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Perry Mason '58

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The Case of the Black-eyed Blonde

Hear the story of the blonde murder victim in the love triangle who fell on her watch and broke it? Sure you have. Let's get more specific... How about a jealous killer, a previous incident where a man gave the blonde a black eye and forced her out of the house? Let's add a photo of the victim's beaten face, an incriminating diary and the dead woman naming her killer from the grave.

You know the story of O.J. Simpson beating his blonde wife, giving her a black eye and ultimately killing her in a jealous rage. This time it's an all blonde triangle consisting of a man named Tony and two women. One of the women is so jealous that she pulls a gun and threatens to shoot her roommate, who she thinks is having an affair with her boyfriend. The rivalry for her affections is only in her head, put there by a violence prone, self-absorbed liar. Outside of the triangle is a third blonde woman, all of whom look enough alike to fit the same general description and therefore to be mistaken for each other in the dark.    

Jan Merlin is Tony Davis.  Judith Ames is Marian Shaw.  Whitney Blake is Diana Reynolds. Phyllis Coates (a.k.a. Lois Lane) is Norma Carter.

It's late May, 1958. Matthew Bartlett is a wealthy widower living in a mansion with his new wife Helen and her wastrel adult son Tony. Mathew's personal secretary Diana Reynolds lives in the house during the weak and in an apartment she shares with Marian Shaw on the weekends. Five years earlier, Mathew had a falling out with his son who went away, married a woman Mathew disapproved of and died in a plane crash. 

That January an anonymous caller told him that his daughter-in-law Norma was living nearby with a grandson he didn't know he had. He hired a private investigator to check on the woman and the boy. She appears to be a good mother. No one else knows about Norma and the boy until an anonymous letter arrives on Diana's desk addressed to Mathew Bartlett. It tells him where Norma lives with his grandson and describes her as an unfit mother.

Tony creeps up behind Diana and gives her an unwanted kiss on the cheek. She has zero romantic interest in him and reminds him that he is Marian's boyfriend. He tells her that Marian was born to suffer. When Marian is called away, Tony reads the letter with alarm and takes it to his over-protective mother. They destroy the letter, unaware that Mathew already knows what's in it, and plot to discredit Diana. They are determined to keep Mathew from learning that he has a grandson. To that end, they frame Diana for stealing Helen's jewelry and demand that she leave the house immediately. When she balks, Tony hits her hard enough to knock her to the floor and to blacken her eye. He force her out of the house in her bathrobe. She has to hitch hike to Perry Mason's office. She tells him the story of the stolen letter. Della Street takes a photo of her battered face.

Perry takes the photo to Mathew Bartlett. They are in Bartlett's study talking about Diana when Lt. Tragg of LAPD Homicide enters the room. He tells them that Diana Reynolds is dead. Tragg takes them to the murder scene near Norma Carter's home to identify the body. When Perry squats down to pull back the sheet covering the body he notices to things: 1) The body is not Diana's. 2) The crystal of the victim's watch is broken. The frozen second hand suggests that it was stopped at 9:35 and 15 seconds.

Diana Reynolds drives a 1947 Oldsmobile. Several hours after Bartlett identifies the body, Diana goes to Perry Mason's office and tells him that she was at the train station trying to figure out what to do. She was in her apartment home when she got a phone call from someone claiming to be a law enforcement officer. The caller, who she couldn't say was male or female, told her that Marian Shaw stole her car and it  was involved in an accident. She took a bus to the location that she was given... "I got off. I looked around. I didn't see anyone. And I went to the house. It wasn't anyone home. I thought I heard a dog moaning, like it it was caught in a trap or something. And I went to look. I saw my car... and I saw Marian!"

"The Case of the Borrowed Brunette" 1 10 '59

      Lt. Arthur Tragg on the evidence: "It was obvious"     Grant Reynolds, "I knew there was something going on."

From time to time, you can figure out who the killers are and why they did it before the halfway point of a Perry Mason episode. The challenge then is to figure out how it was done and to recognize the vital clues when you see them. "The Case of the Borrowed Brunette" is such an episode. For you Mark Fuhrman bell ringer fans, it involves the name of a President, a man named Reynolds, a love triangle, a jealous husband, a restaurant worker, smudged fingerprints, clear fingerprints of the accused, a garbage can and the number 32 – twice.

Helen Reynolds is separated from an insufferable rich husband named Grant. Mr. Reynolds is sure that she's seeing another man, which she is. He has hired a private investigation agency to have her followed so he can get the goods on her in a divorce settlement. She catches on to what he's doing and works out a plan with a man named Slater to deceive him. Slater hires a woman named Eva Martell who fits her description to live in her apartment, wear her clothes and accompany him every night to restaurants and movies. The arrangement includes Eva's Aunt Agnes Nulty as a chaperone.

