The first time I saw Mr. Destiny on HBO in 1990, I didn’t know that I was going to see a comedy that was part It’s a Wonderful life (1946), part Heaven Can Wait (1978), and wholly entertaining for its own neat little touches. In It’s a Wonderful Life an angel does something right by showing George Bailey how the world would have changed for the worse without him. In Heaven Can Wait an angel-like being does something wrong and things get complicated for a football player named Joe Pendleton. Remember the goofy football outfit that George borrowed from the high school locker room? I guarantee you that the authors of Heaven Can Wait, Buck Henry and Warren Beatty, remembered.

In Heaven Can Wait the angel snatches Joe’s soul out of his body in advance of what he falsely assumes will be a fatal accident. The body is cremated before Mr. Jordan, the chief angle, discovers the mistake. To put things as right as possible Mr. Jordan arranges for the athlete’s soul to slip into the body of someone else who is about to die. The body that circumstances force him to pick is that of a fabulously rich and powerful jerk named Leo Farnsworth. Farnsworth is about to be murdered by his wife and her lover. If anybody deserves to go that way, he does.

In the end, Joe, in Leo’s body, does wonderful things for his employees and mankind in general. He meets the woman who was destined to be his mate when she crashes a board meeting as the representative of a small town that his dirty dealing senior execs are about to steamroll. In retrospect, you can see how one dramatic, life-altering incident followed by a series of contrived circumstance and subtle hints gave Joe the illusion that he was shaping events that were really being shaped by Mr. Jordan. In the original 1941 version of the movie called Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Joe Pendleton is a boxer played by George Montgomery.

Before we go back to Mr. Destiny, let’s review Mark Fuhrman’s top three list of athletes. Number one was boxer George (Bailey-Montgomery) Foreman. Number two was basketball star and baseball failure Michael (Mike) Jordan (Mr. Jordan). Number three was basketball star, unqualified success Larry Bird.

In Mr. Destiny, Mike drives a taxicab while James Belushi as Larry J. Burrows, a failed baseball player sits in the back not suspecting that Destiny is driving him to a new life of fabulous wealth and influence.

In 1990, Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan # 23, was living in a mansion. He owned a fleet of expensive cars. He was running his own sporting goods company, becoming a respectable golfer and appearing in television commercials as a spokesman for various products. Nike had named a line of expensive shoes after him called Air Jordans, and news programs were doing feature stories about his lavish lifestyle.

That was the life Mr. Destiny had arranged for Larry Burrows, who sees himself as a failure because of a 3-2 pitch he didn’t hit in a big high school baseball game. He has a good life in suburban Chicago with a sporting goods manufacturing company owned by an ineffectual man named Leo Hansen played by Bill McCutcheon. Jay O. Sanders plays the ex-football-star president, Leo’s son-in-law Jackie.

Linda Hamilton, known to sci-fi fans everywhere as Sarah Connor in The Terminator (1984) and T-2: Judgment Day (1991) is Larry’s wife, Ellen Jane. She is a union representative (like Mark Fuhrman) in Leo’s company who suspects that the people she represents are being steamrolled by dirty dealings in upper management. She appears to have forgotten Larry’s birthday, which has been a total disaster for him until Mr. Destiny, masquerading as a bartender called Mike in a place called The Universal Joint serves him a drink called the Spilt Milk.

That’s where Mr. Destiny begins, with Larry’s station wagon breaking down on a deserted street at night in front of The Universal Joint. The irony of his car’s mechanical failure causing him to stop at a stop sign at the corner of a place named after a car part that could have caused that failure, goes right over his head. Larry is not what you’d call a sharp observer or a deep thinker.

"Destiny," he says in a voiceover, "is a pretty big concept when you think about it; where you are in life, how you got there, what would have happened if this or that had been different. To be honest, I never gave it much thought myself until today June 14, my 35^th birthday…."

I never gave much thought to the idea that a murderer who was a sharp observer and a deep thinker could get anything out of a movie like Mr. Destiny until I read Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood. When Nicole Brown Simpson was killed at the age of 35, the stories that Fuhrman had been telling for years in a West LA bar of his relationship to Nicole made him the goat in the big game that cost her her life. In Fuhrman’s story, he was the white night who came to her rescue in ’85 when football hero O.J. Simpson was terrorizing her with a baseball bat but failed to do so on the 12^th of June 1994 when O.J. murdered her. That’s the story of Larry Burros’ # 5, striking out on a 3-2 pitch on his 15^th birthday.

