(WBBM NEWSRADIO) – The city of Chicago serves as a footnote in the O.J. Simpson murder-trial saga that began unfolding nearly 30 years ago.
The football legend, Hertz rental car pitchman and Hollywood actor flew on an American Airlines red-eye flight from Los Angeles to Chicago early June 13, 1994 to attend a suburban golf outing. This was around the time the bodies of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, were found at her Brentwood home. They had been fatally stabbed the evening before.
Simpson stayed in Room 915 of the O’Hare Plaza Hotel, which today is a Holiday Inn, along I-90 and Cumberland. He did not stay long.
Police in L.A. contacted him to say they wanted to question him about the stabbing deaths that had occurred 1,700 miles away, and Simpson headed back to the West Coast within a few hours.
It was left to Chicago detectives to examine Simpson’s hotel room, which contained shards of glass in the sink and blood on the bed. Simpson would claim he was so upset about learning of his ex-wife’s death that he broke a drinking glass and cut himself. Authorities would argue the shattered glass was a cover story for self-inflicted lacerations Simpson suffered during his attack on his former spouse and Goldman.
Police also searched in vain in a wooded area nearby where a witness said they’d seen someone resembling Simpson digging. The supposition was he may have tried to ditch the murder weapon. Nothing was ever found.
Simpson would be charged with murder, based on a combination of physical and circumstantial evidence, and go through a “trial of the century” watched by millions.
“In the trial, as you went along, you realized that the prosecution was over-matched. O.J. had Johnnie Cochran, one of the great lawyers in American history, representing him. He did a brilliant job,” veteran sports journalist Lester Munson told the Noon Business Hour on Thursday. “And in the face of overwhelming guilt, the jury found him not guilty.”
Simpson was later found liable for the deaths of Brown Simpson and Goldman in a civil trial. He essentially became a pariah who never regained the good will and fame that he enjoyed but always maintained his innocence.
The contents of the hotel room where Simpson touched down in Chicago were auctioned off in 1994 as a new owner took over the property.
Simpson died this week after a battle with cancer at the age of 76.
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