Nicole Brown Simpson's Condominium on Bundy Drive Still Stands

The building people call “the O.J. Simpson murder house” carries a name that is wrong twice over. It was never his house, and it was never torn down. It was Nicole Brown Simpson's condominium on Bundy Drive in Brentwood, and it stands today under a changed street number. The estate that did come down was Simpson's, on Rockingham Avenue. This is her side of that geography: her life, her home, and what became of it.

Nicole Brown was born in Frankfurt, West Germany, on May 19, 1959, and raised in Garden Grove, California. At 18 she was waiting tables at The Daisy, a Beverly Hills club, when she met O.J. Simpson. They married in February 1985 at his Rockingham Avenue estate and had 2 children, a daughter born that year and a son born in 1987.

The marriage ended in 1992. She stayed in Brentwood after the divorce, drove a white Ferrari, went out dancing with friends, and ran a small interior design business whose clients came from her ex-husband's circle. In January 1994 she bought the condominium on Bundy Drive and moved in with her children.

For the property record, the ownership trail, and the map pin, see Nicole Brown Simpson's Bundy Drive condominium on Velvet Ropes.

The night of June 12, 1994

Her family had dinner that evening at Mezzaluna, a Brentwood restaurant, and her mother left a pair of glasses behind. Ronald Goldman, a 25-year-old friend of Nicole's, came by the condominium late that night to return them. Shortly after midnight, her Akita drew a neighbor's attention, and neighbors found Nicole and Goldman dead near the front gate of the property. She was 35. He was 25.

A criminal jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of both murders on October 3, 1995. A civil jury in Santa Monica reached the opposite finding on February 4, 1997, holding him liable for both deaths and ordering him to pay the Brown and Goldman families $33.5M. Both verdicts are court record, and this article treats them that way.

The house that came down was not hers

A misconception has trailed this address for 30 years: that the murder site was demolished. It was not. The demolished house was Simpson's estate on Rockingham Avenue, where he and Nicole had married 13 years earlier. After the civil verdict he stopped paying the mortgage, the bank foreclosed, and the property went to auction in 1997. The buyer brought in demolition crews on July 29, 1998, and a different house went up on the cleared lot. The O.J. Simpson article tells that property's full story, from the Bronco chase in its driveway to the wrecking ball.

For Rockingham's record and map pin, see O.J. Simpson's former Brentwood estate.

The 2 buildings answered the same year differently. Rockingham went to a landfill. The condominium on Bundy Drive, the place the folklore says was erased, is the one that survived.

What became of the condominium

The condominium sat on the market for 2 and a half years after the murders and sold in 1996 for less than Nicole had paid. A later owner remodeled it and had the street renumbered to turn sightseers away, and the property changed hands again in 2006.

The renumbering did what it was meant to do. Nothing on that stretch of Bundy Drive announces itself, and the people who live in the building today have their own lives to lead there. That is why the exact address stays behind the ropes on our map, a gated record instead of a headline, and why this article names the street and not the number.

Nicole Brown Simpson was 35 years old, 2 years divorced, and 5 months into a new home when she was killed at its gate. The building outlasted the folklore. Her story deserves the same.