Everyone’s a Private Eye in the Ultimate Whodunit

Remember that this is a nation where many people believe that their own government is sheltering UFO wreckage, and that anyone could have shot JFK, and probably did.

For such people, and for millions more--levelheaded people suddenly transfixed by the spectacle--the O.J. Simpson case is bread and meat, a transcontinental whodunit in which they can’t peek ahead to the ending for the solution.

In the first hours, by phone and fax and modem, the theorizing began.

Armchair sleuths have inundated the Los Angeles Police Department--more than a thousand calls a day at first, from virtually every area code--and the district attorney’s office and news media offices with “what abouts” and “what ifs.”

The well-meaning, the helpful, the prescient, the psychic and a few cranks weigh in. It was scissors, it was a dirk, a dagger. Have you looked for the knife at Nicole’s grave site? In the dishwasher? Are you sure the dog’s OK? My father’s bridge partner’s son-in-law’s colleague knows. . . . O.J. was a “football passer,” wrote a Kentucky woman--wrongly--so the knife “might be high up” in the trees.

The case takes root and flourishes in office lunchrooms and dinner parties and holiday barbecues where Topic A is the high-stakes, real-life version of the old board game Clue--Col. Mustard in the drawing room with the candlestick. Every day, with every new bit of testimony, the scenario is retooled: “He couldn’t have done it because . . . “ “He had to have done it because . . . “

Even self-absorbed Washington, D.C., has a sardonic Beltway take on this: that O.J. had an ironclad six-hour alibi for the night of the murder--he was waiting for a cup of coffee at Denny’s. It’s a twist on a complaint by black Secret Service agents who said they were ignored at a Denny’s restaurant for nearly an hour while their white colleagues were served quickly.

Rippling beneath it all are widely rumored if rather complex, and sometimes far-fetched, scenarios:

O.J. was framed. Colombian drug dealers did it. It was the Ku Klux Klan. It was the Mafia. It was, in all seriousness, a werewolf. All of them speak to the desperate wish in so many quarters that please, let it not be this man who could have done that thing.

For viewers on a first-name basis with the principals--O.J., Nicole--”he’s almost like a member of the family,” says Chaytor Mason, associate professor emeritus of human factors psychology at USC. “A lot of people, too, have fantasies about being rich,” says Mason, and “when an idol falls like that, this is terrifying, and (people) spend a lot of time thinking about it. And to protect him and their own fantasies, they come up with a lot of theories.”

Some webs of imagined guilt are so elaborate and even reckless, reaching so far beyond the principal players, dead and living, that it would be libelous even to lay them out in print.

Why the kibitzing, the theorizing racing ahead of evidence, the living-room counterpoint to the plodding, methodical course of law?

Playing shamus isn’t new--people wove tales for years about the disappearance of Judge Crater, and still tell them about Elvis. The rumored Jack the Ripper suspects ranged from the heir presumptive to the British throne to “the Jews” to a law student.

But the electronic virtuality of this case makes it more intense--and more like a TV movie.

Consider, says Mason, the fictional crimes in books, TV and movies, “about all the murders where the obvious is not true.”

“ ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ ‘Quincy’--you never expect that the obvious at the beginning is what you wind up with at the end. To hell with the butler, he never did it.

“So we’ve been exposed to the idea that the obvious is never true, so you jump to the alternate solutions.”

Not since the McMartin child abuse case has the district attorney’s office been so flooded with calls, many from the East Coast. While court is in session, the phones are pretty silent, except for press calls. During the breaks and after adjournment for the day, the phones light up again. (One entrepreneur called the office, wanting to buy the evidence after the case is over because “I think I can make a lot of money.”) Calls are kept confidential and passed along to the right hands if they are relevant, and “most are really concerned. They want to help us,” says Sandi Gibbons, information officer for the district attorney’s office. “We like those kinds of calls. Nobody’s infallible.”

Any L.A. veteran is mindful that a little boy found the gun used in one of the murders at Sharon Tate’s house, and it took a TV news crew, following testimony, to find the bloody clothing the Manson family had discarded on a hillside after the murders.

Usually the calls are prefaced apologetically by, “Probably you guys have already thought about this, but . . . “ Sometimes, people have dreamed about the case, and then it’s, “Please don’t think I’m crazy, but I want to help . . . “

If they can’t reach the district attorney, people call the press:

* A letter cited “Psycho” and “Jagged Edge” and “Sugarland Express,” an early Spielberg film about a slow police-car chase of a suspect. “If the Simpson story plays like a Hollywood movie, this is because it probably was a Hollywood movie and O.J. Simpson saw it and planned the murders from it.”

* A caller said, “Just rent ‘The Fugitive’ (a film about a man wrongly accused of murder) and you’ll realize the great similarities.”

* An Atlanta bank employee passed along a girlfriend’s husband’s theory that Nicole Simpson was killed with a “bow-tie” cut, characteristic of Colombian drug dealers.

* The werewolf of recent movie fame killed them. As the rumor goes, the movie was filmed at the Bradbury Building, near where Simpson allegedly bought the knife. It explains the jagged wounds, the hairs left behind, and why the dog wailed--he saw a wolf.

Many theories have come from the concerns of the African American community. Part of the reason for such alternative theories, Mason said, is concern “about the police, some earned, some not.” The real agenda, as expressed by a Pomona man, is to “keep the black man down.” A Los Angeles Times poll of city residents 10 days ago found 74% of blacks to be sympathetic toward Simpson, compared to 38% of whites.

Reminding readers of the confusion in the years after President Kennedy’s assassination, an article from an Orange County publication called “The Black Orange,” about the African American community, offered three scenarios.

One, that Simpson “is the victim of a horrible con game” of too much incriminating evidence. “Sorry, I think O.J. had too much to lose . . . it just doesn’t make sense. He couldn’t be that stupid.”

Another: “A powerful, wealthy and unscrupulous person who hates O.J. for some reason” decides to “get him back in a way that is worse than killing him” and sends “goons” to kill his ex-wife and link the crime to Simpson.

And the third, that the incentive for a setup was a distraction. “Maybe you want to get some awful bill passed with no fanfare. What better opportunity . . . (than when) the public’s attention is totally distracted?”