PREVENTABLE MURDERS

By MARGARET CARLSON

IMAGINE THAT O.J. SIMPSON HAD A HISTORY OF BEATING THE BEJESUS OUT of Robert Kardashian and that one day Kardashian was found brutally murdered at his home. Simpson had no alibi, other than he was chipping golf balls in the dark. And there were tapes, pictures and police reports to show that Simpson had broken down Kardashian's door, smashed his windshield with a bat, threatened him with a gun and beaten him until his lip split open. How likely is it that juror Brenda Moran would have called looking at this evidence "a waste of time," or that Johnnie Cochran would have been able to wave it away as "domestic discord" and a sign that his client was "not perfect"?

Not very likely. It's also unlikely that such vicious assaults would have gone unpunished: smashing in Kardashian's face would have got Simpson arrested and given him pause; beating up Nicole got him phone therapy. Only when he was booked for murder was this "family matter" taken seriously enough to put domestic violence--the leading cause of injury among women, which kills at least 1,400 of them a year--on the national agenda. Network news teams investigated; talk shows buzzed. Calls to hot lines multiplied.

But by the time of the verdict, the Sojourn shelter, which Nicole Simpson had phoned five days before her death, frightened that her husband was going to kill her, got only two media calls instead of hundreds--and no more than the usual level of hot-line inquiries, reports Carol Arnett, coordinator of the Los Angeles County Domestic Violence Council. Shortly after the murders, Arnett received a state grant of $22 million for new facilities and programs, but she expects that could be "a one-shot deal." With domestic violence dropping off the screen, she has decided to talk about the council in terms of "homicide prevention," she says. "We don't know what 7-Eleven is going to be robbed next, or what car hijacked. But we do know which woman is going to be killed, and with enough resources, we can prevent it."

Cochran tried to make the opposite point at trial--not every man who beats his wife murders her. But just last year at its "murder summit," the International Association of Police Chiefs concluded otherwise: because their figures show that most women who are murdered are killed by men they know who have previously attacked them, the chiefs agreed that one of the most efficient ways to reduce the homicide rate is to build more shelters.

But shelter is only the beginning. Abused women also need a financial safety net and legal help to make a permanent break. A Senate vote just restored $50 million for the Violence Against Women Act that had been cut from the House crime bill. But the Justice Department's Bonnie Campbell, hired to implement the act's provisions about better law enforcement against violent husbands, says, "I'm thrilled we're getting our money but deeply worried over moving battered women through a system where welfare, child and health care, legal services and shelters are all being cut. The laws may be there, but the dollars aren't."

It doesn't help the effort that so many people aren't holding Simpson's shameful behavior against him. Hearing Larry King fawn over Simpson on the phone last Wednesday night, it was too easy to forget that even if Simpson has been acquitted of murdering Nicole, it's been proved that he brutalized her. That's a charge he didn't even bother to contest.