Mark Fuhrman, a former Los Angeles police detective who found the glove during the investigation into the OJ Simpson murder trial and was convicted of lying during testimony, has died. He was 74 years old.
Lynn Acebedo, the chief deputy coroner in Kootenai County, Idaho, said that Fuhrman died on 12 May. The county does not release the cause of death as a rule.
According to TMZ, Fuhrman died from an aggressive form of throat cancer. He was diagnosed last year and had been hospitalized about a week before his death. He initially underwent cancer treatment, but later chose to stop.
Who was Mark Fuhrman?
Fuhrman was an investigator in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
After , Fuhrman retired from the LAPD and relocated to Idaho with his wife, Caroline, and their two young children, where they established a 20-acre farm and raised chickens, goats, sheep and llamas.
In 1996, Fuhrman was charged with perjury and pleaded no contest. He later became a TV and radio commentator and wrote the book Murder in Brentwood about the killings.
A criminal-court jury found Simpson not guilty of murder in 1995, but a separate civil trial jury found him liable in 1997 for the deaths and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to relatives of Brown and Goldman. He served nine years in prison on unrelated charges and died in Las Vegas of prostate cancer in 2024 at the age of 76.
When did Mark Fuhrman come to limelight?
Fuhrman was one of the first two police detectives sent to investigate the killings of Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman, in Los Angeles in 1994.
At the , Fuhrman reported finding a bloody glove, but the credibility of this finding came under attack as the defence raised the prospect of racial bias.
He was accused of planting one of the gloves as a racist effort to frame Simpson for the killings.
Under cross-examination, Fuhrman testified that he had never made anti-Black racial slurs in the past decade, but a recording made by an aspiring screenwriter showed he had done so repeatedly.
Speaking with ABC News years later, Fuhrman said, “There was never a shred, never a hint, never a possibility, not a remote, not a million, not a billion-to-one possibility I could have planted anything. Nor would I have a reason to.”
(With agency inputs)
