Murder in Brentwood (35 page)

The next morning I was supposed to go elk hunting with Scott Clawson, my boss. I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, put on my hunting jacket, picked up my rifle, and walked out of my house. I heard footsteps, and then lights shined in my eyes. Somebody shouted at me:

“Mr. Fuhrman, could we ask you a few questions?”

I went back inside cursing and shouting. No elk hunting for me that season.

A while later, too angry to go back to sleep, I answered the phone and heard the same voice that had already ruined my morning: “We’d really like to talk to you. Let you tell your side of the story.”

Yeah, I’m sure they would have.

“Listen,” I told them. “First, it’s October in Idaho. It’s going to start getting pretty cold out there. In here by the fire, I’m going to stay nice and warm. Another thing: If you’re hungry, call Second Avenue Pizza. Just tell them you’re across the street from Fuhrman’s house.”

That’s all the information the media was going to get from me. I suppose that other people in my situation would have held press conferences and submitted to interviews. But I didn’t see how it would do any good. The trial was over, the verdict was in. Whatever I said wasn’t going to bring the killer of Ron and Nicole to justice. While I certainly didn’t enjoy constant criticism by people who didn’t know me from Adam, I knew that giving them anything would only prolong the whole sordid drama. So I kept my silence and waited for them to go away.

It was almost enjoyable to embarrass the media whenever I got the chance. When they tried surveillance, locals reported them. Even though the media was set up with tag teams for a round-the-clock stakeout of our house, we virtually came and went at will. The neighbors would create a diversion, and when the media people fell for it, my family and I could make our moves.

I always wondered what the media would ask if they ever caught up lo me. Would I hey ask if I thought Simpson was guilty?

I don’t think the verdict was Americas verdict. There are a bunch of people in Los Angeles, black and white, who are either star-struck or have a chip on their shoulders. They want to think that a likeable football star isn’t capable of brutally murdering his wife and her friend. Or they want to repay the city and police of Los Angeles for Rodney King. Either way, they’re wrong and the rest of the country knows it, even if they refuse to admit it, and the media will never tell the true story.

O.J. Simpson is not a symbol for racial prejudice or a victim of police misconduct or an example of the absurd argument that a black man cannot get a fair trial in America unless he’s a millionaire. And I’m not a rogue cop or a poster boy for police racism or an indictment of the LAPD. I was just a detective whose phone happened to ring at 1:00 in the morning. If it had been my choice, I would have stayed in bed. But I didn’t have a choice; I had a job. And I did my best.

Race is the original sin of American society. But we’re not going to get rid of it unless we start dealing with it honestly. The vast majority of black people in America are honest, decent, law-abiding people. I know that because I’ve worked in their neighborhoods, protecting them from criminals. But within those neighborhoods, the criminals are predominantly black.

Most black criminals prey on black victims. They rob and kill people, they sell drugs, they make the inner cities uninhabitable. Of course, there are white criminals, too. But the black community is more threatened by people of their own race in their own neighborhoods. And the black community is more threatened by black criminals than by white cops. Sure, police officers aren’t perfect. Sometimes we make mistakes or give in to the immense pressure of an impossible job. But we’re trying to do good. If we didn’t think we could make a difference in peoples lives, make their streets safer, and protect them from people they can’t protect themselves against, then we wouldn’t have become cops in the first place.

It should be so obvious that I don’t have to say it, but when you take an oath to become a policeman, you vow to protect and serve all people, no matter what color, religion, national heritage, or whatever. I took that oath very seriously, and so do most other cops.

Racism is stupid, especially for a cop. A police officer has to work in communities where there are often people of many races, and it’s his job to protect them. And the last thing he wants to do is walk into a case with prejudices or preconceptions. You can’t be a racist and a good policeman.

