Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes  1992

I came upon this Marcia Muller novel in mid January, 2012 when I was researching the possible significance of TWO dimes or TWO pennies to Mark Fuhrman that I might have previously glossed over or missed entirely. The answer, of course, was the fact that two coins of the same denomination were required to serve as weights on the eyelids of a corpse.

The story is set in 1992 San Francisco — where O.J. Simpson was born and played his last year of football.  The pennies were a feature of a 1956 murder case being reinvestigated for a mock trial of Lis Benedict by a P.I. named Sharon McCone. She works for a confederation of lawyers. She lives alone. She has two cants, Ralph and Allie. If the book was a screenplay it could be described as a murder mystery with a female role-model hero, several subplots, and some down and dirty action. I can't take full credit for that description of Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes.

When I was groping for the right words to sum it up, it occurred to me that it had already done. I looked it up in Murder in Brentwood. There it was. I only had to swap "some" for "lots of" to get it right.

I was looking primarily for a significant association between the pennies in Muller's book and the numbers 11 and 22. I found that the 1943  pennies were called "lead pennies" although they were made of zinc-coated steel because of the U.S. copper shortage that year in World War II. They were given to the woman convicted of the murder by her husband for their 11^th wedding anniversary — their steel anniversary. The month of the murder was June. The day was the 22^nd.

Fuhrman, I knew, was very big on the power of symbolism. He wrote about it in defense of the German World War II items he collected, specifically, a Paul Conrad political cartoon. I was also intrigued by the fact that Muller was a German name and did a search on the name to see what connection it might have to World War II that would highlight what Mark Fuhrman wrote about the power of a single image.

This is what I found, a dead man winning a rare, superbly crafted and engraved symbol of astounding courage. WW II Medal of Honor recipient Joseph E. Muller won his medal while losing his life in the Battle of Okinawa. He was born on June 23, 1908. The body of the fictional murder victim in Marcia Muller's who-done-it was discovered with the pennies on her eyes on June 23, 1956.

Murder in Brentwood, page 125: "The cartoon in question is a single-frame drawing of a swastika rising out of the ashes of the newly fallen Berlin Wall. Conrad was asking whether we were making a mistake by allowing a country with the power and history of Germany to be reunified. He was asking if we might have been better off leaving the giant alone. The fact that a single image can provoke such subtle and disturbing thoughts show Conrad's great artistry, and that is the only reason I saved the cartoon."

In the next two paragraphs Fuhrman says, "I am something of a history and military buff and collect all sorts of..." Hold it right there. Let me call your attention to some words and phrases in the same paragraph following "collected all sorts of..." listed in the order of their appearance:  rare, superb craftsmanship, engraved. If you saw only those words in that order in a redacted paragraph, you would have every reason to think that they applied to coin collecting.

Fuhrman explained his part in making the Laura Hart McKinny audio tapes for a screenplay partly by saying this on page 270 of Murder in Brentwood: "I envisioned the film with a female role-model hero, several subplots, and lots of down and dirty action. Laura was interested in the story I began to spin.

"Meeting at her apartment in Santa Monica, we began laying out the goals of the screenplay. During these sessions we socialized, and ultimately we became involved in a casual sexual relationship. We were both single, but neither of of us wanted to carry the relationship further, or so it seemed..."

In Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes, the female role-model Detective Sharon McCone has a casual sexual relationship with a mystery man named Hy. He pilots his own airplane and seems to know a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot of things like the symbolism of 1943 pennies, the chemical nomenclature for zinc and the atomic weight of lead. Sharon does not know a hell of a lot about him. They are both single and neither of them want to carry the relationship further, or so it seems until the end of the book.

Muller's two-penny murder mystery makes two explicit references to dimes. It makes one explicit reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who has been pictured on dimes since 1946 (the year Joseph E. Muller was awarded the Medal of Honor) and served as the 32^nd President of the United States. The story of Henry A Wallace, FDR's first Vice President is a clue to another murder, this one a woman found at the bottom of some stairs in 1992, stabbed to death with a long, sharp knife. Her murder is one of a dozen or so subplots that you'd think Muller would never be able to tie together — but she does, brilliantly. The first victim  in June, 1956 was killed with a pair of gardening shears. 

