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Chapter 27

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Chapter 26

David and Maddie

Model builders have a saying, "No matter what you have to do, you have to do something else first." The previous chapter was supposed to have the name this one has and it was supposed to be mostly about Bruce Willis and the characters named Maddie playing opposite him. To show how the sequence of events leading to Fuhrman’s best selling book was tied to David Addison and Maddie Hays in Moonlighting, I first had to show its connection to Fuhrman’s writing career.

From the moment Fuhrman graduated from the LAPD’s Lincoln Heights Academy in July 1975 his emphasis on making "the big arrest" fit a pattern of moves that look like stepping-stones to something bigger. He used a disability claim and a lawsuit to take a paid leave for half of ’81, all of ’82 (when Charlotte Rampling starred as Laura in The Verdict) and all of ’83. When he returned to work in ’84 it was in the part of town where people close to the film industry lived and worked. Remarks he makes in Murder in Brentwood about Hollywood producers show that he spent much of his time off reading Joseph Wambaugh novels and studying popular movies. Laura Hart was a teacher at UCLA. In her spare time she was trying to establish herself as a screenwriter. That’s what she was doing when Fuhrman approached her in February 1985.

Fuhrman then got chummy with O.J.’s cocaine-addicted friend Ron Shipp. Sometime that year he joined the Gang/Narcotics Squad, so it’s likely that he had contacts in the science lab on or before the day he joined the squad. Mind you, all of this came in the second year of his return to duty in an area best suited for an ambitious cop looking to make a big arrest. Rumors abounded that O.J. was heavily involve in cocaine.

O.J. lived with his cocaine-using girlfriend Nicole, in Fuhrman’s territory. Near the end of ’84 or ‘85 Fuhrman pops up on O.J.’s property and leaves with a story about a "domestic dispute" that doesn’t get told until he puts it in his January 18, 1989 letter to the city attorney. In 1989 Nicole buys the Aris gloves. In 1991 Julia Roberts stars as Laura, in Sleeping With the Enemy, a battered wife who fakes her own death, leaves town and changes her name to Sara. Her neat freak husband erects a tombstone in her memory. In 1991 Bruno Magli Lorenzos go on sale, and Mark Fuhrman becomes a homicide detective. In 1994, while investigating the murder of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman, Fuhrman makes a note about a pizza.

To be precise, Fuhrman’s handwritten note (all caps) concerned another handwritten note that said, "CARA 575-5713. CAL PIZZA KITCHEN." In Sleeping With The Enemy Laura keeps records in a box with a handwritten label that says, "LAURA’S PERSONAL RECORDS." You can tell where she got her new name by dropping the L and the U in LAURA’S and reading the name backwards. You can also see how much Laura’s handwritten L looks like a C and how following Sara’s lead of dropping two letters gives you CARA, the name on Fuhrman’s handwritten note.

Does any of this business about Cara, Sara, and Laura remind you of the name Clara on the tombstone of Doc Brown in Back to the Future III? Can there be any doubt that Fuhrman made those connections in his mind when he made an issue of the name, the number, the pizza and the menu in his fifth note? If you think there can be doubt, just take a look at his fourth note, the one about the music and the lit candles; his sixth note, the one about the ice cream, and his seventh note about the children in the house. There, the names Sydney (Sidney), Cathy (Kathy) Jennifer (Jenny) and Lisa are clustered together in the Fuhrman collection.

One link between Fuhrman’s Fourth note and this fifth is Vanity, the killer that a woman named Jennifer sees in a restaurant (candles and menus) in Memories of Murder and Jennifer the murder victim in South Beach. The murderer in South Beach breaks into her place of business wearing a black ski mask (Fuhrman note 17). He kills a woman with a knife. He leaves a sheet of paper on the back of a chair with a handwritten note inside of a crudely draw valentine that says, "Billy Loves Jennifer."

Jennifer runs a phone-sex operation from Miami that she advertises on national television. South Beach begins with the camera following the killer’s boots then to a pizza box with a little leftover pizza and a lot of roaches. It has a plastic knife, a pair of scissors and scores of press clippings in the lid. You see an empty milk container lying on its side, along with some beer cans and a newspaper. Billy is calling Jennifer by a pseudonym and telling her that he is her Destiny.

