Ironically, it was Sylvia’s refusal to get involved regardless of what it was likely to mean in terms of Henderson’s future victims that made her one of them. Like some of the people who watched Winston Moseley attack Kitty Genovese, Sylvia had wanted to report what she saw but feared what would happen to her if she did. So, using her detailed description, Terry told police that he was the witness although he was in the bathroom taking out his contact lenses when it happed. Only he didn’t tell Sylvia (or the audience) the reason for his trip to the bathroom. It came out in court when the defense attorney demonstrated his need for corrective lenses. Only then did you know that the reason he hadn’t recognized Denise when he saw her at the police station prior to the trial was because he couldn’t make out her face from 22 yards away.

"Twenty Two" again. Never mind the diamond earrings Elizabeth is wearing (earrings that would survive a fire) and the shape of the airline’s emblem in the same frame when she sees flight # 22 burst into flames with the angel of death aboard. How can we not make the Twilight Zone link to Elizabeth Powell’s vision of violent death when we have Elizabeth McGovern narrowly escaping the fate of Kitty Genovese at the hands of Winston Moseley and a witness who refused to get involved? How can we ignore the fact that The Bedroom Window was filmed partly in the city of Winston-Salem North Carolina?

Wasn’t there a package in "Twenty Two" that had to do with the doomed flight and Mark Fuhrman’s observation of the package left in O.J.’s Bronco when he flew to Chicago? Only if the package had something to do with a frame. Liz’s manager brings her a package when he visited her in the hospital. At least it looks like a package until he takes the  wrapping paper off and you can see that it is a picture of her in a frame. Symbolically, Elizabeth Powell was The Package. When you see the movie by that name, you will, no doubt, be struck by how one could associate an airplane bursting into flames on takeoff with O.J.’s parked Bronco and the blood that Fuhrman said he saw inside of it on the 13^th . You’ve already seen how the flaming car comes to a sudden stop at a severe angel to the curb.

Minute for minute, Rod Serling’s "Twenty Two" could be the most influential teleplay of all time, particularly in its use of symbolism to foretell the future. Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Edward Dmytryk’s Mirage, both starring Gregory Peck as an amnesiac, make heavy use of symbolism, but as gateways to the past rather than keys to the future.

How often have you heard the expression "key to the future" or "gateway to the past" or "future"? Mirage brings those metaphors together in a key chain. It bears the slogan "THE FUTURE IS HERE" on a disk surrounding the raised Western Hemisphere of the Earth—like the USC’s emblem without the eagle and the anchor. The key is to a private elevator in New York and bears some resemblance to an anchor with the hole for the rope at the opposite end. You see the eagle on the US Army officer’s cap of a man called the Major who runs a lab in California through a dummy peace foundation. The Army uniforms are those of Word War II when the Air Force was part of the Army. Thus, you have a clever symbolic representation of all four branches of the American Armed Forces in a peace sign—and the key to the future of the world in the hands of whoever controls the symbols of power.

Universal released Mirage before the Vietnam debate, when the key chain was clearly intended to reminder us of President Eisenhower’s warning about the "military-industrial complex." In retrospect, those of us who learned the lessons of the dove success in Vietnam can see "the future" in the Major’s key chain that the makers of Mirage couldn’t have seen unless they were clairvoyant. Even then, they would have had to decipher the symbols correctly to know what they were seeing.

In "Twenty Two" Liz didn’t know that she was seeing the future in the person of the nurse on the elevator anymore than Gregory Peck as David Stillwell saw the past in the Major’s elevator key. Remember Liz trying to alter the events in her vision by reaching for a cigarette instead of a glass? The lighter igniting then dropping to the floor and causing the glass to fall anyway might have told her what was coming. It probably would have if she had realized she was glimpsing the future in greater detail than when she first broke the glass, heard the footsteps of the nurse and followed her in the elevator to the morgue. She had fire (the lighter’s flame), falling metal (the lighter’s body), and falling glass (the drinking glass). The difference was in scale. Blood is mostly water and the nurse in her vision had to be a symbol for something or someone else if she wasn’t a nurse (she stood for many things including the angel of death).

