From: Jasper
Date: 1/9/01
Time: 8:21:37 PM
Charlie,
Once again you nailed it. VERY well put. "Too many," "too much" and "too rare."
These are ALL crucial points.
I have good reason to believe that Mark Fuhrman liked to gamble, that he ALWAYS played the odds, and that he understood how bad most people are at figuring the odds. Most people don't have a clue. That's why you can get away with wallowing in so many improbable clusters of coincidence, evidence and tailor made clues. Very few people will ever see it…You can bet you life on it.
The trouble with always playing the odds is that sometimes you are certain to be wrong. The odds were high that Fuhrman or Roberts would find a knife in O.J.'s home that would match the stab wounds in Ron and Nicole's body. That's why I think there were so many thrusting wounds in Goldman's body, as straight in and out as bodies in motion would allow. That helps narrow down the possibility of the kinds of knives that could have been used to one O.J. was known to have (The German Stiletto) and the ones he was most likely to have (the large Swiss Army knives) in his collection. I'm convinced that the trail of evidence leading to the house was chiefly to find "the knife." This time the odds didn't pay off. Another detective found the Stiletto and O.J. didn't have a large Swiss Army knife.
The case you mentioned that Mark Fuhrman "coincidentally looked up shortly before he had occasion to go over the Ashford wall, yanked my chain, too. I was running into so many Cain, Caine and Kane links in my research on the first Smoking Gun, that I knew it had to mean a lot to Fuhrman and the killer. When the Cain links took me to Deathtrap with playwright Sidney Bruel's (Michael Caine's) large collection of weapons, and Cliff's (Christopher Reeve's) comment about having herd about the collection, I new where to look. I started with the part in screenwriter Mark Fuhrman's Murder in Brentwood where I remembered him writing about his search of O.J.'s home and the large collection of knives O.J. was "rumored" to have there. Eventually, I found it. I should have started in the index where Fuhrman gives the page number (98-99). It was People vs. Cain. -- Jasper