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Dragnet 1967: "The Gun" Fuhrman and McClinton Pinpointing Source Hammer Model P Picture Gallery
Mark Fuhrman apparently thought that Dragnet was important enough to make his Murder in Brentwood reference to the show and its lead character Joe Friday easy to find by listing it in the table of contents: Dragnet. 287. He used it to help explain the “composite character” he was “playacting” on the Laura Hart McKinney tapes. The point here is that he used fictional character Joe Friday among other fictional characters to explain his real world actions as a police officer and what guided his decision to do it.
The introduction to “The Gun” episode of Dragnet 1967 ends with a man holding a pistol. The hammer is cocked, ready to fire. He pulls the trigger three times without cocking the hammer sending a flash of fire from the barrel each time, thus indicating that the gun has a double action. It looks like a .45. The gun in the story that is used to kill a woman in her home is definitely a .45. It looks like a late 19th century Colt model P single action revolver. The gun that Michael McClinton displayed in Thomas Riccio's Palace Station Hotel room could be fired in a double action or single action mode.
Los Angels Police Det. Joe Friday: “We’d just come back from a bomb investigation. It turned out to be a hoax.”
Lines like that pull a critical reader of Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood to page 80 where Fuhrman writes about having lunch with a former city attorney who defended him in a case where he shot an armed robber five times. Implicit in that story is his gun and bullets that matched his gun. Former Los Angeles Police Det. Fuhrman: “Nobody was on stage. They said there was a bomb threat.” The threat turned out to be a hoax.
Fuhrman was talking about a news conference scheduled to announce O.J.’s surrender to police on June 17, 1994. In The Naked Gun 2 1/2, O.J. as Los Angeles Police Det. Nordberg was on stage telling people at a banquet to leave calmly so that nobody will be hurt by the huge bomb that is going to explode at any minute. This bomb threat was a hoax by definition because it was only a movie. In an episode of Get Smart, Maxwell Smart and 99 foil a plot to set off a bomb by two men having lunch at the Pomona National Golf Club. This, too, was a hoax by definition because it was only a TV show. But what happened with O.J. on June 17 to delay the announcement of his arrest was the infamous “slow speed” Bronco “chase” with O.J. holding a gun to his head.
Did you notice how easily one scene from fact and fiction slips into another with Fuhrman’s gun and bomb story drawing them together? If you don’t see it, perhaps this review of Fuhrman’s glove story is in order.
Fuhrman was on the Bundy murder scene where he was photographed with one of the killer’s gloves. In one of those photos you can see his holstered gun – a 9mm Beretta.
On Rockingham, he questioned O.J.’s houseguest Kato Kaelin in his bungalow and asked him if anything unusual happened the night before. Something unusual did happen. Kato heard three thumps on his wall. The spacing of the thump was so odd that Kato’s description of them in court created speculation that he invented them, that he misrepresented them or that they were made deliberately as a signal of some kind.
Fuhrman investigated the thumps and found the glove that matched the killer’s glove. On cross-examination in the O.J. murder trial, Fuhrman was visibly caught off guard when F. L. Bailey asked him whether or not he drew his gun when he was alone on the Rockingham south path searching for the source of the three thumps. In court, he said he couldn’t recall. In Murder in Brentwood (pate 32) he wrote: “As I started to walk slowly forward, surely I held my gun, thought I don’t remember pulling it out or even thinking about it. After twenty years, some things become reflex.” There is no question that he carried a flashlight. Although he omitted it from his finding-the-matching-glove story in his book, this is what he said on cross-examination in O.J.’s murder trial: http://walraven.org/simpson/mar13.html “WELL, I TOOK OUT MY FLASHLIGHT AND I STARTED WALKING DOWN THE PATH TRYING TO FIGURE OUT THE RESIDENCE ARCHITECTURE TO FIGURE OUT WHERE KAELIN'S WALL MIGHT HAVE BEEN. Anyhow, in the next paragraph of that story in the book, Fuhrman writes, “Within my first few steps past the air conditioner, my face hit cobwebs. Since I was slightly crouched, lower than most people would stand, I concluded that whoever had dropped the glove did not continue walking down this path. The rest of the leaf-cover was undisturbed; no one had crawled or dragged along the path either.” If you’re wondering what was on Fuhrman’s mind to inspire him to use “dragged” so awkwardly in that sentence, try Dragnet – specifically, “The Gun” episode of Dragnet, 1967.