All of those little details—including the fact that the broken vase in the airport didn’t have water in it added up to warnings that they were all symbols of something bigger that hadn’t happened yet. The ticking clock (time), the crazy thirst (a sudden loss of body fluids—blood), broken glass (the cockpit and windows of the airplane) and the flight number being the same as the morgue told her everything she needed to know. Flight number 22 was going to crash. In Mirage the falling water appears in the form of a watermelon falling to the sidewalk from the 17^th floor of a building. When you see it splatter you know what it stands for because you have already seen a man falling from the 27^th floor and you’ve heard a man making the comparison. It doesn’t matter that Mirage was filmed in black and white. You know what a watermelon is and what color it is on the inside so that’s what you see.

I included "Twenty Two" in this chapter on the basics of time travel because the kind of time traveling that Mark Fuhrman had to do to set up O.J. passed though "Twenty Two" again and again. It’s like a refueling stop on the way to the future of the clues that were going to be left in the language of symbolism on Bundy, Rockingham, and everywhere else Mark Fuhrman showed an interest. How can we not recall ambidextrous Elizabeth, also known as Kitten, smoking a cigarette, or ambidextrous Cheryl Ladd in Millennium, a former Charlie’s Angel, dressed like Sylvia and smoking a cigarette? When we know that Camel cigarettes were made in Winston-Salem, North Carolina by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., how can we not notice that Louise Baltimore smoked Camels?

You know that the LAPD suspended Mark Fuhrman for 22 days because of a racist incident involving the Birthday of Martin Luther King—ten days after Fuhrman’s. But did you know about the 1947 strike against R.J. Reynolds by Local 22 of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Worker’s Union of America? You can bet that Police Protective League union representative Mark Fuhrman did. He used the same technique to "bust" O.J. Simpson that Reynolds used to "bust" the union.

Mark Fuhrman, Ron Shipp, Faye Resnick and Denise Brown all claimed inside knowledge that O.J. was a spouse-abuser and that he said and did things that make him a probable killer. Once those labels were firmly attached to him by the timely release of damning information to the press, there was little O.J. could say in his defense that most "respectable" people were willing to listen to.

In Tri-Star’s Sunset, released the same year as Die Hard, Bruce Willis plays the silent film star Tom Mix. James Garner is Wyatt Earp. Mix befriends an innocent man framed for murder. The innocent man is primed for the frame-up by false stories that he had a habit of beating up women. The real killers then frame Mix for rape. When a co-conspirator observes that the plan hinges on Mix being found guilty in a court of law, Malcolm McDowell as Alfie the chief villain tells him that it doesn’t matter, that the press will find him guilty. You know the minute you hear the charge that only a miracle will save Mix from the power of the label.

The false rape charge comes after a scene where a woman is stabbed to death, a car crashes into a white picket fence and Mix walks though time (on a movie set) with Wyatt Earp. The time walk, from a barroom in 1880’s Tombstone though 60-something B.C. Egypt—you know, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, begins with a conversation about Buffalo Bill (O.J.’s first pro football team). It leads directly to Mix’s confession that he wasn’t with Teddy Roosevelt’s RoughRiders in Cuba but bronco busting in the states. Does any of that sound familiar?

Fuhrman documented his understanding of the power of labels in Murder in Brentwood by talking about the "race card." The word he used as an unfair label applied to him was "racist." That’s what he meant by "playing the race card," an expression made popular by Jeffery Toobin during the O.J. Simpson criminal trial to mean the same thing Sen. Joe McCarthy did when he called his enemies "card-carrying Communists."

The principle is the same. It was first used successfully, not by Sen. McCarthy in 1950, but by R.J. Reynolds and the House Un-American Activities Committee against Winston-Salem’s Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers Union of America Local 22, in 1947.

Reynolds planted a man and woman inside the FTAAWUA to tell an influential newspaper that the union was controlled by Communists. The fact that they were insiders with access to confidential information gave added weight to their claims. The fact that they were white people in a black union gave added weight to their claims of being hardcore Communists themselves because of the Communists’ anti-segregation agenda. Even the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover equated anti-segregation with communism into the ’60s and labeled Martin Luther King Jr. a Communist accordingly. The Communist fight against Jim Crow (a bird) is what made Richard Wright want to be one of them until he found out what else their agenda included and disowned them in 1945.

You get all of this history through a web of timelines spun from the center of the Bundy murder investigation. Mark Fuhrman is at the center of the web. Start at any nexus, like "Twenty Two" or Native Son and they will all touch each other along one thread or another which, in turn, lead back to Fuhrman. When I wrote The Random Factor in 1992-’93 I thought I was making up that business about a time web and how it worked until Fuhrman’s book confirmed its existence in at least one case.