Jennifer can take us in three directions, all of which are linked to an early episode of Moonlighting. The first role Jennifer Jason Leigh is credited with playing is Kathy, in a 1980 episode of The Waltons. She is Agnes in Flesh and Bone (’85). For most of Loaded Weapon 1 Destiny Demeanor is Kathy Ireland. Before she takes off her glasses and lets her hair down she’s Allyce Beasley, better known as Agnes DiPesto in Moonlighting. That’s the shortest rout—next to going straight to Moonlighting from the closing argument scene in The Verdict with Roxanne Hart and Bruce Willis when he was a nobody.

Because Vanity’s real name is Denise, like the phone sex murderer’s victim played by Parker Posy in Dead Connection, the two names are interchangeable. Because Jennifer Jason Lee’s birthday is the same as Mark Fuhrman’s, birthdays associated with the name have a special meaning to him. You can, therefore, plug any meaningful birthday in the Fuhrman collection of movies into any other and see a logical relationship to Mark Fuhrman.

Short Cuts (’93) has twenty-two stars and three pivotal birthdays. Fuhrman collection links include Lori Singer (Sydney in VR5) Jennifer Jason Leigh (Single, White Female), Robert Downey Jr. (Chances Are). Teamed with reincarnated Downey in Chances Are is Moonlighting’s Cybill Shepherd.

Other Fuhrman collection links in Short Cuts include Buck Henry (Heaven can Wait), Francis McDormand (The Butcher’s wife), Chris Penn (brother of Shawn Penn of We’re No Angels) and Tim Robbins (Moonlighting) as a lying, cheating cop named Gene Shepard. Madeline Stowe (Stakeout) is his wife. Fred Ward (The Naked Gun 33 1/3) is a fishing enthusiast name Kane. Lyle Lovett, former husband of Julia Roberts (Sleeping With the Enemy) is Andy commissioned to bake a cake topped by a bat, a ball and a glove for a boy named Casey’s 9^th birthday. When his parents Andie MacDowell (Groundhog Day), and Bruce Davison (Hunter) fail to pick up the cake he makes nasty phone calls to their house. They confront him at his bakery where you see a Ford Bronco parked in the back.

This is where the baker learns why he got stiffed on the cake deal. The running boy was hit by a car, like the jogger in the pilot episode of Moonlighting, and died a day after his birthday. We saw in another of the Short Cuts for which the movie was named that Casey’s turn for the worse began with a glass of spilt milk. Had you been following the Fuhrman collection’s spilt milk links you would have known right then that the boy wasn’t going to make it.

While we don’t have a pizza here, we have a California kitchen and the fact that Nicole gave a pizza party at Rockingham sometime between her final birthday (May 19) and the day she was killed (June 12). Like pizzas, cakes have different toppings and there are more than enough phone calls about the cake with the bat and glove to see the link between the dead boy’s phone number and a tombstone. The baker and his cake with the baseball bat and glove also gives us links to Fuhrman’s ’85 baseball bat report on O.J. and Nicole at Rockingham and his discovery of the Rockingham glove. Did Uma Thurmond and Cathy Baker in Jennifer Eight suddenly pop into your head?

Never mind them; we want to stick with Short Cuts and look at Jennifer Jason Leigh who plays a phone sex operator named Lois. We first see her changing her baby’s diaper while she talks dirty to someone on the phone named Andy. Sexual passion is only an act with Lois who never talks that way to her husband Jerry. You get a hint of how far she will go for money if the price is right when a black man in a jazz bar asks her to perform oral sex on him. She dismisses him with a threat worse than death, but you can see her warming up to the idea when he lays down two hundred dollars on her table. Just then her husband Jerry comes back and asks why the money is there. The black man snatches it up and a symphony of intimidating, awkward, expectant and thoroughly cowed looks tells the story. When Lois sees that her humiliated husband is neither going to fight nor leave, she leaves in a huff with bitter words for him. "We could have used that money," she snaps. Jerry eventually snaps and murders an innocent girl with a rock who reminds him of his wife.

In another scene, Lois tells her friend Honey about recognizing the voice of the bishop of her mother’s church. He asks for an incest fantasy with her playing a little girl. Honey is appalled but Lois says it’s a harmless way for him to relieve his tensions and for her to make good money. When she introduces Honey to the idea of virtual reality, you don’t have to hear any more to know where the conversation is going to go.

