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Chapter 24

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Chapter 23

Angel of Death

If I tried to hit all of the high points of the movies in the Fuhrman collection starring Bruce Willis and Demi Moore I’d have to add another three or four chapters to this book. The same goes for Kathleen Turner, Chevy Chase, Michael Douglas, James Woods, Nancy Allen, Brad Dourif, Barbara Hershey, Carl Weathers, Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Gene Hackman, Dennis Franz, Sharon Stone and, Michael Caine. I’ve already written plenty about most of these stars, but there really are that many more significant links between them and Mark Fuhrman’s role in his best known case. I will therefore choose one of them as an example.

Bruce Willis’ role as David Addison in the TV series Moonlighting made him a star. If Fuhrman were truly fixed on him as a source of ideas for the murders and the frame-up it had to show up in the series. The first four episodes alone (1985) are filled to the brim with hits, some of them so close to the mark that you have to look or listen closely to pick out the differences. Others are so specific that they give you the willies. Addison’s first appearance in the pilot show falls in neither category, but it does involve something that would have gotten Mark Fuhrman’s attention. He’s sitting at his desk playing with a miniature basketball.

That scene is not the only thing that connects Willis and the game of basketball to the basketball link between Mark Fuhrman and Phil Vannatter. Willis, with the basketball, connects Fuhrman to the scene in Mortal Thoughts where his character goes into his wife’s hair salon, to unload their baby so he can go out and "shoot hoops." Fuhrman shot hoops with Phil Vannatter. He’s wearing a dark blue baseball cap (The Philadelphia Experiment II) and a basketball jersey. In that movie he’s a spouse abuser named James (O.J.’s middle name). In Moonlighting he’s a detective.

Something else you might have caught if you saw Mortal Thoughts and Groundhog Day back to back is the Mark Fuhrman/Phil Vannatter link by way of Andie MacDowell and Demi Moore. One of the things that led me to Groundhog Day initially was a false memory of Demi Moore as Rita. This was early in my research on Fuhrman and the movies when I was writing the chapter by that name in Iago in Brentwood. I rented the tape, saw my mistake and jettisoned the idea of any link between Groundhog Day and Mortal Thoughts. I did another 180 when I saw the physical resemblance between Moore and MacDowell and the androgynous name link between Andie as Phil Connors’ aid, and Andy the lawyer who dies of AIDS in Philadelphia.

I’d often wondered about the Fuhrman collection’s super-abundance of androgynous names and the females with some of his more extreme defining characteristics. How he identified with his mother Billie may have explained some of it, but not enough unless he blamed her for the blood disease that killed his brother. Is it possible that Fuhrman, a man whose professional, recreational and fantasy life centered on blood, did not see himself as God or a god, but an angel—the Angel of Death?

What got my attention was Bill Murray as Phil telling Andie MacDowell as Rita that she looked like an angel. In Mortal Thoughts the juxtaposition of Moore’s face and a Christmas angel automaton waving a light bulb candle from side to side tells you that someone has just died. But only later, when you see the flashing red and blue lights and the yellow police tapes like the ones on the cover of Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood, do you see it as the Angel of Death. An angel figures prominently in two movies in which Moore plays a woman named Molly; We’re no Angles (1989) and Ghost (1990). In Ghost, Sam sees the statue of an angel in her place on their bed when he dies.

With Phil in Groundhog Day seeing Rita as an angel and Sam seeing one in Molly’s place, the similarities in how the actress might have looked not just to me but to Fuhrman become striking. They become more striking when you factor in the sobriety test he gave to Kato (penlight waving from side to side in front of his eyes) and the significance of the name Rita in Ghost. Rita is the name on the account that Sam was murdered to access. Now, take the story of the photo that has Fuhrman pointing to the dark brown leather glove with the dark blue knit cap and the wet-transfer heelprint of the Bruno Magli (Molly) Lorenzos in a tight group shot and combine it with the Rockingham search. How much of those two stories can you find in one frame of Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott as Larry standing in the foreground of the groundhog’s tree stump home?

