American Murder Meets American Idol
When two-and-a-half-year-old Caylee Anthony disappeared in 2008, there were probably 3,000 other juveniles reported missing, Furhman notes. Only her story had the right ingredients for national news coverage. While it was clear early in the case Caylee was dead, the media pushed the “missing” child meme to fuel ratings and keep the story alive.
Does Fuhrman see the irony of being part of the media he criticizes? “Even though I now work as a journalist, at heart I’m still a cop. I try to balance the often-conflicting responsibilities of truth, justice, and the public’s right to know. … The greater good of helping law enforcement solve the case outweighs any other considerations.”
Fuhrman’s media criticism is familiar. The more interesting material is a behind-the-scenes look at police blunders from the perspective of a man with 20 years experience in law enforcement. Furhman’s Murder in Greenwich helped prompt Connecticut to convene a grand jury to re-examine the unsolved 1975 murder of 15-year-old Martha Moxley.
One of the Moxleys’ neighbors in upscale Greenwich was Rushton Skakel, brother of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy’s widow. Two of his rowdy teenage sons, Tommy and Michael, befriended Martha, whose family had recently moved to the neighborhood. She preferred Tommy, and Michael was jealous. Returning home from a party at the Skakels, Martha was bludgeoned to death.
Looking at evidence more than 20 years old, Fuhrman said it was obvious she was murdered in a rage killing likely committed by a neighbor who had some kind of relationship with her. The murderer used a Toney Penna golf club to kill her, a rare type of club owned by no one in the neighborhood but the Skakels. The club that killed Martha was missing from the set. Incredibly, the police did not get a warrant to search the Skakel house.
Thanks in part to Fuhrman’s independent investigation, 41-year-old Michael Skakel was convicted of Martha’s murder in 2002. A case that should have taken three days took 27 years. “In Greenwich, the police are like a civil service security force. The wealthy residents they serve tell them what to do and when to do it. The cops are their employees — literally.”
What did the local media do during the half-hearted Moxley investigation? According to Fuhrman, they wrote articles mostly based on press releases and police statements:
[T]he way the media covered Martha Moxley’s murder is another prime example of journalists simply following the leads they’re handed, instead of looking at the facts and trying to draw their own conclusions — never mind create their own leads. So much for the “watchdog” media.
Fuhrman also reveals incompetence in the Drew Peterson case. In 2004, the police officer was suspected of killing an ex-wife, Kathleen. In 2007, fourth wife Stacy Peterson disappeared. Fuhrman learned that during the investigation into Kathleen’s death, a six-person coroner’s jury of citizens with no medical or forensic training who may or may not have ever seen a dead body determined that Kathleen, found dead in a dry bathtub with contusions and abrasions on her body, had accidentally drowned. The jury, which included a cop who knew Peterson, ruled an obvious homicide an accident.
The Murder Business ends with the Simpson case, and Fuhrman reveals gross mishandling from start to finish. Fuhrman’s writing is unadorned and to the point, and his insider look into high-profile cases is worth reading.
Mark Fuhrman makes an excellent point. The Media have perverted justice for a long time in their preoccupation with creating the “narravtive”. However he left out the most glaring example of media/police/local authority malfesance in our country’s history. The famous case of Teddy Kennedy and a dead woman in his car which was found on the bottom of a pond. The handling of that case by the authorities and the media was a cover up of gigantic scope. Ted Kennedy controlled everything from his Hyannis headquarters and prevented an autopsy from being performed and ordered the body flown out of Massachusettes to Pennsylvania right away. This was the beginning of the perversion of the American justice system. The media even tried to spin the story to the interpretation that it was a “Kennedy” tragedy; somehow the dead girl was not the victim but the rich privileged Teddy Kennedy was the victim. That case will always be the prime example of how justice is perverted by the rich and the famous.
Another case that many PajamasMedia readers probably haven’t heard of, but that is a good example, is that of Ryan Frederick. On my blog, I did a break down of the initial media coverage and how they fell down, and in this case it’s actually even worse because the man was railroaded into a terrible sentence which the media should have gone nuts over because it was so transparently corrupt. Even in the beginning, before Radley Balko started exposing sordid detail after sordid detail through his own investigative journalism, there were enough details in the “official account” that eyebrows should have been raise–but weren’t.
The mainstream media is an enabler of this corruption because it just regurgitates official accounts 99.99% of the time.
Hardly. Our system has always had corruption of this magnitude, but what has made things worse in recent years is the combination of the mainstream media’s out of control behavior (it either spins it into a narrative or actively aids the suppression of suspicious stories like Kennedy’s victim and many of the victims of police and prosecutor corruption) and the powerlessness the average citizen has now before the legal system due to the complexity and scope of the laws.
“The narrative was right but the facts were wrong.” That infamous statement was in regard to another case of journalistic malpractice, the Duke Lacrosse “rape” case. The narrative was about white privilege and how rich jocks could get away with raping a poor black woman. The facts were that there was no rape at all.
