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Chapter 30

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Chapter 29

Faking It

In this chapter we're going to look at a timeline in reverse, from Mark Fuhrman's 1997 book Murder in Brentwood to 1978 when O.J. Simpson starred as an astronaut in Capricorn One. At nearly every stop on the way we will touch on incidents in Fuhrman's history that intersect with William Peter Blatty's masterpiece The Ninth Configuration. Of all the movies that could have figured into the way Fuhrman sought to get a disability discharge from the LAPD in 1981 and the way Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson were murdered in '94, The Ninth Configuration ('80) had to be the most influential.

This is a good place to remind you that Fuhrman used a case called People vs. Cain to justify going over the wall of O.J.'s estate. Many key elements in Murder in Brentwood appear in The Ninth Configuration. You will find them where you would expect them to be if Fuhrman saw the movie and used parts of it to commit the murders that O.J. was tired for. Some of this material is on the edges of the wide screen. We can therefore be pretty sure that he saw the movie in a theater well before he told police psychiatrists that he would have killed his ex-wife Janet Hackett and her lover if he had caught them together.

1997: Murder in Brentwood goes on sale with a foreword by Vincent Bugliosi, the man who prosecuted Charles Manson for the bloody Bel Air murders of Sharon Tate and her houseguests in 1969. George DeCenzo is Bugliosi in the '76 TV movie Helter Skelter. Sharon Tate is Jennifer in the Valley of the Dolls ('67) and Sara in The Fearless Vampire Killers ('67). In the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies ('63-'65) she is Janet the bank secretary (Charlotte Zucker's role in her son Jerry's 1990 movie Ghost). Columnist Rona Barrett wrote in the Nov '69 issue of Hollywood Magazine, that she saw Sharon Tate's ghost at a seance.

In The Ninth Configuration George DeCenzo is Capt. Fairbanks, a Marine Corps test pilot and a patient in a Karfka-esque military mental institution. In his first appearance onscreen he is dressed as a pirate with a scarf on his head, a rapier on his hip and leather gloves on his hands. He believes that people can walk through walls ("cops, people in Nashville…"). One of his multiple personalities is a Navy frogman (O.J. in Frogmen). You see him dress for the part in a swimming pool. Fairbanks dresses for all of his parts. George DeCenzo is Zoot Lafferty in The Blue Knight ('73) and Lt. Girmsley in The Choirboys ('77).

Fuhrman writes in Murder in Brentwood that Joseph Wambaugh, who wrote the novels that The Blue Knight and The Choirboys were adapted from, was the writer he wanted to emulate. Fuhrman's book includes a copy of his Bundy crime scene notes with his name added at the top where it didn’t exist on the original page. It shows his pen & ink drawings of a German Stiletto and a Swiss Army knife, diagrams of Ron Goldman's body showing some of his wounds and the extent to which the Swiss Army knife matches the wounds and the German Stiletto doesn't.

He also includes a diagram of the Rockingham estate, which shows the main house, the bungalows, the parked cars, the swimming pool and the tennis court. A photo of him pointing to the bloody glove on Bundy shows his right shoe near a large pool of blood. He writes about discovering a videocassette of the movie Ghost in O.J.'s VCR. He erroneously describes it as you would correctly describe Shakespeare's Othello, with the title of the movie borrowed from a pivotal character in Hamlet, a ghost who tells Hamlet that he was murdered.

Murder in Brentwood reaches # 1 on the New York Times best seller list. Fuhrman becomes a sought-after guest on the media talk-show circuit. To answer charges of racism highlighted by what he said and how he said it on the McKinney tapes, Fuhrman claims that he was speaking as a fictional character with various attributes borrowed from a variety of characters. He writes that he was drawing heavily on Joseph Wambaugh's books and screenplays in his approach to his screenplay project with Laura Hart McKinney. He writes that the similarities between him and Wambaugh "are not mere coincidence." A large percentage of the screenplays and teleplays in the Fuhrman collection have a first generation actor link or character link to a Wambaugh book or screenplay. The TV version of The Blue Knight, for instance, stars George Kennedy, O.J.'s boss Capt. Ed Hocken in The Naked Gun series.

In Fuhrman's second appearance on Primetime Live with Dianne Sawyer to promote his new book, Fuhrman says he can prove that Ron and Nicole were killed with a Swiss Army knife rather than a German Stiletto. He produces a distant, out-of focus shot of something on O.J.'s bathtub rim that he says is an empty Swiss Army knife box. He says that Robbery/Homicide Division's lead detectives Phil Vannatter and Tom Lange bungled their interrogation of Simpson and made other grievous errors because they did not read his notes.

In one of Fuhrman's notes he identifies a bloody fingerprint in brass (bronze) that wasn't documented and in another he speculates that the dog bit the killer. He says that O.J. dropped coins (twenty two cents) on Nicole's driveway near a drop of O.J.'s blood by the rear gate and a blood trail on his own "brick" driveway leading to the front door of his house.

