The Alibi and the Evidence

The word "alibi" comes from the Latin word alius meaning "elsewhere."

When we ask whether or not O.J. had an alibi for the murders he was charged with we are really asking whether or not he could have been on the scene of the murders when they were committed or whether he was elsewhere. No amount of evidence that says he was the murderer, even DNA, can prove his guilt if his alibi proves his innocence. If he did have an alibi, the evidence against him can only mean that he was framed.

Nobody can be in two places at the same time. Either O.J. was on Bundy at the time of the murders or he wasn't. If he wasn't he couldn't have committed the murders and someone must have planted the evidence against him.

All of that is as simple and straightforward as you can get. The complication arises out of the confusion over when the murders occurred. Was it between 10:15 and 10:30 as the prosecution argued in the preliminary hearing and the criminal trial, or was it between 10:30 and 10:45 as the defense argued and the planitifs agreed to in the civil trial? That's the first question I set out to answer before I did anything else to answer the question of whether it was physically – as opposed to theoretically possible -- for O.J. to have been guilty of the murders he was charged with.

The prosecution, on the other hand, gathered a huge amount of circumstantial evidence of O.J.'s guilt and cherry-picked the time witnesses until they came up with five of them who seemed to confirm the incriminating evidence against him.

The prosecution used a 10:15 to 10:23 start time for a barking dog as perceived by three witnesses near the murder scene on Bundy as the start time for the murders. The prosecution used the thumps that one witness heard on his wall at 10:40 or 10:45 as the time O.J. got to his home on Rockingham two and a half miles north of Bundy. And they used the 10:40 to 10:45 time that another witness was ringing the buzzer to be let into the north gate to show that O.J. was too busy banging into the wall and dropping one of his bloody gloves to answer the buzzer. They used the witness at the gate to suggest that O.J. tried to sneak into the main entrance of his house -- the well lit front of his house -- past two other entrances -- at 10:56. That's about five or then minutes after he supposedly bumpted into the wall and made the thumps where he dropped the glove.

To determine whether or not O.J. did, in fact, have an alibi you can forget about Bundy and find the definitive answer on Rockingham. That's where O.J. says he was. If you can prove that his claim is false he no longer has an alibi.

The prosecution didn't do that…because they couldn't. O.J. did have an alibi.

The best alibi is one that does not require special skills to verify. That's only because such an alibi is so obvious to everyone that no thinking is required to see and understand that it is valid. If O.J. was in Chicago he has an obvious alibi. But if he was in his house his alibi is just as valid. It's just harder to demonstrate to people who are predisposed to believe that he didn't have one.

O.J. claimed that he never left his estate between 9:40 when he returned from McDonalds with one of the Rockingham witnesses and 10:56 when he was seen by the other Rockingham witness. He said that hours before the murders, he parked the vehicle he was alleged to have driven to and from the murder scene on the street where it was found.

The position of the vehicle, alone, gives O.J. an alibi if it can be shown that the last time he drove it was through his circular driveway and around the sharp corner at the street. No one could testify to seeing him park the car but the housekeeper next door testified that she saw it there before the murders, in the same "crooked" position that the police found it the next morning. She said that he always parked it there that way.

Using basic drafting techniques you can determine that the crookedness of the parking angle was exactly 2-degrees. You can also determine from the turning radius of the vehicle in question what angle would result if he turned the corner from the driveway to the street and parked without backing up and driving straight in. That angle is exactly 2-degrees. That's not much of an angle. But it is what you will get every time and that's what makes the housekeeper's observations so important.

The prosecution did not call the housekeeper to the stand. The defense did. But they did not call any expert witnesses to testify to the significance of the 2-degree parking angle. Once you know about it, you should have no trouble seeing it in the Parked Cars animation. O.J.'s story and the housekeeper's story are the only ones that match the police photos taken on the morning after the murders. The story about the vehicle being parked "haphazardly" at an "odd" angle are simply not supported by the photographic evidence.

When you combine that evidence with the testimony of the prosecution's timeline witnesses on Rockingham as you can see in the Kato's Walk animation O.J. has an alibi as solid as if he had been doing a live television interview in New York with Barbara Walters. We know he was at Rockingham because that's the only place he could have been. --Jasper