THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : Condo Has Many Gawkers, No Buyers
It sounds like many overpriced, outsized Brentwood townhouses. Four bedrooms, three fireplaces, a voluptuous 3,400 square feet. “Beautiful Mediterranean villa,” exults the small ad in the newspaper.
There is no mention of the small flaws--the crumbling plaster in the sky-lit bathroom, the smudge of a child’s red crayon in the carpet of one bedroom.
And there is no recounting of the extraordinary recent history of the piece of property listed on South Bundy Drive for $795,000. (Also available for lease at $5,100 a month.) So when real estate agent Pauline Walsh Rimp gets a phone call from a broker representing a client who wants to see her Brentwood listing, it becomes her responsibility to have an unusual conversation.
“I tell them on the phone the minute they call, ‘Are you aware that it’s Nicole Simpson’s condo?’ ” Rimp said. “Sometimes you hear dead silence. Sometimes they say yes. Sometimes they say ‘I’ll tell my client and get back to you.’ ”
The house went on the market in mid-October. Since then, Rimp has shown it to a grand total of five people. No one has made a bid. Not one has asked to see it again.
Rimp can’t even rent it in an area where she says leases are few and coveted since so many were uprooted by the Jan. 17 earthquake.
“Because of the stigma,” explained Rimp, who shares the listing with Jeane McKenna, the realty agent who originally sold the house to Nicole Simpson. “If it weren’t for that, it would be gone in an instant. . . . It’s probably the prettiest townhome I’ve ever seen.”
By any measure, it is one of the most scrutinized, most photographed homes in Los Angeles. Ever since the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found in pools of blood in front of the home, a steady stream of people make pilgrimages, day and night, to the site of the most infamous murders in recent memory. Soon, an entire jury will visit.
Everyone wants to look, but who wants to buy?
Some houses besmirched by an infamous murder have a magnetic appeal. “I leased the house to Sharon Tate where she was murdered,” said real estate agent Elaine Young (who sold O.J. Simpson his Rockingham Avenue house). “Immediately after, people were calling offering double what it was worth. . . . The macabre really interests people.”
But in the history of real estate tainted by crime, the price sometimes goes down. The Beverly Hills house where the Menendez brothers killed their parents sold in 1991 for $3.6 million--a loss of slightly more than $1 million.
So agents handling the Nicole Simpson house must do an intricate dance between keeping out the mere voyeurs and wooing the serious buyer.
On one hand, they are rigorously selective. There are no open houses, no caravan tours for real estate agents. Appointments to see it are made strictly broker to broker. The potential buyer must submit a photo I.D. and a credit report.
“We didn’t want people taking chunks of the carpet,” said McKenna, who became friends with Nicole Simpson and was representing her when she put the home up for lease shortly before her death. Both McKenna--who has since moved to Albuquerque, N.M.--and Rimp share the listing for John Aaroe & Associates, a purveyor of mostly high-end Westside property.
On the other hand, the real estate people are seriously considering letting talk-show host Larry King film a tour of the house for his show.
“From a marketing standpoint, this house is going to sell to a collector--like the person who offered $100,000 for (Al Cowlings’) Bronco,” McKenna said. “And if we got on a worldwide show, we would appeal to a Saudi or a Japanese investor maybe--someone who wants to buy the most infamous murder scene in history and still get a nice piece of Brentwood property.”
Both are unapologetic about asking $170,000 more than the $625,000 Nicole Simpson paid for it a year ago.
“What we’re interested in is the children getting the money,” McKenna said.
Whether the mystique of the property repels or attracts, realty agents still have to wrestle with other more mundane impediments to a good sale--a soft condo market, a busy street location.
“It’s always possible that we will end up reducing the price,” McKenna said. “It hasn’t been exposed to the kind of buyer we think is going to buy it.”
Rimp said she knows little about those who have seen it. One interested person was a plastic surgeon. Another was a divorced woman with two daughters in college. There was a Colorado couple. The most recent showing was Tuesday afternoon. Most are unfailingly polite and tasteful. The woman with the grown children felt the place was too big for her needs, Rimp said.
And one, Rimp suspects, was a looky-loo with a good enough real estate agent and credit rating to make it past her screening.
“I just had a sense that he was maybe having fun and he somehow got in there,” Rimp said.
Any real prospects can not only see the house, they can talk to Nicole Simpson’s long-suffering neighbors. “They said, ‘If you ever get anyone who’s interested, we’d love to talk to them and let them know how normal we are and how we love the place,’ ” Rimp said with a chuckle.
As keeper of the keys to the condo, Rimp also opens doors and tames the alarm system for prosecutors and police detectives. She’s the one the neighbors called when they spotted a tourist who crawled over the locked back gate and opened it for a parade of others. (Her arrival sent them sheepishly off.) She fields requests to film from every local television station and every tabloid television show. “I turn down everybody,” she said.
“There really is not a sense of morbidity,” Rimp said about the property. “The first time I went there, I was anxious and a little bit concerned about how I’d feel. But it has a very warm feeling despite the fact that it’s cleaned out.”
Rimp showed off the house earlier this week to prove her point.
Hardly the typical condo, the three-story townhouse is airy and large with a graceful curving staircase in the front and another staircase in the back. Patios dot the south side of the house, secluded from neighbors by high walls. The interiors are that typical Brentwood architecture that is either sleekly modern or starkly bland, depending on your taste. A crescent window accents the front wall of the living room. Narrow runners of white paper lie unfurled across the newly cleaned cream carpeting.
“And if you could have seen it when I got here,” said Rimp of the carpeting. “It was black. There was graphite everywhere you looked. Fingerprint dust. And it was tracked everywhere. The place was just trashed.”
The house has been stripped bare of the furnishings and mementos of Nicole Simpson’s life. Rimp gives just bare hints of how the onetime owner filled it. A loft looks out over the first floor. “She had her exercise equipment up here,” said Rimp, who met Simpson only once--the Friday before her death. Simpson was looking at lease properties with McKenna and Rimp.
A sun deck sits atop the roof. “She had a nice table and chairs up here,” Rimp said. On the main floor, Rimp opened the side door of the house onto the tile pavers lining the path that leads to the front gate where Simpson’s body was found. The walkway is to Simpson’s house alone.
The walkway from gate to door is actually short--half the distance it seems on television. The garden in front of the house, adjacent to the walkway, is a tiny patch of dirt.
“Everyone is so surprised at what a small area it is,” Rimp noted. “Everyone thought it was so much bigger.”
Where Nicole Simpson’s body was found, 25 potted plants stand like sentinels, their tall stalks bare and gray, wedged into rows going up the steps from the locked gate.
Even early on a Monday morning, there were periodic slow-moving tourists roaming by the house.
On her way out, Rimp whipped off the lid of a plastic garbage pail outside the house’s garage. “Look in here,” she said, glancing in disdainfully at a dozen discarded camera film boxes. “I don’t understand it.”
Nonetheless, Rimp believes occupancy will reduce the number of sightseers. “The fact that it’s empty gives people a little more nerve to be intrusive. I think once people move in, that’ll go away.”