Three years later Lori Singer, another Short Cuts player, will be cast as Sydney in a short TV series called VR5. In that series her unique blood chemistry and some special equipment allow her to inject her virtual reality self into the subconscious minds of people she contacts with a simple phone call. She is the lone survivor of a car accident in which her parents and her twin sister drown. In Short Cuts she’s Zoe Trainer, a terrific musician and half court basketball player who goes to macabre extremes to get her mother’s attention. She pretends to have drowned in the swimming pool. She deliberately cuts her hand on a glass then plasters a blood trail, complete with bloody fingerprints, from the sink to the door. She finally asphyxiates herself Kevorkian style with her car engine running in a closed garage.

Are you starting to see what I mean about the choices that casting directors make? Watch for it. You will see it a lot. Here’s another example, one that comes from a television series and goes into a move. Madeline Stowe (China Moon) is Officer Gene Shepard’s wife. Madelyn Hays in Moonlighting is Cybill Shepherd. Keeping in mind the running birthday boy who is hit by the car, see how many elements from Moonlighting’s first two shows you can detect in Short Cuts….

Frances McDermand, the boutique owner who sold the expensive shoes to Demi Moore in The Butcher’s Wife, is the woman Gene (Tim Robbins) is having the affair with. Her former husband is a jealous helicopter pilot. He has a grandfather clock in her house that has to be wound to keep the right time. She never winds it. Her ex buys her a cake at Andy’s bakery for her birthday. There, he crosses paths with Mrs. Kane who is dressed as a clown to entertain children at a birthday party in the hospital where Dr. Ralph Wyman, Mrs. Shepard’s brother-in-law (Mathew Modine) works. His wife Marian is played by Julianne Moore. She was Fred Ward’s seductive, murderous, double-crossing ex girlfriend in Cast a Deadly spell.

Casey, the boy who was hit by the car, is Dr. Wyman’s patient. Jerry, the husband of the phone sex operator Lois, cleans his mother’s swimming pool. Honey, Lois’ best friend is the daughter of the woman who hit Casey with her car. Honey is housesitting for a black couple. The black couple is flying out of town to visit the woman’s mother on her birthday and to stay for a month. They are neat freaks. The man is afraid that they might miss the plane. Honey’s husband wears a T-shirt that says "NAKED" on the front and "Angels" on the back.

One more thing about Short Cuts before we move on to David and Maddie. The black guy who makes the indecent proposal to Jennifer Jason Leigh boasts to his friends about killing a man much larger than he was by ambush. He describes himself as "a black cat in a shadow."

The killer in Dead Connection drives a Jaguar XJS stolen on June 12, 1993. Like Short Cuts, Dead Connection was released in 1993. It also takes place in the City of Angels. It also involves phone sex combined with violent death. The killer is a world class boxer (bloody gloves) who assumes names like Walker Smith (Sugar Ray Robinson) and Joseph Barrow (Joe Lewis) to rent motel rooms. His real name is Richard Leslie Welden. He comes to the rescue of young women in distress, lures them to his room and kills them after making a call to sex line 555-6969 that turns him into a madman. Michael Madsen as Det. Matt Dickerson works at the LAPD Holenbeck Station where Mark Fuhrman once worked. While investigating the death of Denise and her friend at the Night Moon Motel, he discovers an LAX baggage claim ticket. Fuhrman found one on Rockingham.

Dickerson wears rubber gloves and carries a small flashlight.

Dickerson is a philanderer, but he gets emotionally involved with Lisa Bonet as Catherine Briggs pretending to be a journalist. She is really the revenge-seeking sister of an early Richard Leslie Welden victim named Jane Prescot. Catherine feels guilty for her sister’s death because she left her dancing alone with the killer. She was the one who drew his attention by rejecting the unwanted advances or other men. She was the one who took her sister dancing to celibate her birthday.

Three birthdays loom large in Fuhrman’s book, Martin Luther King’s (his 22 day suspension), Nicole Brown Simpson’s (the mother) and Sydney Simpson’s (the child). You remember the flowers and the creepy note about mothers and children that Fuhrman propped up in a corner of the murder scene—like a tombstone.

Something is also creepy about the names of all three of Fuhrman’s wives relative to the women in the movies who share his birthday and one whose birthday is close to O.J.’s. His first wife who divorced him in 1975 was Barbara, as in Barbara Hershey. His second wife was Janet. Janet Leigh’s birthday is July 6^th , a 180-degree rotation away from O.J.’s July 9^th. His third wife Caroline is the one I’m afraid for. Take a good look at Charlotte Rampling. You have all of the letters you need, all but one (the "e" in Charlotte) in the right order. His Christmas gift to her of a horse sounds more fitting for a birthday. Children born on Christmas are often called Chris. Keep that in mind the next time you see the name "Chris" (a name that appears frequently in the Fuhrman collection) and think about Anthony in the last segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Anthony celebrates more than one birthday a year.

