Political Bodies

In a January 2007 interview with Variety writer Robert Hofler, Mark Fuhrman calls himself a "trivia hound" on the subject of actor Steve McQueen. In that interview Fuhrman makes a special note of McQueen's role in Bullitt ('68) as San Francisco Homicide Lieutenant Frank Bullitt.

The male murder victim (note the position of his body compared to Ron Goldman's) is a used car salesman from Chicago (Ron was from Chicago)named Albert Renick posing as a mobster named Johnny Ross. When Renick is tricked into opening the door of his "safe" hotel room for the man with leather gloves who kills him with a shotgun blast, the killer wounds "Ross'" police protector in his left leg. In the original screenplay "Ross" was "Rossi." Faye Resnick, reputedly from Chicago, introduced Nicole Simpson to Ron Goldman and set up the June 12, 1994 meeting where Ron and Nicole were murdered. The first name Mark Fuhrman wrote on his Bundy crime scene notes was "Sgt. Rossi."  The first date you see on a fax that gives the dead man's true identity in Bullitt is Feb 5, 1968 -- Mark Fuhrman's 16th birthday.

The controversy surrounding the dimes  and pennies on Nicole's driveway (11 cents in one LAPD count and 22 cents in another) leads inevitably to associations with November 22, 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy.  In Bullitt, Robert Vaughn is an ambitious Senator who hopes to promote himself by manipulating his own image and the image of the man he thinks is Johnny Ross. Robert Vaughan's birthday is November 22, 1932. Don Gordon is Frank Bullitt's partner. McQueen appeared with Robert Vaughn, Don Gordon, O.J. Simpson, Faye Dunaway and Felton Perry in The Towering Inferno ('74). Perry was San Francisco Homicide Lieutenant "Dirty Harry Callahan's" partner in Magnum Force ('73) with Clint Eastwood and Tim Matheson (Quicksand: No Way Out with Donald Southerland). Perry also appeared in Percy and Thunder ('93) with Ron Shipp. Perry is an Omni Consumer Products executive in the RoboCop movie series set in Detroit -- across the Detroit River from Windsor, Ontario. The Santa Rosa Airport, where Fuhrman said he met his friend Kevin Devries, is actually in Windsor, California just off of Highway 101. The gas station where Fuhrman said he used his American Express Gold card on the night of the Bundy murders is roughly five miles west of the Ontario, California Airport.

The blonde female murder victim in Bullitt is Renick's wife. The strangulation wound around her neck looks as though her throat was cut. You see Ross, the killer,  leaving her apartment and taking off his gloves. He meets his well-deserved end in a shootout at the San Francisco Airport.

Of the 2,000 people who auditioned for Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio in 1955 only Steve McQueen and Martin Landau were accepted. Strasberg appeared in The Cassandra Crossing ('76) with Bert Lancaster as an Army colonel and O.J. Simpson as a fake Catholic priest. 

In the 1970 movie They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!, Martin Landau is a minister named Logan Sharpe implicated in the murder of a high class prostitute. Sidney Poitier is his friend, San Francisco Homicide  Lieutenant Virgil Tibbs who investigates the murder and turns up two other suspects before finding the vital clue that proves his friend's guilt. One of those suspects is a character named Woody played by Edward Asner (Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Guy Bannister in JFK with Kevin Costner and Joe Pesci. He runs from police when evidence on his shoes tie him to the murdered woman although his only crime is having an affair that he is trying to hide from his wife. He drives his car across the Golden Gate Bridge and ends up in a wreck where he is captured by the California Highway Patrol (CHiPs). The moral dilemma for Tibbs is not only that the killer is a friend who he knows to be a good man under normal circumstances, but that arresting him days prior to an important ballot proposal he campaigned for could affect the election. 

In the 1967 movie In the Heat of the Night, with Scott Wilson (Billy Cutshaw in The Ninth Configuration with Stacy Keach as Kane) Poitier's Virgil Tibbs character is a Philadelphia homicide detective.  His move to San Francisco in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! is never explained.