On the June, 1994 double homicide scene at 875 S. Bundy Dr. in Brentwood, the the pennies and dimes were linked by their proximity to each other on the murder scene. Fuhrman linked them to O.J. Simpson (#32) in his Hypothesis of a Murder chapter in Murder in Brentwood on page 210: "Simpson reaches into his pants, pulling his car keys from the pocket and dropping change onto the ground." On page 32, Muller's gardening shears morph into Fuhrman's gardening glove: "I looked further along the path and noticed a dark object. At first I thought it was dog droppings, but as I walked closer, the object began to resemble an old gardening glove..."

I received Muller's Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes and an issue of Vanity Fair magazine within a few days of each other. The top headline on the Vanity Fair cover said —

 "THE COP WHO FREED O.J.: Mark Fuhrman Fights for His Life by H.G. Bissinger"

Murder, She Wrote: Showdown in Saskatchewan '88 (the yellow pickup truck belongs to the cowboy in the red shirt)

I was less than 60 pages into Marcia Muller's 300-page novel when the Vanity Fair issue I purchased online arrived in the mail. I had forewarning about some pictures of Fuhrman as a Marine in 1970 and '71  and some eye-popping items in the text. I was already having an ugly time of trying to figure out where and how to put the material coming from Muller's book that tied into the work I was doing on More Tales of Two Coins. Too much can be as paralyzing as too little and the traffic between my brain cells on the matter was threatening gridlock.

I thought at the time that a bigger problem for me was the danger of source information overlap. That is to say, I didn't want my subconscious mind to read something from the magazine into the book. I therefore chose to finish reading the book before I finished reading the article. I'm glad I did, for whatever reason. By the time I'd read about half of the Vanity Fair article on Fuhrman and studied a few of the photos with the number 98 interceding in a TV airing of Ghost, I'd seen so much that I might not have gotten as far as halfway through Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes.

Some powerful symbols are better known as such than others. The Marine Corps emblem is one of them. It's more than an emblem; it's a badge of honor. The man wearing it on his uniform commands instant respect because of the gallant history and elite warrior tradition it represents. Being a Marine is a big deal.  It always struck me as odd that Fuhrman never spoke about being one with the pride that should come with it until I saw a picture of him in Vanity Fair as a shirtless kid sitting on an air-conditioned barracks bunk in Okinawa reading a magazine.

Then it hit me as I thought about where I was and what I was doing in the Army for the first half of 1971. While I was in Vietnam doing what combat soldiers do in combat zones, he was at "Fort Shiny Boots" playing dress-up for the brass. That's pretty much what I did for the second half of '71 because of the U.S. drawdown in ground combat units in '71 beginning with the Marines. Neither of us had a choice in the matter but I can see how being a Marine at that time could have lost much of its luster for him.

I did not recognize 98 as a Fuhrman bell ringer like 12 (21), 22 or 23 (32) until I started concentrating on the Ghost penny. It follows the reversibility rule (89 is as significant to him as 98). It goes one better with a 180-degree rotation that gives you WW II Marine Corps combat veteran Don Adams as  Maxwell Smart, CONTROL agent 86. 

The Spanish American War began under Pres. William McKinley in 1898 with Teddy Roosevelt resigning his position as Assistant Secretary of the Navy then becoming an Army Cavalry war hero in Cuba. Roosevelt was McKinley's VP when an anarchist fatally wounded him in  Buffalo, New York on September 6, 1901. That was the year the first Pres. Roosevelt started pushing for Abe Lincoln's profile to replace the mythical Indian on the penny.

The man wearing the Smoking the Bear hat with his hand on Fuhrman's shoulder in the Vanity Fair picture below is race car builder Carroll Shelby. The pattern on Fuhrman's T-shirt is a map of North America). Don't know why Shelby is wearing the military-style campaign hat. But, considering his first name, the "Ghost penny" number on his Cobra, and Fuhrman's self-identification as "something of a history and military buff..." it's damn interesting.

