Simpson Case Infamous but Interest May Not Endure : Culture: Sex, race and celebrity fuel fascination with the murders. But they may not join crimes of century category.

Jack the Ripper. Lizzie Borden. Bruno Hauptmann. Charles Manson. Lee Harvey Oswald.

Guilty or innocent, the names of these people have become synonymous with crimes so compelling, shocking or gruesome that they fascinate successive generations.

And now comes another so-called Crime of the Century: the O.J. Simpson case, in which a Heisman Trophy winner is accused of slashing and stabbing his gorgeous ex-wife and her handsome friend.

Some think this case, like others before it, is rich in “primal archetypes” that endure to tell much larger truths about modern existence. Others think not.

“Ten years from now, the O.J. Simpson case will be a footnote in sports trivia questions games,” predicted Ronald Allen, professor of constitutional criminal procedure at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Criminologists, legal experts and cultural historians may differ on the Simpson case, but they agree that certain crimes transcend their times, provoking works of art and scholarly discourses, inspiring conspiracy theories, creating cadres of followers.

The experts say there are several ingredients that move a crime from headlines into history books.

First, the deed itself must be especially brutal, audacious or grisly--most likely the first of its kind. The crime makes us feel vulnerable, because it either plays upon primal fears or upsets the social order. It usually involves a hero or public figure. And it remains just mysterious enough, despite a trial and punishment, to leave the door open for conspiracy theorists and doubters.

But a crime becomes truly historic when, like an eclipse, its timing brings into alignment many profound and often troubling questions about society, say the experts. Acting as a prism, the macabre crime has the power to show the spectrum of various ongoing struggles in the culture, they say.

Thus, Jack the Ripper is not just the story of a 19th-Century killer who mutilates the bodies of London prostitutes, but a cautionary tale about the unspeakable evils that awaited farmers who moved to the city in Post-Industrial Revolution England. Or a grotesque parable of men’s physical and political subjugation of women.

The rampage by Manson’s followers in Benedict Canyon becomes Middle America’s worst nightmares about moral breakdowns among the free love generation in the 1960s. The Leopold and Loeb case becomes the triumph of arrogant depravity over genius and advantage during the uninhibited 1920s Flapper Era.

“The truth is there have been quite a number of ‘crimes of the century,’ ” said Paula Fass, professor of social and cultural history at UC Berkeley.

“In each case, the crime seems to encapsulate something about the particulars of the time that make people want to describe it in those terms,” she said.

Some heinous acts are unquestionably in a class by themselves: War crimes such as Auschwitz and assassinations such as that of President Kennedy change history as well as define it by transcending contemporary politics to live on in the popular imagination.

Outside that realm, among the most enduring cases is that of Lizzie Borden, the spinster acquitted of hacking her tightwad father and overbearing stepmother to death with an ax in 1892. At the time, the crime served as a touchstone for society’s struggle over the virtue of family life and the nature of women. It played out conflicts between suffragettes and the Victorian notion that women are frail innocents who should be protected, said Cal State Fullerton professor Wayne Hobson.

By the 1930s, however, the public consensus was that Borden had committed the murders but her actions were only Freudian payback for a repressive father, he said. In the 1970s, Borden became a feminist icon, striking out against sex-based limitations. Now there’s a theory she took revenge against a father who molested her and a stepmother who covered it up.

“There was a lesbian angle for a while, that she was caught in a tryst with another woman,” said Hobson, who has taught a course on “Images of Crime and Violence in American Culture.”

Borden’s symbolic power has earned the crime a cult-like following, spawning 28 books, two operas and one ballet (choreographed by Agnes DeMille). Two years ago, more than 500 scholars and enthusiasts gathered in Fall River, Mass., to mark the centennial of the crime with a conference, hosted by a local community college instructor who edits a Lizzie Borden quarterly for 700 subscribers in seven countries.

Although it may be hard to imagine in the midst of the media frenzy over the Simpson case--more than 10,600 stories have been published about it in 147 newspapers--some believe that it will never come close to sustaining such interest.

“If I would pick up a textbook 30 years from now, would (the Simpson case) appear in the book? Probably yes,” said UC Berkeley’s Fass. “Would there be more than two sentences? Probably not.”

Vincent Bugliosi, the former Los Angeles deputy district attorney who prosecuted Manson and his followers before writing a best-selling account of the killings, said the Simpson case is hardly worth a serious book.

“It will always be a famous case, but I don’t perceive it as a case where the interest is sustained throughout the years,” he said.