If you think Andie MacDowell has enough in common with Demi Moore to remind you of her in Ghosts and Mortal Thoughts, the Bruno Magli (pronounced Molly) name is a gimme. When Moore starred in Mortal Thoughts, her real husband was Bruce Willis, a.k.a. Bruno. In Ghost she plays Molly the girlfriend of Sam-the-ghost. Joe Turner is framed for killing Sam, his best friend, in Lorenzo Simple, Jr. and David Rayfiel’s screenplay Three Days of the Condor. Michael Kane and Addison Powell play the real killers. In Country, starring Bruce "Bruno" Willis, features a young, spirited female Sam (a filly) who discovers a photo and a diary of her dead father in a shoebox. Holding her widowed mother’s shoes she derisively refers to her stepfather as "Lorenzo Jones." His real name is Larry. Bruno Magli Lorenzo is 1.

A cameraman is 2.

A dark blue knit cap is 3.

Dark brown leather gloves are 4.

A celebrity is 5.

You pick out the rest of them. But when you get to "Phil" don’t stop with Vannatter’s first name on the tree stump and Fuhrman’s defining characteristic in the presence of Phil Connors. Ron Phillips, Phil Vannatter and Marcia Clark were a package deal. Fuhrman needed Phillips to become the first lead detective in the investigation. He needed Vannatter to get inside of O.J.’s estate and they all needed a "Philadelphia lawyer" to make the bogus warrant stick. Does the name Andie remind you of a character in another movie that fits this description? Sure it does. Andy, the lawyer with a deadly blood disease, gets us into a courtroom where "tainted blood" evidence is used to mislead a jury and every attorney present is a Philadelphia lawyer. But the kind Fuhrman and Vannatter needed was someone whose idea of justice was to use any means necessary to justify their illegal actions. Marcia suborned perjury and used blood evidence from O.J.’s Bronco, his home and his body that had to be planted—tainted blood that tainted judgments and had no place in a fair trial.

Mark Fuhrman was all for "Philadelphia Lawyers" like Marcia Clark and Chris Darden as long as he could use them. But he expressed disdain for women, blacks and gays like Andy as well as Philadelphia lawyers who used legal "technicalities" to keep him from operating like the nazi he was. Musings about the mass murder of unpopular minorities were a normal part of Fuhrman’s conversations with Laura Hart McKinney. Genocide was the subject of his outburst at the Marine recruiting station in 1986 when Kathleen Bell, a woman he’d just met, told him that he reminded her of O.J.’s friend Marcus Allen.

The fact that Andy the lawyer contracted AIDS by having sex in a porno theater called The Stallion makes a subtle link to the idea of two "stallions," one a Spartan like Helen of Troy, the other a Trojan like Paris. You have to think like a nazi to see the potential for multiple murder and image assassination in that metaphor. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t noticed the two horses of the American Nazi leader in The Philadelphia Experiment II and read in Fuhrman’s book about the "bigger and healthier" horse that he bought as a Christmas present for his wife and the "old nag" he rode himself.

You never see the American Nazi leader’s horses well enough to say if one is bigger and healthier-looking than the other. One would assume that they are the same. But that’s how illusions are created, from partial facts and circumstances that lead to complete and balanced pictures. Where crucial facts are missing, the brain automatically fills in the blanks and organizes them in a way that makes the most sense under the circumstances. That’s what happens in the figurative universe of dreams. It’s why they make so much sense while we’re dreaming and so little sense when we wake up in the literal universe of physical and manmade laws. What then do we make of Fuhrman’s comment about his wife’s horse and his own when we see the "old nag" of a wooden horse in the 1961 muscle flick The Trojan Horse, compared to the bigger, healthier-looking" one in Ulysses?

In the ’61 version of the story, unlike in Homer’s Iliad, an actor working for the Greeks knocks on the side of the horse three times to let the commandos inside know that it’s safe to come out. While Kato was literally the actor inside the house (one letter different from horse), the same thing could be said figuratively of Ron Shipp who pretended to be O.J.’s friend. Just as the actor pretending to be a friend of the Trojans was really working for the Greeks, Ron Shipp said everything that a man working for Mark Fuhrman would have wanted him to say at all the right times and in all the right places. Kato did not. A considerable weight of evidence says that Ron Shipp banged on Kato’s wall three times at 10:45 after he was informed that Ron and Nicole were dead.

The killer’s idea seemed to be to give O.J. something to appear worried about when Kato and the limo driver saw him after the killings. The timing had to be just right for that plan to work, and it was. The trouble was, Kato did something that no one could have predicted because it would seem on the surface to be irrational and out of character. He checked on the noise himself. Kato was a guest in O.J.’s home. O.J. had a large collection of guns, and he didn’t have time to wait for the police to come by, check around and ask a bunch of questions before he could go to the airport, especially since it took so little to shake the wall a lot.