Eva and Agnes go along with Slater without knowing exactly why he hired them. He tells them only that he is acting as an agent for Helen Reynolds. Everything changes when Agnes opens the door to a woman who tells her that she is Mrs. Slater and that she's looking for her husband.  She tells Agnes what a deadbeat husband and dad he is, that she needs money desperately for their children and that she knows her husband recently won $1,800 in a poker game. With that news, Agnes and Eva decide to see Perry Mason for advice on what they should do. Agnes tells Perry that she is prepared to handle Slater because she has a gun in her purse. When Perry learns that the gun isn't registered, he advises her to get rid of it. Agnes assures him that she will.

If you got to this point in the story by following Mark Fuhrman bell ringers, you know that Slater is going to be shot to death with a .22 or a 32 caliber pistol. Whichever it is, it will be the gun that Agnes had in her purse. You know that she or Eva  will be arrested for the murder and, because Perry Mason represents both of them, neither of them did it.

The victim dies of a gunshot wound to the head (Lincoln penny) in Helen's apartment. The murder weapon is a .32 found inside a trashcan. The suspect placed under arrest is Agnes Nulty, the most obvious suspect to the police. The most obvious suspect to murder-mystery fans is, uncharacteristically, as guilty as Cain, the world's first murderer, who killed his brother in a jealous rage. You could, however, miss the clues that name the killer just because he is obvious and because he seems to have an unshakable alibi. LAPD Homicide Detective Arthur Tragg and assistant district attorney Hamilton Burger were certainly led astray, as they always are, by the real killer's phony alibi and the innocent defendant's apparent lack of one.   

Tragg is a smart, honest, homicide investigator with decades of experience. He does on this occasion what he always does in a murder case. He studies the crime scenes, questions witnesses, gathers evidence, performs scientific tests, obtains the necessary search warrants, draws on his experience, makes common sense judgments and arrests an innocent suspect on the charge of murder. You can't be too hard on the man for making the same mistake every time. Outside of the Perry Mason universe, he'd be right 95 to 98% of the time. You can think all day about the freedom that knowledge gives a killer operating in a 1 or 2% range of how smart, honest, experienced homicide detectives process crime scene information. Or you can get a working model pre-assembled with batteries included in this Perry Mason cross-examination of Lt. Tragg...

Mason: Now lieutenant, you had the lid of the garbage can tested and found Ms. Nulty's fingerprints. 

Tragg: That's right. On the underside of the lid handle there were several latents; some smudged and some clearly identifiable.

Mason: Did all the identifiable fingerprints belong to Ms. Nulty.

Tragg: Oh no. No sir.

Mason: And of course you had these other prints checked out.

Tragg: (laughs) We'd have to go through the whole kitchen staff.

Mason: And of course you also had the murder weapon tested for fingerprints.

Tragg: Yes. Negative. Everything had been smudged and smeared. It was in there an appreciable amount of time and garbage had been piled on top from time to time.

Mason: Now isn't this only any assumption of yours lieutenant?

Tragg: Well, yes. Of course...It's obvious.

Mason: Will you please explain the part of the evidence that makes it obvious?

Tragg: Well, I found the gun pretty well down inside the garbage.

The prosecution is arguing that Agnes shot Slater shortly before 1:20 in the afternoon because 1:20 is when the man hired by the killer to follow Helen Reynolds saw Agnes drop something into the garbage can in the alley. The can was behind Wilson's Grille, the restaurant where Slater's wife had worked for 32 years. One of her jobs was taking out the garbage, which qualified her to answer an essential question about the time of the murder that neither Tragg nor Burger thought to ask. When was the garbage emptied into the cans?  The answer lets you know that Agnes put her gun in the can on top of the garbage. The man who took it out to kill Slater brought it back and shoved it down to make the wrong assumption about the garbage on top appear to be the obvious right one.

If, by the way, you were counting the names of Presidents in this story, you need to know that Slater's wallet contained thee $500 bills and three $100 bills. Note: John Q. Adams, Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley were all pictured on a $500 bill.

Okay... We've got the killer by the garbage can, some smudged fingerprints and some clearly identifiable fingerprints. What about a bleeding murder suspect and a gold plated – I mean plate glass – I mean brass plate... Oh, you know what I mean; the most obvious suspect's fingerprint in blood.

Coming right up...

 "The Case of The Glittering Goldfish" 1 17 '59

Among the first batch of Mark Fuhrman bell ringers I discovered were gold and fish tanks (aquariums). Gold was a gimmie with a Bundy murder victim named Goldman, Gold's Gym and O.J.'s gold plated trophies. I did not, however, recall fish tanks as Fuhrman bell ringers I recognized before encountering them repeatedly when I was looking for something else. In any event, when I saw that a Perry Mason episode was called, "The Case of The Glittering Goldfish" I paid attention.

Afterwards, I went back to Chapter 11 of Murder in Brentwood to see what could have kept me from looking for a Fuhrman fish tank as a bell ringer directly instead of merely noticing it because it popped up so frequently on other Fuhrman bell ringer paths. I read the short chapter and don't see it until I stopped to think about why I went to that chapter. I was looking for something cleverly hidden inside of it when the bell ringer was out in the open. It was the Chapter 11 title, "Living in a Fishbowl."

