Imagining uxoricide : reading the scene of the crime

Some time between 9.00 p.m. and midnight on 12 June 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered on the pathway outside the front door of Nicole’s condominium at 875 South Bundy Drive, Brentwood, in West Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles Police Department arrested Orenthal James (O.J.) Simpson, Nicole’s former husband, for the crime on 17 June 1994. The criminal trial jury delivered a not-guilty verdict in the matter of the People of the State of California vs Orenthal James Simpson, case number BA097211. The legal acquittal reflects the prosecution’s inability to prove Simpson’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It is a judicial and juridical determination based on a system of crimino-legal evidentiary structures and logical reasoning. Within the popular imaginary, however, in which the distinctions between fact and fiction are more subjective, Simpson’s guilt is understood as fact; and his sentencing in December 2008 to a maximum of 33 years in prison, on 12 charges including kidnapping and armed robbery, is understood as belated justice for his acquittal in the murder trial. The focus of this paper, however, is not the legal case but the crime scene, real and imagined, and Simpson’s intervention within the circulation of meanings about the Brentwood murders.