One would have expected Kato to call O.J. and for O.J. to check out the thumps himself, if anyone did, or to tell Kato to make sure the doors were locked and to set the alarm when he left. But something happened earlier that day to change everything, a small thing that would have remained a small thing if it hadn’t been for the thumps. Kato had asked to use the Jacuzzi. O.J. had agreed, on the condition that he turn off the water when he was finished…Kato forgot to turn off the water.

When Kato went to check out the thumps, could he have been trying to make up for the mistake he made with the Jacuzzi? It makes sense to me. But it would not have made sense to someone who doesn’t think that way, someone who might have pegged Kato as a man afraid of his own shadow who could, if necessary, be made to look like O.J.’s accomplice.

Everyone’s brain has a built-in bias for symmetry. The more symmetrical the face the more beautiful the model. The brighter the truth, the darker the lie has to be to keep the truth from shining through. For the warm, wonderful O.J. that we thought we knew to be the man who butchered the mother of his youngest children in the front yard where they played with their toys, another side of him had to exist that was pure evil.

Fuhrman’s picture of O.J. did not show up in the psychological testing that he was subjected to after the murders when he fought for custody of his children. It emerged only in the accounts of Denise Brown, Faye Resnick, Ron Shipp and Mark Fuhrman until the moneymaking potential of selling their image of him opened the floodgates.

In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman makes everything he did with respect to his involvement in O.J.’s life sound like accidents, coincidences and brilliant deductions. He compares himself favorably to O.J. as a father. But he lapses into the same pattern of attributing at least one of his own "defining characteristics" to O.J. That tendency is one of the most reliable ways of backtracking his steps from his book to the murders and the screenplays that gave the murders their defining characteristics.

In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman compares his five-year-old daughter to Sydney Simpson. To show how uncaring O.J. was after his acquittal, he said that O.J. played golf on Sydney’s birthday. She would have been nine years old. Here again, you will find a closer representation of the kind of man Fuhrman was suggesting that O.J. was in a screenplay than in real life. In this case, it would be more accurate to call it a teleplay. You will see it in the pilot episode of Moonlighting when you count the candles on the birthday cake of a little girl in white whose grandfather—a Nazi—is about to leave the house on a diamond hunt. Her name is Jennifer (Uma Thurman in Jennifer 8). Mark Thurmond was the San Diego pitcher in the center of the diamond during the Padre’s ’84 World Series loss in Detroit, a.k.a. Motown. Mark Fuhrman has the same birthday as Jennifer Jason Lee.

Barbara Hershey and "Hammerin’ Hank" Aaron, who broke Babe Ruth’s home run record of 714, also share Fuhrman’s birthday. When you see where, when and how often birthdays and Christmas appear in the Fuhrman movie collection, you’ll see how closely they relate to one point or another that he goes out of his way to make about O.J. and himself. For instance, the birthday scene in Moonlighting begins with someone lighting a candle from one of the eight that that is already burning on the cake. Adding the 9^th lit candle is only a small movement but one that could easily be morphed into the Christmas angel in Mortal Thoughts waving her electric candle from side to side.

As the scene progresses you see packages on the table, the grandfather who is less than two minutes away from leaving and the beautiful, blond birthday girl in white—just like the angel in Mortal Thoughts. Only it’s not the candle that waves back and fourth, it’s Jennifer’s face, as she blows out the candles and smoke rises in front of her eyes. Consider, for a moment, the similarity between the candle that the man lights from another lit candle on the girl’s birthday cake in Moonlighting and the electronically lit one in the hand of the mechanical angel. Put them together and you’ve got a small flashlight, a penlight. Consider the movement of the girl’s head as she blew out the candles in the dark room and the smoke that rose in front of her eyes.

Now consider the penlight that Mark Fuhrman used to peer into the back of the Bronco’s cargo area and the searching he did in the dark to see the package through the smoked glass. All of these elements from Mortal Thoughts and the Moonlighting pilot merge in Fuhrman’s account of his actions involving the Bronco, the package in the Bronco and O.J.’s absence from his daughter’s 9^th birthday. Fuhrman’s reference to the age difference between O.J. and Nicole, his inclination to exaggerate and O.J.’s hair that came out in the knit cap sets up the O.J./bald grandfather association in Moonlighting. In The First Power (92) with Lou Diamond Phillips, an incestuous grandfather is the father of his daughter’s child.

