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Murder on a Honeymoon
(1935) (starring Edna May Oliver as Hildegarde Withers and James Gleason as Inspector Oscar Piper)
New York City school teacher Hildegarde Withers is taking a vacation to Catalina Island off the California coast.. She is one of seven passengers on a seaplane taking off from Loss Angeles Harbor. The other six passengers are: A retired rumrunner who plans to start a chartered fishing boat business, a honeymooning couple, a movie producer, an aspiring actress and a man known only as Forrest. Shortly after takeoff, Forest becomes violently ill. By the time the plane lands in Catalina Forrest is dead. Hildegarde is certain that someone on the plane slipped him a deadly poison. Ultimately she learns that it was done by a team of killers using a poison cigarette.
On her way to identifying Forrest's killers, his body is stolen from the morgue. Outside of the window, which Inspector Oscar Piper deduces was opened with a sharp knife, Hildegard sees a distinctive heel impression clue and points it out to Inspector Piper.
Piper responds, "Well I’ll be; a nice clean heel mark with a K in it. Hummm. Have you got a list of the suspects?" He assumes that the killer moved the body and has a theory about who it is.
Compare Hildegarde's heel print discovery outside of the morgue to the photos below in Mark Fuhrman's Murder in Brentwood book and read his caption, which draws attention to "the distinctive heelprint." [A closeup of the same glove and the black knit cap (note the distinctive heel impression in the foreground).]
This is a Jumble puzzle It is different from a Scrabble game in two critical aspects: 1) All of the characters have to be used in the solution. 2) They have to provide a suitable caption for a picture. A Jumble puzzle is composed of several anagram clues. If you unscramble them correctly you get the letters in blank circles that you need to spell out the solution below the picture
To spot the Jumble puzzle code on the page of Mark Fuhrman’s first "murder book" showing his pointing finger photos, you need to have seen Jack the Ripper (’88) and Murder on a Honeymoon (’35). You have to know the Fuhrman/Roberts allusions to Jack the Ripper’s signature in blood. You have to wonder why Fuhrman called a shoe imprint an "impression" and made a parenthetical reference to a heelprint and a "black knit cap" (it was blue) in the caption below his close-up photo of his finger pointing to the glove and why he left the hyphen out of close-up (he spelled it "closeup"). These are things that word game-makers sometimes have to do to make the game solution come out right.
Hint: On page 127 of Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman did something similar to calling the blue knit cap “black” by misidentifying the rank of retired Army Sergeant Major Robert C. Hurd Jr. Fuhrman never gave his name. He identified him as a former “Master Sergeant.” Hurd was killed with a hammer. The end credits in “The Hammer” episode of Dragnet 1967 contains a consecutive letter code about Hurd that works with “Master” but doesn’t work with Major.
Jumble Puzzle -- Solutions
This isn't necessarily the solution. Here's another one:
(149 letters – 7 punctuations) MURDER ON A HONEYMOON: HILDEGARDE SUSPECTS PEOPLE ON PLANE / FLIGHT VICTIM MOVED AT NIGHT AND K HEELPRINT CLUE (K TM) SEEN BACK OF CATALINA ISLE INF. OSCAR PIPER PUT HEAT ON THE DEVINGS B/G.
There could be other valid solutions. There might not have been enough time to perfect the setup or the solution. Furthermore, nothing you come up with can take into account a spelling error on the part of the puzzle maker or a little cheating here or there to force-fit a bothersome leftover or omission. A deliberate misspelling or insertion of a foreign word can do wonders.
Any relevant solution shows that it is a Jumble
puzzle with a solution that can be found without an apostrophe,
a J, a Q, a W or a Z and only one Y. If you think you can make
a Jumble puzzle out of any two or three sentences selected at
random, try it and see how far you get with punctuated sentences,
phrases and abbreviations relevant to the heelprint in Murder on
a Honeymoon. If you followed the Simpson-Goldman murder case, you might have noticed that the wound to Nicole's throat that was almost identical to the wound that Jack the Ripper inflicted on Marry Nichols. Fuhrman took the Jack the Ripper parallel a giant step further in his pointing finger photos and his reproduction of those photos in Murder in Brentwood. In his Murder in Greenwich movie, he signs his name in red ink, as Jack the Ripper did in his "Dear Boss" letter to simulate a signature written in blood. He also makes a pointed Jack the Ripper wisecrack about a suspect that he crossed off of his suspect list.
