OJ: Media Made Me The Heavy

It has been 10 years, but for O.J. Simpson it seems "another lifetime ago" since the world as he knew it ended with the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Acquitted of their killings, Simpson says he holds the news media responsible for persuading a majority of the public that he was guilty. And the football star said he still waits for the next chapter of his life to unfold, after the real killers are caught and he is absolved once and for all in the public's mind.

"My prayer is that it will be solved so that I can go to so many people that I felt I had to be nice to," he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "I've always been a gracious winner and loser. Only this time, I don't think I'd be gracious."

Overnight on June 12, 1994, Simpson went from revered gridiron superstar, movie actor, announcer and commercial pitchman to accused killer.

When a jury found him not guilty a year later, Simpson vowed he would spend the rest of his life searching for the real killers. He acknowledged that he's no longer putting much effort into that search, saying that's partly because he's too busy raising the couple's two teenagedchildren.

His lawyer, Yale Galanter, who sat in on the interview, said he continues to receive tips every week. But Simpson added that he no longer has the money to pursue them.

Prosecutors say he needn't bother, that the real killer was caught 10 years ago.

"I thought there was compelling evidence that Simpson was guilty," said Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney William Hodgman, who helped prosecute the case. "I thought this case was a tragic injustice and the jury verdicts were wrong."

Simpson said it's not uncommon for the news media to portray people as guilty, even before the jury has deliberated their fate.

"You can't watch the media now and not think that Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson and Kobe Bryant are guilty," he said of three high-profile cases yet to be resolved by a jury.

His own case, called the Trial of the Century, helped create a cottage industry for TV shows featuring legal experts debating the innocence or guilt of high-profile defendants. And although he admits to watching them, Simpson says they are not something he's happy about having his name linked with.

"If there's a negative legacy I have, it's all of those damned court shows on TV," he said during the interview, which stretched across nearly three hours.

Over the years, public fascination has often centered on Simpson's two children, who were asleep in their mother's home when she and Goldman were stabbed to death just outside the front door. His daughter Sydney is 18 now and his son Justin is 15. Simpson said he has never discussed the bloody night with them because they never brought it up.

"In the beginning, I wanted to sit down and talk to them about it," he said. "But the child psychologist said to me, 'Kids live for the future. They move on. One day in the future, they may want to talk about it, and you should be ready."'

The focus of the Simpson household, he said, is on remembering the good times with Nicole, not her death. He added that he recently took the children out to dinner, and they toasted what would have been her 45th birthday.

"My hope is that my kids will reach their full potential," Simpson said a day after his daughter graduated high school. She plans to attend a prestigious university in the Northeast, he said, adding that her grades were good enough to get her accepted at a number of schools, including his alma mater, the University of Southern California.

It was at USC that Simpson won the Heisman Trophy as college football's top player of 1968.

During the year he spent in jail without bail, Simpson's children lived with their grandparents, who fought unsuccessfully for custody. These days, he says, he is on good terms with his former in-laws, with whom the children visit every summer and Christmas.

Not on good terms with Simpson is Nicole Simpson's sister Denise Brown, who still believes he is guilty.

"He's evil," she said before the interview. "I think he's the devil walking around on Earth."

After his acquittal, the victims' survivors sued Simpson in civil court, where a jury, using a lesser standard of proof than required at a criminal trial, found him liable for the murders and ordered him to pay $33.5 million.

The judgment remains unpaid by Simpson, who now lives in Florida, where his pension cannot be touched.

In discussing the murders, Simpson said, "I wasn't there. I can't add anything."

His hair graying, looking a bit heavier than he did during the trial, the 56-year-old said he sometimes wonders how his relationship with his ex-wife would have turned out if she had lived.

"The last time I told her it wasn't working, we ended up making love," he said. "There's no doubt that Nicole and I loved each other."

She was just 18 when they met nearly 30 years ago, and he remembers her as "the most beautiful woman I had ever seen."

"I remember saying to the guy with me, 'That girl there, I can't look at no other girl in this place. No other girl is going to look that good.'"

After their divorce, he said, she fell in with a bad crowd that he believes somehow contributed to her death.

"A month before she died, I had an argument with her about those people," he said. "Something was out of control here."

Before the divorce, he said, he had considered moving to Florida.

"Sometimes I think that instead of putting off the move to Florida I should have grabbed Nicole and the kids and changed our environment," he said. "I wonder how things would have turned out."

By Linda Deutsch