Why did people have more sympathy for Laci Peterson and less sympathy for Nicole Simpson?
It’s the same old story. People in this country (and plenty of other places) are starstruck and obscessed with their sports “heroes”. Having earned this status on the football field, O.J. Simpson was also featured in a number of well known commercials, so he was constantly in the public eye. People have a habit – once a person has reached that kind of “image” to go on thinking of him as the “hero figure” even when it becomes known that he has fallen off his pedestal and engaged in some serious wrongdoing. Scott Peterson, on the other hand was anonymous. Nobody knew he existed until the awful story of his missing pregnant wife hit the headlines, and of course, his behaviour after that rapidly turned everyone’s initial sympathy into first suspicion and then loathing, as it became more and more clear that this was not an innocent man, but a twisted, lying, cheating sociopath. There WAS no “hero image” before that fall into suspicion, and then disgrace. People felt a lot less sympathetic t
