|
Batman '66
In Murder in Brentwood (page 114) Mark Fuhrman says this about the publicity surrounding O.J. Simpson's defense theory that he found two gloves on Bundy and planted one on Rockingham: “The desperation I felt made me remember movies I had seen where the shipwrecked survivor watches the ships pass, time and time again. Just as I seemed to recover from one onslaught, another ship passed over the horizon.”
The theory came from the word “them” that Fuhrman used in the preliminary hearing to describe seeing the glove on Bundy for the first time. He said, “I could see them...”. F. Lee Bailey pounced on the word in the murder trial. Fuhrman told him that he was referring to the knit cap and the glove. That courtroom exchange and Fuhrman’s movie analogy come together in Robinson Crusoe on Mars (64) with Paul Mantee in the lead role and Adam West who dies less than ten minutes into the movie. The ship passing over the horizon "time and time again" is a spaceship, the abandoned mother ship orbiting Mars on autopilot.
Paul Mantee as Cmdr. Christopher Draper in Robinson Crusoe on Mars gives you an astronaut on Mars. In Capricorn One, O.J. Simpson is an astronaut on a staged Mars landing with James Brolin as the Mars mission commander. In "The Sandman Cometh" episode of Batman Brolin is a rookie cop who gives Batman a ticket.for the way his Batmobile is parked.
Adam West as Batman and Paul Mantee as Catwoman’s henchman Cornell get together again in “The Catwoman Goes To College” episode of Batman. That episode also brings together the cap and glove photographed on Bundy with Batman plucking a single strand of red hair out of a cap dropped at a crime scene. From that hair the caped crusader, in his bat cave libratory, determines that “the man is 6’1 ¾” in height, 36 years old, has flat feet, wears glasses, has a deep voice and suffers from hay fever.” The only thing in Batman's bat cave analysis of the hair that you can completely toss out of the evidence against O.J. in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photos is the hay fever.
Did you notice how much the small blood smear on the artificial tile between the glove, the cap and the heart in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo resembles a bat – specifically the red bat on the side of the 1966 TV series Batmobile?
I did. I dismissed it, though, believing that I had gotten carried away with artificial shapes in blood. When I read in Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich that he called one anonymous informant “Lou Philips” and another one “Batman,” I thought about it again. However, it wasn’t until Fuhrman produced his Murder in Greenwich movie where he merged Lou Philips into Batman that I started to take my initial observation more seriously. When Rovaan found the 1966 episode of Batman featuring The Riddler, which was tied to the question marks on Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich suspects list, I decided to take a closer look.
I first looked for something in writing in the 1966 Batman TV series that conformed to the
I gave it a whirl. This is what I came up with:
SPECIAL GUEST VILLAIN BURGESS MEREDITH AS THE PENGUIN
IAL GST VILLAIN BGE EEIH AS THE PENGUIN MURDER SUSPECTS
A G VILLAIN BGE EEIH AS THE PENGUIN MURDER SUSPECTS LIST
G IAI G I AS THE PENGUIN BELLE HAVEN MURDER SUSPECTS LIST
A VAI G EEI A THE ENGIN ENGLISH PUB MURDER SUSPECTS LIST
G I EI EE GT HAVE A MURDER SUSPECTS LIST IN AN ENGLISH PUB
You might get a real word or two out of the remaining letters in your solution but if they aren’t relevant to the Murder in Greenwich bar scene with the murder suspects list they don’t count. As you see, you can even spell out Belle Haven if you sacrifice the b in pub but you need a pub, a bar or a tavern to identify the scene in which the murder suspects list is shown. Whatever you get has to be rational and relevant. You need a common denominator. With the word games in Batman, Lorenzo Semple Jr., is the common denominator.
Lorenzo Semple Jr. wrote "The Penguin Goes Straight" episode of Batman with Burgess Meredith. Nine years later he would write the screenplay for Sydney Pollack's Three Days of the Condor. He plays the name game in "The Devil's Fingers" with Batman Special Guest Villain Liberace as Chandell, a flamboyant concert pianist who happens to dress like Liberace and display a candelabra on his piano. In the 1950s and '60s piano + candelabra were synonymous with Liberace. This is an easy one:
LIBERACE AS CHANDELL minus LIECE S HL equals CANDELABRA
Here's
SPECIAL GUEST JILL ST. JOHN AS MOLLY
PIAL GUEST JL T. HS ML -- OJ SLAYS NICOLE
In the entire Batman television series only one woman was killed, a character named Molly played by Jill. St. John. It happens in part II of the pilot episode (part I was "Hi Diddle Riddle") called "Smack in the Middle," written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. The Riddler, of course, plays a different word game. He makes up riddles. His first riddle in his first appearance in the first part of the first episode is, "How is an orange like a bell?" (They both must be pealed). The solution to another riddle is "glove," which takes Batman and Robin to a discothèque on 222 Glover street where Batman meets Molly at the bar and orders orange juice. The bartender slips him a Mickey and kidnaps Robin who is waiting outside in the Batmobile.