If O.J. weren’t dyslexic and Fuhrman didn’t have a penchant for flipping O.J.-related material on its head, you couldn’t count Janet Leigh’s birthday as a hit. But O.J. is, and Fuhrman does, so you have to count it. Then, there’s Morrison, "Leigh’s" real last name. Fuhrman claimed to be a fan of rock star Jim Morrison. Jennifer Morrow is Jennifer Jason Leigh’s real name. She’s the daughter of Vic Morrow who played the bigot Bill Connor in The Twilight Zone movie. He was killed along with two children in a helicopter accident while making the movie in 1982. Jennifer’s middle name was Lee, as in Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh’s daughter. Jennifer got the name Jason (O.J.’s first son) from family friend Jason Robards (St. Valentine’s Day Massacre).

Vic Morrow seems to be the key to unlocking Fuhrman’s attraction to his second wife Janet and the things he said about Sydney’s birthday that led me to Moonlighting. No white, male celebrities shared his birthday. Vic Morrow, who was born on St. Valentines Day, was the biggest star of Fuhrman’s youth to come the closest, followed by Lee Marvin who was born on February the 19^th. Morrow appeared frequently on TV in popular series such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Richard Diamond, Charlie’s Angels and Hunter. He had a starring role in his own series Combat, with Rick Jason. Lee Marvin, a Marine combat veteran appeared with Morrow in a 9/17/63 episode of Combat. Morrow played Artie West the racist juvenile delinquent with the switchblade knife opposite Glenn Ford and Sidney Poirtier in Blackboard Jungle (55).

Ann Francis (Forbidden Planet with Jack Kelley as Lt. Farman) played Ford’s wife. Like Vic Morrow, Ann Frances was a ubiquitous TV presence in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. In 1965 she had the title role in her own TV series, Honey West. She starred with Janet Leigh in the 1954 movie Rogue Cop. As a heterosexual male who watched old movies and current series on television, Mark Fuhrman would have made those connections at a very early age. In 1965 Combat and Honey (Short Cuts) West (Blackboard Jungle) were both shown weekly.

Mark Fuhrman despised his father who left home when he was seven. From what we know about Fuhrman’s so-called imagination it’s reasonable to surmise that he looked for a father substitute in a composite of famous men he did like. From his interest in race, violence, art, rock music (Vic Morrow as Artie in Blackboard Jungle), martial arts (6’ 4" Rick Jason was the first American actor to use karate on TV), and the Marines (6’ 3" Lee Marvin), Combat gives us a good place to start. Fuhrman was in military school, which he enjoyed, when the Combat episode with Morrow, Jason, and Marvin was broadcast on 9-17-’63. If that date had a powerful symbolic meaning to him that stuck with him and grew as he did it would go a long way toward explaining why Sydney Simpson’s birthday (10-17-’85) was so important to him.

As a history buff and a rock fan, he had to know that Blackboard Jungle was the first motion picture in history to be shot with a rock and roll score. The featured tune was "Rock around the Clock."

Fuhrman was probably married to his second wife Janet when he first learned that Vic Morrow and his wife Barbara Turner celebrated his birthday. That’s because Jennifer Lee Morrow made her TV début as Jennifer Jason Leigh in Young Runaways with Ann Francis and Robert Ellenstin as Sydney in 1978. That role put her in the media spotlight for the first time. In 1980 Ann Francis starred in Detour to Terror with O.J. Simpson as Lee Hayes.

This is the point in my first draft of this chapter that I started to wonder whether there was something about Sydney Simpson’s birthday that I was missing. Jason came with Lee and there were references to Arnelle and Justin in the Fuhrman collection that didn’t involve their names. But the names Sydney and Jennifer kept popping up in the damndest places when I was looking for birthday links from Blackboard Jungle to the pilot for Moonlighting. They were places that demanded a date for Sydney’s birthday, to tell me whether I was looking at anything significant. Just remember that another name for diamonds is rocks, and Maddie Hayes is the one who gets them from the clock on the wall.