In my most recent viewing of Mr. Destiny I noticed how little it took to derive O.J.’s football number (32) and Fuhrman’s birthday (2/5/52) from Larry’s last time at bat on the scoreboard. Reading the runs, hits and errors like game pieces on a chessboard (horizontally, vertically and diagonally) give you Michael Jordan’s number, Larry Bird’s number, Nicole and Ron’s age at death, the day they died and the day Fuhrman the super star was born. Both victims were hit on the head.

When Larry down’s Mike’s Spilt Milk concoction his life becomes the one he would have had if he’d been the hero in the big game instead of the goat. He would have dated and married Cindy Jo, played by Rene Russo, and become president of Leo’s company in place of Jackie. The company, Liberty Republic, has an eagle as its logo. Larry’s baseball team was the Eagles (Larry "the bird" struck out on a 3-2 pitch—Larry Bird # 33, get it?). When Michael Jordan # 23 played for the White Sox farm team, he struck out a lot.

Larry couldn’t see the obvious fact that the woman he married and had such a happy life with before Mr. Destiny served him the Spilt Milk is someone he would not have met if he had gotten the big hit. Larry’s best friend Clip puts the situation into perspective with an homage to Republic Picture’s (Eagle logo) It’s a Wonderful Life, when he says, "The way I see it, you’ve got the perfect life. You’ve got a wonderful home, a terrific wife, a good job and the best friend money can buy."

The only thing Larry can see is the downside of his last time at bat in 1970 before a hometown crowd of thirty thousand people. "Why is it," he says, "when you do something terrific nine times out of ten you’re all alone, but when you screw up really big the whole world is watching?"

Fuhrman’s version of the strikeout and its consequences with O.J. and himself at different points as Larry and Fuhrman alone as Mike, is a little different. Instead of making it big by saving the day and marrying Cindy Jo (Nicole), he makes it big by failing to save her and pointing the finger of guilt at O.J., the man he saw with the baseball bat in ’85.

In the new life that Mr. Destiny arranges for Larry, he’s called L.J., only an M (as in Mark) and an N (as in Nicole) away from O.J. Jay O. Sanders is out of the picture (O.J. Simpson was in jail). Larry tells his story to Mike the bartender in an empty bar as a prelude to the big change (Fuhrman told his story in a bar full of cops). Pictures of old baseball heroes decorate a wall of Mike’s Universal Joint. One picture stands out because it’s big and clear and it looks like Babe Ruth swinging a bat. Next to that picture is an analog clock. The first time you see the clock the time is about three minutes after 10:00. Five minutes later the time on the clock has not changed.

Nicole Simpson’s killer broke her Swiss Army watch, set the time back to 10:03 and positioned her wrist with the watch crystal against the concrete walkway to make it look like it stopped with the shock of her fall. He wore the same size shoes O.J. Simpson wore and used a knife that was made by the company that made the Swiss Army watch. O.J. was a spokesman for that company. In Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood, he claimed more evidence against O.J. Simpson in the Bundy murders than the government of the United States had against Imperial Japan in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But it was all evidence that passed though his zones of influence beginning with what he was supposed to have witnessed O.J. doing with a baseball bat in 1985.

The incident with the baseball bat…. The murder trial of O.J. Simpson gave Fuhrman a chance to revisit that incident with the whole world watching him—Mark Fuhrman—at the plate. According not only to him in his book, but most people in the poles, he hit a home run with his story of O.J. smashing the glass in Nicole’s car and running home in a panic after he killed her nine years later. At the time of the murders Fuhrman was nearing the end of his career (bottom of the 9^th) and aching to score the winning run the way Larry did when Mr. Destiny took him back in time and gave him another swing at the ball.

Fuhrman spoke of his career using the metaphor of a baseball player who could swing the bat from either side of the plate. In The Natural, Fuhrman’s metaphorical counterpart is a left-hander—in Mr. Destiny he is a right-hander. In both movies the hero comes home with his bat laying outside of the left field foul line in the same relative position where Fuhrman observed the stick by the curb in front of O.J.’s home. In both movies you will find one brown leather glove at home and an opposing player who wears a mask and is known to lose it on a certain play in foul territory. It’s not called a "foul play" in baseball, but how much imagination does it take to see the connection if you’re looking at police work as a metaphor for baseball and calling   a ski mask a knit cap?

