The verdict in the most recent O.J. Simpson trial came and went in the dark of night in a Las Vegas courtroom. The proceedings may not have been breathlessly awaited, but the outcome still provoked strong emotions through Los Angeles, a city indelibly marked by the first Simpson trial 13 years ago.
This latest verdict was seen by many as a sad epilogue: either Simpson is getting what he deserves or he can't figure out how to stay out of trouble. Or both.
"It's just catching up with him," said Vartan Tashjian, an Eagle Rock set dresser who watched Simpson's murder trial but did not pay much attention to the latest one.
The issues, this time, were armed robbery and kidnapping, not murder and race. The verdicts were read without fanfare. It was not a day the Earth stood still, as it did 13 years ago for the reading of the verdict.
"I woke up this morning to all these voice mails on my phone asking me to comment on the verdict, and I wondered, what verdict?" said Shawn Chapman Holley, a lawyer who was part of the team that defended Simpson on those infamous murder charges.
But as news of the verdict spread, observers weighed in. "I just couldn't believe they actually got him on this, as opposed to a double murder," said Andy Brown, a travel industry manager who lives in Brentwood, just five minutes from the condo once owned by Nicole Brown Simpson.
Outside her home on the night of June 12, 1994, Simpson's former wife and a friend, Ron Goldman, a waiter and sometime model, were stabbed to death. The crime scene made Brentwood a landmark for gawkers for months.
The trial mesmerized the country, spinning out a daily soap opera -- literally, given that it was televised. Every detail was gobbled up and people around the world passionately discussed them: a blood-stained glove, a Bruno Magli shoe print, a howling dog wandering from the murder scene.
It was Los Angeles pre-9/11, pre-mortgage debacle, still nursing painful memories of the 1992 riots that racked the city in the wake of the Rodney King verdict. Race and justice were obsessions, and Simpson, the handsome, affable black football star and actor accused of killing his blond ex-wife, seemed the perfect avatar of those issues.
The courtroom was packed daily, and outside the courthouse, a carnival sprang up of media, gadflies and vendors peddling souvenirs. On verdict day, from the hallway outside the courtroom filled with reporters -- including a pregnant Katie Couric -- to airplanes in flight and ships at sea, the world waited to hear how the soap opera would end.
