From: Jasper
Date: 10/17/01
Time: 4:05:01 PM
Miss Marple,
I hardly know where to begin with the plastic sheeting (actually a big, plastic bag) and the shovel. A body in plastic or the plastic bag together with the shovel pop up all over the place in the network of movies I call "the Fuhrman collection."
In Psycho, the killer wraps the body of the woman he stabs to death in the bathtub shower in the plastic shower curtain and puts the body in the trunk of her car. In Death Becomes Her, Goldie Hawn brings a sheet of plastic and a shovel to the murder scene to bury Bruce (Bruno) Willis' wife. The victim died at the foot of the stairs of a hideous neck injury (see The Smoking Gun Chapter 23:Angel of Death. Search "reporters") and comes back to life. Ghost themes and resurrection themes, by the way, are very big in the Fuhrman collection.
The entire Twin Peaks series revolves around a blond girl whose body is found by a big rock (Rockingham?) wrapped in plastic. The sheriff in that series drives a Ford Bronco. The killer stuffs the body of the plastic-wrapped murder victim's identical twin cousin (her initials are MF) in a golf bag, which he puts in the trunk of his car. When the sheriff sees him driving recklessly (with the body in the trunk), he pulls his Bronco to a sudden stop at an angle to the curb and gets out to question the killer - who happens to be wearing dark leather gloves.
In another scene in the series involving a forensic expert played by Mel Ferrer (MF), the sheriff's deputy (with leather gloves in his pocket) inadvertently makes a big discovery. When MF drives up, he panics and runs to a killer's house dropping a stick in front of the Bronco. He steps on a loose board (with nails in it) and gives himself a bloody nose. When the Sheriff and an FBI man come out to investigate, you see them standing next to a shovel, which stands next to a truck tire. Under the floorboard is a plastic bag of cocaine and a new pair of boots with a distinctive heel.
What Fuhrman did with the plastic and the shovel was a net plus for him. As a detective on the scene who had been off of the case for hours and was "just helping out," it wasn't his job to know what the shovel and the plastic meant. With two gruesome murders to think about, he was simply noting everything that "might" have some evidentiary value. It was the job of Lange, Vannatter and the District Attorney's Office to determine whether they did have any value or not.
All of this fits the pattern of the contrived errors in Fuhrman's notes. It fits the pattern of his observation about the video tape Ghost in O.J.'s VCR and the bubble gum he found that may or may not have meant something. It fits the pattern of Fuhrman's admonition in Murder in Brentwood not to make judgments on the evidence until you had checked it out. He didn't judge the plastic or the shovel. He just wondered about them - as any good detective would have done.
Fuhrman took advantage of Marcia's poor sense of time. He wasn't setting himself up to look foolish. He was setting up O.J. (reinforcing the IMAGE of O.J. as a killer over the long weekend) the RHD detectives (planting the idea that they weren't as thorough as they should have been) and Marcia Clark. They were the ones who looked foolish. Mark Fuhrman came off looking more human (See, I'm not perfect, and I can admit it!) and more competent during the short time he did have control of the investigation. --Jasper