The only bricks on O.J.'s circular driveway were the bricks lining the drive and dividing the fuchsia stone tiles. In The Ninth Configuration, author/director William Peter Blatty plays Capt. Froam, a patient who likes to pose as a doctor wearing the real doctor's clothes. When Stacy Keach arrives at the institution as Dr. Hudson Kane, a psychiatrist, and asks to be directed to his quarters, Froam points to his left and tells him to "Follow the yellow brick road." Two Marine sergeants escort him away as he protests that Kane needs immediate surgery because he is bleeding to death. One of those sergeants is Christopher Atkens. In Dracula Rising ('93) he's Dracula.

Thee characters in The Ninth Configuration have an association of some kind with dropped coins. One of them is Capt. Fairbanks (George DeCenzo). You see him dressed as a Catholic nun (Nicole was Catholic) dropping coins into a vending machine.

The second character associated with dropped coins in The Ninth Configuration, is the black actor Moses Gunn as Maj. Nammick. He thinks he's Superman. You see him in an early scene changing clothes in a homemade telephone booth (coin operated phone). That scene includes a portrait of William Shakespeare, a cluster of drawings showing characters from Shakespeare's plays, a shaggy dog named Sir Lawrence, and a life-sized photo of the dog.

Sir Lawrence Olivier in blackface plays the title character in a film adaptation of Othello, Shakespeare's play in which a rich and famous black man murders his white wife and leaves his own blood on the murder scene. In Fuhrman's fifteenth Bundy crime scene note he speculates that Kato the dog might have bitten the killer. The dog was named after Kato Kaelin the struggling actor and houseguest of O.J. Simpson who led Fuhrman to the bloody Rockingham glove.

Maj. Nammick is one of the men you can tell is responding to Col. Kane's treatment methods by a subtle change in how he identifies himself. You first see him with the letter "S" scrawled on his T-shirt with a laundry marker. Later, when he gets to wear a real Superman costume, the "S" for Superman has been replaced by an "N" for Nammick.

In his book, Fuhrman uses an upper case "N" to write the "n-word" and uses it almost exclusively within the context of the screenplay he was working on with Laura Hart. You see the upper case N on Maj. Nammick's chest for the first time when Jason Miller as Lt. Reno, standing with Kane just outside of a big, open door, discuss the stabbing scene in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Reno is adapting Shakespeare's plays for dogs.

Crisscrossing that scene is Joe Spinell (one of the Corlione crime family hit men in The Godfather) as Marine Corps Lt. Spinell, Reno's note-taking casting director. As always, Spinell is wearing a black baseball cap with an expert marksmanship badge and squeaky white shoes. In his first appearance onscreen he asks his mother to throw down a quarter for the movies.

Also crisscrossing the "superman" scene is a "medical" team led by "Dr." Froam with a black-bearded Air Force officer trailing behind wearing a female nurse's uniform, which includes squeaky white shoes. You saw the nurse's shoes before on Arlene Sax as the morgue nurse in "Twenty Two" and on Michael Caine as the murderous psychiatrist with the split personality in Dressed to Kill. Near the end of the scene with Reno, Kane and Nammick, Reno goes into the door and comes back out behind a dog. He tells Col. Kane that the dog bit him.

The Ninth Configuration revolves around the mental anguish of Vincent Kane, a remorseful marine who began to see himself as a murderer after killing one too many Viet Cong soldiers. When he came in from that mission in which he decapitated a young enemy soldier with a wire, he was met with orders to report to the States as a psychiatrist. Vincent Kane was a "full bird" colonel. His brother Hudson was a Lt. Colonel. Hudson was the psychiatrist.

Vincent "Killer Kane" assumed his brother's identity and suppressed his own to such an extent that he came to believe that he was an idealized version of Hudson, and Vincent was his dead former patient. His only link to his real self is his flashbacks to the decapitation of the young Viet Cong soldier. Though never in combat, Fuhrman told his psychiatrists that he killed people in Vietnam, and suffered no flashbacks or remorse. In our society, a dramatic show of remorse can be a free ticket to forgive almost anything, a lesson learned by Jane Fonda from Richard Nixon's fall from office for what he failed to do after the Watergate scandal.

Col. Kane's orders send him to a creepy old castle in the Pacific Northwest (where Fuhrman was born and raised) brought over from Germany in the early 1900s. In the first two minutes of the movie we learn that "the controversial nature of the Vietnam War" coupled with an unusually high number of servicemen showing symptoms of psychosis caused the military to wonder if an unusually high number of them were faking. The experimental facility set up in the castle was one of 18 established across the United States to study the phenomenon.

