From: Jasper
Date: Saturday, March 29, 2008
Time: 07:21:57 PM
Solitairea1 (Reply button on your previous post doesn't work so I am replying to it here) — Sometimes ignorance is an asset when trying to break new ground. …………..If I had watched the Law and Order series from September 2001 to November 2002 when Murder in Greenwich made its television début I would have known who Serena Southerlyn was. I would have probably concluded that the S-o-u-t-h-e-l-y-n spelling in Hildy Southerlyn was merely an allusion to Meloni’s appearance as a Law and Order detective. Happens all the time in the movies. End of investigation. …………. The fact that didn’t watch the show meant that I had to research the name. The best place to start, I thought, was the Internet Movie Database. However, a glitch in its search parameters for characters named Southerlyn turned up no results (if you search for a character named Southerlyn today you will still get nothing). Fuhrman could not have known this would happen when he invented that character with that name. Therefore, it appears that his likely intent was to draw superficial attention to the Serena Southerlyn character in Law and Order and to use what he had with ELIZABETH Rohm in that role to link the actress to the tombstone of Martha Elizabeth Moxley. …………..On the other hand, you never see Southerlyn in writing during the movie so the sound of it (Sutherland) is all you have to work with until the end credits. …………..By then, you have already gotten subliminal links to Donald Sutherland’s character, Father Robert Koestler in The Rosary Murders, in one scene where he underlines information in red ink on the obituary page of the Detroit Catholic News http://smartfellowspress.com/obituary.htm . The Hildy Southerlyn links are in the name “Lancaster” below the Javison, Kathrin ANNE obituary where it says that Katherine attended a parochial school. In Murder in Greenwich, Fuhrman (Meloni) and Weeks (Robertt) crash the Belle Haven Club cocktail party, Hildy Southerlyn introduces herself and calls the moonlighting Greenwich cop Lancaster. In the “crochet in the rain” scene where she and Fuhrman (Meloni) next talk, she tells him that she attended a parochial school. ……………..The name Anne in The Rosary Murders obituary is also associated with a Catholic woman, the mother of the boy Fuhrman names as Martha Elizabeth Moxley’s killer. In Murder in Greenwich, Fuhrman goes to extra lengths to highlight Anne Skakel’s Catholicism on her deathbed with a rosary in her hand. In The Rosary Murders, Donald Sutherland’s character, accompany by an actor with Fuhrman’s birthday (he has the keys) discovers the body of Sister Ann in a bathtub with a rosary dangling from her wrist. …………….My “Hildy” searches also took me to Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich movie with Murder in Brentwood crossovers to his fifth Bundy note, his partner Brad Roberts, The Twilight Zone and the socks on O.J.’s Oriental rug. But despite the fact that “Elizabeth” takes you to Elizabeth Rohm’s character Serena Southerlyn in Law and Order, there is no getting around the Fuhrman-Hildy-Lancaster connection to Donald Sutherland on the obituary page in The Rosary Murders.–Jasper