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Chapter 25

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Chapter 24

Lights, Candles, Action

1985 was a big year for a handsome, articulate, dark German, thrill-seeking racist named Mark Fuhrman who was constantly looking to make the "big bust." In 1985 he joined the gang/narcotics unit of the LAPD, he met Laura Hart, became "friends" with O.J.’s "friend," Ron Shipp, and met O.J. and Nicole in person inside the Rockingham estate. 1985 appears to be the year that Fuhrman conceived an evolving plan to do something big with respect to O.J. Simpson’s image and his own.

It is inconceivable to me that a "war and history buff," like Mark Fuhrman would have missed the June ’85 story of how Mengela’s bones were discovered in Brazil—a story of huge historical significance. Mengele had escape from Europe to Argentina by way of an Italian ocean liner in 1949. Owing to a global low priority of interest in his fate, his accidental drowning death in 1979 wasn’t discovered until an Auschwitz survivors’ demonstration on January 17 1985 caught the media’s attention and started a drumbeat for his capture

Mengele’s unreported 1979 drowning death coincided with genocide in Indochina and accolades from the press to the peace movement for "ending the war." A whole year had passed in which stories of Vietnamese refugees drowning by the hundreds each month in their attempt to avoid certain death in death camps called New Economic Zones were being reported by the media without the word "genocide" ever being used. That’s how loathed the media were to admit their part in helping history to repeat itself. For a man like Fuhrman who was as sympathetic to what the Communists were doing to their enemies as he was to what the Nazis did to theirs, the message was clear. Once committed to any position, the media could be counted on to defend it no matter how horribly and demonstrably wrong it proved to be.

While the 1978 wave of genocide in Indochina was going unchallenged in the name of "peace," NBC TV was running a miniseries called Holocaust with James Woods, Meryl Streep and David Warner. The release of Time After Time with Warner as Jack the Ripper in the year of Mengela’s death had to be a true coincidence since his bones weren’t found until six years later. But I doubt that the makers of Time After Time made their Jack the Ripper a doctor, gave him white cotton gloves to wear and music to listen to as he did his grisly work without Dr. Mengela in mind. I doubt that Mark Fuhrman would have missed the irony in the comparison.

Everyone knew the name Jack the Ripper although the scale of his atrocities to Mengele’s was as a single grain of sand to a bucketful. In that sense Mengele’s ambition to be "great" was not fulfilled. The lesson was, as Eddie Murphy noted in Harlem Nights, it’s not how many you kill, but who you kill—or, as Fred Aberline noted in Jack the Ripper—who you are. Who was Josef Mengele but a follower of Adolph Hitler? How many "important" Jews, Gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and other undesirables did Mengela kill? Your answer, of course, is all of them. But how many of them can you name?

The Jewish Holocaust is remembered as well as it is only because many influential people in the American news and entertainment industry lost Jewish friends and relatives in Nazi death camps and slipped occasional reminders into their work. In Time After Time, for instance, when H. G. visits a pawn shop in 1979 San Francisco to get some jewelry appraised, he sees a Nazi death camp number tattooed on the pawnbroker’s arm. He doesn’t know and couldn’t imagine what that means. But we do.

If the first four numbers on the pawnbroker’s arm look familiar, it’s because they are the last four numbers in a different order that Fuhrman wrote down for Cara’s Pizza Kitchen (5713). They are the only numbers he needed to write the entire phone number (575-5713). If Clara in Back to the Future III hadn’t been attracted to the doctor (women found Dr. Mengela attractive); if she hadn’t been called Cara while she was inside of a train car; if her name hadn’t been on a tombstone; if Tombstone hadn’t been the name of a pizza; if pizzas weren’t baked in ovens; if Fuhrman hadn’t associated a pizza with a fireplace (a fireplace has a chimney); if Fuhrman hadn’t ranted about burning a whole race of people… If all of those things hadn’t been true and Fuhrman hadn’t been a "collector" of Nazi paraphernalia you might be able to argue that there is no connection between him and the pawnbroker in Time After Time, or the Nazi and David in Moonlighting. But all of those things were true, and he was a nazi.

