Bases 13

Sudden Death, Part 4:
The Murder Of O.J. Simpson
by Chris Oakley
Adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

Summary:

In the first three chapters of this series we charted the timeline for the murder of former NFL star O.J. Simpson and the arrest of Simpson’s killer, Jonathan Bricker; examined the public reaction to both events; and looked back on Bricker’s subsequent trial and conviction. In this final episode of the series, we’ll look back at the last month’s of Jonathan Bricker’s life and the 2008 criminal trial of three men arrested for attempting to steal the late O.J. Simpson’s memorabilia.

Jonathan Bricker began his prison term deep in solitary confinement-- during the time between his conviction for murder and his sentencing, his defense attorney had expressed concerns that his client might be killed if he were put into the general population. In spite of the disgrace which had tarnished O.J. Simpson’s name during the original Simpson murder trial, the one- time NFL great still had some defenders out in the general public, and one of those defenders might take it into their head to exact a crude form of vigilante justice on Bricker in retribution for Simpson’s grisly death.

Indeed, even before sentence had been pronounced in Bricker’s case Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies had to break up an assassination conspiracy by a Compton gang leader who’d been a lifelong fan of Simpson and wanted to have Bricker killed as an act of revenge for Bricker’s slaying of the football star. And on the very day of the sentencing hearing itself, an Anaheim man with a long history of both criminal violence and paranoid schizophrenia was arrested by federal agents in the act of trying to sneak pipe bombs into Los Angeles County Jail to blow Bricker up while he was waiting to be transferred to the state penitentiary at San Quentin.

Not that Bricker particularly minded the solitude; for him it was a welcome opportunity to further consider those conspiracy theories he’d already hatched and craft some new ones. It also gave him the opportunity to contemplate possible ways of escaping from prison. Although some people questioned whether a lunatic would or could have the presence of mind to plan a jailbreak, others might have suggested his madness had a certain bizarre logic all its own. In any case, Bricker’s desire to get out of prison would furnish the backdrop for the grim finale to his troubled life....

While Bricker was busy adjusting to life in solitary, the rest of the world was moving on from the Simpson case-- or at least trying to. One particular witness from the original Simpson trial had literally packed up and left town: the LAPD detective who had helped find the infamous bloody glove thought to link Simpson to the Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman murders had quit the force in hopes of finding a new quieter life in the Pacific Northwest. Most of the old Simpson defense team were pursuing other cases or making the rounds of the cable TV news circuit as consultants on the latest celebrity legal trouble or Supreme Court showdown. Former Simpson team advisor Alan Dershowitz was a particularly visible cable presence, speaking out not only on 1st Amendment issues but also on the Middle East and the Whitewater scandal which was beginning to engulf the presidency of Bill Clinton.

When the inevitable tell-all books about the Bricker case started hitting the shelves, their sales were-- to put it politely -- mediocre. The nation had a serious case of Simpson fatigue, and that fatigue extended to the Bricker case as well. A cable TV documentary about the trial finished dead last in the ratings. Even the tabloids had had enough of the Simpson-Bricker affair: the National Enquirer, which normally goes after scandalous tidbits like ants after a picnic basket, turned down an offer by a former high school classmate of Jonathan Bricker’s to sell the paper what the classmate alleged were excerpts of Bricker’s personal high school diary¹.

In January of 1998, right about the time the Monica Lewinsky scandal was beginning to engulf the Clinton Administration, Bricker finally set his escape plan in motion. Watching the San Quentin guard shift change routines in the same way a meteorologist might analyze cloud patterns, he kept detailed notes about the guards’ movements in a makeshift diary hidden under the bunk in his cell. He also arranged to have his daily recreation time adjusted so that it would coincide with one of those shift changes; the first chance he got, he promised himself, he would take off out the main gate and never look back.

That chance came three months later during an afternoon when he was in San Quentin’s exercise yard. While working out with one of the yard’s weightlifting benches, Bricker noticed the main gate had been left ajar after being opened to let a laundry truck in; before anyone even realized it, Bricker had leaped off the bench and was sprinting toward the open gate as fast as he could go. He was about six inches from the gate before one of the guards spotted him and demanded that he halt; after this command had been given and ignored three times, a second guard fired two shots from his sidearm into Bricker’s chest. One of those shots caught Bricker squarely in the heart, leaving him mortally wounded. At 2:37 PM Pacific time on April 23rd, 1998, doctors at the prison hospital wing pronounced Jonathan Bricker dead.