Hudson Kane saw that the mix-up in the Kane brothers' orders gave the military a unique opportunity to look at the problem from the inside out. Ed Flanders (a Catholic priest in The Exorcist III with Jason Miller as a serial killer) is the real Hudson Kane, the officer really in charge of the asylum. He is posing as a medical officer named Richard Fell. Dr. Fell looks awfully familiar to Vincent but he can't quite place him.

During a conversation in which Vincent Kane describes himself as his dead patient "Killer Kane" who somehow transferred his worst nightmare to him, he calls his other self "a murderer." To put that self-description and what happens next in historical context you have to know that Jane Fonda posed for pictures with North Vietnamese soldiers manning an anti-aircraft gun. She sat in the gunner's seat and said, "I wish I had one of those murderers in my sights." It's in the context of those times that Hudson asks Vincent if he is a friend of Jane Fonda. Vincent, who never smiles, says, "we're close." Hudson says, "You're kidding." Still without smiling Vincent replies, "I'm kidding."

Following the 1988 example of Jane Fonda in her version of an apology for her work in Vietnam on behalf of the enemy when they were using American prisoners of war for leverage, Fuhrman begins his book with an apology. His apology includes pained expressions of remorse (that's exactly what Jane did), not for anything wrong he did in substance (Jane, again), but for the thoughtless, insensitive, immature way in which he did it that caused pain to others. Those were Jane Fonda's words, for which the media promptly forgave her and vilified anyone who didn't.

If you study Jane's apology and Fuhrman's you'll see that they follow the same, media-wise formula. If you count the blue Air Force nametags on the patents in the Marine Corps facility in The Ninth Configuration (four out of sixteen) you know that the "Hanoi Jane" allusion is intentional. A high percentage of American POWs in Hanoi, during the time The Ninth Configuration is set and Jane was most active in her zealous campaign to aid the enemy war effort, were airmen.

When The Ninth Configuration was released in 1980, Jane Fonda's popularity was on the rise. Only when the Vietnam Memorial was dedicated in 1983 did criticism of her part in Hanoi's war effort eventually force her to make her calculated, self-serving "apology."

Dianne Sawyer leads her show with shots of Fuhrman walking in the snow with his head bowed (while taking long, confidant strides) and a voiceover of Fuhrman reading his apology from the preface of his book. If you pick up on the Jane Fonda apology formula you get your first indication that Fuhrman might be short on imagination but long on recognizing and applying formulas for mass consumption that work. His book, though well written, follows one successful formula after another.

1996: Fuhrman pleads no contest to perjury for his testimony in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson. He is sentenced to three years probation and a $200 fine. Before the civil trial, Diane Sawyer interviews him for the first time. Fuhrman gives his first public apology using almost the identical language and tone that Jane Fonda used eight years earlier. He claims that he is no racist (Jane said that she wasn't a communist). Sawyer backs him up with testimonials from two black cops and a misleading report from official investigators stating that there were no citizen complaints against him since 1988. The report is misleading because by the end of 1987 Mark Fuhrman was no longer a street cop. He was a detective who spent most of his time analyzing crime scenes, talking to witnesses, interrogating suspects and sitting behind a desk.

We learn that Fuhrman is a talented artist when the Primetime Live camera zooms in on a picture he drew of his daughter when she was two and a half years old. The drawings in his book are mostly of professional quality, especially his drawings of the German Stiletto and the Swiss Amy knife. The exceptions are telling. One wound in Goldman's neck could have been made only with a blade similar to the Stiletto. Fuhrman's drawings of Ron Goldman's wounds do not show that one or the blunt force injury to the back of Nicole's head, which match the heel of the Stiletto. They do not include the stab wounds in both of Ron Goldman's cheeks. Sawyer does not question him about any of those wounds.

1995: Mark Fuhrman testifies in the O.J. Simpson murder trial and comes off looking like a star until the McKinney tapes pop up and he elects to exercise is right to remain silent. In The Ninth Configuration Scott Wilson as Marine Corps astronaut Billy Cutshaw (Mark Fuhrman's brother is Scott and his mother is Billie) reads a stuffed boar's head on the wall of Col. Kane's office its rights. Cutshaw tells the boar's head, "I want your name, badge number and every other boar in your group." As he does so, a mad painter bursts into the room and paints both of Col. Kane's cheeks red before he knows what happened.

The painter is Alejandro Rey, the Devil posing as a priest in the 1975 TV movie Satan's Triangle. Rey is Lt. Gomez. He wears a crucifix on a long chain around his neck the way Nicole Simpson wore hers in a film clip of her walking with O.J. across a football field. This is how the nuns were theirs in The Rosary Murder's '87) with Belinda Baur (Nicole's maiden name) as a Detroit Free Press reporter who wanted to be a nun as a child. Baur is Dorian Gray in the TV movie The Sins of Dorian Gray ('83). In a 1990 episode of Murder, She Wrote, Belinda Baur is Carla (Fuhrman's fifth note "Cara, Cal Pizza Kitchen". There is a pizza link to Baur in The Rosary Murders). As the dealer in a poker game Gomez designates six numbers (24 cards) as wild cards, making it impossible to calculate the odds of having a winning hand. He then cuts the cards thirteen times. He says that 13 thirteen is his lucky number.

