profile alone when that blood was deposited or how it arrived on the object being tested.
The EDTA controversy ultimately pushed that question further. The defense argued that indications of the preservative used in reference blood tubes could support the possibility that certain stains originated from preserved blood rather than blood deposited naturally at the crime scene. The prosecution fiercely disputed both the testing and the conclusions the defense attempted to draw from it. EDTA never became the simple scientific proof of planting that the defense hoped it might be.
Yet viewed together, the questions were more substantial than any one of them alone: a reference vial personally transported by a lead detective; uncertainty concerning its original volume; evidence collected and stored under procedures criticized for increasing degradation and contamination risks; disputed blood beneath Nicole’s fingernails; potentially informative biological material that was not always pursued to the same degree; and, most remarkably, blood collected from the Bundy gate three weeks later that yielded dramatically greater quantities of usable DNA than several samples collected the morning after the murders.
None of it proves that Simpson’s blood was planted. It raises a different question. The prosecution repeatedly demonstrated how extraordinarily unlikely it was for the DNA profiles obtained from certain stains to belong to someone other than O.J. Simpson. But that statistical certainty addressed the identity of the biological material. It did not establish the history of the evidence itself. In a case in which that history had become part of the accusation, the distinction mattered.
THE ALLELE THAT DIDN’T FIT
There was another complication buried within the DNA evidence, one that Barry Scheck repeatedly returned to during his examination of the prosecution's own scientists.
On the Bronco steering wheel, item 29, both Cellmark and the California Department of Justice detected three DQ-Alpha alleles: 1.1, 1.2 and 4. Simpson's known DQ-Alpha type was 1.1, 1.2. Nicole's was 1.1, 1.1. Ronald Goldman's was 1.3, 4. The presence of three alleles established that the steering-wheel stain contained DNA from more than one person. But the additional 4 allele created a problem: Goldman's corresponding 1.3 allele was not detected in that sample.
If the 4 came from Goldman, where was his 1.3?
One explanation was allele dropout. The amount of Goldman's DNA could have been sufficiently small or degraded that his 4 allele appeared while the accompanying 1.3 failed to register. But if that explanation was rejected, the result raised another possibility: the 4 alleles had come from someone else.
Scheck made sure the jury understood that the unexplained allele could not simply be attributed to the people who had collected the evidence. During his cross-examination of LAPD criminalist Collin Yamauchi, Scheck established the DQ-Alpha types of Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola and then returned to the steering wheel.
Neither Fung nor Mazzola possessed a 4 allele.
“So that means that neither of them could be the source of the number 4 allele on number 29, the steering wheel; isn't that right?” Scheck asked.
“Yes, that's correct,” Yamauchi answered.
