Former L.A. Police Chief Calls Fuhrman Tapes Exaggeration Officials’ Findings Didn’t Match Detective’s Account, Gates Says
Former Los Angeles police chief Daryl F. Gates Sunday dismissed as exaggeration former LAPD detective Mark Fuhrman’s audiotaped description of a brutal beating of suspects in a 1978 police shooting, saying that the LAPD’s own findings in the case don’t match Fuhrman’s account.
“That was fully investigated, thoroughly investigated, and the department did not find any of that to be true. So this is an exaggeration,” Gates said on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley.”
Fuhrman’s graphic taped accounts, conducted as background material for a screenplay about police officers with a North Carolina professor, have become a central focus of the O.J. Simpson murder trial as the defense tries to portray Fuhrman as a rogue cop who may have planted evidence to incriminate the former football great.
Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey, also appearing on the television interview program, asserted that if Fuhrman - and the evidence he handled - is discredited, the prosecution’s case against Simpson would be destroyed.
Countered Gates: “The evidence that has been presented by the Los Angeles Police Department and the prosecution is overwhelming in this case.”
Gates, who was police chief at the time of the 1978 Boyle Heights incident mentioned on the tapes, said he wasn’t sure why Fuhrman would have exaggerated. “I guess the more provocative you are today, the better … television sells, the better books sell. It’s the only thing I can see as a motive for Mark having done all of this.”
Gates noted that an LAPD sergeant on the scene in 1978, now retired, also recently denied that Fuhrman’s taped account is an accurate rendering of the incident.
Asked if the scenario Fuhrman describes on tape could have occurred and then been covered up, Gates said, “Oh, absolutely not.”
The Fuhrman audiotapes, which Superior Court Judge Lance Ito has not yet decided whether the Simpson jury will listen to, were recorded with aspiring screenwriter and professor Laura Hart McKinny. In transcripts shared with The Los Angeles Times, Fuhrman describes investigating a shooting at a housing project. In the transcript, Fuhrman talks about a bloody beating by police of suspects in the 1978 shooting of two policemen.
“We basically tortured them,” Fuhrman said in the transcript. “They had pictures of the walls with blood all the way to the ceiling and finger marks of trying to crawl out of the room.”
In his segment on the ABC show, Bailey said that if jurors hear the Fuhrman tapes, they will have a visceral reaction.
“I think that the jury is going to have to have very strong doubts as to how that evidence got where it was claimed to have been found,” he said. “And if they believe that some evidence was planted, I think they will equate that with an innocent defendant and I think their deliberations will be swift.”