If You Think <i> You're </i> Addicted to O.J., Meet Your Soul Mates : Trial: Illinois woman watches by day and downloads transcripts by night. Then there's the man who drew own blood to test for spatters.

By RICK HAMPSON

June 4, 1995 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

PARIS, Ill. — Before O.J., there was an emptiness in Jeri Williamson’s life out here on the edge of the prairie.

Chronic pain in her arms and legs had ended her career as an emergency medical technician and curtailed her needlepoint and antique stripping; her daughter had gone off to college; her husband worked nights and slept days, leaving her alone much of the time.

To a woman who’d always worked--she once made an ambulance call to the scene of a double murder--and who’d lived in Chicago for 16 years before coming back home, life seemed as flat as the Plains.

Then she discovered the O. J. Simpson murder trial, and her life acquired a certain zest.

Now she watches the trial on television from gavel to gavel, and videotapes it if she has to go out. When the day is over she sits down at her computer to discuss the case on-line or download trial transcripts.

She’s engrossed by the melting ice cream and the splattered blood and the burning candles. She wants to know what happened to a missing .05 milliliters of O.J.’s blood, and wonders if the doctor who performed the autopsy will crack on the stand.

With its high-priced advocacy and high-tech forensic analysis, its brew of celebrity, money, sex and race, the Simpson trial is everything life here is not.

“It serves the same purpose as a soap . . . You can immerse yourself totally,” said Williamson, who is 52. “It’s like sticking your head in the sand.”

But it is far from solitary. Although Williamson lives at the outskirts of Paris, population 9,600, she’s also a resident of O.J. Nation, whose population is measured in the tens of millions.

O.J. Nation is bound together by the satellite dish, the fax, the personal computer and the talk show. It assembles not so much in public places, like the town square or the corner barbershop, as on the air and over the lines.

In O.J. Nation, people who had never learned to use a VCR now run low on blank cassettes. A discussion of Kato Kaelin’s hair draws three times more responses on a Prodigy computer discussion session than one about House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia. (He’s the man polls have shown is less recognizable than Judge Lance A. Ito.)

In O.J. Nation, hundreds of people have paid $13 for membership to the Kato Fan Club. They have bought more than 75,000 copies of an O.J. comic book and close to 100,000 copies of a home viewers’ trial guide. The satiric “O.J.’s Legal Pad,” purportedly featuring the defendant’s jottings and musings, had a first printing of 175,000.

Meet a few of Williamson’s fellow citizens:

* Sheila Scott of Los Angeles, a retired character actress, celebrated her 63rd birthday watching the trial. A frustrated lawyer, she has assembled voluminous files and, having somehow obtained the phone number, faxes legal advice to her heroine, Marcia Clark.

If only the trial would end, she could attend to her own legal affairs, clean her house and lose weight. Because of nervous nibbling in front of the tube, she’s up a dress size or two.

* Robert Butterworth, a psychologist, created a 10-question test for “O.J. obsession” after he noticed that he was getting hooked. “O.J. obsessives are over the line. Their work and their relationships are suffering. They don’t have a life anymore.”

* Teddy Artemiou, who installed small television monitors on the pumps in his gasoline station in Coconut Creek, Fla., and finds that people pump a bit more Shell to watch a bit more O.J.

Interest in the trial ebbs and flows--up when Kato’s on the stand, down after Oklahoma City. But the trial’s descent into complex, technical DNA evidence has separated fans from fanatics. The utterly mass phenomenon of February has become something of narrower but deeper interest.

“It’s hard to talk about the case now if you don’t know what ‘polymerase chain reaction’ and ‘restriction fragment length polymorphism’ means,” said Williamson.

Kathleen Sullivan, who anchors E! Entertainment network’s spirited trial coverage, sees a rift between steady viewers and everyone else.

“They feel isolated. They’re watching so much that can’t be translated to their husband when he gets home, or capsulated on the evening news. They see a different trial than non-viewers do.”

At 9 a.m. Jeri Williamson drives a visitor through the vast, empty parking lot of Honey Creek Square mall, just over the Indiana line in Terre Haute. On April Fool’s Day, this was the scene of O.J. Nation’s grandest spectacle--Kato’s first public appearance.

People began arriving at sunrise, and Williamson herself was en route when she heard a traffic report--the mall was gridlocked.

