If O.J. Simpson Didn't Do It, Then Who Did?

Glen Rogers copped to it.

He says he killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. It was part of his thing as a serial killer. The 54-year-old sits on Death Row in Florida, imprisoned there since 1997 after being convicted of killing a Tampa woman. So confessing to one of the most ballyhooed crimes of the century was no big deal to him.

According to the National Enquirer in November 2015, O.J. hired Rogers, then a $6.25 an hour house painter in Los Angeles, to persuade some drug dealers to leave Nicole alone. “From what O.J. told me, my theory is that he was getting tired of paying Nicole’s debt, and he brought in Glen Rogers to get the drug dealer out of the picture,” former O.J. manager Norman Pardo is quoted as telling the Enquirer.

But things went south and Rogers ended up knifing Brown and Goldman.

One thing that is definitely settled with regard to who committed the most famous homicides of the nineties is that it is still most definitely unsettled. The floated possibilities are debated enough to warrant a Reddit page devoted to the subject, although most of the conjecture wouldn’t pass a Snopes probe.

It Was Probably O.J., Right?

The passing of years has increased the percentage of people who believe that O.J. was the killer, even as more reports of other possibilities have surfaced. The majority of Americans — at 69 percent — still believe O.J. was the killer, while seven percent do not think he was culpable, according to a poll taken earlier in 2016. That figure is a little above the 62 percent in 1994 who believed that O.J. was “definitely or probably” the killer.

The whodunit positing continues, though, and often includes the far out, the unprovable, and notions from shady attention-seekers.

Just Say No

Drug lords, angry at Nicole for an overdue drug debt, committed the homicides. That was the focus of another <em>National Enquirer</em> story, citing a guard at the Nevada prison housing O.J. as the source. The guard claims the info came from O.J. himself.

O.J.'s Son

Or Jason Simpson, O.J.’s son with his first wife, Marguerite, was the killer. The theory goes that he was angry because Nicole moved the location of a party from Jackson’s Restaurant, the West Hollywood eatery where he worked, to Mezzaluna in Brentwood.

Proponents of this scenario point to Jason’s bouts with depression and alleged emotional instability as well as entries in his purported diary, obtained by Dallas private investigator William Dear, author of a 2012 book, O.J. Is Innocent And I Can Prove It. It was Dear’s second book attempting to pin the murders on Jason.

“I can’t help but think of the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A man that when induced with a chemical becomes a madman,” Dear claims Jason wrote in the journal. “My insecurity and knack for letting it become uncontrollable and ultimately contributing to the demise.”

And Who The Hell Is Charlie?

We still don’t know who Charlie is.

"Charlie" is O.J.’s make-believe friend, the one he claims in his 2007 book If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer was along with him on the evening of June 12, 1994, when the murders took place.

O.J met Charlie at a dinner party not long before the murders happened. Later on they hung out together, hitting some clubs with mutual friends.

Shortly before the murder, as O.J. relates it in the book, Charlie came to O.J. with some information that Nicole was partying and getting high with a friend and some other men in Cabo. According to the book, O.J. and Charlie get into O.J.’s infamous Ford Bronco and head over to Nicole’s place “to scare the sh*t out of that girl,” according to O.J., and “read her the f*cking riot act.”

The knife makes an appearance from under O.J.’s driver's seat as the two pull up to the condo, but Charlie grabs it before O.J. heads up to Nicole’s entryway. When Goldman shows up, all hell breaks loose, as Goldman assumes a karate stance and Nicole comes out. Simpson grabs the knife from Charlie, who had joined O.J. at the entryway.

Amid yelling and screaming and an oh-so-convenient blackout, O.J. claims to wake up covered in blood with no recollection of what happened.

The Charlie theory flips the case back to the notion of there being more than one killer, a theory O.J.’s defense team introduced in its opening arguments.

Were There Two Killers?

Testimony from a forensic pathologist noted that neither Brown nor Goldman died immediately and that Goldman, a third-degree black belt, had put up an especially brave fight.

A police forensics expert, Michael Baden, of the New York State Police Department, told the court specifically that Brown did not die immediately and that she'd resisted her attackers during the 10-minute assault. Observers contend that this infers that there was more than one murderer.

Throughout the trial, the defense floated the notion of multiple killers. When O.J. came up with Charlie, it satisfied both the aged defense theory of two assailants and renewed interest in the possibility of who Charlie could be.

Credibility Issues

Then there’s the case of <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/keyword/mary-anne-gerchas" target="_blank">Mary Anne Gerchas,</a> who wraps up the dubious credibility sweepstakes. Gerchas said she saw four men in knit caps running from Nicole’s house around the time of the killings.

"At 10:45, Mary Anne Gerchas sees these four men running from 875 down toward her direction. She believes they're coming after her," Simpson defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran told jurors during opening arguments.

Gerchas, a jewelry-store owner, was on the defense's witness list until it was discovered that she had been sued 34 times. She had also been charged for walking on a $24,000 hotel bill at a Marriott in Century City. Removed from the witness list, Gerchas’ claim became just another shredded hypothesis, a woman with about as much credence as, well, Glen Rogers.

Watch Investigation Discovery’ss ix-part series, Is O.J. Innocent? The Missing Evidence with ID GO.

Read more: National Enquirer, Reddit, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Gallup, CNN