Mark Fuhrman, flawed witness in O.J. Simpson trial and Sandpoint radio host, dies at 74

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 last week in North Idaho. He was 74.

The detective, who claimed to have found the bloody glove in the case in which Simpson was later exonerated, settled in Sandpoint where he became a radio host and later an author.

Lynn Acebedo, chief deputy Kootenai County coroner, confirmed to The Spokesman-Review that Fuhrman died on May 12.

Acebedo would not say where Fuhrman died and would not release the cause and manner of his death. Acebedo noted that under Idaho law a person’s death certificate can remain private for 50 years.

But Lyndda Bensky, who is Fuhrman’s manager, told the New York Times that his cause of death was throat cancer.

Soon after a California jury in October 1995 found Simpson not guilty of killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, Fuhrman pleaded no contest to perjury charges brought against him and was placed on probation.

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 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 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.

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 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.”

In January 1995, Fuhrman was interviewed by former Spokesman-Review reporter Bill Morlin at Spokane International Airport while Fuhrman was traveling through Spokane for house hunting.

“Do you really think it’s that sensational that I can buy a house in the country?’’ Fuhrman said, according to Morlin, who died in 2021.

In that same interview, Fuhrman denied his investigation of Simpson had anything to do with race.

“This is not a racial issue,’’ Fuhrman said. “This is about a guy that murdered someone. And he was sloppy.’’

After speaking with Morlin, Fuhrman then hit former Spokesman-Review photographer Dan McComb in the chest with a metal briefcase.

The photographer, who was 28 at the time, continued snapping pictures as he was pushed to the ground in the airport terminal. He was not injured, but four buttons were ripped from his shirt.

“I was just doing my job and I told him that,’’ McComb said in 1995. “But he kept getting more and more upset until he grabbed me by the shirt and shoved me to the ground.’’

Fuhrman, 43, was questioned but not arrested by airport police, who tried to track down a half-dozen witnesses.

Later that year, in August 1995, Los Angeles Police Chief Willie Williams indicated he thought the reported assault on McComb was “set up.”

“I’m not sure if the results have been made public, but it was my understanding that the results of that investigation have indicated that basically it was a set-up by that press group of Mr. Fuhrman,’’ Williams said at a news conference in 1995.

As for his views, some of 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, 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, Simpson’s lead lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, likened Fuhrman 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 Simpson not guilty.

Nonetheless, 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, and then struggled to reshape his life; he died in 2024 at 76.

In the end, the only person convicted in the case was 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 Simpson and that, as he said on Fox News in 1999, 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.

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 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, Connecticut, 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 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.”

Evergreen State native

Mark James Fuhrman was born on 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, 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’ 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 Fuhrman’s most serious cases had shown virtually no complaints about his 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.”

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, 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.”

Spokesman-Review reporter Thomas Clouse contributed to this report.