Does OJ’s Accomplice make its case?

The crime
The murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman by OJ Simpson…

The story
…but perhaps not only by OJ Simpson. The thesis of OJ’s Accomplice, as you probably deduced from the title, is that Simpson didn’t act alone; Simpson maybe couldn’t have acted alone; and LAPD and the prosecutors ignored or failed to take seriously evidence to that effect.

I tried to keep an open mind. I agree with the filmmakers* that a handful of components of and figures in the case haven’t ever come out far enough of the shadows for us truly to assess them. I think it’s likely that drugs played a bigger role in the murders than we traditionally talk about. 

*OJA is co-directed by AMPLE Entertainment’s Ari Mark and Sumit David (Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy, among other genre projects – and I’ll disclose here that a friend of mine is one of OJA‘s executive producers.

But as I watched OJA, I kept thinking about Face to Face with Scott Peterson, and to a lesser extent Errol Morris’s objections to various aspects of the trial/s of Jeffrey MacDonald, that two things can be true – that law enforcement and officers of the court did their jobs imperfectly or incompletely; and that none of the new or excluded evidence is probative. That’s where I landed after OJA ended.

Which it did somewhat abruptly, not for nothing. I know the two-parter got rushed through the edit phase, possibly because the New York Times ran a lengthy piece (gift linked here) on the allegations by Sam Ippolito that his older brother, the late drug-runner Joey Jr., was present at the crime scene and had abetted Simpson during and after the murders. Or possibly because it had become clear via said piece that Ippolito miiiiight have a teensy credibility problem:

In his conversations with a reporter earlier this year, Sam Ippolito maintained for months the story about his brother’s involvement.

Then, in a follow-up exchange this past summer, Sam Ippolito asked for compensation. He said he had been “offered a ton of money” and was under contract to tell his story elsewhere. And now, he wanted to recant what he previously told The Times, saying he previously could not differentiate what was real and what was not.

I don’t know if “elsewhere” refers to OJA, and it doesn’t really matter. The game-of-telephone, “thank you, Simone” quality of various talking-head interviews in OJA is an issue entirely aside from whether Ippolito The Lesser was trying to start a bidding war for his so-called information. For the record, said information is basically that

• Ippolito The Greater ran a scene-y restaurant in L.A. in the early nineties, which was frequented by celebs, including the Simpson “circle,”
  • possibly because ITG, a drug dealer, was their cocaine connect;
• The night of the murders, ITG – who had gone AWOL from a minimum-security “campus” in Florida the month prior – came home from an errand with Simpson looking bruised and thrashed;
• ITG told yet another brother in 2006, the year ITG died of cancer, that he’d been involved.

I mean, yes, “objection: hearsay” – but my problem with these so-called revelations is more that it takes forever to get to them, and along the way, we have to hear from a peeler-bar owner with a couple of tangential connections to Los Ippolito and the (If) I Did It book, and from an ex of ITG’s who appears in shadow and with her voice altered, and has really nothing to add – except to sign off, sort of, on a sketch commissioned by the production of a guy two eyewitnesses claim to have seen crouching in the bushes outside Nicole Brown Simpson’s condo the night of the murders. This is actually a creative way in for OJA – and I would for sure watch a documentary or series about police and/or courtroom sketch artistry! – and an example of the doc’s mostly impressive access. Kato Kaelin is interviewed, as are Tanya Brown, lead detective Tom Lange, and various agents connected with the Ippolitos.

Unfortunately…well, in addition to working with a glimpse, in the dark, from the side, at speed on skates, over three decades ago, the sketch doesn’t look like ITG. 

The sketch does look like Ron Goldman.

Maybe it’s just me; even if it’s not, I don’t think that’s probative either. I don’t think reconstructing Nicole and Ron’s wounds using deeply unnerving clay models is helpful. I don’t think the disappearance of the murder weapon and any bloody clothes tells us anything at all. I don’t think the presence of unidentified prints at a crime scene in one of the country’s biggest cities is valuable, and I don’t think the doc’s explanation as to why ITG’s prints didn’t show up in a CODIS search is convincing. 

OJA tried to get LAPD to re-run the prints, and asked AC Cowlings and William Hodgman – the third chair at Simpson’s criminal trial – to sit for interviews, without success. It isn’t an irresponsible doc, it does the best it can with what it has. It…just doesn’t have anything.

In the fourth episode of OJ: Made In America, Hodgman has a careful, gruesomely illustrated analysis of how he thinks the killings occurred (it starts at roughly the one-hour mark here, and I’ll note again that the imagery is extremely upsetting). I didn’t hear anything in OJA that seemed to contradict Hodgman’s theory; if anything, the suggestion that the common thread is cocaine makes it more likely to me that Simpson, fueled not just by hurt rage but also by a stimulant that causes paranoia, slaughtered these people by himself. 

This is a strange thing to say, probably, but I feel for OJ’s Accomplice. I too want Cowlings to say what he knows. I too wonder exactly what Kato heard make that thump. But we’ll never know those things – and what we do know, we…do know. There is the sense here of the production “settling for” making this documentary, instead of the one with meaningful evidence or exclusive testimony they set out for. My relationship with the case is such that I don’t regret spending the time, but I can’t recommend anyone else do the same.