by John Douglas
“So you think he was in the process of attacking her when Goldman happens to show up at the scene?”
“That’s possible,” I acknowledge. “But I don’t think so, because it appears that he began with her, went to him, then back to her. What I think happened was: the UNSUB sees the two of them together; he’s been watching, he’s been stalking her. He doesn’t like what he sees. So he comes out and confronts them. She recognizes him. Goldman probably does, too, so he puts out his hands, palms up, like, “Hey, stay cool, man. Nothing going on here. I just came to return her mom’s glasses.”
“But the offender whacks her on the head with blunt force—boom—probably the butt of the knife, probably sufficient to knock her out.
“He then goes to Goldman, who is about five or six feet away, near a palm tree growing up through the ground. This is maybe two or three seconds later and Ron is caught off guard by the attack on Nicole. He’s trapped in this small area—a four-by-six-foot space with a fence behind him—and he’s blocked by this palm tree. Instinctively, he goes into a pugilistic stance—we can tell this from the defense wounds—and he’s also stabbed in his left thigh and left abdomen. There’s a struggle between the two men. The shirt Goldman’s wearing is twisted around his body so that when he’s stabbed and stabbed again the holes don’t seem to line up with the stab wounds when the body is examined later.
“Now, the defense wounds are primarily concentrated on the fingers of his left hand, and the palm of that hand. What I think happened is that he reached out as the attacker was stabbing with his right hand. Goldman reached out and pulled the left glove off, which is the one found at the scene.
“By this point the offender has worked himself up into a frenzy. As soon as he’s got Ron neutralized, which is not easy, he goes back to Nicole, lifts her head from behind, and cuts her throat, slicing right through her voice box, nearly taking her head off.
“The UNSUB then goes back to Goldman because he has to make sure he finishes him off. We know he goes back because her blood is found on the bottom of one of Goldman’s shoes. Now, this is very, very important, because it tells you that the offender is not a professional killer. This is not a hit man. He doesn’t know exactly what it takes to kill this guy. He has to come back and check on him. He sees that Goldman is dying and he goes back and stabs him multiple times. In fact, he’s actually stabbed more times than Brown, even though the personalized sort of attack is reserved for her. That’s because even though she’s the one he’s out to punish, to revenge himself on, the male is the greater physical threat. That’s another reason we know the crimes were committed by a single offender. Two or more killers would have been able to control the situation better. You wouldn’t have the evidence of such a struggle on Goldman’s body.”
Even if it didn’t happen exactly this way, even if Ron came upon the scene as the offender was already attacking Nicole, that doesn’t change my assessment of the type of individual responsible for the crimes or what his motive would have been.
“So you don’t think this could be a drug killing, then, John?”
I don’t. “Was either victim involved in the drug scene?” I ask.
“Not really. They may have tried recreational drugs. A lot of that crowd does. But there’s nothing in the tox screens and both of them took pride in their bodies. Certainly neither of them had ever sold.”
“Then who butchers two people who aren’t any threat to a dealer’s commerce? You expect a drug murder to be very symbolic, like the ’Colombian necktie’ in which the victim’s throat is cut and his tongue is brought out through the wound. Something like that. It would be done in some symbolic place, not the victim’s home. And as I said, it would be done by professionals who would have been better prepared to subdue the male victim. Or, if they weren’t, upon finding him at the scene they would have been dispassionate enough to walk away and try again at a more opportune time.”
It is very important at this stage to try to classify the type of homicide we’re dealing with. If this isn’t a rape-murder or a burglary gone bad, if it’s not a drug killing, an insurance murder, a criminal enterprise murder, or what have you, what is it? I was lead author on a book entitled Crime Classification Manual, which was published in 1992. After years of research and consultation on thousands of cases, some of us at Quantico felt the need for a system of classifyingand thereby explaining—serious crimes that would have the same rigor and organization that DSM -the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—has on the psychiatric side. The result was the volume which has come to be called CCM. Outside the Bureau, Dr. Ann Burgess of the University of Pennsylvania and her husband, Allen, a professor of management at Northeastern University in Boston, served as co-authors and oversaw the compiling and organization of the voluminous data. Virtually all the special agents in the Investigative Support Unit and many in Behavioral Science also contributed. For example, Jud Ray headed up the Personal Cause Homicide classification committee and worked with Jim Wright on the Group Cause committee.