Fuhrman tied the name Morrison to rock music (Jim Morrison), which ties the name to O.J. (O.J.’s middle name) and to Leigh (Janet Leigh’s real name is Morrison/Jennifer Lee Morrow’s stage name is Jennifer Jason Leigh). In Old English, the suffix "son" means "son of" the root name it’s attached to, which is one reason I think English actors appear as frequently as they do in the Fuhrman collection. I think the "son" part of Morrison meant every bit as much to Fuhrman as the "Morr" and the "o" in Morrow. Instead of reading "daughter of" Vic Morrow in the name Jennifer Jason Leigh, through Fuhrman’s eyes, I think you can read "son of" Vic Morrow, Rick Jason and Lee Marvin. Like Mark Fuhrman, Lee Marvin’s first son Christopher was born in 1952. In short, it looks to me as though Fuhrman saw Sydney’s birthday as an anniversary of his own second birth on the same day—of the previous month.

Do you want to know why that time shift looks so familiar?

Those associations funneled into Fuhrman’s autumn of 1985 appearance on Rockingham. Or was that a 1984 appearance? Let’s take another look at the clock as a metaphor for time travel and the song, "Rock Around the Clock" in Blackboard Jungle. Glenn Ford’s character has a French name that sounds enough like "daddy-o" for Vic Morrow and Sidney Poirtier to call him that. And then there’s Deathtrap with Michael Caine as Sidney and Christopher Reeve as his sociopathic lover that Sidney "kills" to plagiarize his sure-fire hit play but rises from the grave (gets reborn) to kill his killer.

Remind you of anyone else? How about Meg Ryan as Sydney in D.O.A.? Roxanne Hart is Meg in Special Bulletin (’83), a TV reporter in Charleston South Carolina covering a nuclear treat by three male and two female terrorists. The group is lead by an ex-marine named Bruce and an unstable genius named David. In the first phase of the attack a graduate of the University of North Carolina (Michael Jordan and Laura Hart’s alma mater) is taken hostage. Coastguardsmen Mark Harris and Lyle Freeman are shot. A man named James in a dark blue knit cap is the third male terrorist. A reporter in black leather gloves explains the effects of a nuclear blast in a segment that includes a survivor of Nagasaki with two brothers who died of leukemia. Mark Fuhrman lost a brother to leukemia. Meg makes her last report from a Navy ship. Mark Fuhrman served on a Navy ship as a marine.

Is it purely by chance that three men—one of them an ex-marine named Mark Fuhrman—and two women were required to frame Orenthal James Simpson for killing Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman? I don’t think so. Consider the call letters of the mythical network Meg is reporting for, RBS. Now complete this thought with the call letters: The reports you are receiving this evening…

Fuhrman’s reports on O.J.’s spouse abuse are BS, too. What all of these name associations add up to is so obvious that it will probably piss you off when you see it. When I say obvious, I mean as obvious as a pregnant white woman in a famous black man’s estate sobbing on the hood of a Mercedes Benz with a shattered windshield and a baseball bat laying nearby. Fuhrman said nothing in his report about Nicole being pregnant. That’s a lot like describing Santa Clause without mentioning a red suit.

Nicole became pregnant with Sydney in January 1985. She did not want to have the baby out of wedlock. O.J. was the father (daddy-O). He had a large appetite for sex with different women and didn’t want to get married. Abortion was out of the question for Nicole, who was Catholic, and for O.J. who didn’t want to lose Nicole or the baby. They got married on February 2, 1985. Sydney was born by way of a Cesarean section on October 17, 1985. O.J. said that he recalled the baseball bat incident, which, of course, was much different the way he told it than the way Fuhrman did. He said that it happened in the fall but no one called the police; Fuhrman just showed up. Simpson went on to give details of the event that would have proven his claim or totally discredited him—if anyone had bothered to check, Fuhrman’s story had no records to support it and O.J.’s story didn’t need any. He was O.J. Simpson.

Those records were somebody’s treasure. The exact date would have been easy enough to confirm with repair receipts for damage to the Mercedes or by interviewing the people who did the work. The big question, however, is why would Fuhrman lie about the year?

The false time moves the false instances of domestic violence closer together. The winter of ’85 would put the January ’89 incident closer to 3 years. The fall of ’84 makes them sound as though they were five years apart. It’s the kind of detail that gives him the timeline "flexibility" he talked about for securing a murder conviction. Confronted with the fact that Nicole was pregnant in the fall of ’85, he could say that the incident took place after Sydney was born. If a real investigation showed that the incident couldn’t have happened after October 17, he could claim that he made a harmless error—that the year was unimportant, and the essential facts remain the same.