The man who killed our 16th President, Abe Lincoln, was an actor named John Wilkes Booth.  The man who killed our 25th President, William McKinley with a 32 cal. pistol, was Leon Czolgosz ( Zol-goz?). He was put to death in the electric chair. Throw the name "Abe" into your research hopper with Czolgosz's method of execution. You are bound to turn up the names Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Abraham Reles somewhere along the way.

 Somewhere along the way you will also find a 1960 movie called Murder, Inc. with Peter Falk as Abe Reles, who kills for Lepke and then informs on him to save himself from the electric chair.

The first contract he takes for Lepke requires somebody to draw the victim outside of his nightclub where he can get close enough to stab him with his signature weapon, an ice pick. He sets up the hit with a friend of the victim at a candy store/coffee shop table. He sits with his back to a phone booth. When a woman goes into the booth an makes a call, her voice soon gets on his nerves to the point where he opens the booth door and runs her out. This screenplay introduced Peter Falk to the public as a rising movie star. His role as the title character in Columbo made him one of the brightest television stars of all time.

              Columbo  1992                           Vanity Fair  1997                      Murder in Greenwich 2001  

The Mario Casilli shot above of Peter Falk as Lt. Frank Columbo was taken in or around 1992. It has enough in common with the Fuhrman-in-and-out-of-his-truck photo taken by Annie Leibovitz for the February, 1997 issue of Vanity Fair to make you wonder who persuaded who to take that Fuhrman photo.  After all, Fuhrman did have a trained eye for artistic composition and Leibovitz had to know a good composition when she saw it... One more thing... Why did Fuhrman's solid yellow truck in the Vanity Fair article become a two-tone blue one in his movie? It is worth noting that the blue color of Columbo's convertible in Casilli's publicity photo is not what you see in the series. It's really about the color of the background -- which explains why the color was changed.   

Frank, by the way, is the real answer to the Trivial Pursuit board game question, "What is Columbo's first name."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivial_Pursuit  After finding pieces of their Scrabble game missing, [Canadians Chris Haney and Scott Abbott] decided to create their own game. With the help of John Haney and Ed Werner, they completed development of the game, which was released in 1982.... In October 1984, Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia...filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. He claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game's Genus Edition had been taken from his books, even to the point of reproducing typographical errors and deliberately placed misinformation. One of the questions in Trivial Pursuit was "What was Columbo's first name?" with the answer "Philip". That information had been fabricated to catch anyone who might try to violate his copyright.

Click first Prescription Murder screenshot to see enlarged picture. Click "chess board" link for Fuhrman quote.

          chess board                                       delphiniums                                      more delphiniums   

Prescription Murder ('68) was a made for television movie that became the pilot for the Columbo television series. Peter Falk's Columbo was, in the tradition of all fictional super-sleuths, a fascinating character. He keeps phenomenal notes that often trip up the killer. His wife-murdering adversary in the pilot episode is Gene Barry as Dr. Fleming. a brilliant psychiatrist who loves to play intellectual games. We see him after the opening credits on backgrounds of predominantly black and red ink blots playing a game of Twenty Questions, the precursor to board games like Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit. A player complains that the person whose name they were trying to guess was not one that regular people would know. Another player jokes that she was stumped the last time they played the game by Alexander Graham Bell. 

Dr. Ray Fleming is hosting a 10^th year wedding anniversary party for his wife Carol in their penthouse apartment. He has a plan to murder her because she threatens, in his words, to "take every penny" from him in a divorce.

To create the illusion that Carol was alive when he had an air-tight alibi, Fleming gets his redheaded girlfriend Joan to impersonate her with a blonde wig, sunglasses, her blue dress, matching shoes and kid gloves after he strangles her. She calls the Rodeo Cleaners to pick up the dress and the gloves in a laundry bag she leaves outside of the penthouse door. They arrive at the airport as Dr. and Mrs. Fleming. He uses his credit card as part the paper trail he's leaving for his alibi. As soon as they are seated on the plane bound for Mexico, Joan  makes a scene and gets off in a make-believe huff. Fleming's expert mind tricks do not fool Columbo. He plays the killer-psychiatrist like an opponent in a high-stakes mind game and wins.