Life on the street is too complex for ideology. That’s why lawyers, academics, and other intellectuals are so obsessed with race. They can afford to be; they don’t live in the real world. Chris Darden said that he had obligations as a prosecutor and as a black man. I’m not sure exactly what he means, but it sounds as if he thought he had to make a choice between doing his job and remaining loyal to his race. If he was a cop and worried about such things, I wouldn’t want Chris Darden as a partner.

Cops don’t have the luxury of believing what they want to believe. They have to look at things honestly. They have to listen to the evidence and follow where it leads them. Any preconceptions about who did or did not do the crime, or about how the crime was committed, are distractions that will keep them from doing their job.

There is no more racism in the LAPD than any other large organization. But almost everywhere else, the racism is silent and less vocal. A cop’s world is full of racism, hatred, anger, and violence. A cop has to deal with racism every day, often from the people he’s trying to arrest or even trying to help. It doesn’t make sense, but then much of what a cop sees doesn’t make any sense. I remember my first autopsy back in 1977. On the table next to it was the body of a beautiful three-year-old girl who had been beaten to death by her parents. Why does this happen? I don’t know. But if you’re a policeman, you can’t ask why. It’s the wrong question. And it will make you crazy.

Most jobs you can walk away from. If you don’t want to do an assignment, yon can hand it off to someone else. But cops don’t have that luxury. We’ve got to deal with things that nobody else wants to deal with. Its called doing our job. My job as a homicide detective was to investigate murders, no matter where those investigations led.

If I had found evidence at Bundy that it was my own brother who had committed the double murder, I would have implicated and indicted him. If the murder suspect had been my friend, someone I knew, or anybody other than O.J. Simpson, I would have done exactly what I did.

Let’s turn the tables on race. Say I was a black detective, a vocal activist for radical black causes, active member of the Muslim Party, and supporter of the Black Panthers. Would Simpson be guilty now? What if all that applied, and O.J. was white-would race become an issue in his trial?

Because Fin white and Simpson is black, I’m seen as a racist and he’s voted not guilty. It has no basis in fact, but people believe what they want to believe. And it was a lot easier for many people to believe that an LAPD detective was a suspect-framing racist than it was for them to believe that O.J. Simpson murdered two people.

Race is a murkier issue than many people like to think. Since we have become more aware of the power and persistence of racial animosity, a cruel double standard has emerged that has done little to advance racial equality and much to widen the racial divide in our society. Anyone charged with being a racist is immediately presumed guilty. The charge itself is a term of guilt, and can be made without regard to the persons life and character. A few insensitive or unthinking words, a human mistake, and that person is branded for life.

Because it is impossible to prove a negative, people charged with racism can never completely silence their critics. Every defense is seen as an excuse or a cliché. When the defense lawyers started claiming I was a racist, I immediately thought of all my black friends. But that would have sounded like the familiar refrain, “Some of my best friends are....”

Those who make charges of racism always take the moral high ground, and others are quick to scramble for position.

Meanwhile, all this finger pointing and blame casting merely divides the two races farther. Throughout the trial, there were millions of words written and spoken about racism. But the result has only been an increase in racial tension. Race was and still is a problem in Los Angeles because no one wants to talk about it rationally or candidly.

In order to have a story, you must have conflict, and conflict always plays better in the starkest terms, like black and white. Race was used in the trial as a diversion and excuse. Even Chris Darden tried to get out of handling my testimony, a job that might have tarnished his image as a down brother. He should have just done his duty as a prosecutor and nailed O.J. Simpson, whether he was black, white, or pink polka-dotted.

The prosecution knew that the defense’s race strategy and conspiracy theories were garbage, but they wouldn’t fight back because they were afraid of being branded racists. So they never stood up and defended their star witness, the one person who found almost every important piece of evidence, and had not made any mistakes.

The media is equally to blame. As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker shortly after the verdict:

Fear of being called racist transcended even/thing in that newsroom. This extended, I think, even to discussions of the evidence. The safe course for those of us covering the case was to nitpick along with the defense attorneys.... Our caution and fear, however, misled. The case against Simpson was simply overwhelming. When we said otherwise, we lied to the audience that trusted us.

