The Hammer

Dragnet 1967: "The Hammer"

The story you are about to read is true. The military title of the victim has been changed to protect the integrity of some word games.

To set the stage, you need to keep in mind a few things about LAPD Homicide Det. Mark James Fuhrman and his partner Bradford Harold Roberts.... By all indications, both had extremely high IQs. Fuhrman was a Military Police Sergeant in the Marines. Roberts was an enlisted man in an elite, top secret, code interception and decoding unite of the Air Force. Fuhrman is on record as paying close attention to details and using Jack Webb’s character Joe Friday to illustrate the kind of cop movie and television producers don’t what to see.

Before you read actor, writer, director, producer Jack Webb’s Mark V11 production of Dragnet 1967: “The Hammer” and the Fuhrman-Roberts 1997 version of that story in Murder in Brentwood, take note:

Jack Webb had two movie roles as a Marine and was commonly believed to be an ex-Marine. His real military service was in the U.S. Army Air Force before the Air Force became a separate component of the Armed Forces as a result of the July 26,1947 National Security Act Using a 36 hour military operation clock as a decoder, July 26 = 714, Joe Friday’s badge number. On the cover sheet of Fuhrman’s Bundy notes he wrote the first three digits of his badge number (214) in a way that they can also be read “714.” His fifth Bundy note is a code taken from an episode of The Twilight Zone called “To Serve Man.”

All of the word game you will see here are taken from an episode of Dragnet 1967 called “The Hammer.” In this teleplay, LAPD Homicide Detectives Joe Friday and Bill Gannon get a call that leads them to the body of an old man and puts them on the trail of his killer who fled to Arizona, a state bordering California, in a stolen car. The victim was bludgeoned to death in his home with a claw hammer. Under interrogation, the killer toys with the L.A. detectives with remarks about the cops who picked him up getting their ideas from television and by naming the capital of various states as non-answers to their questions. He gets one capital wrong – the capital of Nevada. He says, "The capital of Nevada is Reno." Harry Morgan as LAPD Det. Bill Gannon later corrects him with the real capital of Nevada, Carson City.

LAPD Homicide detectives Fuhrman and Roberts went to Las Vegas, Nevada in March, 1994 to investigate the murder of retired Army Sergeant Major Robert C. Hurd Jr. His body was found in a West LA alley in the trunk of his stolen car. He was bludgeoned to death in his home with a hammer. In the 1997 first edition of Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman calls him a retired Army master sergeant. He omits his name. Instead, he uses an Art Harris interview with Hurd’s alleged niece, Connie Law, which happens to be a solution to a word game using National Security Act as the base phrase. National Security has the letters needed to spell Art and Connie. In this context, Act is another name for Law. The name Art Harris also has a back door connection to Great Britton's Royal Air Force created in 1918

Michael McClinton, the Las Vegas, Nevada resident who displayed his gun in the Palace Station Hotel room and threatened to "crack" Thomas Riccio "in the head" with it during the incident he called a "robbery," once lived in Carson, California.

The hammer killer in Dragnet 1967 has a long criminal record going back to a robbery he committed when he was 12 years old. He is tripped up in the murder case by a rent receipt he tossed out of the stolen car he drove across state lines that landed in the luggage compartment.

SCRABBLE GAME: In the scrabble game all you need are enough letters in a word, phrase, sentence or paragraph to spell out the words or names you require to extract a relevant and coherent message. The letters left over don’t count as long as the number of them do not exceed the number of letters in the solution. If, for example, Connie Law had been interviewed by Barbara Walters or Geraldo Rivera you couldn’t use the National Security Act to set up the word game because you’d have too many letters left over – and you wouldn’t get RAF Martial Arthur Harris with a birth day and a death day in April that add up to Brad Roberts’ birthday.

In “The Hammer” episode of Dragnet 1967 the stolen car was a red Plymouth Barracuda.

