"THE SIMILARITIES ARE NOT MERE COINCIDENCE." —Mark Fuhrman, best-selling author

Recalling Laura Hart McKinny’s testimony on the witness stand, you may have gotten the impression that Mark Fuhrman was assisting her in her attempt to write a "gritty" screenplay about LAPD cops. Fuhrman says in his book that it was the other way around. She did little more than transcribe the story he was trying to tell by way of a fictional persona he adopted when the tape was running to set the proper tone. We can all appreciate his argument that the context is what counts, and that some true-life situations would not ring true without the kind of language a certain kind of character would use.

The n-word, he explained, is sometimes essential in the creation of realistic fiction like The Choirboys, Forrest Gump, or Huckleberry Finn. In an apparent allusion to the most troubling things he said on the tapes, he wrote, "I believe the 'N' word is evil if it is meant to pierce someone’s feelings, to demean and dehumanize them. Used in a story like Joe Wambaugh’s [The Choirboys], the word either reflects the hatred of a character, or shows how that character is attempting, however insensitively, to make light of racial pressures and troubling situations." No writer worthy of the name could disagree with that.

He writes, "If NYPD Blue and Homicide were on cable instead of the networks, the racist, sexist, and violent language on those programs would probably be much like the screenplay I tried to write. 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." To those common elements in recent cop movies, let me add evidence-planting, perjury and other acts of duplicity by cops and criminals alike to make an innocent person appear to be guilty of a crime.

If the sum of the preceding paragraph sounds to you like a stretch, let me recommend a 1991 movie called Ricochet. It not only has a law enforcement official calling a criminal "nigger," but the official is played by Denzel Washington. Odessa, the criminal he confronts with that word in a crack house, represents the antithesis of everything the black hero stands for. Odessa is played by Ice T. That’s not the best news for Fuhrman’s thesis. While the credits roll at the end of the film, Ice T does exactly what Fuhrman claims he was doing with McKinny. Using the vilest of language, replete with blood and gore, self-aggrandizement, and over-the-top claims of his ability to get away with murder, he raps up a storm in his stage persona of Ice T, the gangster. He uses the n-word freely. If there could be only one comprehensive model for Fuhrman’s taped remarks, as he explained them in his book, it’s that film, complete with the entire rap by Ice T. But he’d be a fool to use it in his defense.

Mark Fuhrman is no fool. The less he admits about his penchant for blending screenplays and actors with reality and stage personas the better, especially where Ricochet and Ice T are concerned. The smart thing for him to do is to deny he knows anything about Ricochet and Ice T’s rap. To admit that he saw it would be to confirm that it was his inspiration and his blueprint for committing at least three murders and framing O.J. Simpson in two of them.

No one disputes Fuhrman’s ambition to make a big name for himself. His name is, in fact, the biggest thing on the cover of his book. By the same token, no one doubts his fascination with the movies, or his dream of creating one and being portrayed in one as a supercop. That’s how the McKinny tapes were born, as well as the explanation Marcia Clark gave for the stories he told on the tapes and the language he used to tell them. What the tapes don’t tell about the place occupied by movies in Fuhrman’s vision of his future, certain evidence in the Simpson case, along with certain passages from his book, do. They tell us how much more the movies meant to him than they do to most of us. They tell us that he was obsessed with them, that they spoke to him, that he watched them for ideas more than entertainment and that he put the workable ideas to use.

In Fuhrman’s book, he referred to the screenplay he was trying to get produced in terms of his "get-rich-quick mentality" at the time. He incorporated aspects of famous lead characters like Dirty Harry and Popeye Doyle into the eclectic tough-guy image he tried to project. He mixed and matched from stories that impressed him. His lack of imagination makes his patchwork imitations easy to trace to their successful screenplay sources. That’s what we know about Fuhrman and the movies from his pretrial deposition, his court testimony, his TV interviews, his first book, and the tapes recorded by screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny for Men Against Women.

The 1985-1995 lifespan of the tapes makes a profound statement of its own about their content and their reason for being. Fuhrman justified what he said on them in terms of a stage persona like Ice T that he adopted for McKinny’s benefit and the benefit of movie producers she introduced him to. Fuhrman and Ice T spoke the same language. For Ice T, it was the language of success. Whereas O.J.’s wealth depended on his nice guy image, it was Ice T’s image as a bad boy that made him a star and won him his role in Ricochet. That’s why a line Fuhrman used to describe his attempt to emulate best-selling author Joseph Wambaugh is worth remembering in connection with other successful writers and works of fiction. He said, "The similarities are not mere coincidence."