These are not just actors and characters somehow associated with Fuhrman’s history. It’s who theses actors and characters are and how they are specifically associated with words and imagery that Fuhrman used to express himself. They are models for characters he acted out as a policeman as well as characters he “created” in the book that made him a bestselling author and to produce a movie loosely based on his second bestselling book.
In the Batman episode called “Death in Slow Motion,” The Riddler sets up an ingeniously
Robi
When Batman and Robin enter the building, the payroll office door is wide open. ( 3rd note) The first written words you see are “PAYROLL OFFICE” on the frosted glass of the door. You know from the previous scene that a man and a woman are lying unconscious with their faces down in knockout pies. But in this sequence you see only the male victim. Next to a blown open vault, the Dynamic Duo see a riddle addressed to Batman spray painted in red on the wall. Batman reads it aloud. Then he and Robin try to decipher it. Once Robin gets it, they run back to the Batmobile. On their way out, you see the “Payroll Office” sign again.
On the Acknowledgements page of Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich book, he wrote, “Sheila, thanks for the pie.” The only person in the rest of the book named Sheila was Sheila McGuire, the girl who found Martha Moxley’s body on Halloween Day. Fuhrman gave no indication that the Sheila he thanked for the pie was or was not Sheila McGuire. But at the top of page 82 he linked her to Martha’s mother by writing, “Moxley [Dorothy Moxley] had information about her missing daughter. Someone had found a body.” That someone was Sheila McGuire.
On page 89, with Sheila McGuire’s name (an Irish surname) at the top, Fuhrman quotes Dorothy’s son John as saying this about the crime scene, “It would have been a great day to be out robbing houses, because all the police were right there.”
So, in Fuhrman’s call out to “Sheila,” we have bookmarks in his second book for a pie, a mother, her two children, a crime scene, a diversion and a robbery. We also get a mother, two children and a crime scene as we got in 22 minutes with the “Mothers” poem photo in his first book. We get all of it with Batman, Robin and The Riddler in “Death in Slow Motion,” the first half of a two part episode.
With these
What Batman and Robin see written in Mother Gotham’s payroll office by The Riddler and what they say supply all the letters needed to complete the Mothers poem/proverb originated by an unknown Irish or Celtic author: “MOTHERS HOLD THEIR CHILDREN’S HANDS FOR A SHORT WHILE – THEIR HEARTS FOREVER.” Enough of the right letters remain to add the second line in Fuhrman’s version of the poem, the names of Lauren Cohen’s children and complete sentences relevant to the photo. What Batman and Robin say gives you all the punctuation marks, too, including an ellipsis (...) for the consecutive words dropped from their deliberation that aren’t needed for the poem.
PAYROLL OFFICE BATMAN! AS ONE BAKER TO ANOTHER – HOW DO YOU MAKE A DISHONEST SHORTCAKE? BATMAN! AS ONE BAKER TO ANOTHER – HOW DO YOU MAKE A DISHONEST SHORTCAKE? A DISHONEST SHORTCAKE? THERE’S STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE & BLUEBERRY SHORTCAKE. A DISHONEST SHORTCAKE? I’VE GOT IT A LIEBERRY. RIGHT ROBIN. THAT WOULD MAKE IT A DISHONEST SHORTCAKE, CLEARLY A CORRUPTED VERSION OF THE WORD LIBRARY... WE HAVEN’T A MOMENT TO LOSE. LET’S RACE TO THE BATMOBILE. PAYROLL OFFICE
Fuhrman’s version of the Irish/Celtic Mothers poem/proverb is a puzzle on its face. Given that some letters in “Mother,” “spirit” and “heart” are blotted out or hidden behind a red bowtie-shaped drawing of a flower and the curl on the side of the paper, you have to figure out what they are. There are enough clues in the body of the text to make it easy, although you’d have to know Lauren Cohan’s story about the photo and the names of her two children to be sure the last name written on the bottom of the page next to Adam is Ali. But the beauty of Batman speaking the words he see is that you can substitute the & sign for "and" to duplicate the words on the symbolic tombstone precisely.
IRISH POEM?
"MOTHERS HOLD THEIR CHILDREN’S HANDS FOR A SHORT WHILE – THEIR HEARTS FOREVER."
GOD BLESS YOU BOTH AND MAY YOUR MOTHER’S SPIRIT RESIDE IN YOUR HEART – FOREVER... ADAM & ALI
BACK COVER?
