O.J. Simpson's Rockingham Estate and the House on Bundy Drive

O.J. Simpson died in Las Vegas on April 10, 2024, at age 76. The 2 Los Angeles houses at the center of his story had settled their accounts long before he did. One was torn down in 1998. The other still stands on Bundy Drive under a changed street number, which we will not print. This is the record of both.

Orenthal James Simpson won the 1968 Heisman Trophy at USC and went first overall in the 1969 NFL draft. He ran his way into the Hall of Fame with the Buffalo Bills, retired from the San Francisco 49ers in 1979, and moved into acting and broadcasting. After June 1994, none of that led his obituary.

The Rockingham years

Simpson bought the estate on Rockingham Avenue in Brentwood in 1977, while he was still playing. He and Nicole Brown married there in 1985. A guest house sat at the rear of the property, and Kato Kaelin, a family friend, was staying in it at the time of the murders.

On June 17, 1994, 5 days after Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were found dead across town, the white Ford Bronco chase ended in the estate's driveway. An estimated 95 million people watched some part of it live. If you saw any television that night, you saw this driveway.

For the property record, the ownership trail, and the map pin, see O.J. Simpson's former Brentwood estate on Velvet Ropes.

Foreclosure, auction, and the wrecking ball

A criminal jury acquitted Simpson of both murders on October 3, 1995. A civil jury in Santa Monica reached the opposite conclusion on February 4, 1997, finding him liable for both deaths and awarding the Goldman and Brown families $33.5M. He stopped covering the Rockingham mortgage, the bank foreclosed, and the estate sold at auction in July 1997.

Investment banker Kenneth Abdalla bought the property later that year, and demolition crews arrived on July 29, 1998. Asked about it that week, Simpson said, “It’s not my house, and I could care less.” Abdalla had the debris hauled to a landfill and cleared the lot for a house of his own. Nothing of the original estate survives.

The condominium on Bundy Drive

The building people call “the murder house” was never Simpson's. Nicole Brown Simpson bought the condominium on Bundy Drive in January 1994 and lived there with her 2 children. On the night of June 12, 1994, she and her friend Ronald Goldman were found dead at the front of the property. Goldman had come by to return a pair of glasses her mother had left at a nearby restaurant earlier that evening.

A durable piece of trial-era folklore holds that the murder site was torn down. It was not. Rockingham came down; the Bundy building still stands. 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 the facade and had the street renumbered to shake off sightseers, and the home changed hands again in 2006.

If you drive that stretch of Bundy today, you will pass the building without noticing it. That is the point of the renumbering. It is also why we treat the exact address as a gated record rather than a headline: people live there now, and the history is not theirs.

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

What the record shows

Simpson served 9 years in a Nevada prison over a 2007 sports memorabilia robbery in Las Vegas and was released in 2017. He spent his last years in that city and died of cancer on April 10, 2024. The civil judgment outlived him. It had grown past $100M with interest, and his estate was still settling it after his death.

The record reads plainly. Acquitted in criminal court in 1995. Found liable in civil court in 1997. Rockingham foreclosed, sold, and torn down. Bundy still standing under another number. We map both because the record lives at street level, and we keep the exact addresses behind the ropes because people live at both today.