Mark Fuhrman

Mark James Fuhrman was born on February 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 seven, and his mother briefly remarried. He grew up in western Washington and attended high schools in Gig Harbor (Peninsula High School) and Belfair.

After graduating from high school in 1970, Fuhrman enlisted in the United States Marine Corps at 18. He trained as a machine gunner and military policeman. His Vietnam War era service was spent aboard the amphibious assault ship USS New Orleans, stationed off the Vietnamese coast. He reached the rank of sergeant and was honorably discharged in 1975. He then entered the Los Angeles Police Academy and graduated second in his class in 1975.

Fuhrman joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a patrol officer in 1975. In 1981 he requested workers' compensation leave, and in psychiatric interviews in 1981 and 1982 he described racist feelings and claimed to have used violence on suspects. Several psychiatrists recommended he be removed from duty, but the City of Los Angeles argued his statements were a ruse to win a stress disability pension. He lost the pension case and an appeal, and returned to active duty in 1983.

In 1985 he responded to a domestic violence call at the home of O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson. In a 2016 interview for O.J.: Made in America he said he found Simpson breaking a car windshield with a baseball bat and offered Nicole the chance to press charges, which she declined. He was promoted to detective in 1989. In October 1994 he worked to clear Arrick Harris, a Black man he believed had been falsely implicated in a murder. A review by the Los Angeles public defender's office reported in 1995 found virtually no complaints about him planting evidence or racial misconduct. He retired from the LAPD in 1995 after 20 years.

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered outside her Brentwood condominium on the night of June 12, 1994. Fuhrman and his supervisor Ronald Phillips were the first detectives on the scene in the early hours of June 13, before lead detectives Philip Vannatter and Tom Lange took over. At Simpson's Rockingham Avenue estate Fuhrman found blood drops on a white Ford Bronco, climbed the wall to let the other detectives in, and found a bloody right-hand glove that matched a left-hand glove found at the murder scene. DNA tests showed it was soaked in the blood of both victims.

In July 1994 The New Yorker reported that the defense planned to accuse Fuhrman of planting the glove. He testified for the prosecution beginning on March 9, 1995, and on cross-examination by F. Lee Bailey denied having used the n-word in the previous ten years. On August 31, 1995, Judge Lance Ito allowed evidence that he had lied about it. From September 5 the defense presented screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny's taped interviews with Fuhrman, recorded between 1985 and 1994, along with witnesses Kathleen Bell, Natalie Singer and Roderic Hodge. The jury heard only two short excerpts. On September 6, outside the jury's presence, Fuhrman invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked whether he had planted or manufactured evidence.

In closing argument Johnnie Cochran called him a lying, perjuring, genocidal racist. Simpson was acquitted on October 3, 1995. Fuhrman's perjury is widely seen as one of the main reasons, although no evidence was ever presented that he planted anything. Prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi later argued that planting the glove would have required an implausible conspiracy.

After moving to Sandpoint, Idaho, Fuhrman briefly worked as an electrician's apprentice before turning to writing. Murder in Brentwood (1997), with a foreword by Vincent Bugliosi, gave his account of the Simpson investigation. Murder in Greenwich (1998) investigated the 1975 killing of Martha Moxley and named Michael Skakel as the killer. Skakel was convicted in 2002, but the conviction was later overturned. The book became a 2002 television film, which Fuhrman wrote with Dave Erickson, with Christopher Meloni playing him.

Later books were Murder in Spokane: Catching a Serial Killer (2001), on Robert Lee Yates; Death and Justice: An Expose of Oklahoma's Death Row Machine (2003); Silent Witness (2005), on the Terri Schiavo case; A Simple Act of Murder: November 22, 1963 (2006), on the Kennedy assassination; and The Murder Business (2009).

He co-hosted All About Crime on KXLY-AM in Spokane from January 1998, hosted solo from 2001, then hosted The Mark Fuhrman Show on KGA-AM until it ended in November 2007. He was a regular Fox News forensic and crime scene commentator and a frequent guest of Sean Hannity, and from 2018 to 2022 he presented The Fuhrman Diaries on Fox Nation, eight seasons and specials on cases from the JFK assassination to the Zodiac Killer.

Fuhrman was married and divorced three times between 1973 and 2000: to Barbara Koop, to Janet Sosbee (divorced 1980, per People), and to Caroline Lody, with whom he moved to Sandpoint in 1995. According to The Spokesman-Review and People, his daughter Haley and son Cole were born during his marriage to Lody (Wikipedia says the son was born to his fourth wife). He later married Kelly Fuhrman, a board certified nurse practitioner who opened Lakeside Medicine and Aesthetics in Sandpoint. He lived in Sandpoint for years before settling in Kootenai County, Idaho. He collected war memorabilia and medals, including German and Nazi era medals that drew attention during the Simpson trial.

Fuhrman maintained for the rest of his life that he had not planted evidence and that he was not a racist, while apologizing for the language on the tapes, which he called immature, irresponsible ramblings made in hope of selling a screenplay. He argued that the LAPD could have arrested Simpson on June 13, 1994, that colleagues mishandled evidence, including a bloody fingerprint he found on Nicole Brown Simpson's gate, and that he had been made a scapegoat. He also argued that Judge Ito should not have heard the case because Ito's wife, LAPD Captain Margaret York, had been his superior. In his books he criticized Oklahoma's handling of capital cases and the Warren Commission's single-bullet theory, while concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

Fuhrman's testimony turned the Simpson case, in the words of Ron Goldman's father Fred Goldman, into the Fuhrman trial. He became a lasting symbol of debates over race and policing in Los Angeles in the years after the Rodney King beating. His move to North Idaho is credited by the Sandpoint Reader with starting a trend of retired Southern California police officers relocating to the area. His later true crime work, especially on the Moxley case, brought renewed attention to cold cases.

No major awards or honours have been documented. He reached the rank of sergeant in the Marine Corps and received an honorable discharge in 1975, graduated second in his Los Angeles Police Academy class the same year, and was promoted to detective in 1989.

Christopher Meloni played Fuhrman in the 2002 television film Murder in Greenwich. Steven Pasquale played him in the 2016 FX series The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and Alexander Man played him in Joshua Newton's film Nicole and O.J. He was interviewed in Ezra Edelman's 2016 documentary O.J.: Made in America and was referenced in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Captain America: Civil War.

Fuhrman's 1981 and 1982 psychiatric interviews, the McKinny tapes and witness testimony at the Simpson trial documented his repeated use of racist language and his claims of violence against suspects. A later police investigation concluded he had grossly exaggerated the violent claims, and several of his Black and Latino former colleagues said they did not believe he was racist. In January 1995, at Spokane International Airport, he shoved Spokesman-Review photographer Dan McComb to the ground; he was questioned but not arrested. In 1996 he pleaded no contest to felony perjury, receiving three years' probation and a $200 fine; probation ended early in 1998 and the charge was expunged in 1999.

Fuhrman died on May 12, 2026, in Kootenai County, Idaho, aged 74. His death became public on May 18, 2026, first reported by TMZ, and was confirmed by Lynn Acebedo, chief deputy Kootenai County coroner, who declined to say where he died or release the cause and manner of death. His manager, Lyndda Bensky, told The New York Times that the cause was throat cancer. He was survived by his wife Kelly and his children Haley and Cole. Funeral and burial details have not been made public.