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Prosecutors can convince a jury that the evidence and testimony they present is sufficient to remove all reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt. That’s not poof. It’s persuasion. Proof excludes all other possibilities, “reasonable” or not. The history of science, technology, war and athletic competition proves that reasonable answers are sometimes wrong. But explaining what the right answer has to be requires persuasion. It’s much easier to persuade rational and irrational people alike that something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck must be a duck than to get any of them to even grant the possibility that it might not be. Engineers can prove some things that others can only argue about. They cannot persuade parts of real things to fit or move in harmony. Either they do or they don't. Knowing what it takes to open and close a car door is what led me to do the Bronco turn study. The principle involved in driving a vehicle around a corner is the same as opening a car door. If you know the measurable characteristics of the door and the formulas applicable to how it swings, you have to know only where it starts or finishes the swing to know both. That’s why the precise angle of the Bronco relative to the curb, along with other key data that an engineer would know to look for and how to get tells you whether or not it matches O.J.’s story of last driving it from his driveway to the street. You can apply basic engineering techniques to interpreting the pattern of blood drops on the Rockingham driveway marked and collected by the LAPD criminalist Dennis Fung. You can do it with the stories told by O.J., Allan Park, Kato Kaelin and Rachel Ferrara about Kato’s walk to the south path to investigate the thumps on his bungalow wall. You cannot persuade a 2-degree angle to be more or less than it is or blood drops to be somewhere they aren’t. You can’t change time and space independent of the motion between them. If you want the truth you have to obey the laws of math and physics in working with what you have to see what it yields. The murder case against O.J. has an overabundance of static parts that don’t fit and moving parts that aren’t in sync. Those two things by themselves make the case against him dysfunctional. But for all the parts that don’t fit O.J. and aren’t in sync there have to be corresponding pieces linked to someone else that do fit and are in sync. That’s how the Iago hypothesis was born. To write this piece, I wanted to take everything I needed from Iago in Brentwood to make a checklist from the Iago hypothesis and match it to what I subsequently learned about Fuhrman. I soon realized, as I should have in the first place, that it couldn’t be done. Large portions of the book were based on MFG (Mark Fuhrman Guilty) scenarios that were mere logic exercise that I added to RSG (Ron Shipp Guilty), CIAG (CIA Guilty) and other popular alternates to OJG. They were just rough outlines loosely based on evidence, testimony and uncorroborated stories. My MFG scenarios did fit most of the evidence and independently verifiable testimony that I knew about once I abandoned the idea that the killer acted alone. Nevertheless, there were too many gaps in all of them that had to be filled in with invented characters and rank speculation to keep them bound to the evidence. Before I knew it, I had a theory on my hands. I could not call it MFG because the best evidence I had gave Fuhrman a boatload of things that disqualified him as a suspect, not the least of which was an alibi that would have been easy for the defense to break if he fabricated it. Without Fuhrman all I had were long strings of characteristics for a nameless, faceless killer who seemed to have more in common with a fictional movie-mystery character than anyone who could exist in real life. On top of that, most of the key elements were corollaries (logical outgrowths of the hypothesis) rather than itemized components of it. When you understand the proposition you can list them yourself. This is how it works: No alterative to OJG works with the physical evidence against him unless the killings were done for the purpose for framing him. If O.J. was framed by the killer, the killer had to be able to predict with vital certainty that the detectives in charge would find and follow the clues he left for them. That’s one proposition in the Iago hypothesis. These are the corollaries to that proposition: ü He had to know that he would be on hand at the start of the investigation to erase or muddle any unintended evidence that incriminated him and to insure that the clues he left for the detectives in charge would be followed unswervingly to O.J. ü To inflict stab wound patterns on the victims that experienced homicide detectives would immediately associate with a rage killing, the killer had to know how homicide cops think. He had to know how the best of them invariably process that information – what they see that makes them reach that conclusion reflexively. ü He had to know that the detectives in charge, whoever they might be, would limit their suspect pool to someone close to one or both victims and that O.J. would rise to the top simply because of the apparent nature of the crime. ü He had to know that the detectives would then look for evidence to exclude O.J. making further evidence they found against him that much more incriminating. ü He had to know that once the evidence began to line up against one suspect, the investigation would then turn to gathering evidence and testimony to make a winnable case in court. ü To know all of this he had to have observed enough homicide investigations from start to finish to understand why the investigators think the way they do. He had to be a cop. This was the checklist of reasons that a very bright supervisor of Detroit Police homicide detectives gave me indirectly for his belief that O.J. was guilty. It is what real homicide detective do. That’s why fiction writers rarely create detectives on the active payroll of big city police departments for their super-sleuth protagonists. They aren’t as believable as people who work outside the system to unravel complex master criminal plots. Real police detectives with real caseloads don’t have the time or inclination to do what Lt. Columbo does with tiny clues that contradict big ones. You have to be a Sherlock Holmes or a Hercule Poirot to do that. If you are a homicide cop you know what that means. It means following clues that are obvious to you – the pro. It means not “wasting time” on highly improbable murder/frame-up scenarios, especially conspiracies involving more people and more intricate plot twists than necessary to do the job. If you go there, you know that you are entering the world of fiction. So you don’t go there. You wouldn’t solve many real homicide cases if you did. Mark Fuhrman tells how it’s done the right way in Murder in Brentwood and Murder in Greenwich without doing it. He actually does it in Murder in Spokane, Death and Justice and A Simple Act of Murder. The trick is to define