On Wednesday, bulldozers demolished the Juice's former Brentwood digs, briefly as famous an L.A. tourist spot as the Chinese Theater or Walk of Fame.
De-construction crews began tearing up the 6,400-square-foot spread around dawn, each pass of the massive front-end loaders systematically chasing ghosts of the 1990s most inescapable murder case.
Smash! There goes the Bronco-size garage.
Crash! No more Kato-size guesthouse.
At day's end, all that remains of 360 North Rockingham will be a $4 million heap of rubble. The mansion-razing was ordered by its new owner, an East Coast investment banker, who figures it's cheaper to level the place than to make improvements. (Besides, it may get rid of those lingering looky-loos.) He says he'll build a new home on the property.
He paid $3.95 million for the estate in December, three months after O.J. left for a slightly cheaper, more remote, fortress in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Simpson purchased the Brentwood mansion for $650,000 in 1977 and lived there for 20 years. In 1994, he was accused of murdering his estranged wife, Nicole Brown, and her friend Ronald Goldman at her nearby condo--a crime for which he was eventually acquitted.
However, he stopped making mortgage payments after finding himself on the losing end of a $33.5 million wrongful death verdict in a civil case brought by the Goldman and Brown families. His bank, Hawthorne Savings and Loan, foreclosed on the property and later auctioned it. When no other buyers stepped up, the bank purchased Casa O.J. itself for $2.6 million. Hawthorne put the house up for sale in September 1997.
But Simpson isn't exactly teary-eyed over the demolition. Says the former footballer to Associated Press: "It's not my house, and I could care less.
"I walked out of that door, and I've never been back...Rockingham is history."