Had no Jews been involved in Time After Time I doubt that we would have seen the pawnbroker’s tattoo in that movie or the Nazi kill the pawnbroker in Moonlighting. As a rule, people don’t care that much about genocide unless it hits close to home. Jews, Christians, African-Americans, and other group victims of history’s atrocities are no exception. While minorities within these groups seem to be more passionately opposed to genocide than the public at large, there are never enough of them to protect someone else from a similar fate. That is more than an interesting sociological phenomenon, it’s a social constant that the Bundy killer needed to understand to choose his victims and leave the clues that he could predict most people would automatically accept.

It was no accident that Mark Fuhrman the nazi got along as well as he did with Geraldo the Jew. I, for one, was not surprised to see him on Geraldo’s show hawking his book or to learn that they shot hoops together. By that time I’d heard enough from both of them to know that they agreed on two things: 1) A black man killed a Jew. 2) Whoever made an issue of his color and Fuhrman’s racism in regard to the evidence was "playing the race card." That was a racist way of saying that the person who broached the issue knew it was irrelevant to O.J.’s guilt. Now, where can you go from there?

The Bundy killer understood the dynamics of racism and therefore which buttons to push to suck most Americans into it. Think "race" and you’ve got it. In their heart of hearts most white women would like to believe that black men have a secret atavistic lust for them and most white men project their idea of desirable women onto black men. That’s natural. Everyone wants to be desired and most of us project our desires onto others. But let’s face it, what normal, healthy, heterosexual male of any color would kick any passionate, Playboy centerfold-type of any color out of bed in favor of a cold, dirty, unattractive woman of the same color? Still, the social pressure to date and marry someone of your own "race" is so powerful that the people who don’t conform to it are often stared at, harassed or, in other ways great and small, made to pay a price.

That social pressure is racism. It has enforcers like LAPD Officer Mark Fuhrman, and it kicks in automatically with different people at different thresholds of tolerance. Obviously, there have to be exceptions to the rule or the rule itself would succumb to terminal absurdity. Few people in the early ’90s thought much of the interracial affairs involving superstars like O.J. Simpson or Bruce Willis. Even Fuhrman the enforcer got the hots for Vanity, who plays the mistress of Craig T. Nelson in Action Jackson (’88).

Vanity’s real name is Denise—as in Nicole’s sister Denise—a name conspicuously absent from Murder in Brentwood. She got her start with Prince playing a prostitute. She was once engaged to Nikki Sixx of the rock group Motley Crue. Nikki Sixx was raised in Seattle Washington. Vanity appeared in only 13 movies and 8 TV shows. You’ll never guess how many of them tie into Fuhrman’s story of Nicole and Ron’s deaths, his remark about Sydney’s birthday and his observations about the Bronco on the 13^th of June.

Action Jackson has Craig T. Nelson killing his wife Sharon Stone and framing Detroit Police detective Carl Weathers for the crime. Vanity is his lover Sydney Ash. In South Beach (’92) where former football star Fred "The Hammer" Williamson makes love to a white woman, Vanity is a stalking victim named Jennifer. That’s the birthday girl’s name in Moonlighting. It’s the name of Vanity’s stalking victim in Memories of Murder (1990) a woman with amnesia whose memory of Vanity as a killer with a fatal attraction for a white bartender named Ronnie is stirred when she sees her at a candle-lit table in a Seattle restaurant. In a 1989 episode of the TV series Friday the 13^th she is Angelica. The sever angle at which Fuhrman said O.J.’s Bronco was parked is like the one in The Butcher’s Wife (91) where Demi Moore as Marina gets out of the car in her bare feet in front of Gus’ butcher shop. Moore appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991 and in 1992. In the 1991 TV show Sweating Bullets Vanity is Maria. She is Laura Charles in Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon (’85). Fuhrman met Laura Hart in 1985.

Watch how Fuhrman is linked to Vanity (interracial sexual desire) which, in tern, links him to O.J. Simpson’s youngest daughter (the product of interracial sex) and Bruce Willis, the leading man in Death Becomes Her and Moonlighting. In Moonlighting, Willis as David Addison, is prone to breaking into song "at the drop of a hat." His favorite tunes are from Barry Gordy’s Motown, the record label Gordy started in Detroit in 1959 and moved to Los Angeles in 1968.