In CCM, we classified homicide, arson, and rape and sexual assault according to motive and elements and told police and investigators what the components and investigational considerations of each should be. The first of the homicide categories, Criminal Enterprise Homicide, is broken down into eight sub-groups and four sub-sub-groups. Personal Cause Homicide is broken down into two sub-groups, ErotomaniaMotivated Killing and Domestic Homicide. Domestic Homicide, in turn, is broken down into Spontaneous and Staged classifications. None of these are arbitrary or subjective categories. They’re based on extensive research and experience.
Because of the type and severity of the wounds, as I’ve said, and because it is clear to me that the woman rather than the man was the primary target, I do not believe this is a stranger murder. Nor is it what we refer to as a Group Cause Murder. The Manson Family cult killings, for example, were group cause. And a cult murder or a Group Excitation Murder are the only types of group cause that could possibly fit, the others being variations on Extremist Murders—political or paramilitary, religious or hostage.
While the brutality of the Brown murder might seem similar in certain ways to the Tate—LaBianca murders, for example, a close examination reveals major and significant differences. In a cult situation, you would expect to see a lot of symbolism at the scene, such as when Manson family members scrawled “Helter Skelter” and other slogans on the walls with the victims’ blood. In the Atlanta Child Murders, despite widespread insistence that a Klan type white supremacist group was behind the crimes, I knew this wasn’t the case. There was no symbolism attached to the bodies or the dump sites and it was quite clear to me that a single individual was involved.
As I looked at the Brown-Goldman crime scene materials, there was ample reason for me to believe only a single individual was involved there, too. Aside from the disorganization apparent as a result of having to deal with a second victim, all of the wounds on both victims were consistent with a single weapon. Two or more people in this situation wouldn’t share one knife, particularly when one of Nicole’s own kitchen knives was lying on the kitchen counter in plain view.
What was it doing there? My feeling is that she was anticipating some kind of threat. Earlier in the day, or even days before, something happened that made her feel concerned. Her intercom wasn’t working. She didn’t have a gun; the best weapon she could come up with was a knife. We know she was expecting Ron Goldman to come over and return the eyeglasses her mother had left at his restaurant that day. But that’s not who she was afraid of.
“You have to go back to the victimology,” I say. “There’s nothing in Goldman’s life or background that sets him up as the target of a vicious attack. I’m not saying he couldn’t have been mugged, or even murdered in a homosexual attack (it would have to be homosexual—women don’t kill this way). But that isn’t what happened here.
“Brown, on the other hand, has been through a very nasty divorce, and she’s continu
ed to have an on-again, off-again relationship with a very controlling-type husband up until a couple of weeks ago.”
“That’s right,” Scott says. “A couple of weeks before the murder, she was sick and Simpson went over to the house with food and took care of her. He gave her a beautiful necklace. Sometime after she was well, they got into another fight and she threw the necklace at him.”
“So he may have felt she was giving him mixed signals,” I say. “And we have evidence that Simpson had been stalking her in the weeks before the murder, driving by places she was eating or meeting friends, looking in her windows, watching her with other people. There’s no evidence Goldman was being stalked by anyone or had any enemies in the world.”
“So you’re saying it’s the ex-husband, O.J. Simpson,” Scott declares.
“What I’m saying,” I clarify, “is that we see a lot of cases like this one, and whoever did it was not a professional or experienced killer, acted alone, knew the female victim well, and had a tremendous amount of rage toward her.”
