O.J. Simpson, the white Bronco and a chase that gripped the nation (2024)

Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman had been fatally stabbed days earlier. The former NFL legend was about to be charged with two counts of first-degree murder and had been asked by police to turn himself in.

CNN’s Larry King interrupted the network’s scheduled program — a special report about the Simpson case — to go live to the chase. So did NBC, which broke into its own coverage of the NBA Finals midgame.

The televised spectacle grabbed the nation’s attention, dramatically kicking off a 16-month span of nonstop coverage of Simpson’s murder trial that would ultimately end in his polarizing acquittal.

Car chases have become more common in Los Angeles in recent years, said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles who was a legal commentator for CBS during the Simpson murder trial. But the pursuit of the white Bronco on June 17, 1994, wasn’t just any car chase.

“This was O.J. Simpson, who was supposed to self-surrender on a double homicide,” Levenson said. “And it was also true in most car chases, people are rooting for police. But in this case, people were cheering and rooting for O.J.”

The evening started when Simpson vanished from under the noses of his lawyers and doctors after failing to appear at a prearranged surrender to the LAPD.

Al “A.C.” Cowlings, Simpson’s longtime friend and University of Southern California football teammate, was behind the wheel, telling a 911 dispatcher that police who had begun tailing the Bronco needed to back off. Simpson was still alive in the back seat, Cowlings said, but he was emotional, with a gun pressed to his temple.

Police complied, following slowly behind Cowlings’s Bronco as news and police helicopters buzzed overhead.

Between the police seemingly escorting Simpson and the throngs of fans who had begun to gather on overpasses and on shoulders of the highway to cheer Simpson on, Levenson said the scene was more a “parade” than a car chase.

“I spent my life steeped in the criminal justice system,” Levenson said. “I’ve never seen a parade cheering on a double homicide suspect.”

As Simpson headed north on Interstate 405, KTLA reporter Eric Spillman reported that people were carrying signs with messages like “Save the Juice” and “Go OJ.”

After about 45 minutes, the Bronco pulled off the exit toward Sunset Boulevard. As onlookers suspected, Simpson was headed toward his mansion in the tony Brentwood neighborhood, where he was later arrested.

In less than an hour, the chase had captured the attention of viewers across America and ushered in the coming era of the 24-hour cable news cycle.

The Bronco chase was hardly the first news event to crash into scheduled TV programming: The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II were all covered in real-time and at great length, said Bill Grueskin, a professor and dean of academic affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“What set this apart was the wall-to-wall coverage of a double murder that drew so much attention only because it involved a celebrity,” Grueskin said in an email Thursday. “It was a terribly tragic event — but it wasn’t in any way consequential on a global or national scale.”

Levenson noted that in 1994, CNN was the lone national cable news network, and only a fraction of American households had it; Fox News and MSNBC were still two years from their debut.

More people watched Simpson’s preliminary hearing than watched coverage of the Gulf War, Levenson added.

“Cable news was very new, and this made them,” Levenson said. “The O.J. case launched all that.”