Now is a good time to nail down a few loose planks in the bridge that joins Kevorkian, Mengele and Fuhrman to Ernest Menville and David Addison. "Jack" is what Dr. John Leslie Stevenson calls himself in the opening scene of Time After Time when he lures a prostitute named Jenny (Jennifer) into an 1893 London alley. In a shot that evokes images of the photography experiments Kevorkian performed to earn the nickname "Dr. Death," you see Jenny’s eyes at the instant of her death.

Next you see Dr. Stevenson’s pocket watch. You hear the music coming from it and you are now reminded of the victim’s quip when she first heard the music. "That’s lovely," she said, "We got ourselves a band." When you see her eyes as the life drains out of her you are reminded of the orchestra that greeted the prisoners at Auschwitz as Mengele in his white gloves pointed the way to the gas chambers with his cain. The Ripper walks away with a cain. You know that Fuhrman wore white latex gloves on the Bundy murder scene and you know that he made a note of the music that was playing inside of Nicole’s house.

Armed with the knowledge of what the minute hand means in Moonlighting to the Nazi network of links in the Fuhrman collection, you discount the hour hand. When you do that you notice that the minute hand has gone from 6 to halfway between the 8 and the 9 (Demi in French means half). That’s only 2 ½ minutes from the quarter hour. Using the Moonlighting pilot watch as your guide to interpreting the numbers on the watch in Time After Time, you know that the watch isn’t really a watch, but a code that will lead the Bundy killer to a planted treasure. Nevertheless, you can’t help noticing that the minute hand of the clock on the wall in H.G.’s basement that the Ripper visits several minutes later has advance only 2 ½ minutes. That’s really odd since Big Ben chimed 10 o’clock before the Ripper arrived. Now you have to look at the hour hand, which is about three-quarters the way to 10:00. That’s what it was on the watch.

Either somebody’s got the wrong time or the doctor has an airtight alibi.

Because H.G. has several clocks all set at different times maybe we can say that the one so close to the time on the Ripper’s watch when he finished his 12 or 13 minute kill is set to a different time zone. All we can say for sure is that it’s a coincidence.

In my research for this book I learned that continuity editors routinely screw up somewhere—usually with the passage of time as measured by clocks in the background that weren’t put there by the filmmaker to tell time. The Ripper’s watch tells us that the attack started at 9:30 and ended at nearly a quarter to 10. The time on Big Ben tells us that it took another 15 minutes or so for the ripper to get to H.G.’s house.

The clocks on the wall of H.G.’s basement in Time After Time, are there only as visual cures to reinforce the idea of his obsession with time. You see them for only   a few seconds. In real time you can’t be sure of what you saw. But once you introduce the idea of a man truly obsessed with time viewing the movie on video, a whole new way of looking at everything about it opens up. You notice not only the hands on the watch but the length of the burning candles when the doctor first comes into the room with H.G.’s other guests and looks over the chessboard, and their length when the men come back from the basement.

It’s possible that the men weren’t gone long enough for you to notice the change. It is, however, more likely that all of the scenes involving the chessboard and the candles were shot in sequence and the scene in the basement was edited into the middle to create the illusion of a different sequence of events. Consider the implications of that from the Bundy killer’s point of view—from the standpoint of someone trying to create the illusion of O.J. moving through time and space in a way that was physically impossible in real time. First, expand the concept to include viewing movies out of sequence as you can do with movies on videotape. Watch the pilot episode of Moonlighting first. Then see how Time After Time looks through the prism of David and Maddie’s hunt for the Nazi’s diamonds. Remember that the first murdered man inherited them from his father—the pilot.

In Murder in Brentwood, Mark Fuhrman made an issue of looking at movies on videotape. He doesn’t say whether he taped any of his favorite episodes of Moonlighting. But it’s a fair inference from what he said about O.J., Sydney, the Bronco and his interrogation style that if he didn’t tape the pilot, he did watch it. It made such an impression on him that it found its way into his investigation and his book. His observation about not being able to do much with sociopaths (like himself) because they just don’t care, sounds a tad like the problem the detectives had in the interrogation room with David Addison.