The essential fact is, Mark Fuhrman manipulated time by a year or more by keeping the timeline fuzzy. He got away with it on the strength of a racial stereotype that nobody questioned and shocking images alive and growing in the public consciousness of spouse-abusers and their victims. Those perceptions came about as a result of Farrah Fawcett’s portrayal of a real-life spouse abuse victim in the CBS television drama, The Burning Bed. The wife beater is called Mickey but his name is James. The girl playing his daughter at age 12 is Christa Denton. His son at age 10 is David Friedman. His son at age 4 is Justin Gocke. In one scene you see the boy playing with a plastic bat. The scene in which Farrah looks her worst is when her husband bounces her off their car.

Before The Burning Bed nobody took Farrah Fawcett seriously as an actress. She was known as a model who did commercials for Head & Shoulders shampoo, then as one of Charlie’s Angels. Her former husband was Lee Majors. O.J. Simpson’s father was James Lee Simpson. The Burning Bed Premiered on CBS in 1984—October 8, 1984.

Do you want to bet that the month day and year that Mark Fuhrman appeared on Rockingham wasn’t somewhere around October 17, 1984?

What we have here is a test balloon to see whether or not anyone would investigate "minor" discrepancies in his story once they had a clear image of O.J. as a spouse-abuser. When Fuhrman wrote his report in 1989, he had to have imagined himself on Rockingham around the time of Sydney’s birth. We can still refer to the ’85 incident. But now we know that it happened in ’85 only in Fuhrman’s head.

One thing that threw me about the ’84/’85 time discrepancy was the fact that O.J. was terrible with dates (he got his own birthday wrong in his book) and didn’t seem to appreciate how his ’84 date shored up a weak point in Fuhrman’s story. Fuhrman was in a gang/narcotics unit in ’85. Therefore, his job assignment worked against his story that he was summoned to Rockingham on a family dispute call. If he was there in ’85, it had to have something to do with drugs. All agree that he was there. That now appears to be the only thing he told the truth about.

Another thing that threw me was the fact that Fuhrman never mentioned his encounter with O.J. to Laura Hart. The man dropped names like pigeons drop you-know-what. Fall or winter of ’84 was close enough to February ’85 for the encounter to rate as recent history—perfect for the "switch-hitter" analogy he used to describe the different ways he treated people of different socio-economic standings. I thought that he didn’t do it because the incident hadn’t happened yet. I was wrong.

What did happen between the time Fuhrman met O.J. and Nicole and the time Laura Hart made their first tape was the début of Moonlighting on March 3, 1985—one day after O.J. and Nicole were married. In that show, Mary Hart of Entertainment Tonight played herself asking Maddie Hays, the Blue Moon Shampoo girl, about the murder of the German with the Mohawk. On her real show that night do you think O.J.’s marriage to Nicole might have been reported?

Before there was Julia Roberts as Laura in Sleeping with the Enemy (’91) there was Dana Delaney as Gillian in a 1985 episode of Moonlighting called "Knowing Her". If the name Dana sounds familiar to you in this context, it’s because Dana Andrews played Det. Mark McPherson (pronounced "Furson") in the movie Laura. In Sleeping with the Enemy, Laura made it appear that she drowned in a boating accident to escape her obsessed, controlling, stalker-of-a-husband who beat her and threatened to kill her if she left him. When she shoots him to death it’s a true case of self-defense.

Gillian, on the other hand, is a cold, calculating killer. She arranges an accidental-on-purpose meeting with David, her former lover, with a phony story about a stolen heart-shaped locket. To set David up as a false witness to the character of the man she plans to kill, she paints David and Maddie a false picture of him as an obsessed, controlling, stalker and fakes attempts on her life that she can blame on him. The old accidental-on-purpose-meeting-trick is one you see with Tyrone Power in Witness for the Prosecution (’57). You see it again with Charlotte Rampling in The Verdict (’82) and with Kathleen Turner in Body Heat (’84). As the "accidental" reunion unfolds, Maddie says, "I feel like I walked into a movie." It’s a formula.

