Former Los Angeles Police Detective Mark Fuhrman, a central figure in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, has died at age 74. Lynn Acebedo, the chief deputy coroner in Kootenai County, Idaho, confirmed that Fuhrman died on May 12. The county does not release causes of death as a matter of policy.

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. During the investigation, he reported finding a bloody glove at Simpson's home, which became a key piece of evidence in the case.

However, Fuhrman's credibility came under severe attack during the trial when the defense raised questions about potential racial bias. Under cross-examination, Fuhrman testified that he had not made anti-Black racial slurs in the past decade. This testimony was later contradicted by audio recordings made by an aspiring screenwriter that captured him using such language repeatedly.

In 1996, Fuhrman was charged with perjury and pleaded no contest to the charges. He retired from the Los Angeles Police Department after Simpson's 1995 acquittal and subsequently moved to Idaho with his wife Caroline and their children, where they established a 20-acre farm raising livestock.

After leaving law enforcement, Fuhrman became a television and radio commentator and wrote a book titled "Murder in Brentwood" about the killings. While a criminal court jury found Simpson not guilty of murder in 1995, a separate civil trial jury found him liable for the deaths in 1997 and ordered him to pay $33.5 million to relatives of the victims. Simpson later served nine years in prison on unrelated charges and died in Las Vegas in 2024.