When you overlay the Moonlighting pilot with scenes from Time After Time, some interesting patterns begin to emerge. H.G.’s basement isn’t a police interrogation room but it is a room in which H.G. gets interrogated about his time machine. One man says, "You actually built the bloody thing." The first thing you see as the men enter the basement is an overhead electric light in a fixture very much like the one David Addison encounters when he first steps into the interrogation room. You also get a link to the idea of an electric light as a duel purpose symbol when H.G. flips on the "juice" and says, "Electric light gentlemen, courtesy of Thomas Edison the modern Prometheus. Prometheus was the titan who stole the secret of fire from the gods and gave it to man. His name means "forethought."

When the men go back upstairs and Dr Stevenson beats H.G. in their game of chess a guest exclaims, "Again? How does he do it?" The doctor says, "I know how he thinks, that’s all." H.G. tells him that he will beat him one day and Stevenson agrees that he will, "When you learn how I think." A guest pipes in with, "And one day I’ll inherit the Hope diamond." Remind you of David and Maddie finding the diamonds—or the gloves you find on a baseball diamond—or "the bloody thing" that Fuhrman found on Rockingham?

Fuhrman saw, planned and thought many steps ahead of everyone else in the Bundy investigation. You do not have to know how to play chess to know how much those abilities have to do with the game. You see it all the time in the movies. To win you have to see moves that haven’t been made yet and to have countermoves ready to use that will force a series of counteractions that leaves your opponent with nowhere to go.

During the early part of O.J.’s criminal trial the long list of unlikely attributes an alternate suspect would have to have for him. to be innocent seemed to exclude anyone in the real world. Among the attributes the hypothetical man had to have was the ability to think like a grand master chess player in a real game of killing the queen and capturing the king. I was brought up short by Fuhrman’s apparent ability to do just that.

The Fuhrman collection’s chess links take you to Laurence Fishburne in Searching For Bobby Fischer, which gets you to Fishburne and Angela Bassett as Ike and Tina Turner in What’s love Got To Do With It? The birthday boy in Searching for Bobby Fischer gets a baseball glove for a present. What’s love Got To Do With It? created a Jekyll and Hyde image of Ike Turner that made the public receptive to the image Fuhrman needed to created for O.J. Both films were made in 1993.

The chess links also get you to Knight Moves (’92) with Christopher Lambert as Peter Samuelson who has a dead wife and a young daughter. The movie opens at a Washington State chess tournament. There, a 9-year-old loser named David begins an obsession that he carries into manhood with Peter, the boy who defeated him. David kills women to make Peter look like a killer. He burns candles near their bodies. Things look especially bad for Peter when his new lover Cathy finds the names of recently murdered women circled in a phone directory by his bed.

Consider the whole sequence of events in Knight Moves after Peter steps into his shower and Cathy tells him she’s hungry. She asks him what he wants on his pizza while she looks for the telephone number of a nearby place called Rondy’s. He say’s, "You." Fuhrman said Nicole’s foot was on a pizza menu. He told a reporter to call Second Avenue Pizza if he was hungry. Look at the address above the first circled name in Peter’s phone book. It says 2^nd Ave. Recall that the phone number of Cara’s Pizza Kitchen was 575-5713 and see what you can do with the phone numbers above and below the second circled name. If you think that it’s taking liberties to see what connections you can find in the numbers, consider how Peter explains the circled names. He says, "I was looking for connections between them; names, addresses, anything that might be the same about them.

See if this looks like a connection to you: In Angel Heart, private eye Harry Angel tells his client in a missing persons case that produces dead bodies everywhere he looks, "Cypher, you bother me. The closest I ever come to death is standing on the corner of Second Avenue watching the stiffs go by in a hearse." He complains that he is now a suspect in two murders and the he is being set up. He is being set up—by his client Lou Cypher, the Prince of Darkness.

You have to understand that the man doing the talking is in a Catholic church, a place of confession where altar boys light candles and choirboys sing. He has a split personality. One part of him is a decent enough guy who bends over to pick up the hat of a black woman in Harlem and place it in her leather-gloved hands. Another part of him cuts people up in the most horrible of ways and blames his actions on someone else. The person he blames is a sociopath that he doesn’t recognize as himself until the racist detective who interrogates him touches that part of him that cares about his interracial daughter.