“Well, we haven’t come up with anyone else who meets that description,” one of the detectives says.
“And by the time this all breaks publicly,” another one predicts, “every minute detail of these two lives is going to be subjected to scrutiny. If there was anyone else in Nicole’s life who fit that mold, he won’t remain hidden long.”
(This, of course, did happen, and despite massive efforts by entrepreneurial reporters and, presumably, Simpson’s own investigators, not to mention the police, no one of this nature has ever surfaced or been identified.)
“Look,” I continue, “we’ve seen enough of these things to know there’s always a pattern, always a motive of some kind. Some monster doesn’t just show up from nowhere and butcher two people and then disappear again into thin air.”
“Some folks are starting to suggest maybe this is the work of a serial killer. Glen Rogers’s name has been mentioned because he traveled a lot and worked in several different states and jurisdictions.”
Glen Rogers is an alleged serial killer who police believe may be responsible for at least six murders throughout the United States, in California, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Kentucky, and Florida. At one time, he was boasting as many as seventy victims. He was apprehended after a highspeed chase hi Kentucky in 1995. Because of his wide swath and variety of victim types, he seemed a convenient “universal suspect” for alternate theories of virtually any contemporaneous violent crime.
“The MO and signature are wrong,” I point out. “Rogers would pick up women in lower class bars and spend the night with them. It’s just grasping at straws to think that this guy is suddenly going to turn up in Brentwood and change the entire way he goes about committing crimes. And this type of sustained aggression that we see toward Nicole Brown, we see that virtually exclusively in situations where a significant relationship already exists between the attacker and the victim.”
“So you’re saying this wasn’t a crime of opportunity. Nicole Brown was definitely the intended victim.”
“Definitely. We know there’s premeditation and planning. We have the knife, the glove, the cap. The offender selected his weapon of choice. He’s got a lot of rage, a lot of hostility, and he wants this to be personal.”
“Well, John, we do know from talking to her friends that Nicole was very scared of knives, much more so than of guns.”
“Then that’s another factor that would suggest the killer knew her well. You know, the method of kill, getting her from behind and slicing through her neck—that’s like a military commando thing, particularly when you add the gloves and the watch cap. Was Simpson ever in the military?” I ask.
“We don’t think so, but he just recently finished a pilot for a TV series in which he plays a Navy SEAL.”
“And those guys are trained to be experts at close-up, silent kills,” a detective who was himself in the Navy offers.
“Well, the killer approached the scene thinking he had everything under control,” I say. “He thought he could get in, do what he intended, and get out without being seen or heard. And I’ll tell you another thing I’ve been thinking about. Based on what I’ve seen over and over again in personal cause domestic homicides, I believe the offender was planning to stage the crime to look like a sexual assault.”
“What do you mean?”
“If he hadn’t been surprised by Goldman’s presence—the added factor he hadn’t planned on—he would have had the time to try to cover some of his own behavior by making it look like a rape-murder. If he’d been able to do that, you would have found Brown’s body with her dress up and panties pulled down or off. Drawers would have been ransacked and something obvious would have been taken. But ultimately, that wouldn’t have mattered, because we’re better at uncovering staging than amateurs are at doing it. For example, it’s unlikely he would have raped her or masturbated on her after she was dead and he would have taken care to place her somewhere where the children wouldn’t be the ones to find her. Then, of course, you have to figure that rapists work close to where they feel comfortable, and in that neighborhood, then, a rapist would have to be an upper-middle-class resident—unlikely—or a gardener or maintenance man or someone, and we’ve got no one like that working the area. But most important, he still wouldn’t have been able to control the rage that created the kinds of wounds that strangers wouldn’t leave. Nicole Brown was in good shape and she could be a fighter when she had to, so it might have been difficult for a rapist to control her and that might have pissed him off. But then you would have seen more blunt-force trauma, rather than all the stab wounds. A rapist isn’t going to mind assaulting a woman who’s all beaten up, in fact the sadistic type is going to enjoy it, but he’s not going to rape a woman who is bleeding to death.”
