LOS ANGELES — The Mezzaluna restaurant where Nicole Brown Simpson had her last meal is now a Peet's Coffee & Tea. The condo complex where she and her friend Ronald L. Goldman were slashed to death has been remodeled. The Brentwood mansion where O.J. Simpson lived — and where the police chased him down in his white Bronco in 1994 as the public watched on television — has been demolished.
But the public obsession with the infamous double murder case, in which O.J. Simpson was accused of killing Nicole Simpson, his former wife, and Goldman, came screeching back in full force Friday, when the Los Angeles Police Department announced that it had obtained a knife that supposedly had been found at O.J. Simpson's former home and kept for some time by a retired police officer, whose decision to hold on to it was not explained. The knife — which the police cautioned may not be related to the case at all — is being tested for DNA evidence.
However murky and questionable the discovery of the knife might be, it set off a renewed frenzy about the case. The media descended on all their old favorite haunts, like it was 1994 all over again. Dozens of camera crews took up their old spots on Rockingham Avenue, even though Simpson's old mansion there had been razed, and curious bystanders once again stopped by looking for a taste of excitement.
Exasperated neighbors — who 22 years ago took to covering the Rockingham Avenue street sign with garbage bags so the "looky-loos" could not find it — took iPhone pictures of the reporters, documenting the madhouse that had once again overtaken their block. Everyone from President Barack Obama to Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in Simpson's criminal trial, weighed in on the latest twist in the seemingly unending Simpson saga.
"Interest has never waned," said Scott Michaels, the owner of Dearly Departed Tours, which takes people to places in Los Angeles made famous by Charles Manson, Michael Jackson and others. He said that no other Hollywood murder case in the two decades since has ever approached the fascination with the Simpson trial.
"It's such a time capsule for a period in LA history that everyone can remember," Michaels said. "It's almost how everyone remembers what they were doing when they heard Kennedy was shot — it's that big a deal in LA history."
At a news conference on Friday, Capt. Andrew Neiman of the Los Angeles Police Department explained — as best he could — the explosive new find. As he described it, a retired Los Angeles officer had told investigators that while he was off-duty but in uniform, working security for a movie shoot nearby, "an individual who claimed to be a construction worker provided him with this knife, claiming that it was found on the property," Neiman said.
"We still don't know if that's an accurate account," he cautioned. He declined to be specific about the date but said it was "possibly during the demolition" in 1998 of the house Simpson had lived in, in the city's wealthy Brentwood area.
The knife "has been submitted to our lab," the captain said, adding, "They are going to study it and examine it for all forensics, including serology and DNA and hair samples, and that is ongoing as we speak."
The results may scarcely matter: Under the laws against double jeopardy, Simpson, a former football star and actor, cannot be tried again for the crime, no matter what evidence is found. But news of the knife comes as interest in the case has been rekindled by the miniseries "The People v. O.J. Simpson," which is running on the FX channel.
Nicole Simpson and Goldman were slashed to death in June 1994 outside her condominium, a short drive from O.J. Simpson's Brentwood home, but the weapon was never found. A jury acquitted Simpson in October 1995, after one of the most widely watched and closely scrutinized trials in U.S. history. After the criminal trial, the victims' families sued Simpson, and a civil jury found him liable for the deaths.
Separately, in 2008, Simpson, a Heisman Trophy winner and member of the National Football League Hall of Fame, was sentenced to at least nine years in a Nevada prison after being convicted of armed robbery and kidnapping for stealing a trove of sports memorabilia worth thousands of dollars from two dealers in collectibles.
The revelation Friday raised questions over why the retired officer had held onto the knife and whether charges could be filed against him for withholding evidence. Neiman said he was "quite shocked" that a police officer would hold onto possible evidence in a criminal case for years.
But his words of caution could hardly slow the speculation and intrigue.
Michael Brennan, a professor at the University of Southern California law school, said he doubted the knife was a publicity stunt, but he also considered the likelihood of the knife being related to the killings as "very remote."
For the past decade, Adam Papagan has given tours of the path the killer and his victims would have taken that night, weaving in anecdotes from his childhood in Brentwood at the time, like when teachers ordered everyone at his school inside to watch the slow white Bronco chase.
Originally, Papagan did just free tours for people from out of town. But interest in the case grew so much that he now organizes them more formally and charges for them. The next tour, scheduled for March 20, was sold out even before Friday.
"I never get tired of it," Papagan said. "I think it signified the transition into the digital age. It was the last time our entire culture was all watching the same thing."