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One of the most striking things about the June 12, 1994 double homicide on Bundy Dr. in
No one close to the case ever followed up on those movie links to the killer and to what aspiring screenwriter Mark Fuhrman did to shape first impressions of the evidence and the accused, O.J. Simpson. Those inquiries went no further than what Fuhrman said about race and violence in a library of audio tapes he made for a screenplay with Laura Hart McKinny to impeach his credibility as an unbiased witness.
Mark Fuhrman uses dozens of movies and TV shows in his 1997 Murder in Brentwood book (he said he finished it in October, ’96). Some of them recall movies like The Naked Gun trilogy, Ricochet, Guilty Conscience, The Rosary Murders, The French Connection and screen versions of Othello from 1947 to 1995 to tell his story of O.J. and Nicole. He goes so far as bring up the the movie Ghost in a video he said he got out of O.J.'s VCR with a synopsis that describes Othello, not Ghost.
The only relevant things about Ghost in the murder investigation of O.J. Simpson were the thi
The movie connection to Fuhrman that took me over the top was his partner Brad Roberts’ characterization of a phantom fingerprint as the killer signing his name in blood. Jack the Ripper did that symbolically with red ink. I then paid closer attention to the pattern of evidence in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo and something vaguely familiar about the items themselves. Adding those observations to the way Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman were killed took me straight to Jack the Ripper '88 with Michael Caine. There, my vague sense of familiarity with the pattern of evidence in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo took explicit form. In the movie it was Michael Caine’s pointing finger.
That’s why I made The Great Detective the first chapter in The Smoking Gun. The evidence at the foot of Ron Goldman corresponding in shape, material or function to the items at the foot of Annie Chapman in Jack the Ripper ’88 was the smoking gun that Fuhrman arranged the items in his evidence photo according to that shot in that movie. You have to freeze the frame in the movie to see it... but it is there. A random confluence of independent events that we call coincidence is one thing. An item-for-item “coincidence” cluster inextricably tied to a killer, a movie and a detective/student of moviemaking is another. It’s a chimera – a mythical beast. There ain’t no such thing.
I started my Ripper movie search with Fuhrman’s reference to “Cain” in a court case he cited to justify him going over the wall at Rockingham where he found the second brown leather glove. Jack the Ripper ’88 stars Michael Caine as the lead Scotland Yard detective wearing brown leather gloves. It has details about the first victim’s neck wound like Nicole Simpson’s and evidence at the second victim’s feet like evidence at the feet of Ron Goldman. It has an American actor in London giving the Scotland Yard detective Fuhrman’s explanation for his method of creating a composite character for his role as the title character in Jekyll and Hyde.
I tried to do a similar search for a specific movie based on the position of Nicole’s body because I knew that it was the way actors fell to avoid injury. But scenes like that were too common to single out one of them. The same was true with the clothes that O.J. was supposed to have worn (a generic movie killer costume) to commit the murders, or a long death struggle in which a young man protects a woman from a killer with a knife.
The reason these things seemed familiar wasn’t because they were in one movie I saw that Fuhrman could not have told his story without. They seemed familiar because I’d seen them many times. They were as common to crime dramas and murder mysteries as cars crashing through wooden barriers or rolling off a cliff and bursting into flames.
You can find some Jack the Ripper ’88 Fuhrman bell ringers in real murder cases but not all of them in one case other than the one that he investigated on June 13, 1994 with his boss Ron Phillips and his partner Brad Roberts. Think of those bell ringers like words and letters in hundreds of ransom notes, each clipped from various newspapers and magazines. You might be able to trace the origin of only a few of them to specific publications but you will know where all of them came from in general.
A Fuhrman movie is therefore one that has more Fuhrman bell ringers in quantity, temporal proximity or specificity than chance can account for in his subsequent use of them. It can be a specific movie when it has a specific feature or pattern of features that set it apart. It can also be any movie in a class that has the same identifying features in common. Movies like this don’t require anything special to make a case that Fuhrman saw at least one of them apart from the necessity of having been released before they showed up in a Fuhrman footprint on one of the big projects he subsequently initiated.
It isn’t as though Fuhrman never admitted to drawing inspiration for his creative projects to start his career outside of the LAPD from a class of movies. He made a point of it.
On page 282 of Murder in Brentwood he said this about his words on the McKinny tapes. “Go to any theater or video store and check out the current selection of cop movies. I guarantee you’ll find racism, sexism, vile language, and despicable actions by cops and criminals alike.” Only Fuhrman took it a step further. He used language and action by him and the caricature of O.J. Simpson that he created in the real word to write and promote a book. It’s the same pattern across the board with every event he set in motion to make himself a celebrity in the first instance and to boost his celebrity status thereafter.
A footprint, unlike a shoeprint, is made with a bare foot and is therefore as individual as a fingerprint, even a metaphorical one.
