Maybe I’ve been paying too much attention to the ongoing saga of If I Did It.
That’s the title of O.J. Simpson’s book and TV special, in which he talks about the brutal murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in June 1994. Nicole was O.J.’s ex-wife and the mother of two of his children. She was butchered just outside her house while the two children slept inside. Goldman, apparently returning a pair of glasses Nicole had forgotten at a restaurant earlier that evening, was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and was stabbed over and over and over.
In If I Did It, O.J. tells just how the two murders would have happened if he had done them, which he didn’t, but if he had, it would have been like this.
What an imagination!
This week, responding to public outrage, Rupert Murdoch pulled the plug on both the book and the TV special, even though his companies had reportedly already paid Simpson $3.5 million for them.
As I mentioned, I’ve been following this closely. I wonder how this cancellation will affect my own books. See, I’ve been working on a series of detective adventures featuring O.J. Simpson.
After the criminal trial, Simpson famously pledged that he would never rest until he had tracked down the real killers. Nobody took him seriously. Not long after the trial, when Simpson was seen playing golf, Jay Leno joked, “He must suspect a caddy.”
In fact, Simpson is relentless in pursuit, and that’s the premise of my novels, with the series title “O.J. Simpson, Manhunter.”
See, I happen to know that ever since the murders, no matter where the killer has gone, O.J. Simpson has always been right there.
Knowing that, I really don’t know how the killer sleeps at night.