Within hours after receiving the news of Bricker’s death his father, who’d been reluctantly thrust into the public eye when his son was arrested for O.J. Simpson’s murder and stayed out of it following Jonathan’s conviction for the crime, committed suicide in the dining room of the small house he’d been living in since his retirement from the Los Angeles Fire Department. Unlike his son’s demise, the senior Bricker’s exit from this world was relatively quiet; the L.A. County medical examiner’s autopsy determined the ex-LAFD firefighter had died of self-inflicted cyanide poisoning.

Jonathan Bricker’s father was laid to rest at a Bakersfield cemetery a week after his son was killed trying to break out of San Quentin; Jonathan himself was cremated the same day and his ashes scattered over the Pacific Ocean². A few days after the cremation, the California state attorney general’s office announced it was launching an inquiry into the security lapses which had led to Bricker’s ill- fated escape attempt; the inquiry’s final report would be published in November of 1998, just over four and a half years after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

With Jonathan Bricker dead, the insane ramblings he’d issued in the years prior to his L.A. County Courthouse rampage began fading into history; copies of his old videos became collectors’ items among true crime buffs and back issues of The Voice Of Truth were eagerly sought after by scholars seeking to understand America’s conspiracy theory subculture. One West Coast techno music DJ sampled snippets of Bricker’s rantings and turned them into an unlikely nightclub dance hit, “Paranoid Breakdown #7”. Bricker’s tragic and macabre legend even found its way into the video game world when an installment of the notorious Grand Theft Auto series was updated to include a fictional version of his 1995 courthouse rampage.

After 9/11 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, concerned that terrorists might try to mount their own shooting spree at court or civic buildings in the Los Angeles area, moved to further tighten security at such facilities. The Los Angeles city council and the California state legislature passed bills mandating that bailiffs be trained in anti-terrorism tactics so that they could if necessary deal with attacks like Bricker’s; the LAPD approved a 50% increase in spending for its SWAT team.

In September of 2007 a bizarre and tacky postscript to the Simpson-Bricker saga was written in Las Vegas when three men desperate for cash broke into the Palace Station hotel and attempted to rob it of Simpson memorabilia items that were scheduled to be auctioned off to pay remaining legal expenses from the original Simpson criminal case. They were indicted for the robbery attempt two months later and went on trial in the spring of 2008; it seemed like déjà vu all over again as yet another Simpson-inspired media frenzy overtook America.

And there were even more media now than there had been when Bricker killed Simpson-- the Internet revolution made it possible for even the most distant observers of the Station hotel case to comment on it via blogs and YouTube as if they were right there in the courtroom, and thanks to instant messaging the average American had his or her own virtual soapbox with which to voice an opinion on each new twist and turn in the case. The 500-channel cable universe which had followed the original Simpson trial had now grown to 1000 channels, and even as they tracked the course of the Palace Station trial some of those same channels criticized the media tendency toward excess which was once more rearing its head.

When the defendants in the Palace Station case were convicted of all 12 criminal counts against them³ in late August of 2008, the news began spreading across America via Twitter within seconds after the jury forewoman read the first “guilty” verdict to the court and in a matter of minutes was common knowledge all around the world. After the defendants were sentenced to stiff prison terms, a Los Angeles Times legal affairs correspondent doing research for a story on the Palace Station trial’s aftermath made the interesting discovery that the jury forewoman’s home stood on what had once been the driveway of Jonathan Bricker’s childhood home.

1) Which was fortunate for both parties concerned; after the would-be tipster was killed in a drunk driving accident, the so-called diary excerpts were discovered to be forgeries that could have landed him in jail for fraud.

2) Plans to inter the ashes in the cemetery where his father had been buried were scrapped because of fears that fans of the late O.J. Simpson might try to vandalize the crypt that had originally been reserved to house the urn containing those ashes.

3) In addition to the robbery charges against them the defendants were indicted for breaking and entering, attempted kidnapping, and conspiracy to sell stolen goods.