When O.J. Simpson attempted to elude police in a now-infamous white Ford Bronco, he likely wasn’t thinking that it would someday end up in a Tennessee museum that was designed to look like Alcatraz.
Simpson, who’s death from cancer was announced Thursday, is still very much, for better or worse, a worldwide celebrity for being charged with (and acquitted of) the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, his former wife, and Ronald L. Goldman.
And there’s celebrity status as well attached to the 1993 white Ford Bronco that Simpson commandeered to flee, leading a swarm of police cars on a low-speed chase along 60 miles of California freeways, while, in real time, 95 million viewed the pursuit on television.
The Bronco now is on display at the privately owned Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, better known as the home of Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park. The SUV stands alongside the 1968 Volkswagen Beetle that was owned by serial killer Ted Bundy. There’’s also the 1933 Essex-Terraplane used by the bank robber John Dillinger and the so-called death car from the 1967 movie “Bonnie and Clyde,” riddled with bullet holes.
A story in The New York Times explains that the museum was designed to be something of an intersection between the Tennessee State Prison just outside Nashville and the original Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
“There are events in history that will always stick in people’s minds, and I think the O.J. chase is one of those for a large number of people,” Ally Pennington, the artifacts and projects manager for the museum, told the paper.
Simpson’s exploits, his football fame, his movie career, the murder charges and subsequent trial, and his subsequent time in prison on other charges, have become history worthy of Hollywood. The chase took place days after Nicole Simpson and Goldman were killed, and the vehicle at the time belonged to Al Cowlings, Simpson’s friend and former teammate, who was driving it about 40 miles per hour as Simpson crouched in the back holding a gun to his head. O.J. eventually surrendered at his Los Angeles home.
The Bronco, which appears unremarkable if you didn’t know its story, was previously featured on an episode of the reality television show “Pawn Stars.” The identity of the current owner was not disclosed, the Times said.
On Thursday, the museum had taped a label near the Bronco reporting Simpson’s death, near a set of Simpson’s golf clubs. One visitor, asked about the complex background of the event, said, “It was pretty wild — you’d have people arguing about it, you know, at Waffle House.”
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