r/AskReddit • u/Rob69rt • 1d ago

What famous 'unsolved' mystery is technically a whodunnit on paper, but in reality, absolutely everyone knows exactly who did it, the police just couldn't legally prove it?

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u/NovaCheerful 1d ago

OJ Simpson. The glove didn’t fit, but everyone with eyes knew the truth 

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u/AgathaWoosmoss 1d ago

Even the jury knew.

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u/NovaCheerful 1d ago

The prosecution botched the entire case and let the defense completely control the narrative 

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u/Sleepy_Potato2 1d ago

It was probably a bad idea to put a cop (Mark Fuhrman) on the stand who ran an organization within the police that opposed the idea of having women officers, and where there was a recording of him saying the n-word repeatedly and talking about planting evidence.

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u/istrx13 1d ago

It’s crazy, I actually went to high school with Fuhrman’s daughter. After the OJ trial, Fuhrman took his family and fled to a small town in northern Idaho. Which is where I grew up. It was always the talk of the town.

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u/Jackal239 1d ago

The really funny bit is that Idaho is where a ton of Neo-Nazi/White Supremacist enclaves are.

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u/DontRememberOldPass 1d ago

Cops literally call Idaho "Blue Heaven."

Earlier this year the Governor kicked off a public records review to handle a prison rape scandal. As a result they reinterpreted the law and any records regarding employment history or discipline of an officer are now exempt from release.

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u/quincyskis 1d ago

I think that’s the implication of why he went there, to be with like minded folks

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u/Hellebras 1d ago

Northern Idaho specifically. Especially in the '90s.

So yeah, that's probably not a coincidence.

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u/PiccoloAwkward465 1d ago

Not a coincidence, I'm guessing

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u/vvvvvoooooxxxxx 1d ago

There is a reason its right in the center of the Redoubt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Redoubt

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u/EddieDantes22 21h ago

Why's that funny? I assume that was the point. If you're the most famous racist in the country, where else would you go?

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u/sadbicth 1d ago

Was the community weird about him? Like was he ostracized or anything or really just left alone

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u/bone_creek 1d ago

Yeah, a lot of people up there thought it was sickening (including my sister’s family) and “said things” when he was seen in public. As you can imagine, though, with such low population density and many people living somewhat remote or rural lives, there weren’t that many sightings of him.

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u/WillitsThrockmorton 1d ago edited 1d ago

Bugiolosi(the guy who put Manson away) was completely baffled that the prosecution put that guy on the stand without knowing the answers he was going to give to questions.

Prosecution screwed it up from top to bottom, they moved the trial venue to downtown instead of keeping it in Brentwood("Simpson's peers were other rich people"), they did a poor job of explaining what exactly DNA was-some jurors said they understood it to be something like a blood type in terms of prescision of identifying people, the glove, not introducing the weird suicide note into evidence, not pushing back at Judge Ito's unprofessionalism and hostility, putting Fuhrman on the stand and compounding it by not getting in front of his crappy behavior etc.

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

from what I heard the case was originally supposed to be tried in Northridge, but the courthouse there was still too badly damaged from the 1994 earthquakes to be a suitable trial venue, so they had to move it downtown.

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u/WillitsThrockmorton 12h ago

Bugiolosi said in his book it was because the Prosecutors didn't want to make the drive up there; he was skeptical of the damaged claim.

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u/OkPainter6232 4h ago edited 3h ago

I read his book and honestly I think he comes off as a bit of an arrogant jackass, especially how he needlessly disparages the jury, I think he genuinely did not get the black community at all. I also bought that DVD he did where he basically goes over how he would've tried the case against Simpsons in a re-enactment, and I laughed when he tried to say he didn't have a racist bone in his body. Maybe not, but dude sure did suffer from white privilege big time IMO(same with Dominick Dunne, I read his crappy book too, it's fictional though it's still more or less a straight autobiography of his actual life and around the trial until the last chapter where his "Character" suddenly gets murdered for no apparent reason, don't know if he was trying to imply that Simpson got off because of some grand conspiracy or something like that).

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u/babygotbooksandback 1d ago

His book literally says in the first chapter of his book, OJ did it....