If you think I’m exaggerating about Fuhrman’s exaggerating, try on his description of the angle at which O.J.’s Bronco was parked (the name An-gel-a in German is pronounced An-gle-a). Fuhrman said that the backend was stuck out a foot farther than the front. It was less than three inches—a precise angle of 2 degrees.

For this next bit of nonsense from Fuhrman’s story of how the Bronco came to be parked the way he said it was, you’ll want to recall what he said about creating composite characters. You can do the same thing with cars and trucks or sticks and pylons. Here, you will be doing all of those things beginning with the Bronco that was supposed to have sped recklessly away from Bundy to an alley where it crashed into some wood and got a piece of the wood stuck underneath. In the Moonlighting pilot, a chase scene begins with a blue vehicle that could be a late model truck or SUV pulling to a stop beside an old, green and white POS. According to Fuhrman, who drove an old, green and white International Harvester Scout, a witness misidentified the color of O.J.’s Bronco as being blue.

Would you be real surprised to learn that something like that happens with the green car in Moonlighting? Oh, I should have told you that the driver is a hired killer with a German name (O.J. is "Nordberg" in The Naked Gun) and a Mohawk haircut like the Naked Gun’s ayatollah. Ricky Vaughn is the pitcher for the Cleveland Indians (Mohawks) in Major League. That’s the same Cleveland Indians that scouted pitcher Phil Vannatter. Anyhow, the driver notices a car following him and takes off in a panic. He drives straight through a construction zone, crashing into a wooden horse barrier and picking up a long, cylindrical pylon under the right side of his bumper. He drags the pylon beneath the car with the long end angled up and off to the right as he demolishes the wooden horse and nearly crashes into another vehicle in his mad flight.

This is how the wood that was supposed to have been caught under O.J.’s Bronco would have had to be positioned to have landed where Fuhrman, Vannatter, Lange and Phillips found it. In the Moonlighting chase scene, the pylon disappears when the killer’s car comes to a sudden stop. That brings us close to finishing our composite picture of O.J.’s getaway as deduced by Mark Fuhrman from the parking angle of the Bronco and the position of the wood in front of in. For the blood spot on the killer’s door, I humbly submit the spotty paint job on the green and white POS. The doors are red. The only thing missing is the smoked glass. Not to worry. When the killer with the Mohawk comes to a sudden stop, a chauffeur-driven car with two killers inside also stops. The killer in the back, who is a cop in The First Power, has to lower his window so the killer in the other car can see his face. His car has smoked glass.

Before I finish the Moonlighting pilot I’m going to summarize some timeline evidence that says Mark Fuhrman masterminded and carried off the S. Bundy murder/frame-up. It had to have been someone who was able to account for every damning piece of evidence against O.J. that could have been brought to trial. The killer did not have control over everything that would be brought to trial, so it is just as important to look at the incriminating evidence the prosecution chose not to use.

They chose not to use the 10:03 time that was frozen on Nicole’s watch or the two calls from women to two official police locations at about 10:30 asking about two bodies. If the time between 10:03 and 10:30 were valid, it would put the most likely time span of the killing shortly after 10:00 and well before 10:30. Fuhrman described the alley south of Nicole’s condo where he found a pile of wood from an old picket fence that matched the stick next to the Bronco on Rockingham. He said that a witness saw a light-colored SUV in that area in the appropriate timeframe. He also theorized that the killings occurred close to 10:00.

Yet, the prosecution did not use the time on Nicole’s broken watch, even though the crime scene photos show the face of it lying against the pavement. They did not use the calls about the bodies or the man who saw the SUV in the alley where the stick came from—a witness with an end time for the attack that complemented Fuhrman’s theory of when it started. Why disregard this peachy configuration of evidence that would have given O.J. time to do everything that the blood evidence, the autopsy evidence, the missing evidence and Fuhrman’s theories said he did? The only reason for abandoning a workable timeline in a murder case is a fatal flaw that pointed to another suspect. The only person who could be matched to all of that evidence was Mark Fuhrman.

