If eyes are "windows to the soul," whose soul are we talking about when they reflect what they see, the person whose eyes are being looked into or the reflection of the one doing the looking? Either interpretation will work. Eyes, and the things we do with our eyes, are as rich in metaphorical applications as hands. You couldn’t get around it if you wanted to. Even blind people can "see" some things if they choose to "look" just as sighted people can be "blind" if they choose not to. Some people will see what I’m talking about immediately and some never will.

Silent film stars, beginning with the likes of Lillian Gish in Birth of a Nation, learned how to communicate with their eyes in ways that stage actors before them didn’t have to and film actors after them were obliged to perfect. To be any sort of visual media personality you have to know how to speak with your eyes.

Brief eye contact is a big part of public speaking. Among most white Americans it is a sign of fear, guilt or deception not to sustain eye contact when you speak to anyone. Among non-affluent African-Americans, sustained eye contact is considered aggressive or rude. Mark Fuhrman and F. Lee Bailey looked each other in the eye when they did battle in court. But of all the things anyone in the case had to say about eyes, what Fuhrman said in Murder in Brentwood about Nicole and her murderer was the most provocative. He said that in her final seconds of life she looked into her killer’s eyes. Shades of Jack the Ripper.

The vision of Nicole looking into O.J.’s eyes when he cut her throat was a dangerous and unnecessary detail. It fits the defensive cuts on her hands but contradicts what the coroner said must have happened to account for so little blood in O.J.’s Bronco. Why, then, was it so important for him to write that last detail of his Candyman/ Jack the Ripper/ Forbidden Planet/ Jennifer 8 murder hypothesis?

Forgive me for leaving out the entire string of relevant movies but it’s one hell of a long list. I will tell you that Stephen King’s 1985 Cat’s Eye, where a cat in a cage gets tortured by "the juice," is one of them. On the video jacket of Candyman you have one of his white female victim’s eyes blown up as large as possible with a blood-red iris and the black male villain’s silhouette for a cat-like puple. Candyman was into torture—and a cat, in common American usage, has the unusual quality of being a symbol for a male or a female.

The slang word "cat" means a guy, but "Cat," is also short for Catherine, and a "catty remark" is mostly associated with women. "Feline" suggests feminine attributes, although Kim Novack’s black feline familiar in Bell, Book and Candle is probably male as is the gray-striped cat in Cat’s Eye. In The Legacy (’79) a white cat is a shape-shifting female nurse named Adams who performs an emergency tracheotomy with a knife. A sex "kitten" is a woman. And a "catfight" is always between two women.

If, as I suspected when I was researching Iago in Brentwood, Mark Fuhrman put together the same evidence I did for a catfight on New Years day 1989 between Nicole and the housekeeper—as opposed to O.J. having battered Nicole—a cat becomes a powerful symbol. It can stand for a scratching, clawing fight between Nicole and Michelle. It can stand as well for O.J.’s reaction to seeing Ron and Nicole together the way J.J. Adams caught Altaira with Lt. Farman in producer Nicholas Nayfack’s Forbidden Planet. In that case O.J. would be the big, jealous cat who attacked Adams and Altaira when he caught them together.

Cats are superb hunters. They are quick and deadly. They use their paws like clubs to batter their victims and their sharp claws like knives to slash them. They are the Freddy Kreuger’s of the animal world, known to have a cruel streak. When they trap their prey they like to toy with them before they make the kill. In The Incredible Shrinking Man, an ordinary house cat does that with a man.

The man who killed Ron and Nicole exhibited all of those cat-like qualities. He used a knife in each hand. He taunted his victim with intentional non-lethal cuts, dragging out the process for as long as he could. He wrote about it as a fiction writer would through the eyes of a killer he invented, his dark half—O.J. Simpson.

In George Romero’s 1993 film, The Dark Half, based on a Stephen King book, Timothy Hutton plays a good guy named Thaddeus Beaumont who started life as a twin. Only this twin didn’t make his appearance until Thad was in puberty. Apart from a freaky looking eye and tooth it looked nothing like a human being and had to be surgically removed from the boy’s brain. Who could have thought that it would wait around another 23 years to emerge from a grave as a fully-grown mirror image of Thad Beaumont? You have to admit there’s not a whole lot of precedent for that.

Thad grows to adulthood believing that he’d lost a tumor rather than a brother. He is therefore not speaking literally when he, becomes a successful writer and lectures to his creative writing class about the place of duality in their chosen craft. He writes "DUALITY" on a blackboard, underscores it, writes "BEINGS," underscores the "s" and says, "We are all duality beings. The outer being we show to the world at large—inhibited, timid, often a pathological liar… And then there’s the inner being, the truthful one, passionate, uninhibited, even lustful… The writer has to let that inner being out or the book will be a pack of lies…"

Fiction is, by definition, "a pack of lies." So what the hell was he talking about? He was talking about the power of the inner self to see the truth from a given point of view and the courage to use it in your writing.