Common sense tells Joan that she can't pass as Mrs. Fleming. Dr. Fleming tells her why she will, which she does.

Can't let Columbo go without dipping into the second pilot (yes, there is such a thing as a second pilot in TV shows) that aired three years later. It's called Ransom for a Dead Man. It involves Columbo trapping Lee Grant as a brilliant lawyer into proving that she staged the kidnapping of her husband as part of a plan to murder him. It was most notable from the standpoint of elements in the first pilot carrying over to the second one clearly as a test of the audience's ability to see details most people would miss the way Columbo does (the chess board's black and white tiles on the floor symbolizing the strategic game being played with real people).

Then there was the Murder by the Book Columbo "premier" in which Jack Cassidy as a killer named Franklin, wearing dark brown leather gloves murders a man and a woman.  This is a movie about jealousy, greed and murder on the part of a celebrity who is about to loose his meal ticket and his claim to fame as the co-author of 15 bestselling murder mystery books. He has a fabulous lake house Click on the first screen shot with a green border to see more Murder by the Book. Click on the second screen shot with a green border to see what carries over from that episode to Dead Weight with a retired two star Marine Corp general of monumental stature -- and corruption.

The items listed below on the left are things I highlighted in Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes that plugged me into Mark Fuhrman's bell ringers and the June 12, '94 murders in Brentwood according to Fuhrman. The things listed below on the right are items I highlighted in the Vanity Fair Detective Story article that tell us some things about him and his mother Billie that are found nowhere else. They might not look like much by themselves but they add up. The bold-type emphases on both columns are mine. Green notes in brackets are also mine. — Jasper

Pennies on a Dead Woman's Eyes by Marcia Muller

The pay phone... "Then I'll call." I stood, rummaging in my bag for coins.

"You mean he might have been FBI or an informant?"

Buffalo stew.

The woman is Lis Benedict... the murder for which she'd been convicted had been an unusually vicious one involving multiple stabbing and mutilation...

Lis Benedict shot to death with a .32. Neighbor to the right heard the shot... a little while later she heard somebody run down the path between the houses.

...an earth tremor... [Kato describing the thumps he heard on his wall next to the south path. Brad Roberts' birthday, April 18, anniversary of 1906 San Francisco Earthquake -- January 17, 1994 Northridge Earthquake]

[SFPD file. Interview with Lis Benedict's 10-year-old daughter Judy and other potential witnesses in the Two Penny Murder] Judy Benedict: Mama's dress was red in front. It was a white dress, but there was red all the way down to the hem. She said it was ink [pen and ink drawing of falling larkspur on Mother's poem paper] .... The ring was in the delphinium dress she wore last Christmas. / Tom Deck, (head groundskeeper at the Institute): Those shears [the murder weapon], they was always in the garden shed...I was working there that afternoon trimming back those larkspurs that grow around it, and I could've stuck them inside or leaned them against the wall [purple delphiniums on Bundy leaned against the gate].

...kid gloves...

Sharon's cats named Ralph [Mark Fuhrman's father] and Allie [name on bottom of Mothers poem].

I opened my front door and found garbage strewn all over my walk...Slick slimy  garbage [good symbolic substitute for blood with plausible deniability -- combat veterans who have had "slime" nightmares would know better]... looked and smelled as if it had been rotting [like a corpse] for weeks...hosing down walks...

The crime–vicious slashing and mutilation of her husband's twenty-one-year-old lover...

The Two Penny Murder, as it came to be called was a San Francisco Legend...

In the early hours of Saturday, June 23, 1956, the badly mutilated body of post-debutant Cordelia McKittridge was discovered by a gardener in a dovecote... Cordy, as she was called, had literally been hacked to death the night before with a pair of gardening shears. Her body had been laid out ritualistically, as if it were in a coffin; a final bizarre touch was a penny covering either eye.

