OJ Didn't Do It

I saw a news article on O.J. Simpson the other day and it reminded me of this story.  Bear in mind that this is all hearsay on my part so take it for what it's worth.

I have a good friend who attended Tom Brown's Nature and Wilderness Survival School shortly after the O.J. Simpson trial.  For those of you who do not know who Tom Brown is, in a nutshell... he is arguably the world's best and certainly best known wilderness tracker and is often called on by law enforcement to find missing persons and criminals and is directly credited with locating several kidnapping victims.  

As incredible as it seems, my friend, Jimmy, said he witnessed Tom Brown uncovering fox prints in the forest under two layers of leaves as Tom's sensitivity of the environment was so keen that he could sense that the fox had been there without any visible evidence.  Jimmy said part of their training involved learning to sense, to feel, the environment around you.  As a final test of their skills, the students were taken a mile into the wilderness from base camp and dropped off alone, blindfolded and nude, on a frosty, moonless night.  Their mission was to find their way back to base camp within thirty minutes by sensing objects and stepping around and over them without breaking their necks.  Their navigational guide was a single drum beat five minutes apart.  

As an example of some of what he had learned, Jimmy showed me how to tell the sex of a deer from their footprints.  Basically, deer step one foot on top of another, front foot followed by rear foot directly on top of front.  If the rear print is stepped somewhat outside of the front print it's a doe, as does have broader hips than shoulders.  Of course, visa versa for bucks, rear print somewhat inside of front print because they have broader shoulders than hips.

During some campfire chat, they learned that Tom had been asked by the authorities to investigate the O.J. Simpson crime scene which he agreed to do but only if he could do it anonymously because he didn't want to be caught up in the publicity circus surrounding it.

Tom visited the crime scene and quickly came to two discoveries.  The infamous Bruno Magli footprint was not made by the designer shoe at all, but by a shoe that could be purchased at Thom McAn, an example of which he produced.  Secondly, he found evidence that the gloves supposedly worn by OJ at the scene were planted there, possibly by the police.  Naturally, information that never saw the light of day.  Tom Brown's conclusion was that O.J. was not at the crime scene the night of the crime.

Personally, I didn't know what to make of this information but something about the incident always seemed a little fishy to me, especially after learning that the boyfriend was basically a society drug dealer.  Who knows?  But I do know that I was saddened by the whole thing because I liked OJ from the time he was a college football star and as Detective Nordlinger in the Naked Gun series.  It turned out that his wife's death was also the death of that hilarious film series.

Post Script:  My friend Jimmy took Tom Brown's course because, by trade, he is a land surveyor and he had gotten a job surveying in the Alaskan wilderness and he wanted the tracking and survival skills.  His job involved him and a partner being flown deep into the wilderness by helicopter and dropped off for weeks at a time.  He told me that in many places the brush was so thick that they used bear paths to get around.  They both carried shotguns in case of a close encounter.  Five rounds loaded with, 00-slug-00-slug-00.  The bear paths were made by grizzlies.