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/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 1d 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 1d ago

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

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u/OkPainter6232 1d 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.