The prosecution had to know that the early timeline was staged. Rather than explore the evidence of a frame-up, they chose to concentrate on building a case for O.J.’s guilt with the evidence they thought would stick. A knife like the one in the back of the Mohawk man when he falls out of an elevator in the Moonlighting pilot was one thing they thought they could use event though it was missing. They thought that wounds in the bodies made by the tin blade and brain-basher heel were enough because O.J. had recently purchased a knife like that from Ross Cutlery.

The thinking would have gone something like this: We know O.J. is guilty because we see cases like this all the time. Multiple stabbing and slashing wounds. Classic case of overkill. Jealous man flies into a rage. Kills former spouse and the man she’s with. We know by the glasses that the man who was there to deliver them died because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fuhrman knows from first-hand experience that O.J. had beaten the female victim and threatened her life before and it was only a matter of time before he killed her. The bloody shoeprints looked to be about his size. The killer walked with his toes pointed straight ahead. So did O.J. The killer was bleeding from his left side. So was O.J. A blood trail run up his driveway. A glove matching the one on the murder scene was found next to his house where Brian Kato Kaelin heard thumps at 10:45 on the 12^th. While O.J. was working on the pilot for a TV series he purchased a knife that matched the victims’ wounds.

The pilot they should have looked at was Moonlighting, made nine years early. In one character alone they had a man with glasses, dark leather gloves and a knife. He’s the guy who used the knife to stab the man to death in the elevator. He uses a different knife to attack a beautiful blond woman from behind and threaten to cut her throat. His partner is Brian Thompson, the man who plays the Night Slasher in Cobra and Mean Victor in Life Stinks. He’s the guy that Molly runs off when he steals Goddard Bolt’s shoes. In Cobra he steals a man’s glasses and prepares to attack a woman from behind in an elevator.

The woman with the knife to her throat is Maddie Hays. She is a retired supermodel for Blue Moon Shampoo whose financial managers have stolen her liquid assets. Because her fixed assets, like City of Angels Investigations were maintained only as tax write-offs, they are money losers. She is trying to liquidate the detective agency when she meets David Addison. Her first case literally falls into her arms when Mohawk slips a man’s broken watch on her wrist (Nicole’s broken wristwatch was a man’s Swiss Army watch) before he collapsed at her feet. In that episode of Moonlighting you see Maddie calling 911, you hear her complain about having her life threatened, and you hear her plead that she doesn’t want her throat cut.

The Moonlighting pilot begins with a close-up of the broken wristwatch (a false timeline) on a table (a timetable) along with some loose pocket change (the coins on Nicole’s driveway) and a working watch (the real timeline). The man who owns both of them is awakened by an alarm on the working watch. He puts on both watches when he leaves the house to go jogging. Mohawk catches up with him, corners him and gets ready to shoot him when the man runs away only to get run over and killed by a car. Mohawk is the first person to the body. While pretending to give artificial respiration, he steals the watch—and the treasure hunt in on. Inside is a code giving the location of millions of dollars worth of diamonds.

A pawnbroker tells David and Maddie that the watch has no hour hand, no stem and no working parts. The minute hand is fixed at a quarter to the hour (when Kato heard the thumps). When they leave, the Nazi slips into the front of the pawnshop from the back (The S. Bundy killer came into Nicole’s front yard from the back) and stabs the pawnbroker to death when he doesn’t tell him the number he found inside the watch.

The number is really a map co-ordinance showing the location of the diamonds in the wall of a building on a corner. On the outside wall is a real clock. The treasure taken from where Fuhrman was led by the quarter-to-the-hour thumping on Kato’s wall was the bloody, right-hand, Aris Light glove. In the Moonlighting pilot the diamonds are where the minute hand points to the 9. That’s where it points in The Naked Gun during the 7^th inning stretch on the wristwatch of the California Angels’ superstar Reggie Jackson, number 44. 744 is Martin Milner’s badge number as Officer Pete Mallory in Adam 12. In The Sands of Iwo Jima Milner is Pvt. Mike McHugh.