In the sixth month of 1994 thirteen is Mark Fuhrman's lucky number. This is the day he gets the call, against all odds, that makes him the first lead detective in one of the biggest cases of the 20^th century. As the first lead detective, he lays down the ground rules for the investigation that follows by giving the first spin to the evidence found by the responding officers. At every turn in his "assistance" to the new lead detectives, he and his partner Brad Roberts turn up so many "wild cards" that it is impossible to calculate the odds of anyone but O.J. being the killer.

Nicole's body and the evidence at Ron Goldman's feet are positioned so perfectly that only someone with a background in art can see just how well positioned they are for a good "artistic" composition. In The Ninth Configuration we see paintings of a white woman dressed like a queen in a deck of cards and a black man in the medieval attire of the wealthy class with a skeleton between them. They appear in a sequence that includes a Ping-Pong table (O.J.'s tennis court), a vending machine (dropped coins), the dog named after an actor, and Maj. Nammick changing clothes in the phone booth. The painting of the woman is ambiguously entitled "Mother Love."

Mother love is a possible reference to incest. Mark Fuhrman (MF is short for motherfucker) left a poem about a mother's love on the bloody square tiles where Nicole Simpson was murdered.

Continuing with Fuhrman's "luck" on the 13^th… Fuhrman is the first to suggest that the killer was bleeding from his left side and to announce that the blood trail on Rockingham is a continuation of the one on Bundy. He is the first to label O.J. a spouse abuser – from his firsthand experience with O.J. and Nicole on Rockingham in '94. He finds a bloody fingerprint on Nicole's back gate and the first blood drop directly associated with O.J. He wears the same size shoes as O.J. and the killer and he walks in a way that would leave the same pattern of shoeprints.

Fuhrman has a photo taken of him pointing to the glove on Bundy. He finds a key to one of O.J.'s rooms that allows him to watch as O.J. returns to his estate from Chicago along the path where his partner found more blood drops than the criminalist chose to collect or record. He finds "bloody" black socks in O.J.'s bedroom on the rug between the bed and the fireplace. When he leaves O.J.'s bedroom, one of O.J.'s black leather gloves (with a black person's hand hair inside) leaves with him. He poses the right questions to the right man at the right time that lead him to shine his flashlight on the Rockingham glove, thus associating himself with both of the killer's gloves and all of the blood evidence in the case.

Before I shine a light on Killer Kane's leather gloves, I should point out a key artist connection to Killer Kane and a black-socks connection to his brother Hudson. In Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman will call Ron Phillips, the man who brought him into the case and drove him to Bundy "…the big brother I never had." He will write that he and Phillips were "so much alike it scared even us." Fuhrman is the only principle in the case who will make a pointed reference to a castle.

"When Vincent Kane first arrives at the castle in a chauffeur-driven car, his brother greets him without his pants because Capt. Froam has stolen them. You get as good a look at Hudson's black socks at this time as you do when he sits on a ledge in Vincent's office shortly before the mad painter bursts in and paints Vincent's cheeks red. The office does not have a bed but it does have a fireplace.

When they first meet inside the castle gates (guarded by Marine MPs), Hudson sees a faint sign of recognition in his brother's face and calls him "Vincent." Puzzled, Vincent, who thinks he's Hudson, asks him why he called him that. Hudson replies, "You remind me of Vincent van Gogh."

Vincent van Gogh is often called a "mad painter." He is as famous for cutting off his own ear as he is for his paintings. The stab wound in Ron Goldman's neck that matched the blade of the German Stiletto went all the way through to the opposite side of his head and slit his earlobe.

The indirect reference to Ron Goldman's neck and facial stab wounds that Fuhrman will omit from his book are not the only reference in The Ninth Configuration to specific wounds suffered by the victims at Bundy. Nor are the black socks the only allusion to O.J. and Fuhrman.

To see the connections you have to remember that Fuhrman used racial epithets in regard to Mexican-Americans as well as blacks and complained to his psychiatrists about blacks and Mexicans he had unpleasant encounters with in the Marines. He collected Nazi swords, daggers and insignia as well as weapons used by U.S. cavalry officers in the late 19^th century. He called O.J. ''the Juice," O.J.'s nickname as a running back for the Buffalo Bills. O.J.'s offensive line in Buffalo was called "The Electric Company" because they "cult loose the Juice."

The Ninth Configuration is sprinkled with references to old Dracula and Frankenstein horror moves.At the conclusion of this seven-minute sequence with Cutshaw, the mad painter and the Kane brothers, Hudson simulates the electrodes in the neck of Dr. Frankenstein's monster and suggests giving the patients "the shock treatment" to shake out the phonies.

