Mark Fuhrman, L.A. police detective in O.J. Simpson murder case, has died

Former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman, who was convicted of lying during testimony at the O.J. Simpson murder trial, has died. He was 74.

Fuhrman was one of the first two police detectives sent to investigate the 1994 killings of Simpson's ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ronald Goldman, in Los Angeles. He reported finding a bloody glove at Simpson's home but his credibility came under withering attack during the trial as the defence raised the prospect of racial bias.

Under cross-examination, Fuhrman testified that he had never made anti-Black racial slurs over the previous 10 years, but a recording made by an aspiring screenwriter showed he had done so repeatedly.

Lynn Acebedo, the chief deputy coroner in Kootenai County, Idaho, said that Fuhrman died May 12. The county does not release the cause of death as a rule.

Fuhrman retired from the Los Angeles Police Department after Simpson's 1995 acquittal. He subsequently moved to Idaho with his wife Caroline and their young daughter and son and set up a 20-acre farm, raising 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 US 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.