Mark Fuhrman
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Mark Fuhrman (born February 5, 1952) was a detective in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) who found the bloody glove that linked O. J. Simpson to the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson.
In 1970, Fuhrman enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was honorably discharged in 1975 after attaining the rank of sergeant. He later joined the LAPD as a police officer, eventually becoming a police detective.
During the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson, the defense accused Fuhrman of being a racist and planting evidence. Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator for Fuhrman, stated in the Washington Post (August 22, 1995), "Fuhrman's life is in the toilet. He has no job, no future. People think he's a racist. His life is ruined. And for what? Because he found a key piece of evidence."
During the trial, Fuhrman denied ever using the word "nigger" for the previous ten years, yet the defense was able to find an audiotape contradicting that testimony. Fuhrman gave a taped interview in 1985 to Laura McKinney, an aspiring screenwriter working on a screenplay about female police officers. Fuhrman bragged about his membership in the secret organization within the LAPD known as MAW, or Men Against Women. In further interviews, Fuhrman bragged about beating and torturing gang members, "we had them begging that they'd never be gang members again, begging us." Fuhrman's negative attitude toward African-Americans was also evident in the taped interview. He said that he would tell blacks, "You do what you're told, understand, nigger?"
As a result, the prosecution was forced to label their main police witness as a "bad cop." With the jury absent on September 6, 1995, Fuhrman invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in Simpson trial. Fuhrman later pled no contest to a perjury charge and was sentenced to probation and fined $200.
After the trial, Fuhrman retired from the LAPD and moved to Sandpoint, Idaho and wrote a book about the O. J. case, called Murder in Brentwood. For his next book, Murder in Greenwich, he investigated the then-unsolved 1975 murder of Martha Moxley and uncovered new evidence indicating that the murderer was Michael Skakel, a relative of the Kennedy family. This eventually resulted in Skakel's arrest and conviction for the murder. The book was made into a TV movie in 2002, starring Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Oz) as Fuhrman.
Books
- Murder in Brentwood (February 1, 1997), ISBN 0895264218
- Murder in Greenwich: Who Killed Martha Moxley? (June 1, 1998), ISBN 0060191414
- Murder in Spokane: Catching a Serial Killer (May 22, 2001), ISBN 0060194375
- Death and Justice: An Expose of Oklahoma's Death Row Machine (September 2, 2003), ISBN 0060009179