From: Jasper
Date: 10/22/01
Time: 10:25:39 AM
Have you ever thought about the ways that we are like Mark Fuhrman and the ways that we are different?
I started thinking about this when I saw a copy of Fuhrman's original letter to the city attorney in 1989 and spotted a spelling error. No big deal. In fact, I'm not sure that it was an error, but it was something that would not have gotten past a computer spell-checker. Fuhrman's personality struck me as such that he couldn't stand for the "error" to go uncorrected in his book. That was one thing I was looking for when I bought the book. Sure enough, he fixed the problem.
You old-timers here know that we aren't real big on fixing mistakes. If we can tell by the context what is supposed to be there, we figure you can, too. If we can't figure it out we can't presume to "correct" it. Besides, the writers can always repost with their own corrections if they think it's necessary.
It's only human to want to go back and fix something glaringly wrong in a post we submitted. I really hate it when I leave out key words, write the wrong words in key places, insert apostrophes in the wrong places or change one word at the last minute that screws up the grammar. But, like everyone here, I'm adult enough not to think that my essential worth will be on the line if someone sees that I've made a dumb mistake. Moreover, I find it fascinating to backtrack the error and to see where it came from.
You can do the same thing with the mistakes the killer made on Bundy and Rockingham. The left-hand glove, for instance, telegraphed what Fuhrman would find on Rockingham as wells as the blood on the wrist of the glove that would be identified as O.J.'s. That was a mistake.
Mistakes are seldom entirely random. There are definite patterns in the kinds of errors that each of us is prone to make on certain occasions. If you look at my "Figuring the Odds/Thak this test post," you can see that I was pressed for time. But you can see exactly where my mind was when my fingers were striking the wrong keys. I was thinking ahead to the next two words. I added the h in "this," realized two letters later that something should have been deleted, and deleted the "e" from "Take" that I saw in "test."
Leaving the Bundy glove behind solved a big continuity problem for the killer. It explained how O.J. could have cut his finger without leaving a corresponding cut in the finger of the glove. But it created an irresistible photo-op for Mark Fuhrman that can be traced to his future discoveries on Rockingham. Fuhrman's connection to both gloves can also be traced to continuity errors with leather gloves in the movies Three Days of the Condor, Twin Peaks and Memoirs of an Invisible Man. All of these movies have numerous links to the Bundy murders and to Fuhrman's involvement with Laura Hart McKinney, Nicole Simpson, O.J. Simpson and the body of Ron Goldman.
On Bundy, on Rockingham, on the McKinney tapes and in Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman borrowed from the movies whatever seemed to work. Where something didn't work, he fixed it. --Jasper