Remembering the victims of the O.J. Simpson trial: Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman

O.J. Simpson, who has died at the age of 76, is best known to the world for his acquittal in what was dubbed the ‘trial of the century’.

In October 1995, following a criminal court case that lasted 11 months and divided the nation - largely along racial lines - Simpson was found not guilty of the brutal slayings of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman. Brown Simpson and Goldman had been stabbed to death in front of her LA home in June 1994, with Simpson’s former spouse suffering knife wounds so severe that she was almost decapitated.

Although Simpson was acquitted in criminal court, he was later found liable for Brown Simpson and Goldman’s deaths in a civil suit brought by the victim’s families. A jury awarded Goldman’s family $8.5 million in compensatory damages.

Who were Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman?

“Full of love, laughter, and grace”

Born in Frankfurt, to a German mother and an American father, Brown Simpson was 35 at the time of her murder. She had divorced Simpson in 1992, after seven years of marriage, having first met the former NFL star while working as a waitress at the Daisy, a nightclub in Beverly Hills.

During her marriage to Simpson, she suffered domestic violence; in 1989, indeed, he pleaded no contest to a charge of spousal abuse.

After their divorce, a jealous Simpson stalked his former wife, according to Brown Simpson’s family. Speaking to prosecutors in Simpson’s murder trial, Nicole’s mother Juditha quoted Nicole as telling her: “I’m scared. I go to the gas station, he’s there. I go to the Payless shoe store, and he’s there. I’m driving, and he’s behind me.”

Brown Simpson’s sister, Denise, describes her as a devoted mother to the two children she had with Simpson, praising her kindness and good humour.

“If I can have one wish,” Denise wrote in Time magazine in 2014, “it would be for everyone not to dwell on her murder, or on the trial-of-the-century, but on her life and on how full of love, laughter, and grace her life was. How thoughtful she was as a sister and friend, how big and generous her heart was. Most of all, to the core of her being, how much she loved her daughter, Sydney, and son, Justin.”

Brown Simpson is reported to have struck up a friendship with Goldman not long before the pair were killed. However, their relationship was strictly platonic, a friend of Goldman’s told the LA Times after his death. “It was very innocent,” she said.

A “magnetic personality”

Goldman, who was 25 when he died, had been working as a waiter at LA’s Mezzaluna restaurant, where Brown Simpson dined on the day of the murders. After departing Mezzaluna, she realised she had left her sunglasses behind. According to the accepted sequence of events on 12 June 1994, Goldman had left the restaurant to return them to her when the killings took place.

Born in Chicago, Goldman moved to LA in 1987. In a profile in the LA Times soon after his death, Matthew Mosk and Carla Hall wrote: “He had model good looks, a body sculpted by daily weightlifting sessions and tennis, and a magnetic personality that friends said made them want to hang around him, just to see what he would be up to next.”

Goldman, who had also worked as a tennis coach and an employment headhunter, dreamed of establishing his own restaurant and bar in LA, according to his sister Kim. “He had people that were looking into helping him open up a restaurant and he had checked out local spots,” she told a 20/20 interview with Barbara Walters in September 1994. “He wanted it to be like a little neighbourhood spot.”

Together with Kim and father Fred, Goldman was part of a close-knit family. Reacting to Simpson’s death, Fred said to NBC News: “The only thing I have to say is it’s just further reminder of Ron being gone all these years. It’s no great loss to the world. It’s a further reminder of Ron’s being gone.”