In the 1997 interview that Fuhrman's partner Brad Roberts did with Diane Sawyer, he referred to a fingerprint in blood that he said he saw on the back gate. He said that the killer signed his name with it. The heel print in Fuhrman's photo is less than a foot away from the front gate post that happens to have blood on it. On page 33 of Murder in Spokane, Fuhrman defines the "signature" of a serial killer (like Jack the Ripper) as, "...a distinct method of torture, killing, or staging -- arranging the body or crime scene--common to all crime scenes." The beauty of a distinctive shoeprint as a signature in any type of homicide is that a name is sometimes baked into it -- the name of the company that manufactured the shoe.
In the
Murder on a Honeymoon case it was a heelprint embossed
with the "K" trademark (TM)
(124 letters / 4 punctuation marks) INSPECTOR
PIPER: WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
DEVING DID IT AND HE STOLE THE BODY.
HE’S GOT HEELS
MARKED WITH A K
AND I SAW TRACKS JUST OUTSIDE
THE INFIRMARY. SIT EVIDENCE DOWN INSIDE OF GATE. WEAR SHOES THAT MIGHT READ LIKE JACK THE RIPPER’S SIGNATURE IN BLOOD: MAKE TWO TRIPS TO BUNDY YARD?
17 letters / 1 punctuation mark left over) IT TDY STALK A UH HUH A .
(103 letters / 2 punctuation marks) INSPECTOR
PIPER: DEVING DID IT AND HE STOLE
THE BODY. HE’S
GOT HEELS MARKED
WITH A K AND
I SAW TRACKS JUST OUTSIDE THE INFIRMARY.
MUST SIT EVIDENCE INSIDE OF GATE WITH SHOES THAT
READ LIKE JACK THE RIPPER’S SIGNATURE IN BLOOD: MAKE TWO YRD TRIPS.
(5 letters / one punctuation mark left over) D D H H Y.
Before I found these Scrabble games in Murder on a Honeymoon, I played with the idea of how to create a Jack the Ripper signature code with the evidence on the Bundy murder scene. The only way I could do it was to work backward from a solution that included "Jack the Ripper" and a signature in blood. This is what I came up with:
Base: GET
BRAND NAME PAIR OF SHOES TO INCRIMINATE THE JUICE WITH THE KILLER’S
SHOEPRINTS. R H I E N
M F H I Solution: THE SHOE SOLES CAN IMITATE JACK THE RIPPER’S SIGNATURE WRITTEN IN BLOOD.
I tried to formulate a Jumble Puzzle (a word game that uses all of the letters in the base to find a solution that relates to a picture) but what I ended up with was the best I could do. It occurred to me that the leftover letters might represent names, initials or acronyms for people, places and things I wasn't familiar with (HHR, as it turns out, stand for a small airport in a very interesting location). Instead of regarding the leftovers as letters, I wondered what I would get simply by considering the number of them. The number is 9. This is Mark Fuhrman's 9th Bundy note: "BLOODY FOOTPRINTS LEADING FROM VICTIMS W/B TO ALLEY." --Jasper
INSPECTOR PIPER: WHAT ARE YOU
TALKING ABOUT? DEVING DID IT AND HE STOLE THE BODY. HE’S GOT HEELS MARKED WITH
A K AND I SAW TRACKS JUST OUTSIDE THE INFIRMARY. *See Jack the Ripper, 1988 - An actor named Mike Lewin is listed in the full credits of this movie as " Duty Guard ." Lewin is shown briefly in his British "bobby" hat as the coachman awaits the Ripper. He is shown again when the Ripper's heels sound on the cobblestone street as he walks to the coach. A detective named Mike Lewin worked at the West Valley Division of the LAPD in 1994. --Anonymous
The common denominator in all of these Jack the Ripper word game solutions is his signature in blood. This link will take you to the original letter that Jack the Ripper wrote to the Central News agency and the envelope it came in Note the envelope, the post of the gate and the blood drops in the Murder in Brentwood photo on this page within the contexts of two sentences at the bottom of page 52: "Brad and I agreed completely that whoever walked down that path left bloody shoeprints, blood drops to the left side of his body, and a bloody fingerprint on the gate. The suspect just about signed his name in blood before he escaped." 25 Sept 1888 See both sides of The Ripper's full handwritten letter here
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