There are probably fewer coincidences in the O.J. Simpson case than meet the eye, from either a prosecution or defense point of view. From an OJG point of view, the cut finger of the left hand, the blood-drops on the left of the size 12 Bruno Magli shoeprints, etc., fit together well enough to tell a coherent story of only one man who could have committed the murders. From an MFG perspective, that same story fits the evidence of a frame-up much better, with far fewer "coincidences" left over. Think, "Hollywood," and the similarities can be traced to four money-making scripts, one of which predates Hollywood by 300 years.

SCRIPT # 1: OTHELLO. Some of William Shakespeare’s dramas are so ingrained in the consciousness of the English-speaking world that most literate people can tell you something about them. They know the title character in at least five of them and can tell you that someone gets stabbed to death in all five. Say, Hamlet, and they might quote you, "To be or not to be, that is the question." Say, MacBeth, and you might get, "Double, double toil and trouble," or "Out damn spot!" Julius Caesar will most likely elicit, "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." Most people can tell you that Romeo and Juliet is about "star-crossed lovers" who kill themselves in the end. With Othello, you'll get "the green-eyed monster" and a rich black guy who murders his innocent white wife in a jealous rage.

Nobody is really going to say, "Othello, a rich black guy." They’re going to say, Othello the Moor. They’re going to picture a rich black guy—with a bloody knife in his hand and the white woman who married him lying dead at his feet. The fact that Shakespeare’s Othello didn't stab his wife means less than the fact that he did kill her, he did hold a bloody knife in his hand, and he did leave his own blood at the murder scene. Just before killing himself, he spoke of killing a Jew with a knife. Perhaps the only thing that matters in the wake of the Bundy killings was the general category to which the play belonged, a bloody Shakespearean drama.

COINCIDENCE # 1: After verifying the identity of the woman killed at Bundy and going to Rockingham with three other detectives, Fuhrman shined his flashlight on a package in O.J.’s Bronco labeled, "Orenthal Productions." Could Orenthal (rich, black guy) have murdered his (young, white) wife and cut himself with a knife? Could it be his blood at the murder scene next to the bloody shoeprints? Could the package have been planted with the label exposed? Could it have been sitting where it could be so readily seen by coincidence?

COINCIDENCE # 2: Orenthal contains all the letters needed to spell Othello. Drop the r, the n and the a, double the first and last letter, and you’re set. How many names of rich black men in the history of the world can you do that with? The m in Simpson lets you spell Othello the Moor. This kind of game is not for everyone. But people like Mark Fuhrman who are good at solving complex intellectual problems find them irresistible.

COINCIDENCE # 3: Iago was a convincing liar who sought to make it big by destroying the reputation of someone who was as successful as he thought he should have been ("...he that filches from me my good name, robs me of that which not enriches him, and makes me poor indeed."). By robbing Casseo and Desdemona of their good names in the eyes of Othello, he advanced his standing with Othello. By robbing Othello of his good name in the eyes of the state, he expected to achieve vengeance, wealth and power. Fuhrman was a convincing liar who did make it big by destroying the reputation of someone who was as successful as he thought he should have been.

COINCIDENCE # 4: The power of suggestion looms large in the circumstantial case of guilt Iago manufactured against Cassio, Desdemona and Othello. That is, he manipulated how the people around them saw ordinary things as "incriminating evidence" by planting ideas as well as objects (Iago to Othello: "Was that Cassio—that he would sneak away so guilty-like, knowing you were coming?" "Look to your wife," "Beware, my lord, of jealousy; it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on."). Iago planted the idea that something was odd about Cassio’s behavior toward Othello’s wife, and that Desdemona gave Cassio a (lost) handkerchief that Othello had given her. Fuhrman planted the idea that there was something odd about how O.J.’s Bronco was parked, and that the killer was bleeding from his left hand. Once the suggestions were made, no one even thought of comparing the angle at which the Bronco was parked on the 13th to a random sampling of other parked cars on any day. No one thought of asking how O.J. normally parked his in that location when turning right from his driveway. When O.J. was found to have cut his finger, no amount of peculiar circumstances surrounding his blood tests could prompt most people to question the results. No one imagined that a modern-day Iago could have influenced their ideas on the subject by the subtle power of suggestion.

COINCIDENCE # 5: "Honest Iago" was not what he appeared to be ("I am not what I am."). On the witness stand, Fuhrman looked like an honest cop unfairly attacked because he did his job too well. He proved to be a liar who did a job on O.J. Simpson.