TAKE A SHOT FOR THE BOOK THAT HAS TWO NAMES ON THE BASE OF THE "TOMBSTONE" – LAUREN COHEN’S SON AND DAUGHTER. BETTER TO SHOW A BABY BEAR, A TOY OR TO POSE A WORRY DOLL ON THE WALKWAY TO MIRROR NIC? CAN BE KEYS TO CRACK CASE
TAKE RON TO EAT HOTCAKES AT COCO’S?
E! [E! television network] E AIR KKK . A AKA .. ! E
This is not THE solution to the Batman-Riddler code (too much left over). It just tells you that there is a puzzle and a solution. It tells you that somewhere along the way you could get the Mothers poem photo in Murder in Brentwood with the words on the paper propped up like a tombstone, the worry doll mirroring Nicole’s body and an allusion to Fuhrman’s third Bundy note. “RISKE FOUND FRONT DOOR TO 875 S. BUNDY WIDE OPEN. TWO BODIES INSIDE THE WALKWAY GATE, ONE FEMALE WHITE, ONE MALE WHITE BOTH EXPIRED – UNKNOWN CAUSE OF DEATH – POSS GSW.”
“TAKE RON TO EAT HOTCAKES AT COCO’S?” comes from the first paragraph after Fuhrman’s notes. Page 22 of Murder in Brentwood: Ron [Philips] was standing nearby, and we [Fuhrman and Roberts] asked him, half jokingly, to take us to breakfast at Coco’s restaurant, one of our favorite early morning eating spots...” Two paragraphs latter Fuhrman writes, “Meanwhile, Lieutenant Spangler, who had been trying to get a clearer view of the male victim [Ron Goldman] through the wrought-iron fence on the north property line, said he thought he saw a gunshot wound [possible GSW].
Ron Goldman’s left leg in the wide view pointing finger photo is pointing to the area outside the gate where the Mothers poem photo is going to be taken. His arm crops out his bent knee. If you extend a line from his finger, you can see that his finger also points to the area. The “hotcakes” line in the Batman-Riddler code unites the two photos. The bottom bar on the gate is about six inches higher than it looks in the “Mothers” photo. Half of what you see of the artificial tile where the paper sits outside of the gate is therefore inside of the gate where the pointing finger photos were taken.
The letters and punctuation marks in the code following the ones needed for the full text of the poem in Fuhrman’s book can be arranged in several ways that relate to the poem. One "Shot," for example, could just as easily be "photo" but you have to sacrifice "poet" to get it. “Nic,” could be Nicole, NBS, Nicole Brown, Nicole Brown Simpson, or female victim. However, because you can use each letter only once and every choice eliminates other choices, “Nic” gives you the most flexible choice for the greatest number of relevant lines. The same is true for “Celtic Poet?” rather than “Irish Proverb” and any other pertinent choice you can make.
The object of creating a game like this is to cram a maximum of relevant information into a solution with a minimum of extraneous leftovers. If you didn’t create the puzzle (code) to be solved, you can’t change the wording or punctuation to get everything into the solution of a Jumble Puzzle the way you can with Fuhrman’s Bundy notes. What you can do is get practical ideas from the exercise for a plan of action. That means you can draw upon the elements within your power to manipulate to make them fit, like adding a verse to the poem, adding the worry doll to the frame and taking a picture with the knee.
Doing all of those things going into the Mothers poem photo would have taken preparation time with an eye toward writing a book about the murders long before they happened. Adding the flowers could have been an idea that came any time in the countdown to murder after the Batman-Riddler code was written.
Look at the R on Robin’s chest in Mother Gotham’s Bakery payroll office. You see it clearly before he and Batman discover The Riddler’s “LIEBERRY” riddle. But the entire time they are trying to solve to riddle, the “legs” of the R are cropped out by the framing of the shot.
R is the most versatile letter in the alphabet. It not only stands alone on Robin’s costume, it stands alone as a wild card in solving word game puzzles that require reshuffling letters. You can get an F out of an E, an O out a Q and a Z out of an N a V out of a Y and a W out of an M or vice versa by cropping, resizing, rotating, repositioning, or mirroring them With the R you can get 3 other upper case letters – P I D (D) and 4 lower case letters derived from the P – p q b d. Does this formula sound familiar?
This happens to be the formula that Fuhrman used with other visual elements in the Mothers poem photo and the Murder in Greenwich murder suspect list. The knee in the photo is an obvious example of cropping. The worry doll is a duel example of resizing and mirroring. In movie producer Mark Fuhrman’s movie, the curl on the upper part of the first question mark on the murder suspect list is a rotated and resized horn on the Bulls helmet in 1st & Ten. The two horns on the helmet are mirror images of each other.
