September Discussion

Carnations Up

In Rovaan's search for the origin of the paper, flowers and doll in the Murder in Brentwood Mothers poem photo, she found a Corbis photo that came close. The paper was torn where a ribbon was wrapped around it. There was no tiny doll anywhere in the picture and the object on the tile at the base of the paper was not a red larkspur. If it was a flower at all, it was a white carnation that fell from a bundle of white carnations wrapped in clear plastic.

Much time and many searches occasioned by the Fuhrman photo and the photo that Rovaan found have passed between then and now (January 19, 2013).  On some tracks of inquiry, the purple delphiniums are other purple flowers, mostly violets, morning glories or violets. On other tracks the purple flowers you expect to see are not purple -- but they are delphiniums.

The larkspur in Fuhrman's photo was the hardest to identify. At first I thought it was a cherry blossom or apple blossom. But the more I studied it in context -- after learning that the purple flowers were delphiniums like the flowers in O.J. Simpson's front yard -- I looked for another kind of delphinium.  The variety of delphinium that looked the closest to the flower face down at the base of the paper was a larkspur. More import was the pattern of "near hits" like Bruno Magli look-alike shoes. In other words, it didn't have to be a larkspur to complete a Fuhrman thought from one component of a message to another. It  just had to look enough like one to create the association.

I found a piece of the "carnations up" code breaker where I expected to find it; with gangsters and hit men in movies. Recently I learned of another piece, another birthday/death day thing with carnations -- like dates on a tombstone. Carnations are the birth flowers of January. Sometime in January 1994 before the Northridge earthquake and Nicole's move from Gretna Green to Bundy is where most of the evidence converges in a murder for hire plot.