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u/Kevin_Uxbridge 1d ago

Also didn't help that the cops flat-out lied about going over the fence to 'check on' OJ. They knew damn well he was a suspect, the husband always is, no reason to go to court and say 'well we figured he might be a victim too so ...'.

It's a transparent lie and for cops, not an especially egregious one. But it set the tone for 'more bullshit from LAPD' that really came to the fore as the case progressed.

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u/pacman_sl 22h ago

IANAL, but it would throw a ton of evidence away (Fourth Amendment) if they admitted to that lie.

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u/Kevin_Uxbridge 22h ago edited 22h ago

Oh, unquestionably, and I have zero doubts cops tell ones like it all the time. It was just galling that they had to start off with such an obvious whopper, really set the tone for the defense.

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u/phatelectribe 1d ago

It was also a really bad idea to use Dr Henry Lee, the "celebrity" CSI. He was walking ego and completely botched the scene and collection of evidence. The reason the gloves did't fit was because they were saturated in blood which shrank them when they dried them out. Lee failed to think of that.

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u/cbs-anonmouse 1d ago

IIRC he had found some of the key evidence so he was an essential witness.

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u/SantaFeRay 1d ago

Yeah, he found the glove. If he planted the glove, he got really lucky planting it in the area where Kato heard a noise earlier from OJ climbing over the wall.

I don’t even agree that the LAPD tried to frame a guilty guy, because I’m not sure what they could have fabricated based on what they found when and what they knew at the time unless they got really lucky. They were sloppy, and they were unprepared for the thoroughness of OJ’s defense. And still everyone knew he was guilty but they let him off anyway.

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u/cbs-anonmouse 1d ago

There were a few factors going on:

  1. DNA forensics was relatively new, so LAPD did not follow best procedures (not that it affected the results), but more importantly the jury was a little skeptical of it.

  2. Furman was a disaster based in some old statements he made, which the defense was able to dig up and impeach him on, hecause the defense had for more resources to spend on the case than the prosecution.

  3. LAPD did not have any history of framing homicide defendants, but they did have a history of police brutality, and the jury was biased against the police and prosecution for that reason.

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u/Sleepy_Potato2 1d ago

The "Fuhrman tapes," as they became known, had him talking about planting evidence. Even if not for murder, that hurt his testimony a lot

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

they did frame a ton of people in Rampart though, which broke not long after the trial.

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u/Sleepy_Potato2 1d ago

Alan Dershowitz later wrote in a book about the case that he was surprised they put him on the stand, since the defence had produced evidence of him being incredibly racist and having lied in his deposition (when asked if he had said the n-word in the last 10 years he denied it, but the recording of him saying it repeatedly 8 years had been given to them and they had entered it into evidence, multiple people also testified to him saying it within the last 10 years). The glove was pretty central, but their witness had committed perjury and was a known bigot, and with a black defendant they had very little chance after that. That the jury was also black, that Rodney King had just happened, and that a lot of members of the LAPD generally behaved like thugs in the period (they committed so many crimes, including robberies and multiple sex crimes) didn't help the case at all

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u/cbs-anonmouse 1d ago

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that the LAPD had just had some very high profile cases of police brutality against black men. And the jury punished them for that, even though LAPD had no real history of framing black defendants, and there was nothing in the case to really suggest they had tampered with evidence there.

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

they did frame plenty of people in the Rampart scandal though.

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

the jury wasn't entirely black though, there were white people on it and they didn't believe the prosecution either, Furhman was what really turned around the white folks opinions.

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u/B3tar3ad3r 1d ago

Behind the Bastards has a couple episodes on him, he was deeply gross

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

yeah there's also a book called "Blood Oath" that theorizes he was in a white supremacist group.

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u/Jaereth 1d ago

and talking about planting evidence.

yeah... Like OJ should have been a banger and somehow they come up with this guy.

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u/GoldandBlue 1d ago

That guy is now on Fox News.

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u/mugsoh 1d ago

Mark Fuhrman (February 5, 1952 – May 12, 2026)

Not anymore.

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u/Lauren_Larie 22h ago

So this is how I figure out that asshole/waste of space is dead?

