Mark Fuhrman, the former Los Angeles Police Department detective whose name became inseparable from the O.J. Simpson murder trial, died at 74. TMZ reported that Fuhrman died on May 12 in Idaho, and the Kootenai County Coroner’s Office confirmed his death.

Fuhrman was best known for telling the court in 1995 that he found a bloody glove at Simpson’s Brentwood estate, a piece of evidence that became one of the most watched details in the trial. But his credibility soon collapsed when audio tapes surfaced in which he repeatedly used racist slurs and discussed police misconduct, giving Simpson’s defense a powerful new line of attack.

The tapes did more than embarrass a witness. They became central to the defense strategy and helped turn Fuhrman from a key investigator into one of the trial’s most damaging liabilities for prosecutors. At the time, he had become one of the most recognizable law enforcement figures in the country, not because of his police work alone, but because the case around him had become bigger than any single piece of evidence.

A close friend told TMZ that Fuhrman had been privately battling an aggressive form of throat cancer, identifying the illness that had kept him out of public view. That detail gives his death a different shape: a once-famous detective whose public fall was years in the making, and whose final struggle had unfolded away from the spotlight.

Fuhrman’s death closes the life of a man who helped define one of the most consequential trials of the 1990s. The question his name raised for years was never whether he mattered to the case. It was how much of the case was changed once his own words came into evidence.