CHAPTER ONE
1. The Luckiest Guy in the World
I’m going to tell you a story you’ve never heard before, because no one knows this story the way I know it. It takes place on the night of June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murder of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend, Ronald Goldman. I want you to forget everything you think you know about that night, because I know the facts better than anyone. I know the players. I’ve seen the evidence. I’ve heard the theories. And of course I’ve read all the stories: That I did it. That I did it but I don’t know I did it. That I can no longer tell fact from fiction. That I wake up in the middle of the night, consumed by guilt, screaming.
Man, they even had me wondering, What if I did it?
Well, sit back, people. The things I know, and the things I believe, you can’t even imagine. And I’m going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know -- that’s not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong.
EXCERPT OF MURDER DESCRIPTION:
I could hear Charlie just behind me, saying something, urging me to get the fuck out of there, and at one point he even reached for me and tried to drag me away, but I shook him off, hard, and moved toward Goldman. “Okay, motherfucker!” I said. “Show me how tough you are!”
Then something went horribly wrong, and I know what happened, but I can’t tell you exactly how. I was still standing in Nicole’s courtyard, of course, but for a few moments I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there, when I’d arrived, or even why I was there. Then it came back to me, very slowly: The recital -- with little Sydney up on stage, dancing her little heart out; me, chipping balls into my neighbor’s yard; Paula, angry, not answering her phone; Charlie, stopping by the house to tell me some more ugly shit about Nicole’s behavior. Then what? The short, quick drive from Rockingham to the Bundy condo.
And now? Now I was standing in Nicole’s courtyard, in the dark, listening to the loud, rhythmic, accelerated beating of my own heart. I put my left hand to my heart and my shirt felt strangely wet. I looked down at myself. For several moments, I couldn’t get my mind around what I was seeing. The whole front of me was covered in blood, but it didn’t compute. Is this really blood? I wondered. And whose blood is it? Is it mine? Am I hurt?
I was more confused than ever. What the hell had happened here? Then I remembered that Goldman guy coming through the back gate, with Juditha’s glasses, and I remembered hollering at him, and I remembered how our shouts had brought Nicole to the door . . .
Nicole. Jesus.
I looked down and saw her on the ground in front of me, curled up in a fetal position at the base of the stairs, not moving. Goldman was only a few feet away, slumped against the bars of the fence. He wasn’t moving either. Both he and Nicole were lying in giant pools of blood. I had never seen so much blood in my life. It didn’t seem real, and none of it computed. What the fuck happened here? Who had done this? And why? And where the fuck was I when this shit went down?
EXCERPT OF A FIGHT SIMPSON HAD WITH NICOLE:
Nicole came out of the house and watched me for a few moments, still angry, glaring, and I crossed into the driveway, sat on the hood of her convertible Mercedes, and glared right back. I still had the bat in my hand, and I remember flipping it into the air and accidentally hitting one of the rims.
“You going to pay for that?” she snapped.
“Yeah,” I snapped back, then took the bat and whacked the hood. “And I guess I’ll pay for that, too, since it’s my car—and since I pay for everything around here.”
She shook her head, disgusted with me, and went into the house, and I wandered back into the yard and took a few more swings at the tether ball. It was crazy. It seemed all we did lately was argue. People say a lot of marriages get into trouble at the seven-year mark, and we weren’t married, but we’d been together seven years, and maybe that was the problem.
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