COINCIDENCE # 6: "Dream evidence" helped to convince Othello that Cassio was as guilty as Iago’s circumstantial evidence said he was. The dream evidence of Mark Fuhrman’s "old friend," Ron Shipp, helped to convince the authorities that O.J. was as guilty as Fuhrman’s circumstantial evidence said he was.

COINCIDENCE # 7: Iago’s machinations were aided by his knowledge of how the system worked ("I know the state."). Ditto Fuhrman.

SCRIPT # 2: THE NAKED GUN. This slapstick comedy series that ran from 1988-’94 has more in common with Fuhrman and the Bundy murders than one would think (see Final Note in the Appendix for much more about Fuhrman and the Movies).

The more I study it through the eyes of Hollywood producers who saw Fuhrman in the role of Fuhrman, the more I see a bunch of guys with Jewish-sounding names laughing hysterically. This wasn’t Dirty Harry or Popeye Doyle, it was Sledge Hammer, a TV comedy caricature of Dirty Harry too extreme to be viewed as anything but a joke.

Word gets around in closed circles. Maybe that’s what brought Sledge Hammer to life in September of 1986, 18 months after Fuhrman and McKinny started taping for Men Against Women. Who knows? But if Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers, the men who brought us Airplane, didn’t use Fuhrman as a template for an even more extreme character than Sledge Hammer, I’d sure like to know where their character came from. I’m talking about The Naked Gun version of Frank Drebin from the 1982 TV series, "Police Squad."

No one likes to be ridiculed by anyone in any arena, much less a nazi by Jews before the world. If that’s what Fuhrman saw in The Naked Gun, it shines a new light on the torture aspect of the Brett Cantor and Ron Goldman murders. We would then have to wonder if they were chosen for their roles in the Bundy killings partly because they were Jews. We would have to consider the possibility that the death of the series was not an incidental byproduct of O.J. Simpson being charged with murder, but the anticipated result of a plan to kill it.

The Fuhrman-like traits in Drebin did nail the coffin lid shut on the serious character Fuhrman had been trying to sell as a role model and technical advisor. That would be noteworthy in itself, but the number of key concepts and images in The Naked Gun that correspond to key evidence in the Bundy murders, is incredible. Incredible, that is, unless they were observed by Fuhrman, who was outraged in some instances and inspired in others.

COINCIDENCE # 8: If you had set out to lampoon Mark Fuhrman, in 1988, you couldn’t have invented a better character than Lt. Frank Drebin, played for big laughs by Leslie Nielsen. Drebin was a bigoted, right-wing, West LA cop. Ditto, ditto, ditto Fuhrman. The woman Drebin loved left him for another man. Ditto Fuhrman. Drebin was an athletic, trigger-happy, martial artist with a "body builder’s physique," (hilarious scene in The Naked Gun 2 1/2) and a penchant for excessive violence. Ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto, ditto Fuhrman. The only thing Drebin didn’t have was a German name. Simpson’s character, Nordberg, had that. Before Fuhrman could be taken seriously in Hollywood, Nordberg had to go.

COINCIDENCE # 9: The Naked Gun has the real O.J. Simpson sneaking around at night in dark clothes carrying a small bag and a deadly weapon. He has a dark blue knit cap on his head identical to the one found at the feet of Ron Goldman. He also wears a dark knit cap in The Naked Gun 2 1/2, which you can see on the video tape box in the video rental stores that Fuhrman wants everyone to visit.

COINCIDENCE # 10: In the first Naked Gun, one villain asks another, "Who would make an ideal assassin?" When he is told, "Anyone who manages to conceal the fact that he is an assassin," The first villain replies with a demonstration which proves that the best assassin is one who doesn’t know he is one. If the murderer of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson was not O.J., he did conceal his identity, while making an unsuspecting O.J. appear to the world to be the killer.

COINCIDENCE # 11: The Naked Gun showed "Nordberg" covertly monitoring the conversation of a man plotting the murder of a woman with tremendous symbolic importance (the Queen of England). If O.J. was framed, the killer had to have monitored his conversations covertly before killing Nicole, a woman with tremendous symbolic importance (a white female with a German mother and two "black" children).

COINCIDENCE # 12: Speaking of symbolism, The Naked Gun showed a man in gloves slicing deep across the woman’s throat (her picture on a cake) with a knife. If you doubt the importance that Fuhrman attached to symbolism, read what he said about the political cartoon he kept on his desk at work of a swastika rising from the fallen Berlin wall. Then take a close look at the pictures in his first book. He didn’t miss a trick. He even ran a photo of a small child’s toy on a Bundy sidewalk tile not quite clean from where the blood of Sydney and little Justin’s slain mother had run thick.