Fuhrman said that he saw the black socks on the rug in O.J.'s bedroom between the bed and the fireplace. At the beginning of the sequence that ends with "the shock treatment," Cutshaw hurdles a couch in front of a fireplace the way O.J. hurdled obstacles in his running-through-the-airport Hertz commercials. When he lands with his arms spread like the wings of an airplane he says, "Why don't you make it a bed of nails so we can all see the blood pouring out?" This entire scene takes place with Hudson Kane, minus his pants, sitting on the ledge or lying on a couch in his black socks. The LAPD lab found fibers on the socks that the prosecution concluded were shed from the killer's missing pants.

Somewhere between the "bed of nails" (Fuhrman said that a hole in the sharp stick near the leased Hertz Bronco where he found a blood speck was made by a rusty nail) As Col. Kane reads from Cutshaw's file, recall that in Capricorn One ('78) O.J. is an astronaut… "Two days prior to a scheduled space shot subject officer while dining on the base was observed to pick up a plastic catsup bottle, squeeze a thin red line across his throat, and then to stagger and fall very heavily across a table."

The only detective on Bundy to think that a table had anything to do with anything is Mark Fuhrman, who makes a point of the note and the pizza menu on Nicole's coffee table. He will say that he saw one of the menus under Nicole's body where she fell when the killer cut her throat and left her lying in a massive pool of blood that poured from the gaping wound.

1993: Nicole calls 911 pleading for assistance She identifies herself to the 911 operator with a reference to O.J.'s "record." The only record O.J. has is the one created by Mark Fuhrman's letter to the city attorney. When O.J. goes on trial for killing her, the prosecution will use three 911 calls to show a pattern of "O.J.'s escalating violence." Fuhrman is the common denominator in all three of them.

1992: Fuhrman spreads the rumor that he is having a sexual affair with Nicole. He tells stories about O.J.'s "continuing abuse." This is the last year that shoes (boots) like the ones that left the bloody imprints on Bundy will be available for sale.

1991: O.J. makes his last appearance on 1^st & and Ten with former Playboy Playmate Shannon Tweed (Sharon Tate appeared on Playboy After Dark on 2/7/'69). Mark Fuhrman becomes a Homicide detective.

1990: Nicole buys leather gloves from the same lot as the ones worn by her killer. They come in two colors: black and brown. In Fuhrman's three years as a Robbery detective he has established a close friendship with Ron Phillips who will call him to investigate Nicole's gruesome death.

1989: Fuhrman is the only police officer to say that he witnessed O.J. abusing Nicole. He writes a letter to the city attorney giving his version of the incident. This letter establishes a "pattern of abuse" required for O.J.'s arrest and conviction on a charge of spouse abuse.

1988: O.J. stars as Nordberg in the Zucker brothers' comedy hit The Naked Gun, with Leslie Nielsen as a composite character made up of famous TV cops including ex-marine Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday and Vic Morrow as Sgt. Joe LaFreida in Joe Wambaugh's The Police Story.

1987: Fuhrman works the streets in a gang/narcotics unit. He shoots an armed robber five times and plants the man's discarded knife by his hand.

In The Ninth Configuration Capt. Cutshaw finds a book in Col. Kane's office that prompts him to rip open the colonel's shirtsleeve and say, "Show me a Catholic and I'll show you a junky." It is at this point that Gomez the painter makes his sudden appearance and Cutshaw begins interrogating the boar before reading the boar its rights. Cutshaw exits the office with the book in his hand. When the colonel asks him what book he has taken he says, "I Remember Momma by Oedipus Rex.

In Greek mythology, Oedipus the king of Sparta, who kills his father and marries his mother, is a literal MF, the prototype for all MF's in modern psychotherapy. Fuhrman hated his father (Ralph) and loved his mother (Billie). The link to him in that scene from The Ninth Configuration, apart from the fact that he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is, therefore, pretty strong. It gets stronger in the book he will write about the murder investigation of O.J. Simpson.

In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman will criticize Vannatter and Lange's interrogation technique. He will say that a good interrogator does not want his suspect to invoke his rights. He will give this as an example of what the detectives should have told O.J. to shake him up: "We talked to Kato and he said you were missing for an hour around the time of the murders, and when you arrived you were bleeding like a stuck pig."

1986: Stacy Keach, a.k.a. "Killer Kane" in The Ninth Configuration and Mike Hammer in The New Mike Hammer TV series, is arrested in England for cocaine smuggling and sentenced to prison. Legitimate news sources report that prison official confiscated his toupee. His long jail sentence and new public image effectively kill the popular TV series the same way O.J.'s arrest and new public image will kill The Naked Gun series.