In Fuhrman’s lessons on effective interrogation, he criticized Vannatter and Lange for not lying to O.J. about evidence against him just to shake him up. To be fair to the two lead detectives, he was wrong about that. They did lie to him by implication by making him think that he was in Chicago when the murders occurred. They lied overtly by saying that blood drops on his property led into the gate when they that they lead out. They lied to him about the angle at which his Bronco was parked and they suggested that they thought he was innocent when they were convinced of his guilt and using everything he said against him. That much of Fuhrman’s lessons in interrogation they got right.

Fuhrman also made an issue of using timelines in opposite ways to secure murder convictions. He criticized Vannatter and Lange for not making O.J. tell them a story again and again and pinning him down to specific times that he would have trouble being consent with. He criticized Marcia Clark for being too specific with her timeline. To build a murder case he said you have to keep the timeline "flexible." He noted how bad people were at judging time, how differences could crop up in the way they set their clocks etc. He cited incriminating testimony and evidence that would have fit on his "flexible" timeline, but he left out the requirement that they fit together in a compatible sequence.

The only way you could reconstruct the truth with a flexible timeline is with a time machine. But who is going to build the bloody thing? A writer, of course—or a cop who believes that making an arrest then manufacturing the evidence he will need in court is a clever way of doing his job. What Fuhrman wrote in his book and what he said on tape about telling stories that put people in prison are no different in that regard. They tell the same story of him manipulating time to sell his story.

Fuhrman laid out a scenario for interrogation the way a movie director would lay out a movie shoot. Record the action you want to see on the movie screen in any sequence that you can to maximize your available resources. After that, you can put it together in the editing room the way you want your audience to see it. Substitute "courtroom" for "movie screen" and you see not only Fuhrman-the-detective’s time shifting trick but the killer’s as well. In Death Becomes Her, Helen uses it to prepare Dr. Menville for police interrogation when he calls her immediately after killing his wife Maddie and leaving her body at the foot of the stairs. With candles burning on her vanity table, she reminds him of how bad it will look for him that he called her before he called the police. She advises him to tell the police that he was talking to her on the phone when he heard Maddie scream and saw her fall. The phone records would confirm the story.

Did you notice how well Helen’s lie would have worked in reality? The precise time of death is the only thing that would have given the lie away. After the O.J. Simpson criminal trial everyone knew that precision like that did not exist to tell when Nicole met her death at the foot of her stairs. You could have learned that much about pathology the year before by watching Dr. Ernest Menville and Maddie Ashton in Death Becomes Her.

Never mind the similarity in the victims’ appearance—the fact that they were both attractive blonds, that they were both dressed in black and they both died of obvious neck wounds. What we’re looking at here is a flexible timeline vs. a strict one in establishing time of death. As the first homicide detective on the Bundy murder scene Mark Fuhrman had the legal responsibility to call the coroner. He had the knowledge that the coroner’s ability to fix the time of death to within a range that would include or exclude O.J. as the killer diminished with each passing hour. For the hour that he was in charge he held the key to a time machine that would keep the timeline flexible as long as he did not call the coroner.

Fuhrman knew that he was going to be relieved at some stage of the investigation by detectives from the Special Section of the Robbery/Homicide Division and that it would take time for them to arrive. Knowing who would be assigned and approximately how long it would take for them to arrive would have given him a close approximation to when they actually did arrive—two hours after he did. That’s long enough to take medical science out of the game of determining whether Ron and Nicole were closer to 10:00 or 10:40.

Like David in Knight Moves and Helen in Death Becomes Her Mark Fuhrman showed a violent, long-term obsession with a celebrity. Like David and Helen the object of his obsession later became involved in a murder scheme replete with ideas and evidence carefully planted to make police jump to false conclusions. We know by the court transcripts and by his Fuhrman’s own words in his book which ideas he planted. We know by the physical evidence he found how some of it had to have been planted by the killer or his accomplices.

