14. Mark Fuhrman's lies and delusions
Copyright © 2000 by Dan E. Moldea
(Also see: "Mark Fuhrman’s continuing false and misleading statements")
While working feverishly to meet the tight deadline for my book with Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter, I followed, with some concern, the attempts by the media to rehabilitate the reputation of the racist junior detective Mark Fuhrman. A high-school dropout, Fuhrman was in the midst of three-years' probation for perjury after his "no-contest" plea in early-October 1996 for making false statements during his sworn testimony at O. J. Simpson's criminal trial.
Diane Sawyer of ABC's Prime Time Live had softballed Fuhrman during an interview broadcast on October 8. That was followed by an announcement in the October 28 edition of Publishers Weekly that Regnery Publishing, a conservative, Washington-based publishing house, had purchased Fuhrman's book, which would be released shortly after ours.
Predicting that Lange and Vannatter were going to be the villains in Fuhrman's book, I advised the detectives to launch a full-scale preemptive strike against Fuhrman in our book. However, even though they couldn't stand Fuhrman and his behavior during the Simpson trial, they rejected my suggestion, still harboring a basic loyalty towards this fellow cop. In fact, our book already contained a qualified defense of Fuhrman, who had been accused by Simpson's attorneys of planting evidence at the murder scene and at Simpson's residence.
In short, because of the timing of his appearance at the crime scene, Fuhrman couldn't have planted this evidence, which had already been identified. It was simply impossible. And his perjury plea was limited to his repeated denials of using the N-word while under cross-examination by defense counsel F. Lee Bailey.
Then, just before I completed our manuscript, a friend of mine faxed me the galleys to an upcoming story about Fuhrman in Vanity Fair. Journalist H. G. Bissinger, the author of this valentine to Fuhrman, had allowed him to charge that Lange and Vannatter had missed, among other items of evidence, a "bloody fingerprint" on the back gate of Nicole Brown's residence on South Bundy, the scene of the murders. Clearly, Bissinger, a Pulitzer Prize winner, never bother to check this and Fuhrman's other bogus observations at the crime scene, allowing his attacks on Lange and Vannatter to go unchallenged.
After reading Bissenger's story, I went through my files and found a copy of Fuhrman's three pages of crime-scene notes, which provided clearly erroneous information. In fact, other than the false and misleading statements Fuhrman had made, nothing contained in his notes added any new information beyond what had been already reported by the patrol officers who had arrived at the scene two hours before Fuhrman.
Because I believed that Fuhrman would actually use the "bloody fingerprint" issue to make Lange and Vannatter look bad in his book, I prepared a timeline, detailing the early hours of the crime-scene search which proved that Fuhrman was either delusional or just flat-out lying again:
* 12:17 A.M.: The first LAPD officers arrived at South Bundy. They immediately sealed off the perimeter and began identifying the evidence at the crime scene.After faxing the Vanity Fair story to Lange and Vannatter and speaking with them on a conference call, they agreed that Fuhrman's book was going to be his last desperate attempt to rehabilitate himself--at the expense of everyone else in the case, especially them. As a result, they authorized me to add an endnote to our book, stating:* 2:10 A.M.: Fuhrman and his supervisor, Ron Phillips, of the LAPD's West Los Angeles Division arrived at South Bundy. Officer Robert Riske gave them a walkthrough of the crime scene. As per standard operating procedure, Riske pointed out the evidence that he and the other patrolmen had discovered.
* Phillips then placed Fuhrman in charge of the crime scene, along with Fuhrman's partner, Brad Roberts, who had not yet arrived.
* 2:30 A.M.: Twenty minutes after Phillips and Fuhrman, Roberts reported to the scene. Fuhrman gave Roberts a walkthrough.
* Together, according to Fuhrman and Roberts, they discovered the alleged "bloody fingerprint" on the knob of the rear gate.
* After the walkthrough with Roberts, Fuhrman finished his three pages of notes, which consisted of seventeen paragraphs. These notes--which Fuhrman would later describe in his book as "meticulous"--mentioned only part of the evidence that Riske reported during the walkthrough. For instance, among other items of evidence, Fuhrman missed a white envelope, a set of five keys, and two drops of blood on the lower, inside rung of the rear gate.
* Fuhrman added five items that Riske did not report--because they simply didn't exist:
-- a simple watchman's cap that Fuhrman wrongly claimed was a ski mask;
-- a delivery menu from the Thai Flavor restaurant that Fuhrman wrongly claimed was from a local pizzeria;
-- that the killer had been bitten by a dog, which was not true;
-- that Brown and Goldman, who had been slashed and stabbed, had died from "gunshot wounds"; and
-- some sort of smudge or patch of rust on the knob of the back gate that Fuhrman wrongly claimed was a "bloody fingerprint."
* All five of Fuhrman's independent observations were wrong. As a result, Fuhrman opened himself up, as well as the entire police investigation, to impeachment in court because of his errors and irresponsible speculation.
* At or about 2:40 A.M.: Shortly after the Fuhrman-Roberts walkthrough, Phillips notified them that they had been taken off the case would be replaced by detectives from the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide Division. Fuhrman was upset by this news.