Footprints best describe the unique makeup of Fuhrman’s imprints on the steps he took using movies to tell his stories from one key event in his post LAPD career to the next. Nobody weaves movies together the way he does. Where you see the “loops and swirls” of his movie footprint you don’t need him to tell you that he left it. You just need an adequate amount of preparation time to extract the active ingredients from the movies or classes of movies he used that preceded it.
This is how it breaks down by dates with relevant movies released before:
February 18, 1989 – Fuhrman’s letter to the Los Angeles city attorney March 21, 1994 – West L.A.’s involvement in The Robert C. Hurd murder investigation June 12, 1994 (from 8:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. – Fuhrman’s alibi for the Bundy murders June 13, 1994. – West L.A. detectives’ investigation of the Bundy Murders July 5, 1994 – Fuhrman’s testimony in the preliminary hearing March 9 and 10, 1995 – Fuhrman’s murder trial testimony October, 1996 –Murder in Brentwood manuscript completed (according to Fuhrman November 15, 2002 – Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich movie released Mid August 2007 to September 13 2007 –Palace Station incident arranged; executed
Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood, Murder in Spokane, Death and Justice, Silent Witness and A Simple Case of Murder books were undoubtedly big projects of his. They add to his self-confirmed list of movie bell ringers and suggest others that can later be confirmed or discarded but they are based on cases that did not begin with him.
Finding a Fuhrman movie was easy, given all the movie scenes he referenced in Murder in Brentwood, all of them he listed in the index, and all the movies O.J. Simpson appeared in. The Deliberate Stranger TV movie about the handsome, charming, bleeding-on-a crime scene, knit cap-wearing serial killer Ted Bundy was a gimmie. So were most of the movies I noted in the The Smoking Gun because I’d seen them and recalled some of the Fuhrman-related material they contained. I had only to check the release dates before watching them again to see if my recall matched the source.
I did the same thing anyone seeing a movie spoof would do to identify classic scenes from other movies. The difference with Fuhrman was that he used obscure film references as often as not. To see them you have to pay close attention to details that only Fuhrman saw, combined, invented or thought were important enough to elaborate on in cinematic style.
To find the ones I had no previous knowledge of, I started where Fuhrman did in referencing movies or TV shows. I looked for the context in which he conjured films, actors or characters in departing from the facts of the case he was supposed to be talking about. I picked out where he noted something no one else did, where he substituted something that didn’t exist, wildly exaggerated something that did exist or inserted something personal that did not flow naturally into or out of his narrative. I looked for things that Fuhrman went out of his way to associate himself with, things that he was uniquely associated with and thing that he named inappropriately or repeated excessively.
I could use these Fuhrman bell ringers to determine whether I had a hit or a miss in the movies that this process led me to through a scan of move schedules on TV. I looked for actors on his list and read the synopsis of movies they appeared in that I hadn’t seen. I looked for birds, hearts or valentines, birthdays, bleeding killers and plots involving love triangles, frame-ups, political assassinations, jealous husbands and ex-husbands, killer cops, super sleuths, etc.
The hits substantially outnumbered the misses. But even the misses yielded patterns I hadn’t seen before in what Fuhrman was actually referencing in many of the movie sources he specified. I saw actors who served as links to other movies with Fuhrman bill ringers galore and other actors with just as many Fuhrman bell ringers or more.
For instance, the name Jennifer and the actor Jason Robards Jr. were significantly overrepresented in these movies. I used the first three digits of Fuhrman’s badge number (214) to see if there was a logical connection to Robards. I started that way just because 2 14 is St. Valentine’s Day and I knew that Robards played Al Capone in the 1967 made-for-television movie The St. Valentines Day Massacre.
I wasn’t looking for a Jennifer connection to Robards or Fuhrman but I read in Robards’ bio that he was a close friend of actor Vic Morrow who was born on St. Valentines Day. Morrow’s daughter is Jennifer Jason Leigh. Her birthday is February 5, the same as Fuhrman’s. Charlotte Rampling and Barbara Hershey also popped up repeatedly while I was following other links to Fuhrman movie. I asked myself, “Why these actors?” I read their bios and found that they shared Fuhrman’s birthday.
A male actor’s name I didn’t know until his face appeared with eye-catching frequency was Stefan Gierasch. He proved to be a link to other Fuhrman movies that started other chains. I got his name from the credits of The Rosary Murders and checked his bio. He, too, shared Fuhrman’s birthday. His is the Fuhrman birthday link to The New Centurions, Silver Streak, Remington Steele" and The Twilight Zone".
Michael Mann is another Fuhrman birthday link with movie credits that loom large in displays of Fuhrman's "imagination" when you know which movies and TV shows he wrote, directed and produced. Tim Holt and John Carradine were Fuhrman birthday actors I discovered only in 2010 when I realized that Val Kilmer's portrayal of Doc Holliday in Tombstone was modeled after John Carradine's "Hatfield" character in Stagecoach. It is of no small consequence in tracking Fuhrman movies from one to another that John Carradine appeared with Barbara Hershey in Boxcar Bertha.
