Popping Off: Its up to us to put an end to the O.J. frenzy

“If I Did It.”

That’s a heck of a title for a ghostwritten book about how O.J. Simpson would have killed two people who many believe he did kill in 1994.

One was his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, with whom he had two children, Sydney and Justin. The other was her friend, Ron Goldman. Both were found in a bloody heap in the courtyard of the condo complex where she lived.

I’m having a flashback to a year that was a big turning point for me, and the whole OJ story was in the background and sometimes the foreground that whole year.

I used to live in Seattle, and this article is from a Seattle-Tacoma paper. My former boss was the sort of person who would become consumed by whatever big, lurid murder story was in the news, and all conversation in the office was nothing but endless speculation and conjecture, with no grisly detail omitted.

1994 was the last full year that I lived in Seattle as a completely single woman. I met my husband David late that fall, and within a few months, we were a long-distance couple

But before I met David, I was trapped in a job that I didn’t like, working for someone who prattled endlessly about whatever her current fixations were in the news, and how to transform her business, but she never actually settled down to do much work. And that year, it was OJ, and earlier the same year, it was a big murder case involving someone she knew slightly. Every interaction she’d ever had with
the victim in the latter case was repeated endlessly, and over-analyzed until I was ready to scream. Meanwhile, the TV was always on because her school-age sons same to the office after classes. Although they lived in a distant neighborhood, they had the boys in school near work. It was partly practical, and partly snob appeal; she wanted her kids to go to a nicer, more socially acceptable Catholic school than the one nearer their home. Also, the interaction with the other parents at fundraising
events and science fairs was supposed to be good for business.

But I digress. I remember watching the slow-speed chase of the white Bronco all too well; we had no choice but to be glued to the TV, because it was at the end of the workday and it was on all the channels anyway. Remember? There was nothing else to watch but OJ that day.

5 years before that, it was all Ted Bundy, all the time. Every possible encounter my former boss might have had was relentlessly dissected. He was active in both Washington State and Utah in the late Seventies, and I have to admit that I knew of someone in Utah who thought Ted Bundy had followed them home once. Ted Bundy was every woman’s ultimate bogeyman, the attractive killer who appears to need your help. We spent a year discussing his last murders, his arrest, and his trial before he was executed.
I had read the book by Anne Rule, you see. And then I stirred the pot by discussing the most famous murder case from my former town, because I knew several people connected with the Diane Downs case, including a prosecutor and a social services volunteer who had met her surviving kids.

It seemed all we ever did in that office was discuss gory murders or sexy scandals, and occasionally were interrupted by phone calls or visits from clients. It wasn’t a healthy work environment.

So I had that to look forward to, working in that office – every year, the next sensational murder trial, the big lurid news story, on and on.

And what do I think, ultimately, about OJ? There is no “if” in my mind. The investigation was screwed up, the trial was screwed up, all the little players screwed up the timeline, the evidence was manipulated in court, and of course they never found the damn knife. But of course he did it, and for him to go through with this ludicrous “If I Did It” project, and for Fox/Murdoch to have actually contemplated putting it on the air is deeply offensive to me.

Of course he did it. And I’m tired of hearing about it. And I agree, we should stop paying OJ any money, or any attention, ever again.