Crime Stories of the Century
The awful acts of the past 100 years forced America to look at itself in the mirror
The only issue at his 1992 trial was whether to accept his plea that he was criminally insane--and therefore not responsible for his revolting actions. Dr. Park Dietz, a respected California forensic psychiatrist, determined that he was not insane. "Dahmer was quiet, introverted, and performed his job pretty well until he finally fell asleep and couldn't do his work because he couldn't keep up with his nighttime dastardly deeds," says prosecutor McCann.
Dahmer was serving 16 consecutive life terms when inmates beat him to death in a prison bathroom in November 1994. Two years later, a businessman offered more than $400,000 to buy his implements--the refrigerator, the vats, the drills, the saws--to prevent a public auction. They were secretly buried.
THE 1990S
The O. J. Simpson case
It was a foggy June night in 1994 when Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman were slashed to death outside her Brentwood, Calif., condo. There were no witnesses, but many clues: bloody shoe prints and glove, a knit cap. When police later noticed cuts on the left hand of Nicole's estranged husband, O. J. Simpson, it started a chain of events that's still reverberating.
It turned out that a trail of blood drops leading away from the bodies appeared to match the mighty former football player's blood type. Detective Mark Fuhrman told other cops that he had found the mate to the bloody glove at Simpson's posh Brentwood mansion. DNA experts testified that there was blood from the victims at Simpson's house and in the white Ford Bronco in which he had led police on a surreal televised freeway chase after the murders. And prosecutors showed he had a history of slapping his wife around.
The 1990s have seen terrorism in the United States--at the World Trade Center and at the federal office building in Oklahoma City. It has also been a time when angry, alienated boys opened fire on classmates in Columbine High and other schools. But it was the Simpson case--a tangled tale of money, power, celebrity, race, domestic abuse, media madness--that captured America's perverse fascination with the famous. It started as a macabre parlor game that, thanks to cameras in the courtroom, everyone could play. But as the case evolved, it became a racially tinged referendum on the American justice system.
"What made it unusual was O.J.," says Vincent Bugliosi, the former Los Angeles prosecutor who wrote a book about the case. "The murder was very garden-variety." The football star turned Hertz pitchman hired a colorful cadre of high-priced legal talent dubbed the "Dream Team." The televised 13-month trial, presided over by Superior Court Judge Lance Ito, was the most widely watched criminal proceeding in history. Simpson's lawyers accused the police of bungling the investigation. Forensic experts pointed to sloppiness that could have compromised blood samples; the bloody glove didn't seem to fit; Fuhrman was a disastrous witness.
The jury deliberated for only a few hours before acquitting Simpson. A civil jury later disagreed, finding Simpson liable for both deaths and ordering him to cough up $33.5 million in damages. He sold his mansion, lost his Heisman trophy, and now lives not far from the murder scene with his and Nicole's two children. Did he get away with murder? That's the question of the century.
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