Mark Fuhrman, the Los Angeles detective whose testimony helped sink the prosecution during O.J. Simpson’s 1995 murder trial, died May 12 in Kootenai County, Idaho. He was 74.
Mark Fuhrman’s role in the O.J. Simpson case ended with a turnaround that still echoes in the way Americans talk about race, credibility, and the power of a single witness.
Fuhrman. the Los Angeles police detective who had been treated as the prosecution’s star in the 1995 murder trial. died 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, Fuhrman’s manager, said the cause was throat cancer.
In 1995, the defense tore at the heart of his credibility by focusing on his past use of racist language. Fuhrman had initially denied using a racial epithet. but audiotapes introduced during the trial showed him using the word dozens of times. In the courtroom record. the collapse wasn’t just in what jurors heard—it was in what the prosecution lost when Fuhrman’s testimony became a liability.
Simpson, found not guilty by a California jury in September 1995, watched that shift unfold as the case consumed the country. Fuhrman later pleaded no contest to perjury charges and was placed on probation. After the trial, he became a television commentator and wrote books about the Simpson case and other high-profile killings.
Fuhrman was among the Los Angeles police officers who repeatedly responded over the years to calls for help from Nicole Brown Simpson. Brown Simpson told people she had been beaten by her husband, the former football star, and that she feared for her life. The couple divorced in 1992.
On June 12, 1994, Brown Simpson and her 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 Brown Simpson’s former husband was the killer. Investigators collected evidence including a bloody glove found at the murder scene. Simpson’s lawyers argued during the 1995 trial that the police had planted the glove, offering no support for that allegation. The knife used in the attacks was never found.
As the case shifted to the witness stand, Fuhrman’s testimony became the moment the prosecution couldn’t recover from. In his second turn as a witness, Fuhrman invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In summation, Simpson’s lead lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, likened Fuhrman to Hitler and called him “a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist.”.
Ronald Goldman’s father, Fred Goldman, described the feeling outside the courtroom with a line that landed like a verdict before the verdict. “This is now the Fuhrman trial,” he observed sarcastically to Vanity Fair’s Dominick Dunne.
When the jury returned in September 1995, Simpson was found not guilty. But the story did not end there. Two years later. in a civil suit brought by the victims’ families. Simpson was found liable for the deaths and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. He paid only a little of it, then struggled to reshape his life; he died in 2024 at 76.
In the criminal case, the only person convicted was Fuhrman. In October 1996, through a plea bargain arranged with prosecutors, he pleaded no contest to perjury charges. The sentence was three years’ probation and a fine of $200. The charges were expunged in 1999.
Over the years. Fuhrman apologized for his racial slurs. including in a 1997 interview with television host Larry King when he said it was “the worst piece of judgment that I’ve probably used” and added. “I am not a racist.” He also insisted in interviews that he had not planted evidence against Simpson. In a 1999 appearance on Fox News. he said. “The jury was set up to acquit; they figured the LAPD was entirely racist.”.
After retiring from the police force in 1995, Fuhrman moved to Sandpoint, a city in northern Idaho. He briefly worked as an electrician’s apprentice, then turned to writing. He also appeared as a Fox News commentator on prominent criminal cases. For a while, he hosted his own radio show on a station in Spokane, Washington, discussing local and national topics.
His first book, “Murder in Brentwood” (1997), was followed by other true-crime books, including examinations of the John F. Kennedy assassination, the 1975 killing of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a serial killer’s spree in Spokane. “Murder in Greenwich” was made into a 2002 television movie that he wrote with Dave Erickson.
In “Brentwood,” Fuhrman again said he should not have used racist language, while also maintaining that he had been made “a scapegoat” in the Simpson case and that “policemen never get the benefit of the doubt.”
Fuhrman, whose full name was Mark James Fuhrman, was born Feb. 5, 1952, in Eatonville, Washington, 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. After graduating in 1970, he 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.
He left the Marines in 1975, enrolled in Los Angeles’ police academy, graduated second in his class that year, and began a new career as a patrolman in the city’s poorer precincts.
In 1981. he sought and won paid leave. saying 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 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 Fuhrman’s most serious cases had shown virtually no complaints about planting evidence or about racial misconduct.
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 Lody, and his wife, Kelly Fuhrman.
In 1995, Sosbee told The Times that she thought Fuhrman “had a real identity problem,” adding, “On the outside, Mark is very poised, but inside he had the lowest self-esteem you can imagine.”
In the Larry King interview. Fuhrman acknowledged making errors in the Simpson case and admitted that some of the police work had been “sloppy.” He also said he did not think he would ever be able to convince people that he was not motivated by racism: “I don’t think I’m going to ever change that completely.”.
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