the fundamental issue as clearly as you can without getting ahead of the facts in front of you and to follow up on every possibility they suggest. Where most professional detectives go wrong is where most professionals in any field go wrong. They get far enough into the problem to think they know the solution and that's where they stop. If they hadn't seen enough results to convince them they were right 98% of the time they wouldn’t do it. What that means to a highly intelligent killer who knows how homicide detectives think is simple. It means that he doesn’t have to worry about committing the perfect murder/frame-up. Most frame-up claims are dismissed out of hand, anyway, because it is a claim made routinely by suspects with damning evidence against them. If 98 % of what the cops and prosecutors see is habitually treated with 100 % conviction, operating in the 2 % zone, no matter how sloppily, puts the killer safely beyond suspicion. As an Agatha Christy character in a 1982 made-for-television movie told a probability expert doubting the likelihood that anyone could pull off the "murder business" she described. "Oh, forgive me professor," she says, "that's where you're in error. You see, the person in question is just the last person anyone would suspect. And so long as no one suspects you, murder is easy." It’s like stripping naked and dancing an Irish jig on second base in Yankee Stadium. Can you do that without getting caught? Sure you can if you have the desire, the guts and the physical ability to do it. Think about what it would take. Think about the big picture, the broad storks and the details. What would be the point? When could you do it? What will you have to know about the stadium and its security? What inside knowledge will you need? Who can you trust to help you do what you can’t do yourself? What back-up plans will you require when something goes wrong? Something always goes wrong. Under what circumstances will you have to improvise? That is the basic structure of the Iago hypothesis. Learning that O.J.’s alibi was corroborated by objective tests with measurable data put me at a loss for other identifiable suspects. The thing I need to emphasize here is that I worked up my MFG scenarios and many others at least two months before the Laura Hart McKinny tapes came to light in August of 1995. I bothered with Fuhrman only because of his military, intellectual and special knowledge qualifications that I couldn’t find with anyone else before Johnnie Cochran made his closing remarks about Fuhrman's alibi in October. I knew from watching the murder trial for six months that he was: ü An x-Marine ü Highly intelligent ü Cool under pressure ü Attentive to small details ü The first lead detective on the scene ü The only person in the case positively linked to both bloody gloves ü The man who wrote the letter that resulted in O.J.'s spouse abuse record ü The detective who consistently pointed the way for other detectives to follow ü The witness who reminded me the most of a great detective in a movie or TV show The last item is less subjective than it might appear to be and more important in terms of subsequent events and discoveries that could invalidate or confirm the observation. The victims, the alleged killer and the detective who associated himself with the most dramatic evidence on Bundy and Rockingham were perfectly cast for a movie. Every major aspect of the case could be traced to scenes in movies and TV shows, beginning with the knit cap like the one O.J. wore sneaking around at night in The Naked Gun. Hastily parked cars, bloody gloves, bloody shoeprints and blood trails left by a bleeding killer were movie clichés. Fuhrman’s words and his actions described by others wove those scattered movie fragments into a single narrative – like an “original” movie mosaic comprised mainly of bits and pieces from other movies. That’s as clear a picture as you can get of the killer’s primary frame of reference for staging the murder scene. Fuhrman’s alibi was, of course, the thing that put those observation in hibernation and my discovery that it could have been a false alibi was the thing that revived them. When you run down the list of items the killer had to have in place before the murders to implicate O.J. and operate under police and media radar, a false alibi is ineluctably one of them. The list of other requirements is so long with so many essential sub-components for so many of them that the random probability factor for all of them is practically zero. Although careful planning and the wherewithal to execute and improvise when necessary remove probability from the equation to a great extent, it looks ridiculous in advance of having the information needed to fill the gaps. Iago (before I gave it that name) called for an athletic killer (able to use both hands efficiently and move quickly in any direction like a basketball player or a boxer) who:
o a fellow thrill seeker o a man with deck shoes (a boat owner) that the killer trusted with his life
o observe the Bronco on Ashford or Rockingham without being observed o make the thumps on Kato’s wall o keep tabs on what O.J. did outside his house and who he talked to inside o be mistaken for O.J. if he were seen near the Bronco when O.J. was in the house o have a reasonable excuse for being on the property if he was identified o know enough about O.J. to look for blood drops from a cut hand or finger o take the fall if the frame-up was discovered
o was absent when the photo of O.J. with Sydney was taken
o Had to be close enough to the investigation to be considered a credible source
All of these things could have theoretically applied to someone other than Fuhrman; a detective, patrol officer or police photographer who was scarcely mentioned in any public document on the case or entirely omitted. If so, his identity might never rise above the level of speculation. If, however, you’re talking about Fuhrman, with everything said, written and shown by and about him from June 1994 through October 2009, many of those bullet points have become check marks. They include his screenplay defense of what he said on the McKinny tapes, the movie he produced, and his repeated movie references to illustrate his thoughts. The check marks on Fuhrman now include his artistic ability, his 6’ 3” height, size 12 shoes, pigeon-toed stride and his shorter, deeper voiced, thrill seeking, yacht owning partner Brad Roberts. You also get another bullet point that has to be checked off for the hypothesis to stand up. · He had to know that he would be the first lead detective on the scene. Thanks to Fuhrman’s book, The Murder Business, that bullet point is now a check mark. His junior partner Brad Roberts was on call. Roberts’ hidden role in the investigation was crucial but the fact that he was going to be summoned to the scene means that Fuhrman had an iron-clad guarantee that he would also be called. You don’t send a junior detective to lead a high profile murder investigation when you’ve got the phone number of his senior partner. –Jasper
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