Besides Stacy Keach, The New Mike Hammer features two other alumni of Joseph Wambaugh screenplays. Danny Goldman is a street informer named Ozzie the Answer. Goldman is Carlton in Wambaugh's 1993 made-for-television movie Fugitive Nights. Don Stroud is police Capt. Pat Chambers in The New Mike Hammer. In Wambaugh's The Choirboys ('77), Don Stroud, like Fuhrman, is a police officer and a former Marine. His name is Sam Lyles. The title character in the movie Ghost ('90) is Sam. Ron Goldman's full name was Ronald Lyle Goldman.

Ghost shots us straight back to Fuhrman's search of the Rockingham estate. That takes us back to Charlotte Zucker's role in Ghost, which takes us to back to Rona Barrett's ghost story about Sharon Tate, which takes us back to George DeCenzo as Vincent Bugliosi in Helter Skelter and two Wambaugh screenplays. Vincent Bugliosi loops us back around to the foreword of Mark Fuhrman's book Murder in Brentwood.

Ralph Meeker, who plays Mike Hammer in the 1955 classic Kiss Me Deadly, is a nightstick-twirling Army MP sergeant in the TV series Not for Hire ('59). Fuhrman told police psychiatrists how much he enjoyed beating people up and breaking their bones. In describing how he dealt with "low-class people" he told Laura Hart, "Mostly you just use your stick." Ralph Meeker is Chief Stahlgaher in Wambaugh's The Police Story ('77).

The star of The Police Story is Vic Morrow. His daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh has the same birthday as Mark Fuhrman's, February 5. Vic Morrow and his daughter Jennifer have prominent places in the Fuhrman collection. When Gomez, the mad painter in The Ninth Configuration attacks Col. Kane's cheeks with his paintbrush, he says, "A portrait of Jennifer, perhaps? At least no more Dorian Gray" (Belinda Baur).

Fuhrman meets Kathleen Bell at a Marine Recruiting office in Redondo Beach where she compares his build to O.J. Simpson's friend Marcus Allen. He launches into a racist tirade, telling Bell that he wishes he could gather up "all the niggers in the world" and kill them.

1985: O.J. joins the cast of the HBO series 1^st and Ten where he is shown in scenes kissing and fondling bare-breasted white women. Fuhrman initiates a conversation with Laura Hart that begins their long collaboration to produce a screenplay. She tapes their conversations and from time to time between then and 1994 she and Fuhrman pitch their screenplay idea to various Hollywood producers with no success.

Fuhrman joins an LAPD gang/narcotics unit and begins a so-called friendship with Ron Shipp, a black police officer with a white wife and an addiction to alcohol and cocaine. Shipp is also an expert in spouse abuse and a friend of O.J. and Nicole who invites his police friends to play tennis on O.J.'s Rockingham tennis court.

1984: All is quiet when Mark Fuhrman arrives on Rockingham after Nicole calls the Westec private security company. Westec officers are already on the seen of what appears to have been a loud argument between O.J. and Nicole. The lone casualty is O.J.'s Mercedes Benz, which suffered a ding in the hood and a crack in the windshield when O.J. hit it with a baseball bat. Fuhrman does not file a report of the incident, nor does he mention it to another living soul until 1989 when he claims that he answered a "domestic violence" call from Rockingham. No record has ever been produced to show that Nicole or anyone else made the 911call that Fuhrman said he responded to….

Billy Cutshaw is a master-manipulator who believes that he understands his condition all too well. He is the true leader of the patients in the castle despite the fact that some of them outrank him. This is the powerful position that Fuhrman will have as a union representative in the Police Protective League in 1994. In 1984 he sees how much power that is when he wins a dispute with a superior officer over his work assignment through the intervention of his PPL union representative.

In a scheme to confound the new psychiatrist so that Cutshaw can manipulate him as well as to tell Kane his own story by proxy, Cutshaw talks Lt. Reno into going to Kane's office and pretending to ask his advice about Hamlet. Both Kane brothers are present when Reno launches into his act….

Reno: Some Shakespearean scholars say when Hamlet is pretending to be crazy he really is crazy, correct?

Vincent and Hudson agree.

Reno: Now other Shakespearean scholars say that when Hamlet is pretending to be crazy – (Spinell walks in with his black baseball cap and his shoes squeaking like Arlene Sax's shoes in "Twenty Two." He sits in a corner and begins taking notes) …Other Shakespearean scholars say that when Hamlet is pretending to be nuts he really isn't nuts; it's an act. Considering how Hamlet is acting is he really and truly crazy?"

Hudson: Yes.

Vincent: No.

Lt. Reno points to both men and says, "You're both wrong. Now think what happens… First, his father dies. Then his girl leaves him flat. Then there's an appearance by his father's ghost. Bad enough. Then the ghost tells him that he was murdered. And by whom? His uncle who has recently married Hamlet's mother. Now that, all by itself is a hell of a hang-up because Hamlet liked his mother – a lot."

