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TMZ breaks a lot of stories there’s no doubt. They have spies, they pay for tips and they encourage people to send tips to the point where I’ve accidentally clicked on their tip line on the mobile version of their site. Once in a while, they’ll get a story wrong. It’s the nature of the business, it’s very fast-paced and competitive and it happens. Plus we glom off their stories and I’m just trying to give them their due for helping create careers for those of us who sit back and comment on the work they do. So when I question TMZ, I’m coming from a place of admiration. (Pls link us TMZ.)

This is all me leading up to say holy sh*t, this OJ knife story sounds way too good to be true:

A construction worker found a knife buried on the perimeter of the former O.J. Simpson estate … and it’s currently being tested by the LAPD in a top secret investigation … law enforcement sources tell TMZ.

The story is incredible. We’re told a construction worker found the knife years ago — we have heard several different stories, ranging from “several years ago” to 1998, when the house was demolished.
The weapon is a folding buck knife.

Our law enforcement sources say the construction worker took the knife to the street, where he saw an LAPD cop. He told the officer where he found the knife and the cop took it.

Turns out the cop — who worked in the traffic division — was off duty at the time, working security for a movie shoot at a house across the street on Rockingham. Our sources say the officer took the knife home and kept it … kept it for years.

In late January of this year, after the cop retired from the LAPD, he contacted a friend who worked in
LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division (RHD). The cop told the friend about the knife and said he was getting it framed to put on his wall. He wanted his friend to get the DR (Departmental Record) number for the Nicole Brown Simpson/Ronald Goldman murder case, which he planned on engraving in the frame.

We’re told the friend was indignant, and told his superiors. The brass was outraged and demanded that the retired cop turn the knife over, which he did.

Our sources say the knife is currently being tested for hair and fingerprints. It will be moved to the Serology Unit next week, where it will be tested for DNA and other biological evidence.

[From TMZ]

Here’s my question: are their law enforcement sources people they knew already and what is their fact-checking process? This sounds so crazy and out there.

Harvey Levin has a video up on TMZ now where he tells us not to “Jump to the conclusion that this is automatically the murder weapon. We know cops are very interested in this and they are handling it on a top secret basis. They don’t want anybody really even knowing about this.” That ship has obviously sailed.

He added that they’re testing the knife for hair, finger prints, DNA, etc. Levin also said “there is some evidence there might be blood on this knife. They don’t know because it is rusted out, but they are very interested.” The knife was most likely found around 1998 when OJ’s property was demolished. Levin asserts that this entire story is true and that it happened the way it’s described in their story, but that even if the knife is the murder weapon and ties OJ to the crime with DNA he can never be prosecuted for that crime again because of double jeopardy.

Levin also reminds us that another knife was found a couple of weeks after the murders (in June 1994) on the adjoining property to OJ’s place but it wasn’t the murder weapon.

What I want to know is, if this is true, how could an actual police officer hold on to a knife like this for so long? Like how corrupt do you have to be not to turn over a possible murder weapon in possibly the highest profile murder case of the 20th century and to keep it in your possession for almost 30 years? We don’t really know the timeline though, so maybe it was an unused prop in OJ’s brief-lived prank show.

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