Mark Fuhrman said that he was writing a gritty screenplay about the streets of LA from a female cop’s point of view. Most men spend a considerable amount of time trying to get inside of women’s heads. For a good detective as well as a good writer there are practical reasons for looking at things from the opposite sex’s perspective. As a male detective, you might see a vital clue that you would miss in your normal way of looking at things. As a writer, you double your pool of inspiration without calling attention to the additional source.

The unforgettable Rhoda Penmark first appeared in a novel written by a man, William March. Playwright Maxwell Anderson wrote the part for her on stage and John Lee Mahin did likewise for the classic black and white screenplay. Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas created the truly memorable Catherine Tramell in the 1992 thriller Basic Instinct. To be honest, though, how well would we have remembered Rhoda Penmark or Catherine Tramell without Patty McCormack as Rhoda and Sharon Stone as Catherine?

Basic Instinct is set in O.J. Simpson’s birthplace, San Francisco. It begins with a high-profile murder case. It ends with an obvious suspect and a question of whether the suspect was framed by the obvious killer. It even has a famous Simpson on the scene of a bloody homicide who is tied directly to the keys of the female victim (Bart Simpson key fob). It features a homicide detective named Nick who beat a double homicide wrap and a woman who learns all about him to base her main character on in her next book. She calls the book about him and the woman who eventually stabs him to death Shooter because of all the people he shot to death on the job, as Fuhrman told Laura Hart he did. She goes so far as to have an affair with him for the sake of the book as well as for the sheer thrill of dancing with death. Like Fuhrman, she is a thrill junkie.

Nick, played by Jewish actor Michael Douglas, had been a narcotics cop like Fuhrman with an alcohol and cocaine problem like Fuhrman’s "friend" Ron Shipp. Nick was investigated by internal affairs, like Fuhrman and tested like Fuhrman for mental instability. The name of the writer he has an intimate affair with is not Laura Hart, but there is a heart on the cover of a book she wrote. The title, Love Hurts, gives you the initials L H and you can spell Laura Hart with a combination of the letters in the title and the writer’s first name. Her first name is Catherine.

Catherine Tramell wrote under the penname Catharine Woolf. Love Hurts was the book that put her in the interrogation seat. It involved the murder of a man like the one she was seeing by a woman like herself in the manner she described in the book. She puts the law on the trail of another suspect who is eventually buried under the weight of so much circumstantial evidence that the police don’t even think of questioning it.

Like the self-incriminating photo of Fuhrman pointing to the glove on Bundy before he reported finding its match on Rockingham, the book Catherine wrote before the murder gives her an effective alibi. Whereas Fuhrman could not have been guilty of murder if he found the glove by chance on Bundy and planted it on purpose on Rockingham, it would also seem incredibly stupid for him to point to it and then plant it. Catherine would have to be stupid to incriminate herself with her book and she, like Fuhrman, has a demonstrably superior intellect.

An expert on psychological pathology tells detectives, "I see two possibilities. One—The person who wrote this book is your murderer and acted out the killing described in ritualistic, literal detail. Two--Someone who wants to harm the writer, read the book and enacted the killing described to incriminate her." If the writer did it, "…she had to have planned the murder at least in the subconscious years before it was carried out, indicating psycho-obsessive behavior in terms of the killing and the alibi. If it wasn’t the writer it was someone so obsessed that he or she is willing to kill an irrelevant and innocent victim in order to place the blame on the person who wrote the book. I’m talking about a deep-seated obsessive hatred and an utter lack of respect for human life."

Sound like anybody we know? Faye Resnick called Nicole Nic. Like Faye, who wrote about Nic and O.J. the way Fuhrman did, Catherine, who writes about Nick and the woman he falls for who kills him, is also a "switch-hitter." In baseball, switch-hitting is the rare ability of one batter to do what right-handed shortstop Alan Trammel (number 3) and left-handed second baseman "Sweet Lou" Whitaker (number 1) did as Golden Glove teammates for the 1984 Detroit Tigers. He hits the ball as though he were two different batters, one the mirror image of the other. By extension, a switch-hitter can be anyone who is comfortable with assuming opposite identities. Whitaker, by the way, started as a 3^rd baseman (left side of infield) and switched easily to 2^nd (right side).