COINCIDENCE # 13: The assassin, who doesn’t know he’s an assassin, appears before a large audience to be a black sports superstar who is "not in his right mind" and wearing a leather glove. O.J. Simpson, a black, sports superstar, appeared before a large audience to have lost both his mind and a leather glove at the murder scene.

COINCIDENCE # 14: A haphazardly parked car appears as a running gag in several scenes. Fuhrman claims that O.J.’s Bronco was parked haphazardly on Rockingham.

COINCIDENCES # 15&16. A large shoe is displayed in the police lab with Swiss Army knife attachments. It’s called the Swiss Army shoe. O.J. wears a large shoe and worked for the company that made Swiss Army knives. Fuhrman claims that a Swiss Army knife was "the" murder weapon.

COINCIDENCE # 17: Nordberg is set up to look like a criminal with "incriminating evidence" of his guilt uncovered in the lab. For O.J. to be innocent, someone must have done that to him.

COINCIDENCE # 18: Drebin "goes around" the normal way of entering a room in the lab without anyone noticing. To frame O.J., Fuhrman or Roberts would have had to do that.

COINCIDENCE # 19: Drebin discovers incriminating evidence against his target in an illegal search. Fuhrman discovered incriminating evidence against O.J. in an illegal search.

COINCIDENCE # 20: The month of June appears as an important date. Ron and Nicole were killed in June.

COINCIDENCE # 21: A man in a surveillance car witnesses the arrival of a stretch limousine and passes the news on to Drebin who is involved in an illegal act. O.J. could only have been framed if he was under surveillance up to the time he left in the limo and the news was passed on to the killer at Bundy.

COINCIDENCE # 22: Lt. Drebin’s evidence-handling results in the execution of an innocent man. Most people believe that Fuhrman’s evidence handling should have resulted in the conviction of O.J. Simpson. Many believe he should have been put to death.

COINCIDENCE # 23: The man Drebin was after was closely associated with the number 32. That was the number of the pier he owned that Nordberg was sneaking around on in his blue knit cap. 32 is synonymous with O.J. the football hero. He wore it in his record-setting years with the Buffalo Bills.

COINCIDENCE # 24: A radio microphone that Drebin does not know is ‘on’ catches him in an embarrassing moment he thinks is private. This is not a metaphor for the McKinny tapes which Fuhrman knew was running, but a way of monitoring O.J. through his cell phone when he wasn’t talking on it—through a transmitter hidden inside.

COINCIDENCE # 25: Drebin’s slow, deliberate footsteps are traced on a sidewalk by a camera focused on his shoes. His toes point straight ahead the way O.J.’s do as he walks when they’re not pointed in. Leslie Nielsen and O.J. Simpson are both pigeon-toed. By looking at the shoes alone, you couldn’t tell which man was wearing them. The bloody shoeprints heading toward the Bundy back gate were slow, deliberate and pointed straight ahead—exactly the way Fuhrman walks naturally. There is little to say that O.J. wore the shoes and much to say that Fuhrman did, with shoeprints that would have been left with O.J. in mind. It’s my guess that this is where the idea came from to combine the cap, the gloves and the knife as evidence with shoes that could be worn by Fuhrman or O.J. but identified as O.J.’s with the use of a planted witness.

COINCIDENCE # 26: On Pier 32, Drebin meets a witness planted to say that Nordberg was guilty of the crime he was actually framed for. If O.J. was framed, three people played that role.

Much was made of O.J.’s wetsuit costume and throat-slashing scene in the pilot for the TV series Frogmen. In The Naked Gun 2 ½ Drebin was the one wearing the wetsuit. But the real key to the killer’s identity was in the use of a specific military technique for neutralizing two sentries in close proximity to each other with a stunning blow to the head. In Frogmen, there were three similarities, at most, to the Bundy killings. Assuming O.J. committed the murders that made Mark Fuhrman a best-selling author sought after by Geraldo and Oprah, Frogmen looks bad for O.J. Now, let’s assume that Fuhrman committed the murders to get the attention he needed to become a best-selling author sought after by Geraldo and Oprah. If he knew about Frogmen, part of which was filmed in L.A., the similarities to the murders-to-come look much different.