Reno's last words after a dramatic pause are spoken with raised eyebrows. He pauses again and continues…

Reno: Hamlet is pretending to be crazy to keep from really going crazy – Gets away with murder because crazy people aren't responsible for their acts. The more he indulges himself the healthier he gets."

A light goes on in Vincent's face and he agrees with Reno, who promptly turns to his dog Sir Lawrence and tells him to do the scene his way.

In Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman alludes to Hamlet's play in the king's court to get the king to incriminate himself but the queen incriminates herself by "protesting too much" that the queen in the play bears no resemblance to her. Someone leaked information about a practice court session where Chris Darden was supposed to question Fuhrman. In a meeting with the prosecutor where Fuhrman says that Darden "went on a tirade" about the person responsible for the leaks, Fuhrman suggests that it might have been Darden. Fuhrman writes, "Why did Chris unleash such an outburst – was he simply protesting too much?"

If the office scene with Reno, the Kane brothers and Lt. Spinell had anything to do with it, you would expect that Fuhrman would mention Darden's office or something inside of it that related to the scene. Three paragraphs later he does just that. He talks about a meeting he had in Darden's office and a black baseball cap on a hat rack – in a corner.

Outside of Kane's office Cutshaw corrals Reno and asks him, "Did he buy it?" Reno looks at Cutshaw in bewilderment and says, "Did he buy it? Hell, I bought it. Billy, I think there's something wrong with us."

Billy Cutshaw is a Catholic who lost his faith in God and as a consequence lost his courage to travel into space. Col. Kane does not see him as a coward, a man who would sacrifice others in a time of crisis to save himself, and is truly baffled by the timing of his breakdown and his subsequent bizarre behavior. Kane shows no interest in whether any of the men in his care are faking their psychosis. Instead, he latches onto the fact that they all must be suffering terrible emotional pain to go to such lengths every hour of every day to pretend to be something they aren't. Subconsciously he is doing the same thing. He knows that understanding Cutshaw is a vital key to understanding himself and "his" patients.

1983: Fuhrman is pretending to be a classic nut case to win a lawsuit that will give him a medical retirement pension but his doctors are on to him and he loses his lawsuit.

1982: Fuhrman loses his claim for a psychological disability and sues the County of Los Angeles to get the decision reversed. Because of the lawsuit, his sessions with police psychologist Susan Saxe-Clifford and other psychiatric professional become public record.

1981: Fuhrman goes on paid medical leave while Dr. Clifford tries to determine whether or not he's faking. She decides that he is faking but what he said to her about his violent dreams and violent tendencies was enough for her to recommend that he not be allowed to carry a gun.

O.J. makes his second TV appearance in Goldie and the Boxer.

1980: Fuhrman's second wife, Janet Hackett divorces him. The Ninth Configuration is released to theaters nationwide.

1979: O.J. makes his debut as Joe Gallagher in Goldie and the Boxer.

1978: O.J. moves to Rockingham and brings a young, German woman named Nicole to live there with him. He also stars in a movie with explicit links to The Ninth Configuration and the Bundy murders. He is astronaut John Walker in Capricorn One, a story about an elaborate hoax to make the world believe that American astronauts have successfully landed on Mars when their spaceship never left the ground. In his spacesuit on Mars it is impossible to tell O.J. from the other astronaut supposedly walking on the red planet's "powdery service" (a powdery service means boot prints). In fact, neither of the men seen walking on the planet are the real astronauts and the red planet itself is a movie set.

The Romans named Mars after their god of war because they thought it was stained red with blood. The Greek name for Mars is Aries – which is remarkably close to "Aris," the name of the bloody glove in the photo with Fuhrman on Bundy and the one he found on Rockingham. Fuhrman will say that Vannatter and Lange should have called O.J. a coward. It so happens that Aries was a coward who reveled in the blood of the mortals he killed before the gates of Troy. He fled in panic when Athena wounded him in battle leaving his blood on the tip of her bronze spear.

Capricorn One has as many links to The Ninth Configuration and other movies in the Fuhrman collection as it has to the Bundy murders and the evidence pointing to a frame-up of O.J. Simpson. Consider this phrase that Hal Holbrook as Dr. James Kelloway the chief architect of the hoax uses to recall old times with James Brolin as Colonel Brubaker: "…Captain Terrific and the mad doctor …." Or this response by Brubaker to Kelloway's plea to go along with the hoax because he doesn't want to be put in a corner: "You're crazy…You've got us in the middle of this crazy house and you don't want to be put in a corner?"

Breaker's "crazy house" is a movie set made up to look like a landing craft on the surface of Mars. He has a wife and two young children, a boy and a girl. Kelloway's corner is a threat to kill the wives and children of the astronauts if they don't assist with his plan. On Bundy the corner was where Ron Goldman died and one square tile on the bloody walkway where Fuhrman put his poem about mothers and children – with a flower he painted on the paper to look like something it wasn't.