That was the context in which Mark Fuhrman used the expression in 1985—about 6 months after the San Diego Padres’ star pitcher Mark Thurmond lost the last game of the World Series by giving up 3 runs in the 1^st inning. He pitched only 33 1/3 % of the inning. Thurmond lost the first game by a score of 3-2 Trammel won the Most Valuable Player award for the series. Mark Fuhrman lived within five minutes of the San Diego Freeway. He was talking to Laura Hart about the way he dealt with people in rich, white communities as opposed to how he treated people from poor black or Hispanic communities where, "mostly you use your stick." Catherine Tramell’s bisexuality made her another kind of switch-hitter, one who could assume the role of a man or a woman.

If that’s not a sturdy enough bridge for you to cross from a male movie detective called Nick to a real female murder victim called Nic by her switch-hitting "friend," let me recommend a scene from The Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult. The movie was released a month before Nicole and Ron were slashed to death. In it Frank Drebin goes undercover as a thug called "Slasher." The operative scene was lifted from 1992’s The Crying Game in which a man posing as a woman gives an Irish Republican Army man the nastiest surprise a male heterosexual can get.

The idea probably came from the fact that fans of The Naked Gun series know that Frank Drebin is a male, heterosexual, Dutch/Irish Republican. Anna Nicole Smith plays the woman who is "really" supposed to be a man in her most unconvincing role of all time. She reveals her other self to Frank after a brief confrontation in front of her dressing room mirror.

Are you starting to get flashbacks of the body-switching man and woman in Dead Again? Did any of this remind you of Candyman? If so, it could be because of the scene in Basic Instinct where Nick looks up from the sink in Catherine’s bathroom to see his new lover’s throat-slasher friend Roxy in the mirror. Roxy has just seen him having oral sex with Catherine. "If you don’t leave her alone," she says, "I’ll kill you."

Whatever you do, remember the face in the mirror and what can be seen in one—depending on how you look at it. A 1993 episode of Star Trek called "Eye of the Beholder" is a case in point. When the very female Deanna Troi of the Starship Enterprise sees her lover, the ship’s security officer, played by Michael Dorn, in a romantic embrace with another woman and flies into a murderous rage she doesn’t know that see is looking through the eyes of a man. She’d seen a slight distortion of his face before in connection with a deadly love triangle but doesn’t realize what it means at until she sees a slightly distorted reflection of her own face.

In Basic Instinct Nick's partner (the actor who plays the butcher in The Butcher's Wife) tilts his car’s rearview mirror so that the only face he sees is Catherine’s. She is a passionate, uninhibited, even lustful pathological liar like Fuhrman. Being a thrill junkie, and a psychology expert, she intentionally muddles the issue of her guilt or innocence by literally playing with fire (the flame of her cigarette lighter) during her interrogation, then volunteering to take a lie detector test.

Like Fuhrman she passes the test. Unlike him she boasts of how easy it would have been to beat the machine if she were guilty. She has a different take on the art of writing than Thaddeus Beaumont. She says, "Writing teaches you to lie… You make stuff up, it has to be believable. It’s called suspension of disbelief."

Suspension of disbelief is not quite the same as believing. It’s more like pretending to believe. It allows us to look at Basic Instinct and see Catherine Tramell instead of Sharon Stone and Nick Curren instead of Michael Douglas. It lets us see Gus fiddling with the rear view mirror of his car without caring about the actor playing the part or whether he’s really driving the car. It keeps us from making critical judgments about reality as long as the actors, the sets, the sound effects, the props, the wardrobes and the action are believable. A good actor, with the right script, the right props, the right supporting cast, etc., can make a willing audience "believe" anything.

To make her stories believable, Catherine bases her characters on real people that she arranges to meet and sometimes gets intimately involved with. Johnnie Boz is one such role model. He ends up with 31 (Trammel 3, Whitaker 1) stab wounds from an ice pick in his neck and thirty other places. He’s the victim in Love Hurts, a retired rock star who runs a nightclub frequented by affluent sex and drug addicts and the "beautiful people" who want to party with them. To see what this scenario has to do with the Bundy killings, you have to recall the computer animation in which a man built like O.J. stabs a man built like Goldman after stunning a blond like Nicole with the heel of a German Stiletto. The heel of that knife looks much like the heel of the ice pick in Basic Instinct. Both were heavy enough to be used the same way.

Combining the long, tapered point and heavy handle of the ice pick with the sharp edge and folding blade of the razor her friend Roxy used to cut her two brothers’ throats, you get a fair description of a German Stiletto. When you combine all three bloodstained German/Italian connections to the murder of Ron and Nicole (German Stiletto knife, Bruno Magli shoes and Nicole’s body with a pizza menu) you have to wonder if a bloody German/Italian combination meant something special to the killer. Could the names Hitler and Mussolini—in that order—have had anything to do with it? Not unless the killer was a nazi student of World War II.