* From 2:40 a.m. to 4:05 A.M.: Fuhrman reportedly did little more than pace and stand in the street, waiting for the Robbery-Homicide detectives to arrive.
* 3:05 A.M.: Lange and Vannatter were ordered to the scene. They both lived far away--Vannatter in Valencia and Lange in Ventura County.
* 4:05 A.M.: Vannatter arrived. He immediately received a walkthrough from Phillips. At no time did Phillips ever mention anything about a "bloody fingerprint" on the rear gate--because neither Fuhrman nor Roberts had ever mentioned it to him.
* After this walkthrough, Vannatter met Fuhrman for the first time. Vannatter immediately noticed that Fuhrman had an attitude problem. Fuhrman was still angry about being replaced.
* As with Phillips, at no time did either Fuhrman or Roberts mention anything to Vannatter about a "bloody fingerprint" on the rear gate.
* 4:25 A.M.: Lange arrived at the scene. He, too, received a walkthrough from Phillips, who said nothing about a "bloody fingerprint."
* After Lange's walkthrough, he and Phillips returned to the street with the others. Once again, neither Fuhrman nor Roberts mentioned anything to Lange about a "bloody fingerprint" on the rear gate.
* Phillips asked Fuhrman for his crime-scene notes, which he then handed to Vannatter. Vannatter then handed Fuhrman's notes to Lange, who was responsible for the detailed crime-scene search and for writing the "murder follow-up report" that he would later submit to the district attorney's office.
Fuhrman claimed in his notes that he had also observed a bloody fingerprint on the locking mechanism of the rear gate at the South Bundy crime scene. However, no such fingerprint was seen by anyone else. Also in his notes, Fuhrman speculated that the victims died from gunshot wounds, and that the killer had possibly been bitten by Brown's dog.On January 2, 1997, I completed our manuscript, submitting it at 4:26 A.M.--one day before my deadline--to our editor, Sue Carswell, who had checked into the Georgetown Inn to await my final draft. After Carswell's last-minute editing, Pocket Books delivered the final proofs of the book to me on January 14. I spent the night reading them and personally delivered the finished product to New York the following day.Then, shattering any schedule I had ever seen or heard of for a hardback book, Evidence Dismissed: The Inside Story of the Police Investigation of O .J. Simpson, was bound and finished ten days later, as 200,000 copies of the first printing began to appear in bookstores throughout the country on January 28.
Remarkably, that same day, the Simpson civil case went to the jury. In other words, our timing just couldn't have been better.
Demands for Lange and Vannatter's appearances on a variety of radio and television shows flooded in, including those from NBC's Today Show and Dateline NBC, ABC's Good Morning America and Prime Time Live, CNN's Larry King Live and Burden of Proof, and even Howard Stern's morning radio program, among many others.
On February 4, Pocket flew me to Los Angeles, first-class, to be with the detectives when the jury returned with its verdict. When I arrived at LAX, I called Lange, who asked me to have dinner at his home that night with him and his wife, Linda, as well as Phil and Rita Vannatter.
En route to Lange's house in my rented Thunderbird, I stopped at a liquor store to buy a bottle of champagne. As I was paying the cashier, a news bulletin appeared on the television behind the counter, announcing that the jury had reached a verdict in the Simpson civil case, which would be read to the court later that night.
Although it only took me fifteen minutes to get to Lange's home from the store, two television news crews had already arrived to interview the detectives--and then the press people kept coming.
We didn't even have time for dinner.
At the exact moment that the verdict was read, Lange and Vannatter were in the back seat of a limousine while I was in the front seat with the chauffeur. We were speeding along on the Ronald Reagan Freeway, en route to an appearance on ABC's Nightline, which had just booked Lange and Vannatter an hour earlier. Program executives had sent the limo to guarantee the detectives' on-time delivery. Lange and Vannatter watched the report of the jury's decision on a color television with a three-inch screen and a fuzzy picture that I had brought along.
After hearing the unanimous verdict against Simpson, neither Lange nor Vannatter cheered or gloated. There were no high-fives, no gleeful back-slapping. They simply looked at each other momentarily with considerable relief, smiled, and shook hands.
For the rest of the night and early into the morning, as we hopped from one interview to the next, Lange and Vannatter were treated like movie stars. And, even though I instinctively hung back, they always grabbed me and pulled me into the action, introducing me as their writer and allowing me to share their experience.
The most frequently asked question of them in nearly every interview was: "Do you feel vindicated?"
Lange replied on one program, "I don't know that we have to say we've been vindicated. We didn't do anything wrong. What we did was our job." Then, reflecting for a moment, he added, "Our only real mistake was not sending Mark Fuhrman home that night."
On the evening of February 6, I hosted a dinner party in Lange and Vannatter's honor at Musso & Frank's on Hollywood Boulevard; forty-six writers and law-enforcement officials attended.
Why the celebration? Just the day before, the detectives and I were together between shows when we heard that Evidence Dismissed would enter the New York Times's Best-Seller List at number #6 the following week.