“The only thing that will last is, ‘God, can you imagine what happened to this guy, O.J. Simpson?’ But how do you write a book about something like that? It (the crime) is so circumscribed.”

Most likely, these observers say, the Simpson case will go the way of Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle, the silent-screen comic who was drummed out of Hollywood after his acquittal in the 1921 death of a 25-year-old model who had been raped and killed during one of his orgiastic parties. At the time, the Arbuckle case was big news, with its lurid accounts of debauchery, but it has faded from memory.

Yet others predict the Simpson case will endure because the horrific double murder on Bundy Drive pushes society’s hot buttons--race relations, interracial romance and domestic violence.

Some say the case will be remembered for the same reasons people remember the Lindbergh baby kidnaping and murder--celebrity and media coverage.

Undeniably one of the world’s most widely recognized and beloved figures of the century, Lindbergh was the universal object of sympathy when his child was abducted in 1932. If this could happen to Lucky Lindy, people reasoned, it could happen to anyone.

As a result of the interest, the criminal investigation, arrest of Hauptmann and his trial in the hamlet of Flemington, N.J., drew unprecedented attention--in part because of the escalating competition between newspapers and the emerging power of radio, which beamed live bulletins about the legal proceedings to foreign continents.

Today, the competition is between newspapers, radio and tabloid television. And the added wrinkle isn’t that a celebrity is involved, but that a celebrity is the one facing murder charges.

“Never before in American culture has a crime this serious been suspected of a celebrity this big,” said Jay Rosen, a media critic at New York University. “There have been bigger celebrities caught in the media maw, and there have been equally big crimes, but I don’t think there has been such a combination of those two factors.”

To Frank McConnell, UC Santa Barbara English professor and author of several detective novels, the Simpson tragedy imitates art too closely to be forgotten. The point hit home, he said, when he sat transfixed by television coverage of police cars following the white Bronco.

“I turned to my wife and said, ‘The next time I teach ‘Othello,’ I’ll have to talk about this,’ ” recalled McConnell. “At the end, Othello confesses his guilt and slits his own throat. O.J. takes that long ride with Al Cowlings.”

McConnell said the improbability of Simpson’s fall from grace also strikes a deep chord.

“If Jack the Ripper incarnates our fears about the big city, if Lizzie Borden incarnates our fears that the traditional small-town family may be evil at its heart, and if Charlie Manson incarnates our fears that the younger generation may not be the young visionaries but small boys with long knives . . . then O.J. incarnates our fears that the most distinguished and beloved may themselves be capable of evil,” he said.

At Temple University, psychology professor Sonja Peterson-Lewis got a glimpse of the crime’s symbolic power when she was forced to abandon plans to use the murder case to teach her students how to construct a simple questionnaire for psychological surveys. The thought of writing some questions with the assumption Simpson was guilty evoked strong emotions among the mostly African American students, many of whom argue vehemently that the football star had been framed, she said.

“It’s not O.J. the person. It’s O.J. the idea,” she said. “There’s an identification, and in some cases over-identification, with him.

“Most of my students have been stopped by police and accused of something they did not do,” she said. “I’ve had students leave home an hour and a half ahead of time to allow for the possibility that they were stopped by police and asked for identification.”

Peterson-Lewis said the incident has prompted her to research why people believe Simpson is guilty or innocent, the conclusions of which she will present as moderator of a Popular Culture Assn. panel scheduled to discuss the implications of the case in April.

Her co-moderator, University of New Mexico professor Jane Caputi, said the case has become a “myth narrative,” playing out sexist and racist instincts of the culture.

“You have the fusion of sexism and racism,” said Caputi, a feminist historian who has written about Jack the Ripper. “O.J. and Nicole somehow act out a paradigm of what sexist America believes to be Beauty and the Beast.”

Simpson, she said, becomes the racist stereotype of brutal, lascivious, black masculinity. Nicole, she said, personifies the racist notion of the blonde bombshell--”the ultimate thing”--to be possessed.

On a different level, others say, it will be the mystery of exactly what transpired between O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson that will keep pulling people back into the story like some kind of psychological undertow, whatever the jury decides.

“As long as Simpson continues to say that he is innocent . . . it will go on for a long, long time,” predicted Stuart M. Kaminsky, author of popular detective novels and Florida State University film professor.

“Once he says he’s guilty, it’s pretty much over. There will be new headlines in the Enquirer.”

The Simpson Case

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