RED PLYMOUTH BARRACUDA

D PLYM AAUA

ROBERT C HURD

JUMBLE PUZZLE: A Jumble Puzzle, like a one or two word anagram, requires every letter in the base message to be accounted for in the solution. The longer the message the more letters there are to choose from to get a relevant solution. However, the deeper you go into the game the requirement to use all of the letters makes it tougher for the puzzle maker as will as the problem solver to make all of the letters relevant or at least rational. On top of that, you rarely have all the letters of the alphabet to work with (in none of the puzzles is there a V or a J where you need one for Nevada, major or Jr.) and you are stuck with too manly odd letters that you have to use somehow to complete the puzzle. These are the very challenges that make creating and solving these puzzles attractive to people who enjoy playing word games. Mark Fuhrman and Brad Roberts enjoyed playing word games.

The Plymouth Barracuda in “The Hammer” was not found in an L.A. alley. It did not have a trunk, as such, and the body of the murder victim was not found in the luggage compartment that served as a trunk. The rent receipt that LAPD Sergeant Joe Friday found in the luggage compartment must therefore close some of those gaps to have anything to do with the LAPD murder investigation of retired Regular Army (RA) Sergeant Major Robert C. Hurd, Jr. It does.

DATE APRIL FREDERIC L. TOSCA EIGHT AND DOLLARS APT MAY BY ALEXANDER TROY MGR X

BODY OF RETIRED ARMY MASTER SERGEANT RA DOA GTX CAR IN LA ALLEY LAPD XI HPD TLC

RA is Regular Army (could be AR for Army Regulation) GTX is a kind of Plymouth sports car. GTX could be GT (a sporty Ford Mustang) in which case XI, the Roman Numeral for 11 (Robert C. Hurd has 11 letters) could be XXI for 21. HPD is the acronym for Henderson Police Department. Henderson is a suburb 21 miles southeast of the house in which Robert C. Hurd, Jr. was murdered on March 21, 1994. In 1994, Mark Fuhrman’s mother Billie lived in Henderson.

CONSECUTIVE LETTER CODE: Superimposed on a picture of Joe Friday’s SERGEANT, Los Angels Police, badge 714 in the end credits of the show are the first seven actors in supporting roles and the characters they play. Remember, Robert C. Hurd was a retired Army sergeant major. In The Allegations and the Facts chapter of Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman changed Sergeant Major Hurd's rank to "master sergeant." Changing "major" into "master" is the only way to make this code work

MARRY ANDERS... POLICEWOMAN DOROTHY MILLER (RO)

BRIAN AVERY ...........................................TERRY RIDGES (BERT – ROBERT)

ART BALINGER. ...............................CAPT. HUGH BROWN (C. HUR)

NATALIE MASTERS....................................... MRS. RIDGES (D – HURD)

CHET STRATTON.................................CHESNEY GUTHRIE (RET – retired)

RICHARD SIMMON.................................MARCUS DENNER (AR)

RALPH MOODY..................................................LOU ADAMS (MY – Army

Using the Master in Masters won’t let you get to the consecutive letters you need to spell Hurd. You have to pull it out. But if you do you need a reason for doing it that fits a rational reading order and you have to put it somewhere that makes sense. Master in front of Sergeant makes sense when you read it in the foreground first and then Sergeant on the shield in the background. So, in left to right, top to bottom, foreground to background order you get ROBERT C. HURD RET ARMY MASTER SERGEANT.

Now look at what you can do using the consecutive letter code with an alias for Michael McClinton:

MARRY ANDERS... POLICEWOMAN DOROTHY MILLER RANDALL

BRIAN AVERY ...........................................TERRY RIDGES S

ART BALINGER. ...............................CAPT. HUGH BROWN P

NATALIE MASTERS....................................... MRS. RIDGES E

CHET STRATTON................................ .CHESNEY GUTHRIE N

RICHARD SIMMON................................MARCUS DENNER CER -- SPENCER

RALPH MOODY................................................ LOU ADAMS M M (Michael McClinton initials)

Did you notice that the letters running down from from the Avery line spell "Spence"? Try spelling the name of anyone chosen at random on "The Hammer" template with their initials on the bottom line. Better yet, go to the Internet Movie Database to get an alias and a set of initial. Type in the first movie that comes to mind and see what you can do with any name of any character in the movie and the initials of the actor who plays him or her... Take as much time as you like...How did you do? –Jasper