The ultimate Fuhrman movie birthday link has to be the footprints of Barbara Hershey as Hanna Trout on a plate glass floor in Paris Trout ('91).
The movie is set shortly after WW II in a small town in Georgia.
Paris Trout is the name of
I was led to another Fuhrman birthday link by the baseball bat incident he wrote about in his pattern abuse letter, a misplaced Babe Ruth analogy he used, and an unsolved case he investigated of a man who was beaten to death with a hammer. In The Natural, Barbara Hershey’s character is Harriet Bird. Fuhrman listed Basketball Hall of Famer Larry Bird among his three favorite athletes. But he named a Baseball Hall of Famer in his sports analogy: Murder in Brentwood (pages 116-17) – “Trying to keep Simpson out of the case was like trying to keep Babe Ruth out of baseball.” Only nobody said anything about keeping Simpson (a Football Hall of Famer) out of the case. The issue was race.
The way Fuhrman wrote the first three digits of his 21464 LAPD badge number so that it could also be read 714 was directly related to the 714 badge number of Jack Webb’s famous Dragnet character Joe Friday. In The Natural, a character modeled after Babe Ruth was called “Whammer.” In the signoff to Dragnet, Jack Webb’s “Mark VII Productions” company was stamped in metal with a hammer.
Two Hammerin’ Hanks are in the Baseball Hall of Fame, both of whom are inextricable linked to Babe Ruth. In 1938, Hank Greenberg fell two home runs short of tying Ruth’s single season record of 60. In 1974, Hank Aaron matched Ruth’s all time home run record of 714 and surpassed it. Hammerin’ Hank Aaron’s birthday is Feb 5.
You’ll notice that Bird, Whammer, hammer, Hammerin’ Hank, and 714 are not arbitrary links in the chain from Fuhrman’s Babe Ruth analogy to his birthday. Although they wander through movie and TV land, you can’t take a logical path to The Natural without Fuhrman’s reference to a Hall of Famer named Bird, his Babe Ruth analogy, his “sloppily” written badge number (ambiguously written is more like it) and his birthday. Moreover, the only sports metaphors he uses in Murder in Brentwood are boxing (“he never laid a glove on me” -- Fuhrman's intentionally ironic allusion to the bloody glove that Roberts planted on Rockingham) and baseball (“playing hardball,” “a head’s up.”
You can go a long way with “Bird” and birthday in Fuhrman movies. Adding a kidnapping and the exaggerated way that Fuhrman described how O.J.’s Bronco was parked brings you to the 1982 TV series Police Squad! The full title of the movie version tells you what to expect if you saw the TV series. It’s The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! In the movie, Leslie Nielson reprises his Police Squad! role as Frank Drebin. George Kennedy replaces Alan North as his boss Ed Hocken and O.J. Simpson as Nordberg replaces Peter Lupus as Norberg. The characters they play are the same. Drebin’s was introduced to the public in Police Squad! on a double homicide case. All six episodes contain more than enough to qualify as footprints that Fuhrman left on his Murder in Brentwood case. The second episode called Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment) involves the kidnapping of a boxer’s blonde wife to get him to throw a big fight. This scenario was lifted chiefly from Goldie and the Boxer with O.J. as the boxer and a young blonde girl as the kidnap victim. In the third episode called, “The Butler Did It/ “A Bird in the Hand,” a young blonde woman is kidnapped from her birthday party. The Twilight Zone episode called "To Serve Man" also features kidnapping as a major plot point. Where is there any indication on either Brentwood crime scene for Fuhrman to suspect that the murders might also involve a kidnapping (search “kidnap”)? Fuhrman is the only investigator to say he did. He says it in his 1994 preliminary trial testimony and in his murder trial testimony regarding his thoughts after examining the Bronco that he said was “haphazardly parked” on Rockingham.
In the movies it’s usually the lead police detective in an unmarked car, rather than a killer in a getaway car who parks haphazardly. Frank Drebin takes this movie cliché to an absurd extreme. His haphazard parking is a running joke throughout the TV series that carries over into the movie. You could count on Drebin crashing his unmarked police car into something, leaving the rear end “jutting out into the street.”
The word “jutting” takes in a wide spread of angles. Fuhrman expands the range you can imagine to more than “maybe a foot” by adding a “no parallel parking” line to his reason for finding the Bronco parking angle so odd. Police photos show that this is demonstrably untrue of the vehicle that O.J. parked in the real world. Those photos show that it is demonstrably true of the way Frank Drebin parked his in a TV comedy series that ended up on the big screen co-staring O.J. Simpson. —Jasper
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the Brentwood
neighborhood of Los Angeles was how much it resembled a screenplay. Everything from the killer’s selection of victims and the clues he left behind to the Jekyll and Hyde personality
ascribed to O.J. Simpson seemed to have a movie or television counterpart. Even the first lead detective on the murder scene, Mark Fuhrman, struck the defense team’s lead attorney as a
character “straight out of Central Casting.” 