360 N. Rockingham is on a corner. Before you see the 360 number on the Anaheim stadium wall as Reggie crosses the baseball diamond to kill the queen, you see his glove drop from his right hand. You see that his golf glove (Fuhrman’s reference to O.J. playing golf on his daughter’s birthday) within his baseball glove is red. Before all of that, you see a Seattle Mariner shortstop (SS) number 32 catch a popup in a glove on his left hand as he glides to the top of the diamond then gets hit by a car and loses his dark blue cap with an "S" on the front. In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman calls a warning given to him by a friend a "heads-up." That’s baseball talk to watch for a popup that could come down on their heads. Here’s a little more of Fuhrman’s "baseball talk" from the McKinney tapes: "We searched him again and found the gun. Went over to the baseball diamond and talked to him. When I left, Dana goes, ‘No blood, Mark.’ ‘No problem, not even any marks, Dana. Just body shots. Did you ever try to find a bruise on a Nigger?"

Fuhrman had an active role or a theory that fits all of the key elements in the preceding segments of Moonlighting and The Naked Gun. His story of the Bundy murders and his part in the investigation knit them together.

He was raised near Seattle Washington and he lived in California when Moonlighting and The Naked Gun were made. The baseball bat incident with O.J. and Nicole occurred shortly after the Moonlighting pilot was aired and he wrote his letter to the city attorney about the incident shortly after the release of The Naked Gun. His story of reading the package in O.J.’s Bronco bleeds right into the birthday girl scene in Moonlighting, which bleeds into the mechanical Angel scene in Mortal Thoughts. Then, when you see the signal that turns Reggie Jackson—dubbed "Mr. October" for his consistent playoff series’ heroics—into an automaton programmed to kill the queen, you know he is now the Angel of Death.

By the same token, Fuhrman’s note about the phone number of a pizza place on Nicole’s coffee table magnifies the link between pizzas and death to such an extent that you have to pay attention to where they appear in the Fuhrman collection. The time travel links take you to a tombstone. When the Angel of Death visits Mohawk in Moonlighting the police assume that Maddie and David are connected to the murdered man. The detectives bring David into an interrogation room. When their style of questioning becomes relentlessly accusatory, David indignantly reminds them that they are in America and that he is entitled to one phone call. They let him use the phone. He picks it up, turns to them and asks, "What do you guys like on your pizza?"

In Tango and Cash, Kurt Russell as LAPD Det. Gabriel (God’s messenger angel) Cash grabs a pizza on his way to interrogate a hitman (an angel of death). He tortures the man into telling him what he wants to know and ends up getting framed for murder. In Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (’66) Paul Newman as an American physicist teams up with an East German woman to kill a secret police officer who spent time in the States and fondly recalls Pete’s Pizza (St. Peter is the angel who stands at the gates of heaven). During the struggle in which the woman stabs him, Newman’s coat gets bloody. The woman throws it in the fireplace and indicates with a shovel what she intends to do with his body.

In Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman writes about reporters hounding him the way the detectives hounded David Addison in Moonlighting. When a reporter called him from outside of Fuhrman’s home in Idaho, he told them that it was October (Mr. October) and how cold it could get. He told them how warm he was by the fire and where they could call for a pizza. That’s Fuhrman being cool. To show how humble he could be, he mentioned the "error" he made in suggesting a sinister explanation for the shovel and the heavy-gage plastic he found in the Bronco. The plastic was standard equipment in a Bronco to store changed tires. The shovel was a pooper-scooper for the dogs. If you want a sinister explanation for the plastic and the shovel you have to turn to the movies. If you’re looking for such an explanation in a Bruce Willis movie see Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her.

The most infamous Angel of Death has to be Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS mass murderer known for the horrible experiments he performed at Auschwitz. If Fuhrman did see himself as the Angel of Death, Mengele is the "angel" he would have had in mind. Some clues that he did, come from the wish he shared with Kathleen Bell of burning all "niggers" and the stories he told Laura Hart and Janet Hackett of mass murder.

These stores reflect what Mengele did to non-German Gypsies and Jews. Bruce Willis’ character Dr. Ernest Menville in Death Becomes Her provides the name and occupation for the compost character that Mengele would have represented to Mark Fuhrman. He was a handsome, articulate, dark German, thrill-seeking racist driven to be great. When a boxcar full of prisoners pulled into camp he was there listening to music with his trademark riding crop (a small cane) and white cotton gloves. One of the most influential men in Mengele’s life was the doctor who helped draft the Third Reich’s forced sterilization laws of 1933 that set the stage for Hitler’s Final Solution. The doctor’s name was Ernst Ruden. One of the most prolific contributors to the Fuhrman collection is Scott Ruden, an associate producer of Searching for Bobby Fischer, which begins on a birthday, and the executive producer of Jennifer Eight.