“I aborted the mission,” she says.

By the time Kato arrived, the crowd had swelled to around 5,000, including old ladies in wheelchairs and teen-agers who chanted, “KA-TO! KA-TO!” Someone unfurled a banner: “WE LOVE YOU, KATO.”

At 10:27 a.m., Williamson is back in her living room, using a remote control to rotate the big black satellite dish on the front lawn into position for Court TV.

Williamson rocks back on a recliner, watching the pretrial show on her 32-inch RCA set. She sips coffee in between drags on a menthol cigarette.

When California vs. Simpson comes to order, she focuses more intently, occasionally calling out a question a lawyer hasn’t asked, or grousing about a ruling.

“The new Judge Ito,” she grunts as defense lawyer Barry Scheck’s objection is dismissed. “Save your breath, Barry.”

While everyone else capable of focusing on a television picture seems to hold a strong opinion on Simpson’s guilt or innocence, Williamson is keeping an open mind. But she’s skeptical about the prosecution’s theory: “Such neat, neat evidence for such a messy, messy crime.”

The trial is taking its toll. Her garden is overgrown, her front porch cluttered, her antique collection stagnant. Until she switched phone companies, on-line charges had inflated her monthly bill to $192.

Her living room carpet, however, is immaculate--she vacuums during recesses--and she’s lost seven pounds. “Nervous energy,” she explains.

At 11:30, Williamson’s husband, Daryll, wanders sleepily into the living room after a few hours’ shut-eye.

He glances at the set. “Oh, it’s the O.J. trial,” he drawls, in mock surprise.

“Like watchin’ grass grow,” he grouses, picking up a copy of Newsweek. “Don’t see how anyone can watch it.”

Like most Parisians, he would rather discuss anything but O.J., including the weather and the ban on burning trash after 5 p.m. Williamson knows of no one else, save the pharmacist at Wal-Mart--whom she occasionally phones with updates--who shares her interest. Her mother won’t even discuss the case with her.

Paris isn’t the only place to have O.D.’d on O.J. National cable ratings are only three times above normal, instead of 10. In Carrollton, Ga., the Times-Georgian has vowed not to print any trial news until it’s over.

Last year, Philadelphia management consultant Leslie Cree was so sick of hearing her office mate blab about O.J. that she hung a sign designating their common space “an O.J.-free zone.” But now the sign is down.

“Nobody talks about it anymore,” Cree said. “They got burned out.”

But not Williamson or her fellow fanatics. When the court breaks for lunch, she logs on her computer in a cluttered alcove off the living room. In 12 hours, she’s received 26 messages, almost all O.J.-related.

She has about 70 regular discussion partners who follow the trial as avidly as she does. Or more so. One drew some of his own blood so he could authentically duplicate the trial’s blood-splatter tests. Another records each day’s session and catalogues the videotapes.

“We focus on things we pull from cracks in the testimony,” Williamson said. “Sometimes I prefer the debate about the trial to the trial itself. It’s not personal to us--it’s a game we’re playing with their forensic evidence.”

But if the Simpson trial started out as a national conversation, it’s turning into a shouting match. When Williamson logs on to Simpson discussion groups these nights, she’s appalled by the language and tone. She’s retreated to invitation-only discussion groups where you don’t get flamed for an opinion.

Some of the on-line antagonism is racial, reflecting the fact that most whites say Simpson is guilty and most blacks say he’s innocent.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram disbanded its Simpson trial discussion panel because of tensions, some racial, among the panelists. Similarly, the owner of a Los Angeles furniture factory told workers to turn off the radio after Hispanics and Anglos quarreled during the testimony of maid Rosa Lopez.

The tension has been noticed by O.J. addict Kenny Morse of Los Angeles. “If the trial comes up in conversation, I find myself being very circumspect. I don’t feel free to discuss it wherever I go.”

Williamson has been talking about the case for almost eight hours now, and still hasn’t said what she really thinks about the man at the center of it all.

“He’s been a hero and a role model for a lot of people. I want him . . . to be innocent. I just find it hard to believe he is,” she says.

She takes a puff of her cigarette and fingers the charm on her necklace, “love” in gold script.

“For us, this is a game. When it’s over we’ll go on to something else. For those people out there,” she adds, gesturing at the television, “it’s life and death.”