Moving
A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SILENT FILMS BY Y. Y. FLURCH = CAST FILM ACTOR FOR HILPY SOUTHERLYN FLY BY SII I . .
HILPY SOUTHERLYN? No, not when the P in Pictorial is cropped at the stem or the whole letter is turned upside down, as it is when the book falls on top of Batman and Robin. Then it’s HILDY (Hildy) Southerlyn. The term “actor,” by the way, applies equally to actors and actresses. By now, it should not surprise you that Theresa Healy, the New Zealand actress cast as Hildy Southerlyn, is of Irish decent and that her character’s name in her previous feature film (Jubilee) is Pauline.
Ma Parker, Legs Parker and the Parker Brothers
During the course of the Batman TV series, a character from one episode is often spoken of or alluded to in another. The picture of Mother Gotham on the “Death In Slow Motion” bakery sign, for instance – comes back in the form of Ma Parker in “The Greatest Mother Of Them All.” A writer or producer might have deliberately played a Scrabble game with that title. Simply borrowing an apostrophe (’) from the end quote (”), allows you to spell Mother Gotham’s with leftovers (“Te reet f The All’) that can be ignored. However, there is another way to see Mother Gotham in “The Greatest Mother Of Them All without shuffling letters around to spell the name.
All you need is a prominent sign at the start of the show with “Mother” and “Gotham” written on it. You get, “Gotham City Chamber of Commerce – Mother of the Year Presentation – Ritz Gotham Hotel.” Fran Ryan, the training camp cook in Goldie and the Boxer with O.J. Simpson, is the mistress of ceremonies. She announces the annual Mother of the Year award winner as, “a nice little lady.” Given the Mother-Gotham setup you almost expect to see “the real mother Gotham” step from behind the curtain with a pie in her hand to accept the award.
Shelley Winters with grey hair and granny glasses as Ma Parker comes pretty close in appearance to Mother Gotham until she pulls out a machine gun and announces a stickup. Next, she proudly introduces her sons, Pretty Boy, Machine Gun and Mad Dog. As the Parker brothers go about colleting valuables in bags with their names on them from the ladies in the audience, Trish Sterling as Ma Parker's daughter Legs pleads to get in on the action. It’s the first robbery in a string of them designed to lure Batman and the Boy Wonder into a trap. With Legs by her side, Ma Parker pulls the last robbery and leaves a deliberate clue for the Caped Crusaders to complete her devious plan – a pretty good one at that.
In The Night of the Hunter Shelley Winters as the mother of a son and daughter gets her throat slashed from ear to ear by Robert Mitchum’s character. The little daughter carries a doll with her everywhere she goes. Remind you of the Mothers Poem photo in Murder in Brentwood? When you follow that up with Fuhrman’s, “Sheila—Thanks for the pie,” line in his Murder in Greenwich book, Shelly Winters as Ma Parker in “The Greatest Mother of them all,” is hard to brush off. So is Trish Sterling as her daughter Legs.
First, there’s Shelley Winters as Ma Parker – ley Wnters as M Parker – Sheila
Then there’s Ma Parker’s answer to her son Mad Dog when he asks her, “What’s for dessert?" She says, “Apple pie.”
Finally there's Trish Sterling as Legs. In a 1965 episode of Dr. Kildare, she's Sheila.
Where does this game go from here? I’ll give you a Clue... Colonel Mustard did it in the library with a rope.
Here’s another Clue... This is not The Last of Sheila. —Jasper |
initials that Fuhrman invented on his Murder in Greenwich suspects list, RM and MB for
Rob Mathers and Morris Banks. Special Guest Villain Burgess Meredith as The Penguin in his opening screen credit worked best. But without the letters O and K the only name you can spell is
Mathers. I could get either set of initials from “Burgess Meredith,” but I couldn’t get both. However, I thought I saw enough of the necessary letters in his screen credit to spell out
something more specific to Fuhrman’s bar scene murder suspects list. 
another easy one that wasn't set up by Lorenzo Semple Jr. In fact its an anagram game that could not have
been played without Bruno Magli (pronounced Molly) Lorenzo shoes, O.J. Simpson and the murder of Nicole Simpson. 
In all, the 
n solves the first riddle
things in mind, the written words
in Mother Gotham’s payroll office captured my attention right away. They seemed to have enough of the right letters to go a long way toward spelling out the first line of the
Irish-Celtic “Mothers” poem in Fuhrman’s first book. They did. The spelled out MOTHERS HOLD THEIR CHILDREN_S. However, there weren’t enough letters or punctuation marks to write the full
text. 
on to the Gotham City
Library, the movie producer we know as The Riddler is ahead of the Caped Crusaders inside his van with his actress 
