Mark Fuhrman, a Los Angeles police detective who in the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson went from being the prosecution’s star witness to its disastrous liability when defense lawyers used his past racist language to discredit him, died on May 12 in Kootenai County, Idaho. He was 74.
The Kootenai County coroner’s office confirmed the death, but did not say where in the county he died. Lynda Bensky, Mr. Fuhrman’s manager, said the cause was throat cancer.
Soon after a California jury found Mr. Simpson not guilty, Mr. Fuhrman pleaded no contest to perjury charges brought against him and was placed on probation. He went on to become a television commentator and the author of books about the Simpson case and other famous murders.
Mr. Fuhrman was among the Los Angeles police officers who across the years had responded more than once to calls for help from Nicole Brown Simpson, who said that she had been beaten by her husband, the former football star, and that she feared for her life. The Simpsons divorced in 1992.
Then, on June 12, 1994, she and a friend, Ronald L. Goldman, were stabbed to death on a walkway leading to her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. She was nearly decapitated.
From the start, police investigators believed that her former husband was the killer. Among the evidence they collected was a bloody glove found at the murder scene. But Mr. Simpson’s lawyers asserted during his 1995 trial that the police had planted the glove, though they offered nothing to support that allegation. The knife used in the attacks was never found.
Devastating to the prosecution’s case was Mr. Fuhrman’s turn as a witness — specifically his repeated past use of a racial epithet that he initially denied having uttered. That denial was shown to be untrue when the Simpson defense team introduced audiotapes of him using the word dozens of times. Mr. Fuhrman then acknowledged having used such language, but said it was in the context of creating a screenplay that he hoped would become a movie.
Other trial witnesses testified that Mr. Fuhrman had indeed used the word in earnest; one of them recalled his having said that if it were up to him, Black people “would be gathered together and burned.” On the tapes, he was heard saying that there were police officers who “would just love to take certain people and just take them to the alley and just blow their brains out.”
Some of Mr. Fuhrman’s Black and Latino police colleagues defended him, telling newspaper reporters that while they found him to be arrogant, they did not believe he was racist. Indeed, few complaints were brought against him during his years on the police force, from 1975 to 1995.
All the same, the damage to the Simpson prosecution was severe. In a second turn on the witness stand, Mr. Fuhrman invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. To discredit the detective further in his summation to a jury that had nine Black people among its 12 members, Mr. Simpson’s lead lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, likened him to Hitler and called him “a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist.”
It was a winning tactic. “This is now the Fuhrman trial,” Fred Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, observed sarcastically to Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne.
In a verdict anxiously awaited by a riveted country, the jury in September 1995 found Mr. Simpson not guilty.
Nonetheless, two years later, in a civil suit brought by the victims’ families, Mr. Simpson was found liable for the deaths and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. He paid only a little of it, and then struggled to reshape his life; he died in 2024 at 76.
In the end, the only person convicted in the case was Mr. Fuhrman. In October 1996, on the strength of a plea bargain arranged with prosecutors, he pleaded no contest to perjury charges and was sentenced to three years’ probation and fined $200. The charges were expunged in 1999.
More than once over the years, he apologized for his racial slurs, telling the television interviewer Larry King in 1997, for example, that it was “the worst piece of judgment that I’ve probably used” and that “I am not a racist.” He also insisted in interviews that he had not planted evidence against Mr. Simpson and that, as he said on Fox News in 1999, the “jury was set up to acquit; they figured the L.A.P.D. was entirely racist.”
After retiring from the police force in 1995, Mr. Fuhrman moved to Sandpoint, a city in northern Idaho. He briefly worked as an electrician’s apprentice, then turned to writing and to appearing as a Fox News commentator on prominent criminal cases. For a while, he had his own radio show on a station in Spokane, Wash., where he discussed local and national topics.
His first book, “Murder in Brentwood” (1997), was followed by other true-crime books, among them examinations of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the 1975 killing of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Conn., and a serial killer’s spree in Spokane. His “Murder in Greenwich” was made into a 2002 television movie that he wrote with Dave Erickson.
In the Brentwood book, he once again said that he should not have used racist language, but also maintained that he had been made “a scapegoat” in the Simpson case and that “policemen never get the benefit of the doubt.”
Mark James Fuhrman was born on Feb. 5, 1952, in Eatonville, Wash., to Ralph Fuhrman, a truck driver and carpenter, and Billie (Reid) Fuhrman, a waitress. His parents divorced when he was 7.
He attended high schools in Gig Harbor and Belfair, and after graduating in 1970 enlisted in the Marines, where he trained as a machine-gunner and military policeman. With the rank of sergeant, he was stationed for a time on an amphibious assault ship along the Vietnamese coast.
After leaving the Marines in 1975, he enrolled in Los Angeles’s police academy, graduating second in his class that year and beginning a new career as a patrolman in the city’s poorer precincts.
In 1981 he sought, and won, paid leave, saying that racist feelings and the stress of the job had gotten the better of him. A year later, he said in an interview with a psychiatrist that he had tortured suspected criminals and turned faces to “mush.” But the city felt that he was conning it in hopes of winning a pension, and restored him to active duty in 1983.
He was promoted to detective in 1989. As the Simpson case unfolded in 1995, a senior official in the Los Angeles public defender’s office told a reporter from The New York Times that a review of Mr. Fuhrman’s most serious cases had shown virtually no complaints about his planting evidence or about racial misconduct.
Mr. Fuhrman was married and divorced three times from 1973 to 2000: to Barbara Koop, Janet Sosbee and Caroline Lody. His survivors include a daughter, Haley, and a son, Cole, from his marriage to Ms. Lody, and his wife, Kelly Fuhrman.
In 1995, Ms. Sosbee told The Times that she thought Mr. Fuhrman “had a real identity problem.”
She added, “On the outside Mark is very poised, but inside he had the lowest self-esteem you can imagine.”
In the Larry King interview, Mr. Fuhrman acknowledged making errors in the Simpson case and admitted that some of the police work had been “sloppy.”
But it was unlikely, he said, that he would ever convince people that he was not in any way motivated by racism: “I don’t think I’m going to ever change that completely.”
Charlotte Dulany contributed reporting.
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