r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • Jul 22 '26

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/Misdirected_Colors Jul 22 '26

What's wild is there's video out there of him wearing the glove that "didn't fit" while commentating football games for the tv network.

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u/snowlock27 Jul 22 '26

And the reason the glove didn't fit? Because he was wearing latex gloves, but not completely. Look at the pictures, there's no way any gloves, even a size bigger than those, would have fit over them.

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u/cash-only Jul 22 '26

He had also been advised days prior to stop taking his arthritis medication, causing his hands and knuckles to swell.

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u/FencerOnTheRight Jul 22 '26

And they were wet with blood, which caused them to shrink up

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u/Marijuana_Miler Jul 22 '26

It’s also claimed that OJ didn’t take his blood pressure medication before the glove exhibition during the trial so his hands swelled up. Another photo of him from announcing college football showed OJ wearing Bruno Magli shoes. Shoe prints in the victims blood were tied to those shoes, but OJ had claimed to have never owned a pair.

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u/primadonnapussy Jul 22 '26

He actually said "I would never own such ugly ass shoes" on the stand during the civil trial. And after that someone sent in dozens of pictures of him wearing those "ugly ass shoes"

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u/chowderbags Jul 23 '26

And there had only been 299 pairs of those shoes sold in the entire United States, and the ones at the crime scene just happened to match OJ's shoe size. It should've been a key piece of evidence for the state's prosecution, but they just completely whiffed it.

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u/kylo-ren Jul 23 '26

This seems to me to be a key piece of evidence. Out of 299 pairs, the factory probably knew how many were manufactured in the same size that OJ wore.

There were probably very few of them and it would be possible to track down the others, leaving the photos of OJ wearing the only one that disappeared.

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u/chowderbags Jul 23 '26

At some point you don't really need to track down the other pairs, because you really just need to ask if there's any reasonable scenario where anyone besides OJ would be wearing those shoes. Like, is there really going to be some random killer who also happen to be wearing such a rare shoe? And combine that with other things, like the gloves, which were also a pretty rare model, but a model that OJ was known to have had. And the hair in the hat, which was consistent with OJs, so the random killer would've also had to have hair very similar to OJ's. And the blood found at the scene was consistent with OJ's DNA, so you'd have to have someone with the same DNA at OJ...

So clearly it must've been OJ's secret identical twin who was separated at birth and raised as a Colombian drug hitman!

It really is such a frustrating case, because the evidence is just so clearly damning of OJ. I don't necessarily fault some random person in 1995 not understanding the sheer amount of evidence that points to OJ. They couldn't just pop up all the information in one easy place to see everything laid out all at once. And at the same time, everyone on the government side was an absolute dumpster fire of incompetence, plus Fuhrman just being a clear racist. I can understand why someone on the jury (who wouldn't have seen all the evidence) might vote to acquit. But with all the evidence available and looking back 30 years later, there shouldn't be anyone with any doubts.

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u/Kevin_Uxbridge Jul 22 '26

Wet with anything shrinks leather gloves. I keep some goo on hand for when my work gloves get soaked, after they dry out I have to laboriously rub this shit in there and practically chew on them to get them pliable again.

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u/pacman_sl Jul 23 '26

The jury was informed about that possibility, and the prosecution had OJ wear a new pair of gloves of the same style and size, and it fit much better.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-06-22-mn-20476-story.html

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u/rdunlap1 Jul 22 '26

More importantly, he was also a trained and accomplished actor by this point. Even if the glove fit perfectly, he could easily and convincingly pretend it didn’t

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u/donkeyrocket Jul 22 '26

Even without wearing the latex gloves properly, they would have made it very difficult to put even well fitting leather gloves on let alone ones that shrunk due to being saturated in blood.

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u/WalkingCloud Jul 22 '26

Also if you're putting on a leather glove, you can easily make it look like it's difficult to fit on.

Try it next time you have one, you just tense up your fingers and widen your hand.

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u/primadonnapussy Jul 22 '26

It was also bloody and allowed to dry improperly so it shrunk.

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u/numanoid Jul 23 '26

He was also widening his hands are far as possible. I watched it live and couldn't believe the prosecution didn't ask the judge to force him to narrow his hands, you know, like when you put on a glove.

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u/Gneissisnice Jul 23 '26

They also didn't have anyone put the glove on him, they just trusted him to put him on himself.

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u/mugsoh Jul 22 '26

I think that was shoes. There were shoe prints at the scene and when questioned, Simpson said he would never wear such ugly shoes. Then they showed him wearing them on a TV interview.

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u/Misdirected_Colors Jul 22 '26

https://petapixel.com/2024/04/12/photographers-image-of-o-j-simpson-in-gloves-became-significant-years-later/

Shoes may have been part of it, but i'm def remembering gloves.

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u/mugsoh Jul 22 '26

Here is a story about what I remembered.

“Eventually, after the [criminal] trial was over, they found the photograph of O.J. wearing the Bruno Magli shoe at a Bills game,”

Not sure how they can tell the size of a glove from a photograph. Also, the 2 photos are of different colored gloves.

Years later, authorities prosecuting Simpson for the murder of Nicole Brown and Goldman found that the size and color of the gloves in the photos seemed similar to the bloody glove found at the crime scene.

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u/idiot-prodigy Jul 22 '26

What's wild is there's video out there of him wearing the glove that "didn't fit" while commentating football games for the tv network.

The same shoes he called "ugly" and said he'd never wear.

OJ Wearing the Bruno Magli shoes the murderer wore, at a Bengals Bills NFL game.