Found by a construction worker, a folding buck knife was given to an off-duty police officer.
Advertisement
Neiman said it was found by a construction worker at the Simpson estate at 360 N. Rockingham Ave.in Brentwood while the home was being torn down in 1998 by the new owners.
The officer, whom he declined to identify, kept the knife until recently, when he turned it over to Los Angeles police, according to LAPD. Police planned to provide more details later Friday.
After retirement, that officer reportedly mentioned the knife to a co-worker.
It was only after his retirement in January of this year that the former officer contacted LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division.
“I was really surprised”.
“I certainly hope the LAPD used all of the resources then to scour every inch of his property looking for relevant evidence”, Douglas said.
Investigators also trying to confirm the ex-cop’s story to determine who’d handled the knife before he obtained it.
Simpson was acquitted of the murders.
Instead of delivering the weapon to the proper investigators, that police officer took the knife home, keeping it for 18 years.
The murder weapon had not been recovered at the time of his sensational trial, which was carried live on major television networks in the United States and transfixed much of the nation.
In 1996, ABC News’ Barbara Walters asked Simpson’s lawyer and longtime friend Robert Kardashian to address the famous Louis Vuitton garment bag that he was seen carrying from Simpson’s house after the murders – a bag that many speculated could have contained the murder weapon. That evidence was dismissed by his attorney Johnnie Cochran after the gloves were shown to be too small.
The release of the autopsy comes after months of speculation about how she died, including a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by her estate against her domestic partner, Nick Gordon, accusing him of giving her a “toxic cocktail” and putting her facedown in water. He was forced to surrender the knife to LAPD when the friend told superiors. “This man killed these two people”. “There certainly could be evidence still on it. There could be DNA evidence”.
“It is a knife; it is not a machete”, Neiman said at a news conference in front of police headquarters. “It is pure fantasy to believe that there’s anything relevant with this knife that has now been turned over”.
Since Simpson was found not guilty, the case is still open.
But in the court of public opinion, Dershowitz said the knife could be an interesting catalyst to the public perception of OJ Simpson.
Brown Simpson was likely stabbed four times in the neck before the final attack to her throat, medical examiner Dr. Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran testified at Simpson’s trial in June 1995, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Simpson, who has always maintained his innocence in the killings, is now serving a sentence of nine to 33 years in a Nevada prison for a 2007 armed robbery and kidnapping conviction in which he tried to retrieve football memorabilia.
Advertisement
Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in the 1995 O.J. Simpson trial, has spoken out since the news broke Friday that the Los Angeles Police Department found a knife on property Simpson once owned.
