Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles Police Department detective whose name became inseparable from the O.J. Simpson murder trial, died on May 12 in Idaho, according to Rolling Stone. He was 74. The Kootenai County coroner's office confirmed the death, and a source told the outlet that Fuhrman had been battling cancer. A cause of death was not officially disclosed.
Fuhrman was 42 when he became an international figure in the summer of 1994. He was the investigator who discovered the bloody glove at Simpson's Rockingham estate following the stabbing deaths of Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman on June 12 of that year. The case became known as the Trial of the Century, and Fuhrman was a central witness for the prosecution.
His role in the trial unraveled when a 1985 recording surfaced of him using the n-word and boasting about mistreating Black people. Fuhrman had testified that he had not used the slur in a decade. The contradiction led to a felony perjury conviction that ended his police career. He retired from the LAPD in August 1995 while the trial was still ongoing, and later pleaded no contest to perjury charges, receiving probation.
Simpson's defense team, widely referred to as the dream team, used the recordings to argue that Fuhrman had planted the glove at Simpson's estate as part of a racially motivated effort to frame their client. An Los Angeles jury ultimately found Simpson not guilty.
Fuhrman's former LAPD partner, Roberto Alaniz, pushed back against that characterization in comments to Rolling Stone. Alaniz said he was with Fuhrman on the night they met screenwriter Laura McKinny on a sidewalk in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. He described McKinny as having recruited Fuhrman as a consultant on a writing project.
"She wanted her lines to be in the police vernacular, how a rogue cop would say them," Alaniz said. "She gave him the scenarios, and he put them in street vernacular. We talked about it after the trial, when I went to visit him. That's what got him to use the n-word, those tapes for the screenplay."
Alaniz, who spent decades on the force before retiring, said he would not have remained partners with Fuhrman if he believed him to be racist.
"My personal experience is that he was a great police officer, despite what was portrayed in the O.J. trial. I never saw him disrespecting anyone," Alaniz said. "He worked with me. I'm Mexican. As a police officer, he didn't display anything negative against any minority we ran across."
After his conviction and retirement, Fuhrman built a second career as a true crime writer and Fox News commentator. Kato Kaelin, the Simpson houseguest who testified at the trial, offered brief condolences, saying it was always sad to learn of someone's passing and offering thoughts to Fuhrman's family.
