When O.J. Simpson got into the backseat of his white Bronco and drove off, the whole world tuned in. His slow-speed chase down Los Angeles' freeways proved to be a monumental moment not just for Simpson himself, but for the world. Phone calls from O.J. Simpson in the white Bronco were aired on national television, police updates were broadcast on national news, and it seemed that every network decided to turn their cameras to the chase. While it was clear what was happening outside of the Bronco, the question on everyone's mind was, "What's going on inside the Bronco?" With the five-part ESPN documentary O.J.: Made In America sparking interest in the trial again, now's a perfect time to revisit what it was like inside the white Bronco thanks to audio from the car.
Throughout the chase, CNN reported that Simpson spoke on the phone with Homicide Detective Tom Lange, and the calls seem to reveal a lot about Simpson's state of mind. In CNN's transcripts, you can see that Simpson refused to toss his gun out of the car like police asked, repeating "this is for me" over and over again and saying, "I can't live with..." Lange told him, "You're scaring everybody. O.J." and reminded him that "there's a lot of people that love you. Don't throw it all away."
The calls continued with Simpson saying, "All I did was love Nicole. That's all I did was love her." Simpson hints in the call that he's missing his deceased ex-wife, saying, "I just want to be with Nicole." In the background, hordes of screaming fans that stood along the L.A. highway can be heard.
Lange later told Larry King, as seen in the above video, "At the time [of the chase], this ceased to be a murder investigation. Now we had to consider that this was a man who had obviously been accused of a brutal double murder." Another detective, Phillip Vannatter, told King, "I think [O.J. Simpson's] responses were very, very strange for an innocent man."
Simpson was eventually taken into custody following the chase, and the "trial of the century" began. He was found not guilty and acquitted of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman's deaths in the criminal trial, but was later found liable in civil court for their deaths and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages to their families, according to the New York Times.
Many years have passed since those verdicts, but people won't be quick to forget those emotional phone calls from the Bronco on that fateful day.