SCRIPT # 3: RICOCHET. This movie had damn near everything the Bundy murders did, including cops who liked to play basketball, Nazi symbolism, white supremacists, a body builder, and big shoes that could be traced to only one man, a black one destined to become a fallen hero.

If you haven’t seen Steven E. de Souza’s 1991 screenplay, produced by Joel Silver and Michael Levy, check it out of your favorite tape rental store and watch it. Watch it closely. Put yourself in the place of a white, racist, LAPD officer who once met a famous black man with a mufti-million-dollar image. The black guy is a former football great who had a starring role in an HBO cable television series called 1st & Ten. He played a character called T.D. Parker, who kissed and fondled gorgeous, bare-breasted white women on a regular basis from 1985 to 1991.

Ricochet is about a man who is obsessed with destroying the image of a handsome, charismatic hero he holds responsible for thwarting his own ambitions, and arranges an elaborate frame-up to do it. Viewed through the eyes of a raciest, the movie would be about a white man called Blake (played by John Lithgow) obsessed with destroying the image of a black man called Styles (played by Denzel Washington). With this one, I won’t even bother with a list of coincidences. I think we can safely call them plot points, character descriptions and props for the actual murder of three people and the framing of a fourth. I think that Fuhrman identified strongly with Blake and was as obsessed with Ricochet as he was with O.J. Simpson. I think he relied on Ricochet, even more than Othello and The Naked Gun, as a model to write his own script in blood.

Before we get to that, a movie released in the year Fuhrman met O.J. and Nicole is worth mentioning. Guilty Conscience, with Anthony Hopkins, Blythe Danner and Swoosie Kurtz probably served as Fuhrman’s first model for the murder plot. I’m inclined to think that he fantasized about it with several variations, beginning with himself, his ex-wife and their former lovers as the lead characters. I’m inclined to think that The Naked Gun’s release, followed by news of the 911 call in ’89 attributed to Nicole  transformed it into a murder/setup plan with Nicole and O.J. as his targets. Guilty Conscience has a cluster of features in common with what a plot to frame O.J. would have had to entail—a pattern that fulfills too many requirements of a frame-up to be a coincidence. It has:

• A man falsely accused of murdering his wife

• A discolored portion of her face showing evidence that he had struck her

• A conspirator close to the murder victim, the victim of the setup, and the killer

• A female conspirator secretly following a principal in the crime to a shoe store

• The voice of the man and his wife on an incriminating tape

• An alibi involving a large gathering of people

• The man falsely accused of her murder based on contrived circumstantial evidence

• Planted evidence

• Murder facilitated by phone calls

• An expert in the criminal justice system who knows how to testify in court

• An incriminating document in the murder victim’s safe-deposit box

• Another woman mastering her handwriting to gain access to the safe-deposit box

• Safe deposit box opened by law after wife’s violent death

And how about this for a quote from a tough prosecutor concerning the contents of that box... "A wife in writing says her husband wants her dead and suddenly she is dead...if you had no other evidence—and you do—this fact alone is devastating..."

I can’t prove that Fuhrman saw Guilty Conscience, Othello, The Naked Gun, or Ricochet. The only movie I know he watched was Ghosts which was in O.J.’s VCR when Fuhrman searched his house. Fuhrman speculated that it was the last thing O.J. watched before he murdered Ron and Nicole and called it a movie about "love, jealousy and murder." It was about love, greed, duplicity and murder. When you add jealousy, you get Othello. The link it has to Guilty Conscience is a scene were a woman forges her name to gain access to a bank account. The link to Ricochet is Denzel Washington whose partner, Julia Roberts, pulled that stunt in "The Pelican Brief." She also uses the telephone to convince people that she is someone else. Mark Fuhrman was singularly lacking in the originality to create his own movies but uniquely positioned to use what he wanted from time-tested winners. It’s reasonable to infer that he not only saw all of the above movies, but studied them like recipes for a prize-winning script.

Instead of listing Guilty Conscience as a separate dish from Ricochet, I thought it might be better to view it as an array of condiments for the main course, The Framing of O.J. Simpson. I won’t have to tell you where a sprinkle of this or a pinch of that from Guilty Conscience was used. You’ll see it.

SCRIPT # 4: "The Framing of O.J. Simpson." Viewing Ricochet through the eyes of a white racist, you're going to want to make changes here and there since the hero in the movie is a black man and the principal villain is white. Worse than that, from the perspective of a white, racist, body-builder involved with a hate group, the organized white supremacists in Ricochet are made to look like ineffectual buffoons. Apart from that, you've got a detailed plan for a murder/setup, that should work. I recall thinking when I first saw it in 1991 or ’92—when the Bruno Maglis were, coincidentally, purchased—that something like that could work. I believe now that it did work, with the murder in Brentwood of Brett Cantor in ’93, serving as a dress rehearsal for the Bundy murders in ’94.