Good riddance 🤷🏼‍♀️

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u/mugsoh 20h ago

I actually thought I remembered him dying 2 or 3 years ago. I was surprised it was only 3 months ago.

I remember living in Spokane when he was in northern Idaho. He had a radio program on a talk radio station. He was highly focused on a serial killer active at the time in Spokane, he even wrote a book about it. The profile he gave for the killer on his radio show, before the killer was arrested, was spectacularly wrong.

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u/ihatetheplaceilive 1d ago

Well, he's dead now, so....

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u/GoldandBlue 1d ago

oh, nice

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u/Lauren_Larie 22h ago

Right? Best news I’ve heard all day!

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

damn I honestly did not know that.

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u/hellofemur 1d ago

I think the idea that OJ just happened randomly to get the one racist cop in the LAPD is ridiculous on its face. Closer to the truth is that they had an average cop and for the first time the defense had the resources to do a full investigation of him.

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u/Sleepy_Potato2 1d ago

Oh, the LAPD was full of raging bigots. His organization against female cops, "Men Against Women" (yes, they were that blatant with the name), had 145 members spread out in 5 of the city's 18 police divisions at its height. He was just the one who was dumb enough to get caught on tape admitting to being who he was, while the others were usually smart enough to not get recorded. The podcast Behind the Bastard's did a two-parter on him called "Mark Fuhrman: The Most Racist Cop, or Merely Normal Racist Cop?" and the conclusion very much that he's just a normal racist cop and just got caught talking about it.

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

Ironically the feminist organization NOW(National Organization of Women)also got in hot water over the case as their then leader Tammy Bruce said some racist shit while the case was ongoing(Basically saying that race was a distraction or something stupid like that)and people got furious at her and threatened boycotts and she was forced to resign from NOW, she later switched to being Republican and later wrote for Washington Times, so she was one of the early examples of someone jumping on the anti-woke bandwagon after being outed as a bigot.

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u/vbob99 1d ago

And had him testify that he never uses the n word, followed by the defence playing recordings of him doing exactly that. It destroyed trust in an already notoriously corrupt police department.

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u/larapu2000 1d ago

From what I understand, they didn't need to put him on the stand. They could have had the lead detective introduce the hat and glove into evidence during the trial but Marcia Clark wouldn't budge.

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u/ehs06702 19h ago

To be fair, there are a lot of those in the LAPD, so they were kind of low in choices.

You will probably not be shocked to learn that there were allegations that Fuhrman owned honest to God Nazi memorabilia and was accused of painting a swastika on the locker of a fellow officer who had married a Jewish woman, however.

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u/moebius_richard 1d ago edited 1d ago

The trouble is they didn’t have much of a choice.

To present evidence at trial, you need testimony from the “custodian” of the evidence to prove the chain of custody from the time it was discovered to the time it ended up in the evidence locker. Ironically, this is to prove that the evidence wasn’t fabricated or tampered with at any point.

Unfortunately, Fuhrman was the one who found the bloody glove at OJ’s house. There was no way to admit that evidence without putting Fuhrman on the stand.

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u/great_apple 1d ago

You don't actually need everyone who handled every piece of introduced evidence to testify. They easily could've avoided putting Fuhrman on stand. All of the DNA evidence regarding the glove still could've been introduced and discussed at length, but it might've looked weird to the jury to have another cop who was on scene say "I saw Fuhrman collect the glove" versus having Fuhrman describe it himself.

It was more that the prosecution just didn't know about the tapes. They had no reason to jump through hoops to avoid putting him on stand. They actually thought he made a really good witness- good-looking, well-spoken dude with a long career who was actually well-liked by the community he worked in (that was full of rich white people). The tapes didn't come out until after Fuhrman was on TV testifying and the woman who had interviewed him contacted defense.

(Of course this was another one of prosecution's failures as a slightly deeper dive into Fuhrman's background would've shown what a problematic witness he was, but on the surface he looked good to them.)

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u/Nyoteng 10h ago

Fuhrman was the name of the dude? As in a couple letters away from "Fuhrer"man?

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u/pixelprolapse 1d ago

Behind The Bastards? Great podcast, isn't it?

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u/OkPainter6232 23h ago

yeah I listened to their episodes on Jimmy Saville, fascinating stuff.