Travis Richardson makes his EQMM debut in our current issue (November/December 2023) with the story “Texas-Sized Vanity.” He has previously won a Derringer Award for flash fiction and is a past nominee for the Anthony and Macavity awards for best short story. An L.A. resident, he’s the author of Bloodshot and Bruised: Crime Stories from the South and West. Authors often reflect on novels that have shaped their lives and inspired their fiction on this site; in Travis’s post, he describes how an infamous true crime case affected his life.   —Janet Hutchings

Many people remember where they were during a significant historical event. For my grandparents it was the attack on Pearl Harbor, for my parents it was the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing. For me, some of the historical events include the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11, and . . . OJ Simpson driving down the 405 freeway. On June 17, 1994, I was working at my father’s summertime business, cleaning swimming pool covers with a crew of college students in a Tulsa, Oklahoma suburb. While scrubbing 8-months of gunk off vinyl covers with deck brushes and high-power carwash hoses under a 100-degree sun, a DJ on an alternative rock radio station let us know that OJ had failed to turn himself in to the police and was a wanted man. Our minds were blown.  

After my shift was over, I delivered cleaned and boxed pool covers back to their owners. The radio stations—all stations—kept giving updates on the OJ situation. Where was he? Did he write suicide letters? Was the man beloved by so many really a killer?  

By the time I was delivering my final covers, the then-Hertz spokesman had been spotted in a white Bronco that was cruising down the 405. The chase was long enough for me to finish the deliveries and come home to watch Al Cowlings pull into OJ’s Brentwood mansion with the police, media, and Angelenos out on the streets in full force.  

Fast forwarding to the trial a year later, I was a student at the University of Oklahoma and I had a dentist appointment in Tulsa the morning before classes. With clean teeth, I drove 2 hours down to Norman for my first class. As I was pulling into the school’s parking lot, the verdict was announced over the radio. These were the pre-cell phone and wireless internet days. When I showed up to my class, nobody knew the outcome. During a discussion, somebody mentioned the trial and I let the class know about the verdict to several surprised gasps. 

I thought that would be it for OJ exposure, but as fate would have it, I moved to Los Angeles a year later hoping to sell a screenplay and it seemed like everybody had an OJ story/connection out there. One of my first jobs was working as a production assistant on a show called “Home and Family” on the Universal lot. Candace Garvey was a bubbly segment host who was known for making multiple arts and crafts with her trusted glue gun. She was also a friend of Nicole Brown Simpson who had spent time with her on the night of the murder and had been a witness at the trial. At one point the show dedicated a segment to Candace discussing her friendship with Nicole, dealing with the tragedy of the murders, and the trial itself. I had a friend in the production office who believed in OJ’s innocence. This was a revelation for me. We debated a few times, but ultimately, we decided that it would be best for us not to discuss the issue.    

My next job in television was on the sitcom Cybill at the CBS Radford Studios. There was a car with a license plate that read “MSNG RON” that I saw every day when I walked between the studio and the Carsey-Werner production office. I was told that Ron Goldman’s sister worked on the lot. 

The wildest OJ connection however was from my job with Korbel Champagne. I worked on a commercial for the California champagne company during a summer hiatus from a UPN show called “Wild Things”. I had planned to return to that show with a promise from the producer that I could use an editing suite on the weekends to edit a short movie I had directed. This was back when digital editing software like Avid cost $100k and an array of hard drives were necessary to store media. After the commercial was finished, the director who happened to be the president of marketing and heir to the Korbel fortune asked if I could work for him full-time. He also had an editing suite and said that I could use it anytime. I jumped at the opportunity.  

My new boss’s fiancée was Faye Resnick. She had gained notoriety for co-writing a tell-all book about her relationship with Nicole just as the trial was revving up and OJ’s dream team had a defense strategy that tried to blame the murders on Faye by saying that she owed drug dealers money and they killed Nicole and Ron to scare her. In the 2ish years that I worked for Korbel, I ended up spending a lot of time with her. The job morphed from an assistant editor position to an executive assistant to something like a personal assistant. (I even had a brief VP of Marketing title.) Often when I traveled with my boss (whose name I am keeping out of this article), she would join us. This included various wineries in Sonoma County, Vegas, and even the Cannes Film Festival among other places. As an interior decorator, she was remodeling my boss’s house and often made suggestions for the Beverly Hills office. Occasionally she would mention Nicole and how the first book was exhausting to write. As I remember from her telling of writing that book, she had traveled to the Hamptons where she sat in a room and told stories about her adventures with Nicole and friends to a team of transcribers for two days straight. The stories were then woven into a narrative within a couple of days and the book (Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted) was published within a month or two.  

At the time, my friends thought I had one of the best jobs in LA (flights on a private plane, meals at fancy restaurants, parties, unlimited access to alcohol, etc.), but the job wore on me. There was constant drama between Faye and my boss that could only happen with either the idle rich or in reality-television plots. Boundaries between work and friendship intertwined, but I was always an employee first. I should note that Faye was never rude to me and even had acts of kindness, like cooking dinner for me and my friends on my birthday. Regardless, I knew I had to leave and even gave something like a five-month notice. I left the job and moved up to Berkeley where nobody cared about OJ and people read books! I also stopped writing screenplays and started writing prose.   

Years later, when I moved back to Los Angeles it seemed like people had forgotten about the OJ trial or at least stashed it away. Faye never married my former boss, but she managed to come back to the public spotlight with appearances on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.  

When looking back at my first foray in Los Angeles, I get bittersweet feelings of nostalgia. The late 90s seem like such an innocent time compared to today’s environment. I learned a lot and had fun, but I also missed out on some opportunities I wish I had taken. I also should have appreciated things a little more—something that I hope I’m doing today.