If you’ve seen Ricochet lately, you may be way ahead of me. For the sake of those who haven’t, here are the items that make more sense as a script adapted to real life by Mark Fuhrman to frame O.J. than they do as coincidental similarities. It has:

1. A fallen hero nicknamed P.K. (a one-letter shift to the right in the alphabet from O.J. K even rhymes with J)
2. An LA setting with LA cops, criminals, judges, juries and prosecutors
3. Cops playing basketball, one of whom is white
4. Large-sized, "ugly ass" shoes
5. A multiple murder that the killer planned and carried out to get him into the big time
6. A cop beating up a suspect
7. The killer with a knife
8. The hero’s promotion to detective
9. The detective making one big bust for television before retirement
10. The fateful meeting between the hero and the man who would bring about his fall
11. The hero’s star-making performance recorded on video tape
12. The killer’s realization that he had the power to manipulate the hero’s public image
13. The real killer creating the appearance of an airtight alibi
14. The fallen hero not telling the whole truth when faced with evidence against him
15. A black man that white women find attractive
16. Drug thugs
17. A lab sample switch for the purpose of false identification
18. Lit candles in the living room, and pictures of the hero on the wall
19. Incriminating letters
20. Incriminating photos
21. Incriminating video and audio tapes
22. Damning blood evidence
23. The use of the n-word
24. References to decapitation
25. The hero at his young daughter’s dance recital with a "crazed" look on his face
26. Hot clues being fed to the hero’s defense team to throw them off track
27. Use of direct surveillance and eavesdropping equipment
28. The body of someone the hero had no motive to kill left with evidence that he did it
29. An ideal self-portrait of Mark Fuhrman, mind and body
30. A mountain of evidence the accused cannot explain
31. Organized help for the killer when he needs it
32. A dark knit cap worn by the killer
33. Cell phone communication between conspirators
34. A local television reporter using "exclusive" information provided by the killer to promote herself
35. A duped press corps in general, mindlessly accepting whatever evidence of the victim's guilt that the killer feeds it
36. A criminal trial lasting 9 months
37. Interracial sex
38. A black attorney warning an exhausted jury of "a rush to judgment"
39. Lots of blood
40. A man on a commando-style mission wearing a dark, knit cap and brown, leather gloves
41. Blood on a rug
42. A reference to a ski mask
43. A man who boasts of killing and not getting caught
44. The idea for a successful setup taken from a popular Hollywood movie
45. An ambidextrous killer
46. A bleeding killer
47. Fallen hero wearing dark brown leather gloves (looked like Aris Isotoner lights to me)

Fantasy, coincidence, or script? Which is it?

Ricochet may have been a work of fiction, but the points of comparison I made between it and the evidence of a frame-up against Simpson stand on their own. They could not have been a fantasy of mine or a 47 point coincidence—not with Fuhrman's interest in the movies, his attempts to sell his services to producers as a technical advisor, and the attention he paid to detail. This movie had to have spoken to him personally, the way The Naked Gun would have. Ricochet even had a background reference to Marines. In addition, the mastermind of the frame-up was a "true Aryan," like Fuhrman, standing over 6’ tall, like Fuhrman, who did his homework, like Fuhrman, killed without remorse, like Fuhrman, and paid close attention to detail, like Fuhrman. The only point of similarity out of 47 that was either beyond Fuhrman’s ability to relate to, to predict or to manipulate in the O.J. Simpson case was the 9-month trial.

If you watched any crime dramas in your lifetime, you've seen some of the items on The Framing of O.J. Simpson comparison list numerous times. I've written some of them into my own novels. That's not due to a lack of imagination, but the realization that some things are routinely done in prescribed ways for better or worse, other things can best be done in certain ways, and still other things can be accomplished only one way.

Why, for example, do you suppose filmmakers keep making movies in which innocent people are made to look guilty? It’s because there are only 3 possibilities in any apparent crime, and a frame-up is one of them. Why are we so often shown scenes of men in remote vehicles or apartment rooms viewing or listening in on other people's private conversations with telescopic lenses and carefully concealed bugs and receivers? For the same reason that kind of equipment is sold. It's one real-world way to see and hear what someone else is doing and saying without their knowledge or approval. There are other ways, but the camera shot of the telephoto lens, or the bug beneath the table, gets the idea across in an instant. In the real world, we rarely think that we or anyone we are with could be the subject of clandestine audio or visual observation. We are like ostriches in that way; if we don't see anyone watching us, it does not normally occur to us that someone can see us.

