From: Jasper
Date: 10/6/01
Time: 9:54:07 PM
The dried purple flowers in the corner are delphiniums. The pink one on the ground and the one painted on the page of the letter partially covering the word "Mothers" also comes from the delphinium family, it's call a larkspur.
Charlie is the one who recognized the purple flowers as delphiniums. When I was about a third of the way into writing the first rough draft of The Smoking Gun, she sent me a link that gives a terrific breakdown of flowers in all classifications. That's where I found the larkspur.
At the bottom of the table of contents for The Smoking Gun you will see Picture Gallery. If you click there you will see the photo in Fuhrman's book showing the photo with the poem, the worry doll and the flowers. The original idea for the Picture Gallery was to show a slew of photos from the movies that I couldn't fit into the book with detailed commentary to show how they related to the Bundy murders in general or Mark Fuhrman in particular. I got little feedback to show that anyone was interested in the idea so I just left it hanging where it was when Charlie sent me the URL for the flowers.
I originally had three hotspots on that page, one to enlarge the poem, one to take you to the flowers URL and one to take you directly to the page that gives a detailed breakdown on delphiniums. In all of the shuffling around we had to do because of the changes in ownership of or host site (different platforms support different capabilities) some of the links were lost and I'm still trying the find them. It's the same problem we had with the archived posts and the reason it's taking so long to restore them.
In any event, I have been able to get the worry doll photo restored and the hotspot for the purple flowers should take you to the appropriate URL. I'm still having trouble with the enlargement of the poem (the hotspot will not take you to a good, clear picture) and the larkspur, so don't expect much right now if you click on them.
The significance of the larkspur is that it appears on the wallpaper of the Bates Motel bungalow in Psycho where Janet Leigh's character Marian Crane (a bird) is stabbed to death in the bathtub shower (chapter 4 about three quarters of the way down). In that bungalow you will find a log list of other connections to the Bundy murders. The larkspur wallpaper is one of those clever little things Hitchcock movies are famous for that tell you a little bit more about what is going on in the movie if you are sharp enough to catch it. In Psycho, the flowered wallpaper seems to be out of step with the killer's fascination for birds, which appear everywhere else in the motel where you would expect to see the killer, unless you recognize what kind of flowers they are. Then you see the lark that gives you the bird connection to the killer.
You will find the larkspur in at least three other movies in the Fuhrman collection of movies, all closely associated with the murder of Nicole Simpson (not Ron Goldman) and Mark Fuhrman's part in the investigation. Birds in general are powerful dream symbols and they appear time after time in the Fuhrman collection as omens of death. That's why I was so stunned when you identified the Peruvian worry doll and its association with dreams.
Whenever you think of birds in association with Mark Fuhrman, remember who he identifies in Murder in Brentwood as his top three sports heroes of all time: George Foreman, Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. The Spanish (Permian) equivalent of Larry is Lorenzo, as in Bruno Magli Lorenzo. --Jasper