Detective Wins Sympathy Among L.A. Exiles in Idaho : Lifestyle: Fuhrman's future neighbors--many of them LAPD veterans--understand why he is joining them.

By STEPHANIE SIMON

March 10, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

COEUR d'ALENE, Ida. — In this remote town of peaks and pines, where the police shoo stubborn moose from city streets and rescue hapless motorists from wild snows, the O.J. Simpson double murder trial seems incredibly distant--and yet, incredibly relevant.

Dozens of former Los Angeles police officers have settled here over the years. And they will soon be joined by one more: Mark Fuhrman, the beleaguered detective who took the stand Thursday.

Fuhrman faces a brutal grilling from Simpson’s lawyers, who have blasted him as a racist rogue possibly bent on framing the former football star by planting a bloody glove at his house.

As soon as it’s over, Fuhrman plans to retire, seeking peace in these snow-draped mountains of the Idaho panhandle.

His future neighbors say they understand why.

For the most part, they say they left Los Angeles fed up with the knee-jerk hostility their uniforms provoked. The Simpson trial, they believe, has undercut officers’ credibility still further. The defense has tried to portray the LAPD as a slipshod corps of bumbling amateurs, and what’s worse, the lawyers have viciously attacked Fuhrman’s character, they say.

“If people only watch TV to gain their perception of the LAPD, they may be convinced the police are the bad guys,” said Capt. Karl Thompson, a 10-year LAPD veteran who now patrols the bristling mountains and tumbling whitewater of Kootenai County for the local Sheriff’s Department. “They’ve been trashed relentlessly and it’s a real shame.”

Now that lawyers have been allowed to poke through Fuhrman’s personnel files and root through confidential department records, more “officers are going to say ‘Why put up with it?’ ” former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Sgt. Jeffrey Thomas added. “Good officers are going to leave. They want to get out.”

Those who have already gotten out refuse to gloat.

Instead, as they watched Simpson updates this week, some ex-L.A. cops found themselves identifying with the department they so gladly left behind. Although most have adopted the local quirk of referring to Los Angeles as “down south,” the officers still talk of the LAPD as “our department.” And they bristled as though personally insulted when they caught snippets of the defense lawyers’ assaults on LAPD detectives.

Kelly Willoth fairly boiled at insinuations that detectives at the murder scene should have called the coroner more quickly. “It takes time to gather all the evidence (before moving the bodies) and that’s a fact,” she said.

Her husband, George, like his wife an LAPD veteran, was furious that anyone would challenge the detectives’ decision to throw away the bloody blanket used to cover the bodies.

And several former LAPD officers objected to the defense strategy, repeated Thursday, of waving policy handbooks and blasting the detectives for deviating from written guidelines.

“Some of the things I’m hearing are absolutely ridiculous,” said Kelly Willoth.

And nothing is more ridiculous, she said, than the abuse Fuhrman has suffered. When he finally took the stand and complained that he has “seen a lot of evidence ignored and a lot of personal issues brought to the forefront,” Fuhrman elicited sympathy from his neighbors-to-be.

“The defense attorneys have to probe and push and exploit,” retired LAPD Detective David Daniel said. “But what they’re doing to Fuhrman . . . is unethical.”

“They’re trying him, not the other guy,” said Robert W. Steele, who won a medal of valor during his years as a Los Angeles SWAT sergeant, and now works a desk job for the local Sheriff’s Department.

Much as they empathize with Fuhrman, however, news of the detective’s recent house-hunting trip to nearby Sandpoint has put some local officers on edge.

His arrival in northern Idaho in late January brought the region a bit of unwanted attention, especially after Fuhrman smashed a newspaper photographer with a briefcase at Spokane International Airport.

Although most former Los Angeles police officers here do not believe Fuhrman is racist, they are well aware of the allegations that he hates blacks. So they instinctively slap down the whispers that northern Idaho might be becoming a haven for white separatists.

Few minorities live in the Idaho panhandle. And a knot of white supremacists, known as the Aryan Nation, operate from the small town of Hayden Lake, just north of Coeur d’Alene.

But former Los Angeles police officers “not only have no use for the Aryans, we think they’re a bunch of crackpots,” said Terrance Hannon, a 20-year LAPD veteran now retiring from law practice in Coeur d’Alene.

“We just laugh at people’s assertions that (Fuhrman) is moving up here because there is a skinhead compound in Hayden Lake,” said James Simmerman, who spent seven years with the California Highway Patrol and now polices the 11,000 residents of Post Falls, Ida.

“We frankly don’t have a large minority population--I can only think of three or four black people who live in Post Falls--and we just don’t have the problems associated with racism,” Simmerman said.

Far from it, George Willoth agreed. “I encourage some of my fellow officers who are minorities to come up here and visit,” he said, gesturing out his windows at the mountains framing Cougar Gulch Road. “I know they’d love it.”

Many love it in part because residents of northern Idaho tend to support and respect law enforcement. As Thomas put it, “Everybody waves with all their fingers.”

They love it also because it couldn’t be farther from the grit, grime and graffiti of Los Angeles. As Capt. Thompson said while cruising Coeur d’Alene Lake in his sheriff’s speedboat: “This sure beats the hell out of the Ventura Freeway at rush hour.”

A town of 25,000 built near the Lucky Friday silver mine, Coeur d’Alene bills itself as the “all-America city.” It offers ready access to some of the best hunting, fishing, hiking, skiing and boating in the West. It even has a unique floating golf course, where tourists can tee off on the mainland, and take a ferry to the rough to finish their round.

And while Coeur d’Alene could never be considered quaint--too many fast-food restaurants and neon-splotched strip malls--the town has undeniable charm.

Residents tend to be as blunt and unpretentious as their license plates, which brusquely proclaim: “Scenic Idaho. Great Potatoes.” They actually take seriously the beat-up roadside signs announcing “Idaho is too great to litter.” And they would never consider trying to track down the house that mega-star Tom Cruise has supposedly purchased near Coeur d’Alene Lake.

“You can still get a two- or three-bedroom home with two baths for less than a hundred thousand dollars around here,” Simmerman said. “It’s nothing fancy--we’re talking Formica countertops--but the toilets work.”

Now a sergeant in the Kootenai County sheriff’s force, where he worries more about 25-foot snowdrifts than .38-caliber handguns, Thomas said he receives several calls a month from Los Angeles law enforcement officers hoping to transfer to tranquil Idaho.

He frankly tells them the downside: he must get by up here on about one-third his LAPD salary. Then there’s the weather: Fierce winds can tug the temperature to 50 degrees below zero in winter and officers must learn to navigate with snowshoes.

Still, LAPD officers keep coming--even young officers like Fuhrman, 43, who will be eligible for a pension in November. The Simpson trial, police here predict, will only speed the exodus.

“How can you continue to make the kind of sacrifice (police work demands) if you have no support?” Capt. Thompson said.

The trial, and especially the harsh treatment of Fuhrman, saddens him. “If people continue to trash their police departments,” he said, “they better be prepared to make friends with the crooks.”