But by the time Toobin wrote this, it was already too late. Simpson was acquitted, and most of the media was off being cautious and fearful, misleading their audience about other stories.

The entire Simpson trial was not a search for the truth or a journey to justice or any oilier courtroom cliché. It was theater, or more accurately, television. If O.J. Simpson wasn’t a millionaire celebrity and the trial hadn’t been televised, then nobody would have thought twice about Mark Fuhrman, LAPD detective. I would have been able to retire in peace and live the rest of my life without having to apologize to people because they think I’m someone I’m not. I wouldn’t have to explain to my children why they can’t lead a normal life. My wife wouldn’t have to share the pain of my own small failures and monumental bad luck.

Throughout the media frenzy, I was angry. But I tried not to feel sorry for myself. There were innocent victims involved here who had suffered much more than I had. And they had often been forgotten in much of the hysteria and hype over the verdict. First of all, there were Ron and Nicole and their families, who had suffered not only the tragedy of murder but the avoidable travesty of watching the killer go free. Then there was my family.

My family did nothing wrong and had nothing to do with the Simpson case, except for the fact that they were related to me. I made some mistakes and said some awful things. Even if it’s a stretch, and irrelevant to the case, you can’t say I was an entirely innocent victim. But my wife and kids should never have been brought into it. My wife suffered pain, embarrassment, and hassles that still haven’t ended. We had to cover our children in their coats to sneak them in and out of the house. My daughter would look through the blinds and ask, “Are the bad people still out there?” That’s something she will always remember, something I will have to explain. A five-year-old girl should never have to go through this. But at least I have my kids, and I didn’t murder their mother. O.J. Simpson also has a young daughter. On her birthday, the Juice played golf.

After the verdict, Simpson revealed himself to be either utterly without remorse or completely uncaring about the fact that the mother of his children had been brutally murdered and her killer was apparently walking free. When he went golfing, he made jokes about his gloves for the television cameras. He told a journalist that since the verdict he learned that “fame and wealth are illusions. The only thing that endures is character.”

I always thought that a persons character is reflected in the people around him, his friends and colleagues. But after the verdict, Simpson was dumped by his girlfriend Paula Barbieri, who complained that when they were first reunited, he seemed more concerned with getting photos for the tabloid he had sold an exclusive story to than rebuilding their relationship. His talent agency dumped him, as did all the companies he used to shill for. He was booted from his beloved country clubs. Most of his friends couldn’t run away fast enough from him. Now Simpson is alone and abandoned. He can’t go back to his old life, and he can’t even envision a new one. Locked behind the iron bars of his Rockingham estate, surrounded by bodyguards and lawyers, he’s a prisoner in his own house.

Chapter 27

AFTERMATH

God bless you, and may you find peace in your life. Move on. You’ve done your duty.

FROM A LETTER TO MARK FUHRMAN

O.J. SIMPSON’S TRIAL CONTINUES, as it will even after the civil trial is over. For some reason, we cannot put the case behind us, even those of us who would prefer it end. It has become an unending national soap opera.

But at least some things have changed. The media is no longer staked out in front of my house, and my family and I can begin to have some semblance of a normal life. Eventually, the media got tired of having the people of Sandpoint telling them to get off their street and out of their town.

I finished fixing up our house in town, and we put it on the market in January of last year. Although it was a time of year that few people buy houses, we were able to sell it and buy a new place. Our new home is on a twenty-acre farm outside Sandpoint. Once we moved, our lives improved immensely. People we did not want to see could not get to us; you can’t drive two hundred yards down a driveway onto a farm and say it is not trespassing. The media couldn’t plant themselves on the sidewalk and force us to sneak in and out of our own house.

But that doesn’t mean that we were free of them entirely. One time a media car drove down my neighbors driveway and parked. They started filming our house from inside their car. A friend of mine came by and saw them. He drove up right behind the media car, parked his truck and left it there. The media crew complained that they wouldn’t be able to get out.