May 27 1996
SLEUTHS SET TO TRY ANY LEADS O.J. HAS
Daily News (New York)
May 27, 1996, Monday
BYLINE: By JERE HESTER
SECTION: News; Pg. 7
LENGTH: 399 words
A team of sleuths from the land of Sam Spade has offered to probe the slay-ings of O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife and her pal for free but said yesterday they’ll need the athlete’s full cooperation.
The crack crew of six, led by legendary private eye Hal Lipset, was spurred by Simpson’s recent comments that there were leads in San Francisco the football great’s hometown but that he couldn’t afford to follow them up.
“We want to get to the bottom of it,” Joel Michel, a San Francisco investiga-tor and a vice president of the World Association of Detectives, told the Daily News.
“We’re not here to judge anyone, just to seek the truth,” he said, adding that the detectives were willing to forgo their usual $ 100-per-hour fees.
The gumshoes hatched the idea over lunch recently with the renowned Lipset a former Watergate investigator famed for designing a bug that looked like a mar-tini olive.
“We’ve talked about it, and we feel very good about what our offer is,” Sam Webster, WAD executive director, told The News. “We don’t think anyone has ever done this.”
Lipset, who turns 77 today, told the San Franciso Examiner, “If there are leads in San Francisco that somebody is not looking into, then I think they should be.
“We’re serious,” he added. “But if I find something, I want the right to tell the public and the San Francisco district attorney.”
Bill Pavelic, a former LAPD detective who worked for Simpson, 48, during his successful defense of double-murder charges, told The Examiner he welcomed the offer and would discuss it with the gridiron star.
He confirmed there were investigative leads in San Francisco, but declined to offer details.
Simpson is going to have to come clean with the San Francisco supersnoops if they are to determine whether the leads in the June 12, 1994, murders are real or just stuff that dreams are made of.
“We can’t get started until he gives us something to go on,” said Michel. “But so far, we haven’t heard diddly from him.”
The football star was widely mocked for his vow to devote his life to hunting down the “real” killer following his Oct. 3 acquittal in the slayings of Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.
During his publicity tour of England earlier this month, he cryptically re-ferred to the San Francisco leads in a speech at Oxford University, where he complained he was virtually broke.
LOAD-DATE: May 27, 1996
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