German or Italian could mean anything or nothing but what comes to mind when you put them together three times in the same order and add the mingled blood of a Jewish man and the white mother of two "black" kids? Are we starting to see an applied social philosophy here? Put a "pure" German’s glasses in a Jew’s hands, reverse the roles and what do you get? Could the stab wounds in Goldman’s arm have symbolized a death camp tattoo? Not unless the killer was a nazi and couldn’t resist "drawing a swastika" on his work without giving himself away.

Now, who do we know besides Mark Fuhrman had a history of planting swastikas on "Jew-lovers" and being unable to resist showing them off?

That’s just for starters. A soldier drilled in the stun technique to affect a silent kill of two people in close proximity to each other would not have carried out the mission without a trained lookout in constant radio contact, some dry runs and a dress rehearsal.

In Fuhrman’s West LA territory ten and a half months before the Bundy slayings, someone murdered Brett Cantor, a young, Jewish promoter and part owner of a nightclub called the Dragonfly. Like Goldman, he suffered multiple stab wounds. Like Nicole, he was nearly decapitated. Goldman once worked at his club and Nicole went dancing there with Faye Resnick and her other girlfriends who shared her cocaine habit. Paul Cantor, Brett’s father had a big name in the music business. The LAPD’s Robbery/Homicide Division which handled all high-profile cases was therefore called to investigate. They did not find the killer.

If Cantor’s murder was a dress rehearsal for the Bundy killings, the killer now had an opportunity to study exactly how a high-profile murder case in West LA was handled and to modify his plans accordingly. That is, he would have had that chance if he was a West LA homicide detective. With less than two years as a homicide detective under his belt and the cases he investigated in the single digits, Fuhrman tried unsuccessfully to join the elite RHD unite. But he hadn’t given up on his ambition to be a successful writer and maintained his professional contact with Laura Hart, who was now Mrs. Laura Hart McKinney.

She was still recording him after the Bundy murders. The two of them were trying to sell their screenplay on the strength of his role in the case, but his public racist displays were beginning to catch up to him and it was no go. It would have been worse if anyone had noticed the funny thing that happened to the characters in Basic Instinct after the murders. They became mixed and matched with the suspect, the victims and the first lead detective in the Bundy case, Mark Fuhrman. Like the posed photos in John Carpenter’s Eyes of Laura Mars (’78) that matched unreleased photos of real killings, they were too close to be coincidental.

We’re talking real freaky stuff here, like matching photos of a dead white woman and black man both lying on their backs, his left hand in her left hand with his head touching her left thigh. In both the police photo and Laura’s, the woman’s nylon-clad legs are propped up on a bed. The man has a wound in his right side. A white chair lies right side down on the woman’s right side with the seat facing her body.

That would have been an amazing coincidence, but what do you say about Laura Mars’ photo that matched a police photo of another actual murder scene. This one has an extraneous pair of women’s legs and minor differences in the living room furnishings, but the victims look alike. They’re wearing the same kind of suit and tie. They’re both lying on their right side facing the camera with their arms contorted in the same awkward position atop a rug with a distinctive pattern.

To see the truth in that much detail Laura Mars had to have been looking through the killer’s eyes. That was the answer. But it wasn’t a good enough answer for her or the police. She had no control of when his murderous passions would patch her optic nerves into his kill channel, no way to turn it off and no way to prove that she was telling the truth. She tells the lead detective – who happens to be the killer—her story. "I saw it happen," she says. To which the detective asks, "with your own eyes?"

She couldn’t very well say yes to that. What she did say sounds like what happened to Mark Fuhrman—according to what he told his second wife and LAPD psychiatrists about his dreams and his conduct in uniform. "…I began to see images of murder and violence…and they started to become part of my work." Unlike Star Trek's 24^th century Deanna Troi who’s job it is to use her psychic abilities to uncover the truth, Laura Mars, the 20^th century photographer had a big credibility problem. Eventually, she was able to win over the lead detective. He became her lover and protector—and the man who tried to kill her with an ice pick.

The interesting thing here, from Fuhrman’s point of view, is how well he’d covered himself from the eyes of the most talented psychics of today with his story of being Nicole’s lover and defender. In that capacity, he might well have been seen by psychics as the killer when they were actually tuning into his deep sense of guilt and responsibility for Nicole’s death because he hadn’t done his job as a cop or a man.

Psychics aside, looking at all the details in all the movies that match the details in Fuhrman’s story of the Bundy murders gives this question of Laura Mars a new meaning: "You think I was in those actual situations, committed the murders and then recreated them in photographs?"