Recall the signs of Goldman's battle with a crazed O.J. on Bundy that couldn't have happened and the package in the Bronco on Rockingham that linked O.J. to the Bronco. With that in mind, consider this question from Robert Loggia in a spacesuit as a very crazy Cpt. Bennish in The Ninth Configuration who thinks he's on Mars: "Any packages for me?" After a brief conversation with Kane, Bennish lifts his helmet over his line of sight and stumbles blindly away, knocking over easels that hold the paintings presumably done by the man who ambushed Col. Kane and painted his cheeks red. The easels and paintings go crashing to the square tiles of the castle floor creating the impression of a violent struggle. One of those paintings is the black man you saw earlier in the group of pictures that included the white "queen" and the human skeleton.

A man on a motorcycle playing Steve McQueen with a black, knit cap in the patients' version of The Great Escape, drives by and crashes into the swimming pool. McQueen, who starred with O.J. in The Towering Inferno, said that he was supposed to have been in the house with Sharon Tate when she was killed. That's where things stand when Kane is about to mount the stairs to his quarters and sees the marine who witnessed the decapitated in Vietnam. Kane flashes back to that rainy jungle scene and falls unconscious on the tile floor. He falls, like Nicole was supposed to have fallen, on his side, next to the scattered artwork. You see his body in a shot that includes Reno's dog and a big photo of Bela Lugosi as Dracula on the wall. Fuhrman will note photos of O.J. on the wall of Nicole's condo when he makes his first walk-through of the house.

Cutshaw snaps for real and drives recklessly away from the castle through a stop sign and a wooden railroad-crossing gate at the MP checkpoint. This gives us the stop sign and the splintered wood that Fuhrman will say came from the murder scene when O.J. crashed into a pile of old fencing and drove recklessly away into the night. The wooden stick will come to a sharp point. Just the thing for hammering through the heart of a vampire.

Looking for a ski mask or a bleeding man with a knife dropping a leather glove on a multiple homicide scene? A woman's glasses in an envelope? Blood on an astronaut's shoes? Do you think that you should see a German Stiletto as well as a knife with a shorter blade involved in a death struggle? A blond female victim grabbed by her hair and a crushing blow to the back of her head? The Ninth Configuration has all of these things. But to see them you have to look through the eyes of a killer and a hoaxter who got his ideas from bits and pieces of movies the way screen writers often do, and reassembled them into a scenario of his own.

This is obviously a long chapter; still, I can offer only a condensed version of The Ninth Configuration links to Fuhrman and the Bundy murders. In case you missed it the first time, let me remind you of the boot prints on Mars and Bundy that were made by a man who walks like O.J. and Fuhrman. James Brolin, is O.J.'s height and build in Capricorn One and cannot be distinguished from O.J. in the pictures that are supposedly being transmitted from Mars. You have to remember that the hoaxster's first name is James and that the J in O.J. stands for James.

Sam Waterston (Kathleen Turner's husband in Serial Mom) as Lt. Col. Peter Willis is also O.J.'s height, which means that all three of the astronauts in Capricorn One, Sam Waterston, O.J. Simpson and James Brolin -- like Vannatter, Lange and Fuhrman -- might have worn size-12 shoes. In a scene before the astronauts learn what is happening, you see them together at a secret military base. They are dressed the same, right down to their white shoes – like Spinell's in The Ninth Configuration.

These are the clothes the astronauts are wearing when they realize they are dead men (ghosts) and escape in an airplane. They are wearing these clothes when they crash land in a desert. There, you see the bottoms of O.J.'s white shoes as well as Brubaker in a desert gas station next to a soft drink machine (Fuhrman's alibi) dropping coins into a pay telephone.

Joe Spinell (Italian name/Italian shoes) as Lt. Spinell gives The Ninth Configuration someone who blends fact with illusion in the Bundy murders in a way that you see only with O.J. in The Naked Gun series. Lt. Spinell, remember, is the note-taking casting director for Lt. Reno's Shakespearean plays for dogs. In a scene where Reno is looking for a particular type of dog for Hamlet, he decides on a chow, the kind of dog that O.J. had with him on Rockingham when he shed his first real drop of blood. Spinell repeats as he writes in his notepad, "A chow." One of the casting directors for Capricorn One is Mike Fenton (MF). How does Fuhrman's note about the killer being bitten by a dog look to you now?

The last sequence we will look at begins with a statue of an ancient (German?) soldier holding a sword. It ends with Billy Cutshaw, who has thrown a Frankenstein's monster mask to the floor, demanding a reversal of roles in his Great Escape script so the staff play the POWs and the patients play the Nazis. In between we see Kane in a Nazi Army uniform and his black officer's cap sitting on the edge of his desk. He flashes back to the decapitation in Vietnam as his head rests on a notepad. On the other side of the desk is a lamp – shining down on a pair of leather gloves. You never see Kane touch the gloves but you do see that they've been moved.