... "I'm usually very good with names. Bird? No, a bird. Wren? Finch? No... Cardinal! [House on Carroll Street bar scene baseball wager grafted onto second Murder in Greenwich bar scene with Fuhrman and Weeks]

[Sharon McCone describing bloody murder scene] She lay on the floor at the foot of the stairs...and the blood...Tacky here, still wet there, and the sickly sweet smell...In the neck...door stood open; she'd gone down to let someone in...a phone on the table...toying with the idea of calling...footprints.

 ...a pizza. [Fuhrman's 5th Bundy note -- symbolic wedges in a Trivial Pursuit game?]

"This letter was important to her. There're no crossed-out words, no misspellings, no evidence of haste. I wouldn't be surprised if it was drafted more than once." [Fuhrman's Bundy notes / Mothers poem]

John F. Kennedy

Auburn wig

The actress...did a stagy impression of a witness in distress. She wrung her hands, wet her lips. looked for a way out [Hildy Southerlyn's behavior in Mark Fuhrman's last Murder in  Greenwich bar scene].

 The Detective's Story by H.G. Bissinger

(all Fuhrman quotes are maroon-colored)

"Billie was working at Babe's, a café in town, and at night when she got home, Mark would stay up with her and roll the change for the tip money so they could make the rent."... He started worrying about things that maybe he should have left alone: how to make the rent, whether there would be enough money for school clothes--two pairs of jeans, shirts, shoes. "He did assume responsibility" his mother says. "He tried to put himself in bigger shoes..."

[Fuhrman telling reporter about a recurring nightmare] "I'm in an alley, young gang member shoots me with a shotgun, single-barrel shotgun, in the small of my back, and I go down. I remember lying in this disgusting water in this alley: You could smell the garbage and I'm looking back and he's reloading the shotgun and I see the muzzle blast and I wake up."

"If I could have just been an adult between my 20s and 40s between 1800 and 1890, I think I would have been a very complete person..."

"The only difference between me and the witness-protection program is I've still got my face."

"Today, Fuhrman is eagerly anticipating the publication (later this month) of the book he has written, Murder in Brentwood... 'It's how the case really went down, from somebody who was right there from the beginning to the end.. Who else was at both crime scenes, there at the end of the pursuit, there at the trial with the prosecutors all the way through to the end? Nobody...

'The media, they could have attacked F. Lee Bailey. This guy's a clown... Did anybody outside of L.A. ever hear of Johnnie Cochran [Jeff Daniels is Mike Cochran in The House on Carroll Street]? Oh, give me a break. The media has created icons out of nobodies. ' "

"...a husband who wrote poetry to his wife..."

"Lord of the Flies logic that worked for him."

"Perhaps the proudest day of his life came when he graduated from boot camp and became a full-fledged Marine. "You're being accepted into a brotherhood that is without equal..."

"For the first time in my life I was actually kind of like Leave it to Beaver."

"It was in August 1981, after the marriage broke up, that he went on temporary disability from the police department. He was granted workers' compensation and subsequently filed for a disability pension from the L.A.P.D. on the basis of stress....'It was a game,' he now admits, a battle of adversaries..."

The court records of the proceedings revealed a divergence of psychiatric findings about Fuhrman, as if two different men were being examined, one credible, one incredible. 

"I was a pawn"  (Chess)

"Another close friend felt Fuhrman's interchange with Bailey was born out of his relentless competitive drive, his refusal to ever lose at anything, back down at anything, whether it was Trivial Pursuit or working out in the sour sweat... pulling 220 when it was his turn..."

"It was a work of fiction, he notes, inspired by Inspector Callahan [S.F.P.D.] in Dirty Harry and the police books of Joseph Wambaugh..."

"He met Caroline in the mid-1980s in Redondo Beach at a bar called Hennessey's, where she was a waitress... his need to control her, his insistence that things be done precisely his way..."

"By virtually all accounts, Fuhrman was a gifted investigator—meticulous, inexhaustible, always able to find things that others could not..."

"His friends on the force were much like him, men who liked to be proactive on the job and outside of it drove racecars and rode rodeo and earned black belts it Judo."