text: Former prosecutor Marcia Clark is opening up about the recent bombshell that Los Angeles police are currently investigating a knife that was allegedly recovered on property once owned by O.J. Simpson. 
   
   "I really don't know what to think of it," Clark tells ET exclusively. "I can't believe someone gave a police officer what appears to be, could be, important evidence in a case -- even if it is closed -- and takes it home. I don't know what to say about that except I can't believe it, but it's apparently what happened." 
   
   Of course, she still remains skeptical. 
   
   "I don't know whether to say it is truly evidence, none of us knows that yet -- it might be a hoax, it might be somebody who planted it and then just pretended to find it and gave it to the off-duty police officer, you don't know," Clark says. "But, of course, I'm glad the LAPD is taking it seriously and subjecting it to testing so we can find out." 
   
   Clark notes that DNA evidence could still be potentially recovered from the knife, if it is indeed not a hoax. 
   
   "It's very possible -- I mean, they recover DNA on mummies in Egypt," Clark says. "It's entirely possible that if there is some DNA to be recovered, that it could be found, especially with today's technology, which is much more sensitive." 
   
   "I think it's a remarkable development if it does turn out to be connected to the murders of Ron and Nicole," she adds. "It would be interesting if there was some evidence on that knife that pointed to who might have helped to bury it, if indeed someone else did." 
   
   Though Clark points out that the chances of this leading to any sort of prosecution is unlikely. 
   
   "The likelihood of any prosecution stemming from this evidence is very, very slim," she admits. "But we have to find out what this means -- what the truth of this is." 
   
   "I just hope the truth comes out about this situation, as I always do about all situations -- whatever this is, let's find out," she adds. "Let's find out if it's related or not. I really want to say -- my heart goes out to the families. With these kind of things that stir up all these memories and the pain of it all, I just can't imagine how they're feeling right now." 
   
   In a press conference on Friday morning, LAPD Capt. Andrew Neiman confirmed that the department is investigating the alleged discovery of a knife on the Rockingham property formerly owned by Simpson. He declined to name the retired officer involved in the discovery of the knife, although according to the Los Angeles Times , a construction worker found the knife years ago and turned it over to the police officer in question. 
   
   According to TMZ, the officer informed Robbery Homicide detectives of the knife's existence because he wanted to get it framed. 
   
   Clark, 62, was the head prosecutor during Simpson's trial, and ended up taking a leave of absence from her job after the former NFL star was acquitted of the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman in 1995. Clark retired two years later, but went on to co-author a book about the case titled Without a Doubt. 
   
   Simpson, 68, remains in a Nevada state prison after he was arrested in connection with a robbery at a Las Vegas hotel room in September 2007. He was found guilty on 12 counts, including kidnapping and armed robbery, in October 2008, and was later sentenced to 33 years in jail. Simpson is still eligible for parole in November of 2017 -- at the age of 70 -- his lawyer, Ozzie Fumo, tells ET, unless he receives a sentence reduction through other means. 
   
   On Friday, Neiman said that it is his understanding that could Simpson could not be retried on murder charges, as he was previously acquitted. 
   
   "I think the series actually makes an effort to acknowledge them and the ways in which that they were forgotten," Clark said. "This is an important series that's beautifully done, very compelling and I can't thank Ryan Murphy enough for what he's done here in terms of raising these issues in a very serious and compelling and very substantive way." 
   
   "But at the end of the day, two people lost their lives in a brutal murder," she added. "So we have to remember that. We can't forget them again. Remember Ron and Nicole." ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| O.J. Simpson Murder Case Buck Knife Could Produce Fatal Wounds 
   
   O.J. Simpson Murder Case: Buck Knife Could Produce Ron and Nicole's Fatal Wounds 
   
   EXCLUSIVE 
   
   The knife found buried on O.J. Simpson's former estate was more than capable of inflicting the mortal wounds on Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman ... so says the man who examined the wounds of the victims. 
   
   Dr. Irwin Golden, who served as the Deputy Medical Examiner, testified in the O.J. Simpson case and performed both autopsies, tells TMZ the folding buck knife could have severely cut both victims. Nicole was brutally attacked with a deep neck wound -- 2 1/2 inches deep and 5 1/2 inches across -- and Golden says a 4" blade could have done the deed. We broke the story ... the knife in question has a 5" blade. 
   
   Sources connected with the 1994 investigation and others involved in the evaluation of the knife tell us there was always a wide belief among LAPD cops that Simpson used a buck knife. 
   
   TMZ broke the story ... a construction worker found the knife buried on the perimeter of the property in 2002, gave it to a retired LAPD cop who never turned it in, instead taking it home and putting it in his tool box. The cop claims he alerted LAPD when he got it, but they expressed no interest. 
   
   Dr. Golden cautioned if the murder weapon was a buck knife it had to be "heavy." A knife expert tells us back in '94 buck knives were made with heavy American-made steel. 
   
   The knife is being tested for fingerprints and hair. Next week it goes to the serology unit for DNA testing. ||||| A buried knife was found at O. J. Simpson's estate during construction work, though no one is sure exactly when, TMZ reports. Though the construction worker gave it to a nearby police officer, that cop chose to keep the knife at his own house — and did so for years. It didn't come to official attention until the officer retired and asked a fellow cop for the case number for the Simpson case; he wanted to engrave it on his grim keepsake. The second cop reported the first to superiors, and the knife was turned over to the police forensics experts. It is currently being tested for hair and fingerprints, TMZ says, though those tests may not be of much use. It's hard to know, after so many years, how much forensics experts will be able to find. 
   
