OJ Simpson, acquitted murderer and football star, dies at 76

OJ Simpson, the acquitted California murder defendant, former football star and actor, has died, his agent confirmed to CBS News. He was 76.

Declaration posted on social media Simpson’s family said he died of cancer on Wednesday. Simpson’s agent said he did prostate cancer.

“On April 10th, our father, Orenthal James Simpson, passed away after his battle with cancer. He was surrounded by his children and grandchildren,” the family said in a statement.

Simpson was famously acquitted of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, in a case that dominated headlines and television screens for months. He was later found guilty of their deaths by a jury in a civil trial.

David Cook, an attorney who has sought since 2008 to collect the civil judgment in the Goldman case, said he spoke with Fred Goldman, Ron’s father, on Thursday about Simpson’s death. Cook declined to say what Fred Goldman said or where he was.

“He died unrepentant,” Cook said of Simpson. “We don’t know what he has, where he is or who is in control. We’re going to take where we are and run with it.”

Simpson gained fame, fortune and acclaim through football and show business, but his legacy was forever changed by the June 1994 knife murders in Los Angeles.

On the night of the murders, Simpson flew overnight to Chicago to play in a golf tournament and checked into a hotel near O’Hare Airport. While at the hotel, he claimed to have cut his hand on broken glass.

When he returned to LA, authorities said he had broken his promise to turn himself in, and a live TV broadcast of his arrest after a slow speed chase marked a stunning fall from grace for the sporting hero.

He seemed to break racial barriers as the star Trojans tailback for college football powerhouse USC in the late 1960s, as a rental car salesman running around airports in the late 1970s of the last century, and as the husband of the blonde, blue-eyed high school homecoming queen of the 1980s.

“I’m not black, I’m OJ,” he liked to tell friends.

The audience was mesmerized by his “trial of the century” on live television. His case has sparked debates about race, gender, domestic violence, celebrity justice and police misconduct.

The trialProsecutors, lawyers and defense witnesses became household names. Watercooler conversations across the country focused on prosecutors Marsha Clark and Christopher Darden, Judge Lance Ito, Simpsons guest Kato Kaelin, Homicide Detective Mark Furmanand Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys, including the legendary attorney Johnnie Cochranwho coined the famous phrase “If it doesn’t work, you have to justify it.”

A jury found him not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate jury in a civil trial found him responsible in 1997 for the death and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to Brown and Goldman family members.

A decade later, still in the shadow of California’s wrongful death conviction, Simpson led five men he barely knew into a confrontation with two sports memorabilia dealers in a cramped Las Vegas hotel room. Two men with Simpson had guns. A jury convicted Simpson of armed robbery and other crimes.

Imprisoned at 61, he served nine years in a remote prison in Northern Nevada, including a stint as a gym janitor. He showed no remorse when he was released on parole in October 2017.

The parole board heard him insist again that he was only trying to get back sports memorabilia and family heirlooms stolen from him after his criminal trial in Los Angeles.

“I’ve basically had a conflict-free life, you know,” said Simpson, whose parole expires at the end of 2021.

The public’s fascination with The Simpsons never waned. Many debated whether he was punished in Las Vegas for his acquittal in Los Angeles. In 2016, he was the subject of both an FX miniseries and a five-part ESPN documentary.

“I don’t think most of America believes I did it,” Simpson told The New York Times in 1995, a week after jurors decided he did not kill Brown and Goldman. “I have received thousands of letters and telegrams from people who support me.

Twelve years later, after a public outcry, Rupert Murdoch canceled a planned book from HarperCollins, owned by News Corp, in which Simpson offered his hypothetical account of the murders. It should have been titled “If I Did”.

Goldman’s family, which is still aggressively pursuing a multimillion-dollar wrongful-death lawsuit, won control of the manuscript. They renamed the book “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer”.

“It’s all blood money, and unfortunately I had to join the jackals,” Simpson told The Associated Press at the time. He raised $880,000 in advance for the book, paid through a third party.

“It helped me get out of debt and secure my home,” he said.

Less than two months after losing the rights to the book, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas.

Simpson played 11 NFL seasons, nine of them with the Buffalo Bills, where he became known as “The Juice” on an offensive line known as “The Electric Company.” He won four NFL rushing titles, rushed for 11,236 career yards, scored 76 touchdowns and played in five Pro Bowls. His best season was in 1973, when he rushed for 2,003 yards, the first running back to surpass the 2,000-yard mark.

“I was part of the history of the game,” he said years later, recalling that season. “If I did nothing else in my life, I would make my mark.”

Of course, Simpson went on to other fame.

One of the artifacts from his murder trial, the carefully tailored brown suit he wore when he was acquitted, was later donated and displayed at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Simpson County was told the suit would be in the Las Vegas hotel room, but turned out to be gone.

Orenthal James Simpson was born on July 9, 1947, in San Francisco, where he grew up in government-subsidized housing projects.

After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the City College of San Francisco for a year and a half before transferring to the University of Southern California for the spring semester of 1967.

He married his first wife, Marguerite Wheatley, on June 24, 1967, moving her to Los Angeles the next day so he could begin training for his first season with USC — which, thanks in large part to Simpson, won the national championship that year.

Simpson won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He accepted the statue on the same day his first child, Arnell, was born.

He had two sons, Jason and Aren, with his first wife; one of those boys, Aaron, drowned as a toddler in a swimming pool accident in 1979, the same year he and Whitley divorced.

Simpson and Brown married in 1985. They had two children, Justin and Sydney, and divorced in 1992. Two years later, Nicole Brown Simpson was found murdered.

“We don’t need to go back and relive the worst day of our lives,” he told the AP 25 years after the double murders. “The subject of the moment is the subject I will never revisit again. My family and I have moved into what we call the “negative-free zone.” We’re focusing on the positives.”