When OJ Simpson tried to escape the police in a now-infamous white Ford Bronco, he probably didn’t think that he would one day end up in a Tennessee museum designed to look like Alcatraz.
Simpson, whose death from cancer was announced Thursday, is still a global celebrity, for better or worse, having been charged (and acquitted) in the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, his former wife, and Ronald L. Goldman. became.
And there’s celebrity status, too, with the white 1993 Ford Bronco that Simpson managed to escape from, leading a swarm of police cars on a slow-speed chase across 60 miles of California highways as 95 million people watched the chase on real-time television.
The Bronco is now on display at the private Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, better known as the home of Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s amusement park. The SUV is parked next to the 1968 Volkswagen Beetle that belonged to serial killer Ted Bundy. There’s also the 1933 Essex Terraplane used by bank robber John Dillinger and the so-called Death Car from the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde,” which was riddled with bullet holes.
A story in The New York Times explains that the museum was designed as a kind of cross between the Tennessee State Prison just outside Nashville and the original Alcatraz on San Francisco Bay.
“There are events in history that will always stay with people, and I think the hunt for orange juice is one of them for a lot of people,” Ally Pennington, the museum’s artifacts and projects manager, told the newspaper.
Simpson’s exploits, his football fame, his film career, the murder charges and subsequent trial, and his subsequent prison sentence on other charges have become a story worthy of Hollywood. The chase took place a few days after the deaths of Nicole Simpson and Goldman, and the vehicle was owned at the time by Al Cowlings, Simpson’s friend and former teammate, who drove it at about 40 miles per hour while Simpson crouched in the back, holding a gun to his head . OJ eventually surrendered at his home in Los Angeles.
The Bronco, which seems unremarkable if you don’t know its history, was previously featured on an episode of the reality TV show “Pawn Stars.” The identity of the current owner has not been disclosed, the Times said.
On Thursday, the museum had posted a sign near the Bronco announcing Simpson’s death, near a set of Simpson’s golf clubs. One visitor, asked about the event’s complex background, said: “It was pretty wild – there were people arguing about it at the Waffle House.”