The old sample-switch-in-the-lab trick is another staple of movies where a phony "positive identification" is called for. Again, you have the real world consideration of accomplishing a task in a way not likely to be questioned. We’ve seen it done a zillion times on TV, and we dismiss the reality of it partly for that reason. Everyone knows that evidence in a criminal case is only as good as the integrity of the people who claim to have found it and the chain of custody that brings it before the jury. Still, the evidence itself is usually enough to shut down all thought of other possibilities. In O.J.’s case, most people could not conceive how his blood came to be identified in the lab with "the killer’s blood." They didn’t even pose the apposite question. All they wanted to know was, how O.J.’s blood ended up on Bundy! If you couldn’t answer that, they didn’t want to hear anything else, and felt justified in blasting anyone who refused to accept the obvious on face value.

The busted watch that fixes the time of death in a violent struggle is also an old standby of murder mysteries. But it’s a double-edged sword. Perhaps that’s why neither side chose to use it.

All throughout the preliminary hearings and the first half of the criminal trial against Simpson, something about it seemed naggingly familiar. I thought, at first, that it was the unwanted parallels some people might draw between Simpson and a fictional character in my first novel. Then, I realized I was actually seeing evidence of one thing after another that fit the profile I came up with of a hypothetical killer if it wasn’t O.J. He resembled a real, live, human being I was getting to know as a homicide detective named Mark Fuhrman.

Then, when news of the McKinny tapes came to light and the prosecution protested their relevance in the Simpson trial, I began to think more and more about Ricochet, and its possible relevance. What Marcia Clark said about Fuhrman trying to impress Ms. McKinny sounded the first gong. His testimony with a smile about his fondness for basketball had seemed to me like another way of saying, "some of my best friends are Negroes." I could never get it completely out of my mind. Only after reading Vannatter and Lange’s book did I learn that Fuhrman was a star basketball player. One of his favorite sports heroes is Larry Bird. That gave a new twist to his smile. Ricochet brings those elements together in ways not likely to have happened by chance.

Ricochet begins with four men playing 2-on-2 basketball. Two of them are cops. P.K. (Preacher’s Kid), as Nick Styles is called on the court, is a star player. His partner, Larry, a shorter white guy, seems to be in the picture only to make P.K. look good. After getting roughed up a little, P.K. calls a time-out and shares a good-natured joke with Larry about his color and his style of play.

Fuhrman was not only as athletically proficient as Nick Styles, the fictitious LA cop, he was a real LA cop.

A large pair of unusual shoes plays a key part in the movie. In this case, they are used as a phallic symbol, with a woman holding them straight up on a picnic bench as she watches Styles (P.K.), "style" on the basketball court. As if to leave no doubt about the meaning of the shoes or who they belong to, the woman hands them to P.K. with her elbow resting on a hard-cover edition of Moby Dick. They discuss the book, concluding with this line by the woman, "We need more lawyers like we need more big white Moby Dicks."

Dick also means, "detective." Mark Fuhrman was a robbery detective in the late '80s who became a homicide detective sometime in 1991 when Ricochet was released.

The unusual style of shoes identified as O.J.’s, played a different role in the Bundy murder case, but the essential fact is this: larger-than-average shoes belonging to the hero were an essential prop in moving the plot forward, one that Mark Fuhrman could not have missed. Nor could he have missed the fact that they belonged to a cop.

In the next scene, Blake, a small-time hit man, and his sycophantic partner try to break into the big time with a hit on Spanish-speaking drug dealers. The bloody hit is facilitated by inside help. The Fates intervene, as those of us who saw the TV trailers knew they would, and Styles becomes an instant celebrity at Blake’s expense. Blake gets tricked by the hero and shot in the knee, whereupon he pulls a knife that Styles easily disposes of. The dramatic confrontation is caught on video tape. The hero’s path to lasting fame and fortune is assured.

If you’re Mark Fuhrman and you’re watching this move in 1991 or ’92, you’ve got to be having a hard time identifying with Styles, not identifying with Blake and not making the association between P.K. and O.J. To help you there, all you need is an episode of The Twilight Zone from the early ’60s where Dennis Weaver cannot wake up from a recurring nightmare (see Appendix, Final Note).

