From: Jasper
Date: 10/19/01
Time: 8:23:49 PM
Miss Marple,
I don't think we see Fuhrman's role in using the plastic bag any differently. I, too, am certain that he knew damn well what the plastic bag and the shovel meant all along. This is a guy who pays close attention to details and probably expected Lange, Vannatter or Clark to discover the truth long before the trial. If they did, he had a reasonable-sounding out. If they didn't, he could use it just they way he did.
As the man who "discovered" the plastic (and the "odd" 2-degree parking angle of the Bronco, and the Blood on the door, and the second bloody glove) he was the logical choice to ask about it. If Marcia hadn't, she would have been accuse of trying to hide the fact that Fuhrman was the one who "discovered it." The defense would have eaten both of them alive.
I was talking about the ROLE Fuhrman was playing (a guy who couldn't possibly know what the plastic sheeting was at the time he discovered it), a role that makes perfectly good sense to people who saw the evidence the way Pantura did. That's the audience Fuhrman was aiming at, which is to say 70 percent of the American people.
You will notice that EVERYTHING he said in Murder in Brentwood makes perfectly good sense to him or her because people like you and me were reduced to stereotypes before we were ever heard. Nothing that you or I can say will get anyone with that mindset to take a closer look at what Fuhrman said and how it compares to the quality, the quantity and the timing of the evidence he found. If it implicates O.J. it's "dead on" - and there is something seriously wrong with anyone who thinks otherwise, because they "know" our "irrational motives" for saying it.
If you follow the "mountain of evidence" that implicates O.J. without giving critical thought to how one detective who boasted about his ability to frame certain categories of people is linked to every scrap of it (and much of it BEFORE he "found" it), that's the only conclusion you can draw. --Jasper