Done properly, journalism has a vital role to play in our society. However, their stock in trade is their credibility. Without credibility, they have nothing. Too bad they’re flushing their credibility in the name of higher ratings and the “narrative.”
Larry J. hit the nail on the head. When it comes to journalism, credibility and integrity are paramount. Of course, the public has a responsibility to know the difference between journalism and sensationalism. Nancy Grace and Mike Galanos are not journalists, nor do they report the news. In fact, they have more in common with Billy Mays than they do Walter Cronkite.
Don’t praise Cronkite, his pontificating and twisting of the facts resulted in the deaths of millions.
or the “innocent” perpetrator is white and very pretty. RE: mary kay letourneau. The media loved her so much, they made movies romanticizing her crimes. If she’d been a polynesian male, and twice impregnated her 12 year old white female victim, the MSM would have crucified her.
One of my favorite hobby horses is bashing the old saw that things are getting worse in criminal justice proceedings, when OJ can get away with murder by claiming racism on the part of Fuhrman and others. People who speak as if this is something new are ignorant of history.
Waaaay back in the middle part of the 19th century, Daniel Sickles was on trial for murder in Washington DC. Sickles was a prominent Congressman, married to a beautiful socialite, and they were one of the glamor couples of the capitol just before the Civil War. Mrs. Sickles was having an affair with a local lawyer named Philip Barton Key, the last living descendant of the guy who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Apparently, pretty much everyone in Washington knew Key was cuckolding Sickles, and somehow Sickles *didn’t* know for a good long while. When he did find out, he thought it very humiliating, so he went and confronted Key in the street, and shot him dead. He then went to a local police station and turned himself in. You’d think he would easily be convicted, but you’d be wrong.
In those days juries were all-male. Sickles engaged a “dream team” of lawyers, led by the leading criminal attorney of the day, but including Edwin Stanton (later Lincoln’s Secretary of War) and Thomas F. Meagher (a famous Irish patriot, orator, and future Civil War general). The defense strategy was clever: a sort of 19th century jury nullification appeal. The defense officially claimed temporary insanity, but in actuality the defense position was “he deserved it, Sickles is an aggrieved husband”. With the subtext of “What would you do if he was sleeping with your wife?” the all-male jury dutifully declared Sickles not guilty by reason of temporary insanity, and set him free. He went back to Congress, became a general during the Civil War, lost a leg at Gettysburg, and lived a long and mostly happy life. Oh and yes, he accepted his wife’s apology, and they resumed their marriage.
There are other cases, but you get the point. Juries, and the public, have always been easy to manipulate. The media perhaps has seen its role change, expand, and of course the medium has completely changed, with newspapers almost disappearing. However, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Fuhrman’s critique of murder investigations is based on the credibility he has given himself from his years of employment by the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet he fails to mention any of the huge mistakes he made in his own crime scene investigations.
In one murder case, he was looking for a bullet and found what looked like a bullet hole in a door. He removed the door, dismantled it, then, after finding no bullet, threw the entire door and all its pieces into a dumpster, where, of course, it was lost forever to both the prosecution and the defense. Good police work, right?
I came to the conclusion that Fuhrman is a liar after I pulled his suit against the city of Los Angeles where he sued the city for disability claiming he was disabled from working as a LAPD officer because of the violent stress level of his job.
The court did not determine if Fuhrman was telling the truth but near the end of the case was this, “He is taking two college classes,… working out at a gym bodybuilding every day, dating a woman who is a professional bodybuilder and collecting disability.” Fuhrman’s claim was denied and he had to go back to work.
It looked to me like Fuhrman lied in his lawsuit, lied to get the city to continue to pay disability for the leisurely lifestyle he was so enjoying.
Fuhrman tried to scam the system and now he is trying to scam us.
fox finally found a great consultant! a convicted poice officer!!
It amazes me that people who are genuinely outraged at the OJ acquittal seem to be the very folks who eagerly clasp the egregious Fuhrman to their virtuous bosoms. This wretched man more than any single person or thing is responsible for the Simpson jury’s verdict. He’s a self-confessed racist, a convicted perjurer and a wanton self-aggrandizer. And he was a lousy cop.
He joined forces with another moral nonentity, that weasel with serpent’s fangs, Dominic Dunn, to fabricate a murder conviction in the appalling Moxley killing. Without the vile atmosphere of hatred, class envy and anti-Kennedy loathing assiduously generated and cunningly focused by Fuhrman and Dunn Michael Skakel would never have been convicted on the thin as rice paper evidence presented by the prosecution. Fuhrman now excoriates the excesses of the media that were eager co-conspirators with him in that miscarriage of justice.
On top of which he tut-tuts sickeningly about the public obsession with young blonde pretty female murder victims while the case he chose in order to make his breakthrough into bestselling print featured none other than Martha Moxley, a fifteen year old, blonde, pretty female murder victim!
Breathtaking!
Ironic that a cop who lies on the stand in a court of law should be accepted as an authority on the moral sewer America (and American journalism) has become….