In his dream, which is real to him—though he knows it can’t be—he is tried, sentenced and executed in one day for a murder he did not commit. He "awakens" on trial in a variation of the same dream. Details change; the prosecutor in one dream may be a cop, a judge, a priest, or a death row inmate in another, but they are all people he’d actually met in the real world, and the basic scenario stays the same. The same innocent man is found guilty and sentenced to death.

That’s the way you have to view this movie if you’re Mark Fuhrman. It’s the only way you can stand to watch it all the way through. Only you can use a free substitution rule, with people you’ve met. When you do, you might come up with a script were the chance meeting of a white cop and a black civilian who has already achieved stardom, begins to move the two in opposite directions. You might see the success of O.J. as Nordberg assuring the failure of Fuhrman as Fuhrman.

Unlike a straightforward assassination where the assassin’s name is forever linked to that of his famous victim at the price of life in prison or death, the assassination of O.J. Simpson’s image, along with Nordberg’s, had no down side. If Fuhrman planned it right, and all went well, he could reverse the roles of Blake and "P.K." in the real world so that the hero was "a big, white dick" and all the characters were real. That’s what you get at the Bundy murder scene with Fuhrman’s notes, his theory of a bleeding killer and his finger pointing to a bloody, leather glove.

Let’s pause here, for a minute, and rewind The Framing of O.J. Simpson tape to Vannatter and Lange’s walk-through of the Bundy crime scene. Now, let’s count the subliminal arrows of guilt pointing in sequence to O.J. Simpson as the killer, and compare them to the movies. Let’s see if we can tell where life imitates art as an art form of its own:

1. Lange and Vannatter were told before they arrived that the female victim was the former wife of Simpson—rich black, older man; dead white, younger woman. Another man and a knife were involved (Othello, 1965, Laurence Olivier as The Moor of Venice; A Double Life, 1947, Ronald Coleman as an unstable actor playing the role of Othello, who strangles a blond woman to death. The woman is played by Shelley Winters, who also played the mother of a boy and girl in Night of the Hunter, who gets her throat slashed from ear to ear by her crazy, two-faced husband.). The condition of the bodies tells them it’s a rage killing (Othello).
2. The next thing the detectives are shown is the cap and the glove (The Naked Gun, Othello).
3. They are then led into the house through the garage where they see lit candles, an envelope with O.J.’s return address on it, pictures of him on the living room walls (Ricochet).

At this point, there is no evidence that O.J. did anything wrong, apart from a statistical abstraction that makes all husbands and ex-husbands suspects. Nevertheless, he already has three strikes against him in automatic, subconscious associations alone. It’s like the ancient alchemist recipe for turning lead into gold. The secret is to add one bar of lead at a time to a cauldron of boiling water and stir without thinking "hippopotamus." No matter how objective the new lead detectives may want to be, they have to be seeing O.J. as the killer. The burden of proof is on him.

4. Now, on to Rockingham where Fuhrman’s observation of an out-of-place stick near a white Bronco, leads him to shine a light on a package in the Bronco, labeled Orenthal Productions. Still no evidence that O.J. did anything wrong. Yet, he is on the verge of being struck out twice in the same inning on subliminal screwballs and curves that he can’t lay a bat on. Vannatter and Fuhrman knew that Orenthal was O.J. (Othello).
5. Fuhrman’s observation of a red spot near the door handle of the Bronco links "Orenthal" to his bleeding killer theory (Othello).
6. Fuhrman’s "discovery" of the bloody matching glove brings both crime scenes together with O.J. as the only man Vannatter and Lange can now see as the killer (Othello).

And how did Fuhrman get to Rockingham where he and his partner found all the other damning evidence including the "bloody" socks on the rug? Phillips told the detectives that Fuhrman had been there in ’85 on a domestic dispute call (Othello). Plug that into these lines by Blake, "...all of a sudden one of us took off—lit up the sky like a meteor. And why? Because he met the other." Does that sound like a coincidence to you? How about this passage from Blake’s partner after the media has announced the apparent murder by Nick Styles of his best friend? "What art is, is how you single-handedly deconstructed Nick Styles’ life, I mean it was brilliant. It was the Sistine Chapel. It was like you were the artist and I was your assistant...we were a team. Mind like a steel trap; body of a Greek god—"

How do you think Mark Fuhrman, body builder, artist, smartest guy around, would have related to that description? Do you think he might have been inspired to "retire" Drebin and Nordberg, and make an honored name for himself in one bold, brilliant and bloody Shakespearean stroke?