Because my story was set in the near future I went through a considerable amount of trouble to create a timeline that would not conflict with future developments. So did the Bundy killer. But he needed a different kind of time machine than the one I used in ’92 and ’93 to pull it off.

Time travel by any mode has rules you can’t bend. Even in an organic time machine like the human mind reality depends on a realistic timeline. Once you get to where you’re going, events have to proceed in a logical sequence. In other words, the laws of physics, biology and human nature take over and you have to go with the flow. The makers of Sunset could bring Wyatt Earp onto a movie set with Tom Mix in 1929 but not 1930 because Earp was a real flesh and blood man who died in 1929. That’s one of the biology rules; human flesh and blood was designed to self-destruct in a hundred years, give or take a few decades.

If our bodies and minds did survive in good shape for a millennium or two, you can be sure that we’d be wearing different styles of clothing. Nothing stays in style for long in the modern world. The speed of change is what tells you how far removed you are from primitive society. As soon as you see Mix and Earp in the same picture with a Roman soldier you know that the scene was staged just by looking at their clothes.

When Christopher "Superman" Reeve, as Richard Collier goes from 1979 to June 28, 1912 in Somewhere in Time, he uses a mental technique that requires total immersion with artifacts of the time. He can carry nothing with him that reminds him of the timeline he was born to live and die on. Anything he has that’s inconsistent with being a man of 1912 will send him straight back to 1979. He must wear the right suit, shirt, tie, hat and shoes. He must be sure that every detail is correct right down to the coins in his pockets. So much as a thought out of phase with the time he wants to go to will keep him from going there in the first place.

In case you haven’t noticed, a screenwriter, a director, a continuity editor and a killer who tries to create a false timeline to frame an innocent man have the same problem (that’s why we’re spending so much time with this). One item out of time, one sequence out of order, and you know that what you’re looking at didn’t happen in real time. A careful study of the movies is, therefor a better guide to successful evidence and idea planting in a murder case than you might think. Note what happens to playwright Richard Collier in Somewhere in Time when he succeeds in going back to 1912 to meet Elise McKenna but arrives in the room of a half-dressed woman with a jealous husband. He manages to get out before the man can catch him, but he can’t get far enough away to keep the man from knowing where he came from. So, what does he do when he hears the door beginning to open? He turns around as though he was coming from the other direction—and points his finger at a man who wasn’t there.

You can see why Richard’s quick-turn-around-pointing-finger-trick would work because you would expect a low-life intruder who nearly gets caught to run away. You would expect to see his back several yards distant, if at all. You would expect the gentleman walking toward you in the spats (with his toes pointed straight ahead) to have had a good look at the man running away. In short, The first impression Richard gave of being someone he wasn’t and seeing someone he didn’t completed the picture that was in the man’s head before he opened the door.

The evidence on Rockingham that didn’t fit O.J. says that Mark Fuhrman did the same thing on the 12^th of June 1994 when he arrived on Bundy and started pointing his finger at everything that said O.J. Simpson. O.J. would have needed a time machine to drop the stick and the glove where Fuhrman said he found them. The evidence says Fuhrman used one—the kind a LA cop could have bought in the 1980s for the price of a TV set.

Time machines of the hardware variety have been around since the clay tablet and the pointed stick. Thousands of years later, paper, pen and ink took the next giant leap forward. In the 1400s, Johann Gutenberg’s movable type removed some of the fudge factor from hand copies of hand copies that could have originated anywhere at any time. In the 1830s, only a few centuries after Gutenberg, the first true photographic images took some of the fudge factor out of the written word. Only a few generations after that Edison recorded sound, made the photographic images move and put the sound and images together in the forerunner of today’s most popular time machines: movies, televisions and VCRs.

I started writing my first novel, The Random Factor, five or six years after I purchased my first VCR. Like radio and TV, the technology had existed for decades before someone wised up to the fact that cheaper machines could generate more money than expensive ones by allowing more people to buy them. If you had a VCR, you could move time around in a way that was impossible if you didn’t have one. You could effectively be in two places at one time, watching one program on one channel while recording one running in the same timeslot on another channel. You could watch what you wanted whenever you wanted to.