No explanation is necessary to see how this movie connects to another movie with salient links to Mark Fuhrman's role in the Bundy murders. All you need to see are shots of the woman's body in different positions (a continuity error that shows the scene with the body was staged), a locker showing various gloves, a mask and pair of shoes, and actress Beverly Todd as a prostitute named Puff wearing a leopard skin blouse.

A Touch of Scandal ('84) is directed by Ivan Nagy , who wrote an episode of CHiPs. It features Angie Dickinson (murder victim in Dressed to Kill) as Los Angeles councilwoman Katherine Gilvey campaigning for the office of California's attorney general with Don Murray as her asexual husband and campaign manager. Beverly Todd is Betty, a campaign staffer who sees how to turn the murder of a male prostitute named Billy that threatens to derail Katherine's campaign into a political advantage. This is what the killer expected someone on Katherine's staff to do as a function of political expediency, which determined his selection of the victim as well as where and how the body would be found. The murder plan was an application of proven formulas to stimulate knee-jerk media and political responses. Betty's idea is simply to ask and keep asking "why" Billy was murdered so close to the election and why the body was left where Katherine and her husband lived. The tacit assumption is therefore that her opponent in the race for California's attorney general is somehow behind the murder. 

Jason Miller (Lt. Reno in The Ninth Configuration with Scott Wilson and Robert Loggia) is a self-styled minister with a political agenda that anticipates how Katherine will handle the murder he commits. The title of the movie comes from the fact that Miller's character Garrett Locke stages the murder in a way that gives Katherine the illusion of wiggle room to escape even "a touch of scandal." The scandal she tries to avoid -- one that all politicians initially lie about, is sexual. Locke knows enough about politics and about Katherine to know that she will lie if the stakes are high enough and she thinks she can get away with it. The only thing Locke hasn't anticipated is the move she makes to draw him into the open when she and a priest who supports her work out the likelihood that the killer wants her to win

Locke (pronounced "lock") tailored his murder plan to Katherine's predictable reaction to news of Billy's murder. Meanwhile, he collected evidence to prove that she was paying Billy for sex right up to the night before he was murdered and his body was carefully posed on its side in the elevator of the hotel where Katherine was staying with her husband.  One lie leads to another. She thereby ensnarls herself in a real scandal that puts her at the mercy of the killer for as long as she stays in the race and he remains anonymous. By announcing her withdrawal from the race, she forces Lock to reveal what he did and why he did it to keep her in line.  More...

The body of the second murder victim in A Touch of Scandal was found in Riverside, California. According to Mark Fuhrman's alibi for the June 12, 1994 Bundy murders, he had to drive through Riverside, past the Ontario International Airport and a horse racing track to reach Pomona where he said he purchased gas and a soft drink with his American Express gold card.  The name of that card was the "Centurion," which is significant for two reasons: 1) Joseph Wambaugh, who Fuhrman said he modeled his "fiction" stories after, was raised in Ontario, CA. 2) The name of Wambaugh's first book was The New Centurions.  The book became a movie featuring Stacy Keach, George C. Scott, Scott Wilson, Eric Estrada (CHiPs) and Rosalind Cash (A Killing Affair with O.J. Simpson and Elizabeth Montgomery). Pomona is where Denise Brown was arrest that January on her way to somewhere at least thirty miles from L.A. for driving while intoxicated with Ron Shipp and Faye Resnick as her passengers.

The Dead Zone ('83) has Tom Skerritt, Father Dwell in A Touch of Scandal, as Sheriff Bannerman of Castle Rock, Main . Nicholas Campbell (the Marine Embassy guard in The Omen with Gregory Peck and Lee Remick and the wounded World War II 101st Airborne Division captain in A Bridge Too Far) is his deputy Frank Dodd. Deputy Dodd is also a serial killer. No one suspects him until a young woman's body is found curled on her left side in a gazebo. Dodd identifies her on the murder scene as a girl he knows and a psychic who Sheriff Bannerman brings into the case sees him in a psychic vision stabbing the woman to death with a pair of scissors. Dodd happens to be wearing leather gloves and a knit cap when he kills the woman in the gazebo. The knit cap happens to come off in the psychic's vision. Does any of this look and sound familiar?