Birthdays and Angels go with Fuhrman and the movies like spiders and webs. Start with birthdays, angels or spiders and they will all carry you to Mark Fuhrman and three webs, one literal—one metaphorical and one imitative. The literal web is the one he described on Rockingham between Kato’s wall and the cyclone fence just beyond the bloody glove. The metaphorical web is the World Wide Web he used to identify the Swiss Army Knife as the murder weapon by teaching him how a 3 ½" blade could make a 4 ½" stab wound. The imitative web is spelled with a capital "W" and a double "b." That’s Jack Webb, the ex-marine, writer, actor, producer and creator of Joe Friday and his badge number, 714.

Keep in mind the fact that Fuhrman made his badge number look like Joe Friday’s by the way he wrote his 2 and by making the last numbers illegible. See what you can make out of Goldie Hawn using Fuhrman’s identity alteration method—which is not much different from matching the sound of "f" in Josef to the "ph" in Joseph. We’ll save that for later.

For now we want to stick to birthdays, angels and spiders. Lisa Bonet is Dr. Huxtable’s daughter Denise in the TV sitcom The Casby Show (1984-1992). In Angel Heart, she’s Epiphany, the 17-year-old daughter of a black Louisiana Voodoo priestess named Evangeline Proudfoot and a white singer named Johnny who sold his soul for stardom. Evangeline’s body rests in a cemetery bounded by an old picket fence. The year of death on her tombstone (1947) is the year of O.J. Simpson’s birth. The number in the middle (94) is the year of Nicole’s death. The number in the middle of the birth year (91) is the birth year of Bruno Magli Lorenzos. 18 is the day in November Fuhrman said he beat a man bloody and the day in December that Nicole bought the glove he found soaked in blood.

Angel Heart shows Epiphany having graphic sex with her father. In a composite picture of Christ’s miracle of turning water into wine and the ceremony commemorating His Last Supper in which Christians drink wine that symbolizes blood, rain dripping from a leaky roof into a pitcher and a drinking glass turns to blood. What do you see now in the pitchers Mark Fidrych for the Tiger and the Padres’ Mark Thurmond?

Maybe this will help with the Tiger who has the M.F. initials. During the opening credits of Angel Heart, you see an empty street or alley in 1955 New York where partially melted snow has left puddles of water here and there. The first sound you hear is from a cat—a tiger-striped cat that has witnessed the murder of a woman in an alley. You see the killer with a cain walking away before you know that anyone is dead. A dog finds the body. The woman has had her throat cut. The Bundy killer left the front gate open. The dog walked in the victims’ blood. Fuhrman theorized that the dog bit the fleeing killer. A dog did bite the fleeing killer in Angel Heart—a former singer in the Spider Simpson Orchestra. nicknamed Johnny "Golden Tonsils."

The killer, guided by the hand of the devil, is Epiphany’s father. Padre means Father or priest as in the Padres baseball team that Mark Thurmond pitched for against the Tigers in ’84. Religion, as much as violence, incest and the nude sex scene with The Cosby Show’s sweet, wholesome Denise Huxtable, was what made Angel Heart controversial. One way or another the movie managed to offend every major religion in the Western Hemisphere with the devil sitting comfortably in houses of worship. The devil is Robert DeNiro who calls himself Louis Cypher. He carries a walking stick and pronounces his name cipher—as in code. If you’ve been playing the Fuhrman collection name game, this code won’t be a challenge to you. Lou Cypher is Lucifer, the angel cast out of heaven because of his pride.

Biblical pride is the same thing as hubris. It made Johnny Favorite think he could outsmart the Prince of Darkness. With the help of Charlotte Rampling as Margaret Krusemark, a woman of the Jim Crow South, he got by for 12 years. Mark well Rampling’s face and her many names in various roles. You will be seeing them again and again in the damnedest places. Remember the falling out that Mark had with Margaret York over Martin Luther King’s birthday and the KKK? In Angel Heart, the killer with a split personality tells Margaret his birthday so she can make his horoscope. You get Margaret and Mark in one name, and a man born in February who cuts her heart out. Mark Fuhrman was born on February 5^th. So was Charlotte Rampling.