If it’s not the formula that Fuhrman used to set up Laura Hart, O.J. and Nicole, other features of "Knowing Her" compared to the shoeprints and the gloves in the Bundy murders become extremely difficult to explain. Beginning where the story does outside in a pouring rain you see a sign that says, "SERA’S MINI MART." Next you see Maddie Hayes (O.J. is Lee Hayes in Detour to Terror) in an elevator from the knees down with soaking wet shoes and pantyhose. She walks with her toes pointed straight ahead leaving wet imprints of where she’s been on the carpet behind her. She walks with an awkward gait because she has a broken heel (O.J. had arthritis/Fuhrman made a point of the heel). She leaves her pantyhose (two socks) on the floor in her office.

The rain may remind you of what Michael Douglas did to Kathleen Turner’s heels in Romancing the Stone. Her stumbling may remind you of what Robert Redford said about Jane Fonda’s boots in The Electric Horseman. Jane Fonda may remind you of the blood link to her brother Peter (Future World/South Beach) and the blood link to his daughter Bridget as Allie in Single White Female (’92). You may then recall the bloody Stiletto heel of the shoe that Jennifer Jason Leigh kills Allie’s boyfriend Sam with. She stabs him in the eye with it and leaves his hotel with the desk Clerk misidentifying her as Allie. She leaves the shoes in the bathroom. You may remember her coming home and taking a long shower with bloody clothes from another murder soaking in the water-filled sink and her bloody leather gloves lying on the rim. You may also recall how much she looked like Demi Moore as Molly in Ghost.

Now, back to "Bruno"….

The way the murder works in "Knowing Her" is the only way the Bundy murders and frame-up could have worked, with minor modifications to fit real world conditions. Only Mark Fuhrman was in a position to make those adjustments before, during and after the killings with a little unwitting help from the woman he intended to kill. Gillian tells a story calculated to make the man she wants to frame look like a spouse abuser, then stages two attacks on herself with unsuspecting witnesses. Gillian is the only one at her husband’s funeral wearing gloves. They’re black leather gloves. There’s a tombstone in the scene with Maddie and David seeing Gillian in exactly opposite ways. Maddie has her pegged. She says to David, "You met her husband. Does the shoe fit?"

For David, it does. He is the other man. He was there. He was a detective. He saw the husband’s car he saw the struggle and heard the shot. He sums it up this way, "Music, moonlight, wife, husband, one alive one dead." The LAPD detective in charge is a bald man named Barber. He says, "The evidence is overwhelming. Usually you don’t get this lucky. I mean a killing and a witness. David thinks Maddie is all wet until Barber tells her of one bit of evidence he can’t ignore. There were no witnesses to the Bundy murders but a key witness to the so-called abuse that he told others he knew about because he was her lover, was the first detective on the case; Det. Mark Fuhrman.

A chase scene in "Knowing Her" ends with the killer’s car driving onto a baseball diamond where a batter running to first loses his cap. The killer crashes through a wooden refreshment stand and comes to a sudden halt.

Bruce Willis is as conspicuous for his absence from Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood as O.J. is from the Laura Hart McKinney tapes. Yet, so much of what he did say and do shows defining characteristics of Willis’ best known characters. For instance, he uses Tim Allen of Home Improvement to illustrate the difficulty defense attorneys had of saying, "I was wrong." The same thing could be said of David Addison. In the perfect final scene of "Knowing Her," David does something that is out of character. He takes a rose into Maddie’s office when she isn’t there, puts it on her desk and writes a note that says, "DEAR MADDIE, YOU WERE RIGHT. SOMETIMES I AM AN IDIOT. LOVE, D". He leaves…for a moment. Comes back, retrieves the flower and the note and leaves again.

David’s letter wouldn’t win a medal for penmanship but in Single White Female, Sam’s letter might. Allie finds it in a shoebox after Sam’s death. Like Fuhrman’s notes, it’s printed in caps. It even has a reference to a phone call. In Ghost, Molly’s sorting-through-the-shoebox scene comes after the scene in the cemetery where Sam sees a female ghost walk through a tombstone. Do you see now why SERA’S MINI MART in caps to start "Knowing Her" was relevant to the tombstone and Fuhrman’s fifth note about the pizza? No? Do I have to remind you of the label on Laura’s personal records in Sleeping with the Enemy, or the fact that she changed her name to Sara? Do I have to remind you that Fuhrman was taping with Laura Hart in the fall of 1985 when "Knowing Her" was first aired?

…I didn’t think so.