Like the pizza link to the 2^nd Ave address in Knight Moves, the black socks on the Oriental rug in Death Becomes Her are a dead giveaway to the killer’s Hollywood source of inspiration. Remember the socks on Joe Paris’ rug in Physical Evidence, the ones on the detective’s feet that didn’t match each other? Remember Fuhrman saying how attention-getting the socks where that he found on O.J.’s Oriental rug because they didn’t match the neatness of the room in every other respect? The Dark Half gives us a woman’s socks on an Oriental rug. The Birds gives us a man’s bloody feet on an Oriental rug. We see a man’s bloody sock on "The Ledge" segment of Cat’s Eye. In Paris Trout we see a woman’s blood on her socks. In Death Becomes Her we see the red shoes of a woman named Helen, a fireplace, burning candles and a killer’s black socks on an Oriental rug.

Helen’s plan to kill Maddie was to knock her out with an alcohol-based drug and drive her to the cliff where we saw Leslie Nielsen in The Naked Gun walking like O.J. and Fuhrman. They would put her behind the wheel of her white Mercedes Benz and make anonymous calls to the police to report a drunk woman driving close to the edge (like the anonymous calls made to police asking about bodies on Bundy before the murders). They would then douse her with whiskey and send her over the edge to her death.

You see Ernest as Helen imagines him; in a bow tie (like the one O.J. wore on the 11^th along with the socks that Fuhrman found on his rug) and leather gloves (like the glove Fuhrman found on the 13^th). He is wearing glasses (like the ones in the envelope near the Bundy glove) He is hatless as Fuhrman said O.J. was after Goldman pulled off his cap. So, where does Death Becomes Her end and the Bundy murders begin?

The problem with the so-called "damning evidence" against O.J. that it sounds too much like elements in too many movies. Goldie Hawn is Helen, O.J. is dyslexic and within those boundaries it takes little to turn Goldie Hawn into Goldman. When the murder doesn’t go as planned, Helen comes by to tidy up the mess. She is wearing a hat and a mask that she snatches off of her head and throws to the floor. Maddie blows a hole in her with a shotgun and leaves her in a shallow pool of water that becomes a pool of blood. Helen comes back to life soaking wet and furious about what Maddie has done to her. The two dead rivals duel with shovels until Maddie’s breaks, leaving her with a pointed stick.

Let’s add up the clues to the murder of Maddie and Helen that match the clues to the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman:

1. Body of wife found at the foot of her stairs
2. Neck wound to victim’s vertebrae
3. Wet shoes
4. Dark socks
5. Leather gloves
6. Glasses
7. Burning candles
8. A shallow pool of water (Nicole’s bath tub)
9. A pool of blood
10. A shovel and a plastic sheet

I know I left out a few items. But how many do I have to include to make the point? I found over 50 in Ricochet alone and I’m still finding them in "Twenty Two." I didn’t need as many in Shakespeare’s Othello because the ones I did find were so strong that I named my first book on the Bundy murders after one of the main characters. His name was Iago.

In the 1988 version of D.O.A., a twenty-something English Literature student named Nicholas Lang quotes Iago’s "advice" to Othello. "Beware my lord of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on." Nick is having an affair with his English professor’s thirty-something wife. Dennis Quaid is Dex the professor. Jane Kaczmarek is the wife. Meg Ryan is a student named Sydney who you see at her vanity before Dex shows up and literally glues himself to her. His troubles begin after he delivers a package to his wife who wants a divorce. Back in his office, you see the distinctive soles of his shoes as he props them up on his desk just before Nick’s body flies past his office window and splats headfirst on the pavement several stories below. Within the next 36 hours there are more murder victims including the professor’s wife and the professor himself.

In his search for the person who has slipped him poison in his Scotch Dex stumbles on an unrelated secret involving Nick and Mrs. Michael Fitzwaring, the wealthy widow of the man his father was alleged to have killed. The story went like this: A man broke into Michael Fitzwaring’s home to commit a robbery. The two men struggle and shot each other dead. The real story of the double homicide is a tale of attempted blackmail, incest, a chauffeur with black leather gloves covering for Mrs. Fitzwaring who shot both men. When you see D.O.A. you will note that the college official standing next to Mrs. Fitzwaring at a special event is wearing a red tie with white spots like Mark Fuhrman wore in his best selling book. You will note that Mrs. Fitzwaring is Charlotte Rampling, the actress in Angel Heart with the same birthday as Mark Fuhrman.

The answer to who poisoned Dex is in why someone killed Nicholas. The answer? So an ambitious underachiever could steal someone else’s ideas for a story and put his name on a surefire, best selling book.