“John, what we’ve told you about the events of the day of the murder—does that square with your profile?”
“Absolutely. There’s generally a triggering mechanism to these kinds of crimes, some kind of inciting incident in the hours, days, or weeks before. We know that there had been a lot of strife and conflict between O.J. and Nicole in the weeks leading up to this, and the day of the murder, he feels she’s snubbed him at their daughter, Sydney’s, dance recital. We also know that his girlfriend, Paula Barbieri, the one who’s supposed to help him get over Nicole, is annoyed at him for not letting her go to the recital with him and leaves him a lengthy message on his answering machine saying she wants to break off the relationship. Now, deep down, he probably didn’t want her to go because he wants the best of both worlds. He wants to maintain that relationship, plus he wants to maintain the relationship with his ex-wife. There’s evidence he’s making calls to Barbieri from his residence and from a mobile phone practically up until the time Brown and Goldman are killed. But he’s never able to get through to her. So it’s still on his mind.”
“What if the call had gotten through?”
“It’s an interesting question,” I respond. “If the call had gotten through, would he have continued on his “missionߣ? It’s a possibility he might not have, although he’s got a tremendous amount of rage built up already. He’s getting it from both sides. He’s got two women rejecting him and he’s not used to being rejected. In my view, he sees Nicole as a possession. When they met, he was an internationally known celebrity and she was a high school virgin.
“We can see how control-oriented he is and how much image means to him. As he divorced his first wife he stipulated that he would give her money but he got to keep the house. He doesn’t want people to perceive that he’s lost. Even though he may be paying a lot of money in alimony and child support, he can say, “I didn’t lose. I got the house. She had to move out!ߣ The same thing happens again when he breaks up with Nicole: “She had to move out. I got the house!ߣ
“Then, when he sees Nicole with another man at her own place, this younger white guy, that could be the final trigger he needs.”
“What’s your fee
ling about the blood?” Scott asks. “As you saw in the crime scene photos, there’s a tremendous amount of blood at the scene. In the Bronco there are several drops, but it’s not covering the seats or anything and even though we’ve got the socks at the Rockingham residence, we don’t have a huge amount anywhere else. I suspect this is going to raise questions in some people’s minds.”
“First of all,” I say, “the bloodiest wound—the one to Brown’s throat—was delivered from behind so you wouldn’t expect to see a lot of blood on the attacker’s person. But if he’s anticipating a murder with a knife and he’s thinking at all clearly, he has to figure he might get some blood on himself. The fact that we know he brought gloves and a cap with him indicates he was planning ahead, so I would expect him to be wearing some kind of jumpsuit or outer garment that he could take off and discard soon after he changes out of it. If he was able to stop along the way from the crime scene, he’d get rid of it there. Since the murders took longer than he anticipated and he was in a hurry, I’d actually expect to see the bloody clothing discarded later, perhaps at the airport.”
One of the detectives says, “The only thing that bothers me in this behavioral discussion is, we’re not talking about anyone; we’re talking about O.J. Simpson, a major celebrity. A lot of people knew about his marital problems. As he’s thinking about doing something like this, isn’t he going to stop and think, “Wait a minute. I’m the obvious guy. As soon as they find her dead, they’re going to come looking for meߣ?”
“You would think so,” I reply. “But from my experience, killers—whether they’re first-timers or multiple—don’t figure on getting caught. Had this unexpected man not appeared on the scene and slowed him down and thrown him off, he would have gotten back home in plenty of time to pull off his alibi and be on the road to the airport for his flight to Chicago without anyone being the wiser. What he might have planned was to be able to get to the airport in plenty of time, then call a friend of his and say, “I’m worried. I’ve been trying to call Nicole all evening and I can’t reach her. Could you go over and check to make sure she and the kids are okay?ߣ That not only establishes his alibi but also prevents the children from finding their mother.