The psychic, played by Christopher Walken received his powers after his car was hit by a milk truck in a driving rain and he comes out of a coma five years later. He has another vision of a Presidential candidate named Stillson willing the office and starting an nuclear war. To stop him from becoming President the psychic shoots at him from a sniper's position at a political rally. Stillson holds up a child as a human shield. A photographer snaps a picture of it and the resulting scandal ends his political ambitions.

In The Public Eye ('92) Joe Pesci is Word War ll era photographer Leon Bernstein who works in New York and unearths a scandal involving gas rationing coupons, a government official on the rationing board and competing mob factions. You get samples of how "Bernzy" operates in the first few scenes with remarkable photos of people in extraordinary situations or natural poses that appear extraordinary thought he lens of his camera. These are the photos he takes for a book he hopes to have published. To make ends meet he specializes in sensational photos of murder victims. The first set of photos you see of that kind are in an apartment room where a dead mobster laying face down appears to be bleeding from his neck. He is there taking pictures before the police arrive because he gets that calls on the 1942 equivalent of a police scanner and rushes straight to the scene.  He has no compunction about moving the body or the evidence around the body to get the shot he wants.  He moves the victim's arms and feet and persuades a cop to move his hat because, "People like to see the dead guy's hat."

Mark Fuhrman's first wife was named Barbara and Barbara Hershey's birthday is the same as Fuhrman's. In The Public Eye Hershey is Kay, the widow of a popular night club owner who inherits the club and without knowing it -- at first -- her dead husband's dirty dealings with organized crime. She hires Bernzy because of his reputation for getting into place other people can't to get his pictures, to get a photo of a man who has been bothering her and to find out who the man his and what he thinks she knows. Bernzy fall for her on the spot and takes the job with no idea where it will lead. He gets his first clue that something big is up when he tracks the man Kay wanted to know about to his hotel room, finds a river of blood flowing out of his door with him dead inside He takes his photos, calls the police and the next think he knows he's being grilled and threatened as though it was a federal case. He astutely infers that it is a federal case and goes from there to find and assemble clues that eventually bring the black market selling of gas ration coupons to light.

In a 1997 guest appearance on The Oprah Wenfrey Show Mark Fuhrman gave his credit card alibi for the night of the Bundy murders. He said he was in Pomona, California buying gas and a soft drink with an American Express gold card. Keep in mind the 1994 American Express Gold card was a gold version of the "Centurion" card and in Joseph Wambaugh's first bestseller a centurion was a a uniformed police officer. Also remember that Fuhrman said in Murder in Brentwood that the similarities between Wambaugh work and the screenplay he was trying to fashion with Laura Hart McKinny "are not coincidental."

In The Public Eye Bernzy arrives at a murder scene where a mobster was shot in the head behind the wheel of his car. A young uniformed police officer on the scene finds a thick, blood soiled, gas coupon book in the car. His older partner tells him to keep the coupons. He says, "They're like gold..." This comment gets the wheels in Bernzy's brain turning. He does some digging, cons his way past a security guard and finds a redacted government document with the cryptic unredacted words "black gas." He then puts together other information he finds and figures out that "black gas" means black marketeering in U.S. Treasury Department gas rationing coupons. He sets up a showdown between the competing mobsters, gets some amazing photos, exposes the corruption and becomes a national hero.

To get the whole story of Furman's American Express gold card alibi you need the starting sequence of The Hidden ('87) with Chris Mulkey as Jack Devries. He robs a Wells Fargo Bank in LA, passes a Phillips 76 gas station in his getaway and ends up on the side of a road when uniformed cops and detectives with gold shields shoot up his Ferrari and his gas tank explodes. Wells Fargo is a subsidiary of American Express. Some of Fuhrman's highest praises in Murder in Brentwood went to Kevin Devries who met with him at the Santa Rosa Airport in Windsor, California and drove with him to Sandpoint Idaho, 55 miles south of the Canadian border. The closet Canadian Province to New York City is Ontario. In The Untouchables ('87) U.S. Treasury Department officers and elements of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police conduct a joint operation on a bridge between an unspecified State in the United States and an unspecified Provence in Canada. All of the possible border states depicted in The Untouchables are Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Main, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. --Jasper