This week’s Simpson watch begins with a thrilling media balloon being floated by the defense team: O.J. is being framed by a racist, psycho detective.
It popped up in the New Yorker and Newsweek magazines and was promptly embraced by CNN, Larry King and countless talk shows as a “stunning new development.” The usual expert lawyers rushed to the TV studios to praise Simpson’s attorneys for the brilliance of this strategic move.
The frame-up theory goes this way:
One of the Los Angeles detectives found not one, but two bloody gloves, at the murder scene.
Detective Mark Fuhrman somehow pilfered one of the gloves. When he got to Simpson’s home, he used it to dab that incriminating blood spot on Simpson’s white Bronco. Then he illegally climbed over Simpson’s wall and planted the glove on the grounds and pretended to discover it there.
Why did he do it? Because he wanted to be hailed as a hero, the alert cop who found the key clue. And he is a racist.
The evidence of his racism is supposed to be a psychological disorder he experienced about 10 years ago, during which he admitted to shrinks that he had a violent nature and disliked some minorities.
A real shocker. Who ever heard of a big-city cop having psychological problems, a violent nature and even one bigoted brain cell in his noggin?
Actually, the frame-up theory isn’t original or new. Before the magazines carried it, a couple of pro-Simpson readers told me the same thing.
“Everybody knows the L.A. cops are dirty racists,” wrote a Chicago man. “And O.J. wouldn’t be stupid enough to kill his wife and that guy and then take the bloody glove home with him, would he? No, the cops put it there to railroad him. Check it out!”
Unfortunately, I was unable to check it out. Nor could the New Yorker or Newsweek check it out, but it gave them a good yarn.
A woman in Gary wrote: “You are like everybody else who wants to bring O.J. down. You believe anything the police say. Well, take it from me, one of those cops planted the glove and all that other evidence. It happens all the time.”
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Actually, what happens all the time in cases of wives or ex-wives being murdered is that the cops quickly find that the husband did it, or the ex-husband, or the boyfriend, or the ex-boyfriend. And they don’t have to plant a bloody glove to prove the case.
A friend who prowls computer jabber groups says the planted-glove theory is very popular among amateur cybersnoops.
It does have a certain appeal, especially if you view the Simpson case as Mystery Theater entertainment, which much of the country does.
You can almost see it as the brilliant twist at the end of a movie script-a flashback to the psycho cop sneaking through the night to drop the bloody glove that will damn an innocent man to Death Row.
It would make an even more stunning ending if the cop himself turned out to be the killer.
But the planted-glove theory doesn’t explain other strange elements in the case that should be making Simpson and his lawyers nervous.
There is still the limo driver, who says he saw a big black person entering Simpson’s house at the time Simpson was already supposed to be inside waiting for the driver to take him to the airport.
And it doesn’t explain why the limo driver didn’t see the white Bronco parked near the house when he arrived, although Simpson says he was home at the time, napping while waiting for the driver.
Also, it doesn’t tell us why “Kato,” the professional house guest, told the police he heard a loud thumping noise on his wall, which led the cops to investigate and find the glove.
If this is a frame-up, what’s in it for the limo driver and the faithful Kato? Who told them to lie, and why? Could it be that other car rental companies hatched the whole thing to discredit Hertz? Many a movie and TV show has told us how ruthless those big corporations can be.
A tip-off to this would be if Kato, an aspiring actor, suddenly lands a big TV role in a series sponsored by one of the rival car-rental companies. Or if the limo driver lands a top executive job. That would be very, very suspicious.
Of course, none of these things has happened yet. And we don’t know if they will. So until they do, they are nothing but the ravings of a deranged columnist.
Just as we don’t know if that detective planted the glove, since there is no evidence that he did, other than the rantings of unnamed defense lawyers who floated their ideas to a couple of magazines.
But stay tuned, because who knows what CNN and Larry King will bring us next?
Remember, Jack the Ripper was never caught. And if he is still alive, how old would he be? You never know.