The Case of the Glittering Goldfish begins in Fredrick Rollins Tropical Fish Store. Tom Wyatt, a marine biochemist working for Rollins develops a chemical formula for curing a deadly goldfish disease. He learns too late that he did it on time and equipment that makes it the legal property of a ruthless businessman named Jackson Huxley. Huxley intends to cash in on the formula and leave Wyatt and Rollins out in the cold. They go to Perry Mason's office to see if he can find a loophole in the contract.

Perry gets good news and bad news for Tom on the same day. The good news is he found the loophole in the contract that he was looking for. The bad news is Jackson Huxley has been murdered. The news gets worse when Perry goes to Rollin's house where Tom is staying and they blurt out conflicting alibi stories at the same time. From there the bad news starts piling on thick.

Tom has a bandage on his right hand from a deep cut. Tragg shows up and asks him how he got it. Tom tells a transparent lie about dropping a fish tank that's sitting on the floor. The glass is unbroken. Tragg walks over and picks it up observing that, "It couldn't happen that way in a million years." Naturally he has more to go on before he makes the arrest. For one thing, the murder victim appears to have been beaten and poisoned in his office laboratory. There are clear signs of a struggle, a broken glass window and blood all over the place.

Police lab tests show that the blood is Tom Wyatt's type. He admits to Perry that it is his blood but tells him that he got it breaking through the window to save his girlfriend from Jackson Huxley's "unwanted advances." His girlfriend backs up his story. He didn't realize how badly he was bleeding until he was in the car with his girlfriend and told him that she'd forgotten her purse. Tom went back to get it, hit the man again and grabbed a towel to staunch the bleeding.

So, the old bleeding killer story works for the prosecution. It works on nearly every level of interpretation, including the poison in Tom's formula that was found in Huxley's body. It works with Tom's ridiculous, changing stories of how he cut himself (a normal self-preservation impulse). Sound like O.J. trying to explain the deep gash on his finger when he came back home from Chicago? He said he cut it "accidentally" on a broken glass.

I revisited every record available on anything big with Mark Fuhrman featuring glass and brass before O.J. told his cut finger story to Detectives Vannatter and Lange. They do not exist. They are important details that Fuhrman added to his story of the fingerprint on the back gate's "turn type" lock. However, the pattern encompassing the main themes in his Bundy notes and stretching to his movie and beyond, is seamless.

O.J. was far more likely than not to have cut his finger in Chicago on purpose. If so, it was not the act of a killer trying to hide his guilt. It was the act of a man who did not know the small drops of blood at his home from the cut on his finger before he left town were exculpatory. It was the act of a man who did not know only a deep cut would be consistent with the blood trail on the murder scene. But look how the glass morphs into brass the way Fuhrman tells the story. You might have seen something very much like it in The Case of the Glittering Goldfish.

Berger: Lt., I show you this piece of broken window glass from the lab at Huxley and Myers store and I ask you if you checked it for fingerprints.

Tragg: Yes sir. It has a right thumb and forefinger etched in blood right here.

Berger: Were you able to identify those prints?

Tragg: They belong to the defendant, Thomas Wyatt.

This is no longer O.J. Simpson's story of cutting himself on a drinking glass. It's Mark Fuhrman's story of O.J. leaving his bloody fingerprint on brass. It is a story of blood evidence riddled with telltale markers of improvisation after 10:03 p.m., June 12, 1994.

Wanna know what Lt. Tragg says about a defendant's fingerprints on brass?

The Case of The Romantic Rogue  2 14 '59

A woman running a con game has been bashed in the head with a brass doorknob detached from her bedroom door, then strangled to death with the gold necklace she was wearing. The prosecution's expert demonstrates with a plastic bust and the actual murder weapon how easy it would have been for anyone to strangle her, given the stunning blow to her head, by grasping the back of the necklace palm down and twisting his wrist. Perry Mason has no questions. The witness is dismiss. Lt. Tragg takes his place in the witness box and testifies about the hair, the skin tissue and the fingerprints on the brass knob  The fingerprints belonged to the defendant. They were also found on a table, a radio and a wall by a light switch. 

How much imagination does it take here to picture a demonstration of the military-style stun technique with the brass heel of the German Stiletto instead of the military-style strangling technique with the gold necklace?

Spoiler alert: This show begins as a prelude to a con game that turns into murder. But it's not the murder of the woman Mason's client is accused of killing that cracks the case. It's the idea that an adulterous man and woman assumed to have run away together were, instead, the murder victims of a jealous spouse.  If you followed Mark Fuhrman's stories to this page, you  would know who the killer was and why he did it as soon as you saw the date that The Case of the Romantic Rogue was first aired. He's another obvious killer. You might have been thrown off his trail, though, when you saw the carpenter being framed with planted evidence if you didn't know the story of O.J., the socks and the gloves. Yes, someone frames a guilty man.

The carpenter did it.

As you might have guessed by the date that this episode first aired, the double homicide was precipitated by a love triangle.