In “The Gun,” Joe Friday and his partner Bill Gannon investigate the murder of a woman in her bedroom. She was the widow of a career military man, an Army sergeant killed in Vietnam Her body is on the bed. She was shot twice. One bullet is in her head. The other bullet has gone through her body, and through the floor.
Friday takes his flashlight with him into the crawlspace of the house. Would it surprise you to see cobwebs in this scene, three thumps on the ceiling and his discovery of the second bullet? Well, that’s what happens.
If you don’t think that’s close enough to Fuhrman’s story of finding the second glove and the idea that Fuhrman blinded movies and real life into his actions and his theories about O.J.’s actions, try this wind up to the Rockingham search story on pages 42 and 43:
“The videotape that I pulled from the machine was the movies Ghost. Although it had no evidentiary value, the tape’s being left in the VCR indicated the Simpson had probably just watched this story about love, jealousy, and murder.
“I left the living room and proceeded to search the more unpopular areas of the warrant, like the crawl space under the house...”
This is where Michael McClinton’s part in the Las Vegas robbery trial of O.J. Simpson merges with “The Hammer” episode of Dragnet 1967.
In the preliminary hearing, McClinton said that he owned two businesses, a security business (no details) and a “home service” business he described with the words, “...Paint and do things like that.”
The prime suspect in “The Gun” is a house painter. When a rape victim in the neighborhood identifies him as her attacker, Friday and Gannon search his house looking for the gun that fired the two bullets in the murder case. They find a gun with the suspect's fingerprints on it that looks like a single action Colt .45. Ballistics tests confirm that the bullet taken from the victim's head and the one Sergeant Friday found in the crawl space match the gun – a deadly weapon with a barrel, a bullet chamber, a trigger, a hand grip, and a hammer. The episode ends as all Dragnet shows end, with the sweaty hand of a man pounding the VII of Jack Webb Mark VII Limited productions logo into a metal plate with a sledge hammer. –Jasper
In a fourth season episode of Remington Steele called "Steele Searching, Part 2," a murder weapon is a sledge hammer with a bloody fingerprint on it. The show's introduction features a fingerprint and a Remington .45 pistol.
Post Script:
In "The Gun" episode of Dragnet 1967, the murder victim is a 26-year-old Japanese-American widow. On January 30, 1988 an unmarried 27-year-old Japanese-American graphic artist name Karen Toshima was shot in the head during an alleged altercation between two members of rival black gangs while walking with her boyfriend in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. She died the next day. 30 LAPD detectives and extra uniformed police officers were assigned to the case. Mark Fuhrman, who said that he worked in a "gang/narcotics unit as a uniformed officer in West Los Angeles from 1985 to 1987 (Murder in Brentwood, page 124) was one of the officers assigned to the Toshima case.* -- although he never mentioned it in any of his books.
Several alleged gang members and a 16-year-old witness unassociated with a gang identified Durrell DeWitt Collins as the shooter. He claimed he was innocent. According to a police spokesman, he was a gang member since the age of 13. According to his father he wasn't a gang member at all. No physical evidence linked Collins to the murder. The .38 caliber revolver used in the killing was found without fingerprints by an unnamed police officer in ivy on the UCLA, Los Angeles campus.
The large-scale crackdown on suspected gang members initiated by Police Chief Darrel Gates following Karen Toshima's murder was called "Operation Hammer."
San Jose Mercury News February 8, 1988....
* “In Westwood Village Saturday, a week after the shooting, four police supervisors and 20 officers, about double the normal force, patrolled the area, said Officer Joseph Hager. ''I think it will be quiet for a few weeks now," said Officer Mark Fuhrman. "The gang members read the paper, they watch TV. They know they're going to feel the pressure." In their search for the suspects, officers confiscated 22 weapons at numerous residences in Los Angeles and nearby communities, including the weapon believed used to kill Miss Toshima.”...
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