Mark Fuhrman, a Los Angeles police detective who in the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson went from being the prosecution’s star witness to its disastrous liability when defense lawyers used his past racist language to discredit him, died on May 12 in Kootenai County, Idaho. He was 74.

Lynda Bensky, Fuhrman’s manager, said the cause was throat cancer.

Soon after a California jury found Simpson not guilty, Fuhrman pleaded no contest to perjury charges and was placed on probation. He went on to become a television commentator and the author of books about the Simpson case and other famous killings.

Fuhrman was among the Los Angeles police officers who across the years had responded to calls for help from Nicole Brown Simpson, who said that she had been beaten by her husband and that she feared for her life.

On June 12, 1994, she and a friend, Ronald L. Goldman, were stabbed to death on a walkway leading to her condominium in Los Angeles.

From the start, investigators believed Simpson was the killer. Among the evidence they collected was a bloody glove found at the scene. But Simpson’s lawyers asserted during his 1995 trial that police had planted the glove, though they offered nothing to support that allegation.

Devastating to the prosecution’s case was Fuhrman’s turn as a witness — specifically his repeated past use of a racial epithet that he initially denied having uttered. That denial was shown to be untrue when the Simpson defense team introduced audiotapes of him using the word dozens of times.

One trial witness recalled his having said that if it were up to him, Black people “would be gathered together and burned.” On the tapes, he was heard saying there were police officers who “would just love to take certain people and just take them to the alley and just blow their brains out.”

The jury in September 1995 found Simpson not guilty.

Fuhrman Pleaded No Contest to Perjury

In the end, the only person convicted in the case was Fuhrman. In October 1996, in a plea bargain, he pleaded no contest to perjury charges and was sentenced to three years’ probation and fined $200.

More than once over the years, he apologized for his racial slurs, telling Larry King in 1997, for example, that it was “the worst piece of judgment that I’ve probably used” and that “I am not a racist.”

Fuhrman was married and divorced three times from 1973 to 2000: to Barbara Koop, Janet Sosbee and Caroline Lody. His survivors include a daughter, Haley, and a son, Cole, from his marriage to Lody, and his wife, Kelly Fuhrman.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Clyde Haberman

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