Tyler Starrett was on vacation with his family in Pigeon Forge, about 35 miles from Knoxville in eastern Tennessee, when they learned on Thursday that O.J. Simpson had died.
So they changed plans. They had heard that one of the key artifacts of the Simpson case happened to be on display nearby at the Alcatraz East Crime Museum: the 1993 white Ford Bronco that Simpson fled from the police in, just days after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson, his former wife, and Ronald L. Goldman. They could not resist.
“If the Bronco is here in Pigeon Forge, why don’t we go see it?” Starrett, 23, said.
Starrett is too young to have been among the 95 million television viewers who watched the low-speed chase unfold on June 17, 1994, when a swarm of police cars followed the white Bronco over some 60 miles of Southern California freeways, with Simpson holding a gun to his head in the back seat. But he was among those who visited the museum to see the vehicle in person on Thursday, as a three-minute clip of the police chase played on loop in the background.
Pigeon Forge, best known for Dollywood, Dolly Parton’s theme park, is at first glance not an obvious home for such a relic. But in recent years, this town has increasingly become a place for attractions and museums dedicated to the offbeat and believe-it-or-not interests of an American tourist — including the Alcatraz East Crime Museum, which is housed in a prisonlike building designed to be a cross between the Tennessee State Prison just outside Nashville and the original Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay.
Inside the museum, the white Bronco is one of several notorious vehicles.
It sits alongside the 1968 Volkswagen Beetle that was owned by the serial killer Ted Bundy, 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 Pigeon Forge snow globe featuring the museum, the Bronco and the Beetle can be purchased for $10.99 in the gift shop.)
“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,” said Ally Pennington, the artifacts and projects manager for the museum.
