More than three decades after a Los Angeles jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman, newly unsealed court records have surfaced a name prosecutors apparently never made public: Joseph "Joey" Ippolito, a convicted drug trafficker and prison escapee who became a federal informant.

According to a New York Times investigation published Sunday, a federal letter seeking leniency for Ippolito said he had "become privy to many facts relevant to the [Simpson] case," including details of Simpson's "disposal of the murder weapon" — a knife that was never recovered. Ippolito allegedly crossed paths with Simpson through Al Cowlings, Simpson's longtime friend who drove the white Ford Bronco during the infamous 1994 police chase.

A Brother's Account, Then a Retraction

The Times investigation centers on an account from Ippolito's brother, Sam, who said Joey left the house the night of the killings and returned with what looked like blood on his hands and a bag holding a heavy object, asking Sam to get rid of it. Sam told the paper he dumped the bag in a dumpster at a nearby construction site. He has since tried to walk back parts of his account after the Times declined to pay him for the story, according to CBS News' reporting on the documents.

"YOU WOULD THINK THAT THERE COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE ANYTHING NEW, AND NOW, FOR THE PUBLIC, THERE CERTAINLY IS."

That's how longtime Court TV legal analyst Rikki Klieman described the revelations to CBS News. But Klieman also cautioned that authorities have "no real reason to trust the word of the brother" alone. Marcia Clark, the lead prosecutor in Simpson's 1995 criminal trial, told the Times she had never heard Ippolito's name and that, as far as she knew, he "had no credible or relevant evidence to provide."

Ippolito died in 2006, so he can't confirm or deny any of it. Malcolm LaVergne, the executor of Simpson's estate — Simpson himself died of cancer in April 2024 — noted the obvious problem with the story resurfacing now: "None of those three people can speak for themselves today," he said, referring to Brown, Goldman and Simpson.

The Goldman family declined to comment on the investigation, according to TMZ's coverage of the report. The Los Angeles Police Department, for its part, confirmed to reporters that the Simpson case "remains an open and ongoing investigation" — the same line it has given for 32 years.

Simpson was acquitted of the murders in October 1995 after a trial that gripped the country, then found liable for the deaths in a 1997 civil suit that ordered him to pay $33.5 million to the Brown and Goldman families. Whether the newly unsealed documents amount to anything more than a decades-old rumor finally making it to print remains to be seen — but for a case that has resisted a tidy ending for a generation, it's the closest thing to new evidence the public has seen in years.