   Simpson can't be tried again Over the years, several knives have been proposed as the murder weapon — the knife that killed Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman — though none conclusively. This may not be the right knife, either. The knife found on the Simpson property is "a relatively inexpensive, smaller-bladed utility blade typically carried and used by construction workers, gardeners, landscapers or other laborers," NBC reports. Still, the knife must be tested to definitively rule it out. 
   
   Even assuming evidence is found linking the knife to the slayings, its discovery is mostly a symbolic event. There's no double jeopardy — even if the knife has Simpson's DNA, or that of the murder victims, Simpson can't be tried again. But this is assuming any evidence will be found on the knife, and that's not a sure thing. 
   
   Let's start with fingerprints, though there's no guarantee any will be found. People don't always leave fingerprints, even if they've touched an object, according to the South Dakota Department of Criminal Investigation. There's also no way to know how long a fingerprint will last — sometimes fingerprints are found on surfaces that haven't been touched in decades, but they're sometimes lost on objects touched recently. And fingerprint residue can be wiped away through cleaning. If the officer who had the knife cleaned it, fingerprint evidence is likely lost. 
   
   Samples may have been contaminated through the years Hair is a little trickier. The part of your hair that sticks out of your head doesn't contain nuclear DNA — only the bulb, which produces the hair, does, according to Forensics Magazine. If the bulb is there, though, it may have been contaminated through the years, and time, as well as the environment, may have degraded it — making a single source profile difficult, says Susan Walsh, a forensics professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, in an email. 
   
   That doesn't mean it's impossible to obtain DNA from the hair shaft, though. There may be mitochondrial DNA, which can provide information about the mother of the person who produced the hair — though that's not as useful as a typical nuclear DNA profile, says Walsh. 
   
   Regardless of the type of DNA forensics experts are trying to work with, it's possible the sample was degraded or contaminated over the years. For instance, if the knife was in a damp environment, that makes it likelier that the DNA won't be useful, says Graciela Cabana, an expert in ancient DNA at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Every environment has contaminants, so it's important that DNA from the sample be in good shape, otherwise, the contaminants can drown out important information. "Was the knife in an evidence bag?" she writes in an email. "If not, I wouldn't trust any evidence on it." 
   
   "Was the knife in an evidence bag?" A major question for any kind of forensic analysis is how the knife was handled, and what has happened to it since it was discovered. If it was handled by people not wearing gloves, they probably introduced contaminants, says Cassandra Kuba, a professor of anthropology at the California University of Pennsylvania. Mishandling the knife may mean fingerprints rubbed off, and adds to the likelihood there's contaminant DNA. 
   
   But it may be possible to rule out some contaminants — DNA samples from the construction worker who originally found it and from the cop whose possession it was in could help eliminate any contamination from them. Samples from the environment it was found in could also help scientists eliminate additional irrelevant DNA. "We have gotten DNA from buried items, there is really no way to tell which ones will give you meaningful DNA until you test," says Greg Hampikian, director of the Idaho Innocence Project. "Questions about possible contamination are really premature until we see what is recovered from the knife." 
   
   A little bit of background for the '90s babies: O. J. Simpson was a tremendously popular football player in the 1970s who parlayed his retirement into an acting career in the 1980s (he's in The Naked Gun, for instance). In June 1994, Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson was murdered, along with Ronald L. Goldman; their wounds indicated a knife, but no weapon was ever found. After leading police on a low-speed chase in his iconic white Ford Bronco, Simpson was arrested and stood trial for the murders. Without the knife, prosecutors relied on a blood-soaked glove — and that wasn't enough to convince a jury. Simpson was acquitted. He is now in prison for armed robbery; he was found guilty of that crime in 2008. 
   
   Correction: A previous version of this article characterized O.J. Simpson's police chase as "high-speed." It wasn't; he was driving slowly, but with a gun to his head so that police wouldn't approach.
target: – Yesterday felt like 1994 all over again, with OJ Simpson grabbing headlines across America after TMZ broke the news that the LAPD is testing a knife that was allegedly found nearly two decades ago on Simpson's former estate. More comments and context as the dust settles: The Los Angeles Times spoke with Mike Weber, whose Weber-Madgwick Inc. construction company demolished the Brentwood mansion in 1998. "I think it's a joke. No one on my crew found anything. I had instructed my people, 'If you find anything, don't keep it,'" he said, though he does concede, "Hundreds and hundreds of people were there after me." TMZ keeps its story going by speaking to Dr. Irwin Golden, the Deputy Medical Examiner who examined Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman's bodies. He believes a knife with a 4-inch blade could have been the murder weapon; the newly found knife has a 5-inch blade. NBC News' report throws plenty of water on the story. Its law enforcement sources tell it the knife is not consistent with the murder weapon but is akin to a small utility knife a gardener might carry, was given to now-retired LAPD officer in 2001 or 2002, and didn't have the appearance of having long-been buried. Former prosecutor Marcia Clark weighed in, too, with comments to Entertainment Tonight. "It might be a hoax ... but, of course, I'm glad the LAPD is taking it seriously and subjecting it to testing so we can find out." As far as those tests go, The Verge explains exactly how the forensic analysis will be carried out. And should the knife actually check out? The Washington Post asks and answers a slew of "tricky legal questions." Read more on the newly found knife here.