Mark Fuhrman is the only person in the case who can be tied directly to the Rockingham glove, the Rockingham stick and the story of how the stick ended up in front of O.J.’s home. He called the blue cap a black mask and said that he found the box with an indentation were the murder weapon came from (Michael Caine in Dressed to Kill). He drew the connection between the murder weapon and Nicole’s watch with a description of the Swiss Army knife box and his scenario of the killing that begins "sometime after 10:00." The implication being, shortly after 10:00—like the time on Nicole’s Swiss Army watch, or the time on the clock in Back to the Future and on the wall of Mike’s Universal Joint.

Time speaks. If you can get the time right in a few successive and simultaneous areas of activity you can get the activities right because competing scenarios will not have the same fit. For example, if O.J. made his last unanswered call to his girlfriend at 10:04—which he did—something is wrong with a scenario that has her falling on her watch at 10:03. However, that’s not what gets O.J. off the hook.

If you simultaneously stopped the watches of 50 people at random, few of them would correspond precisely with telephone company time. Assuming that O.J. did knock Nicole to the ground almost immediately after he made the call from a hiding place in her front yard, the 10:03 time is reasonable. What makes that scenario unreasonable are phone company records consistent with several independent eye and earwitness reports that no one was attacked in Nicole’s front yard before 10:30.

The timeline in the Simpson case should never have been argued as evidence of reasonable doubt, because it proves conclusively that O.J. could not have done what the evidence said he did. Moreover, it proves what photographs of the changing locations of evidence in Fuhrman’s care proved. Someone made a few adjustments that changed Mark Fuhrman’s life for the better Orenthal James Simpson’s for the worse.

Don’t you think that’s a tad too convenient for Fuhrman—a tad too coincidental in light of his special interest in O.J., the boasting he did about being able to frame people and the ideas he admitted to getting from the movies? Doesn’t it tell you something when the evidence that Fuhrman was photographed with and the stories he told to explain whatever had to be unexplained to incriminate O.J. fit Fuhrman and the movies better than they fit O.J. and the murders?

Pretend that there was a guy out there who saw himself as a kind of god-like creature where rearranging other people’s lives is concerned. What do you think a man like that would make of a movie sequence like this:

A man goes into a bar where a bartender named Mike serves him a magic drink that gives him the lifestyle of the rich and famous. He gets his first hint of what has happened when he finds a big change in his driveway, a large cop in his home and a change in his driver’s license that puts him in a filthy rich neighborhood. He sees Mike again as a cabby who tells him that he changed his life by letting him hit a home run in 1970 instead of striking out. The man doesn’t know that Mike is really Mr. Destiny. "So Mike," he says, "you do this a lot, I mean change people’s lives and stuff?" With a wry smile, Mike reply’s, "I’ve been known to make a few adjustments now and again."

I don’t have to tell you that this is what happens in Mr. Destiny. Considering all that you know about the movie from what you’ve read so far and the pictures that were so carefully planted in the relevant text, what other movie could I be talking about? So, you know that the man talking to the cabby is Larry Borrows. You can guess that he thinks he’s being put on as a special birthday treat and that Mike was hired to play a part. If you guessed that, you’d be right. If you guessed that it took a lot to convince him that his life had really been altered by magic, you’d be right again.

He walks into his mansion thinking that it was rented by Ellen and Clip only to be met by Cindy Jo and two young children who are calling him Daddy. That’s confusing but what’s convincing is the painting he sees of himself, Cindy Joe and the kids in a big, elaborate frame.

Did somebody say "frame?"

So, now we’re straining to imagine Fuhrman, the artist, with a young son and daughter who exhibited on Primetime Live an excellent painting of his daughter—we’re trying to see the painting in the movie through his eyes. Dare we imagine that he was as good at framing people as he said he was on the McKinny tapes? If so, we have to take a lesson from Shakespeare’s Iago and consider how one in a sufficiently influential position can affect the course of people’s lives through the power of suggestion. Keep your Mark Fuhrman-frame-up-artist-eyes in place as you study the following sequence from Mr. Destiny. When we’re done, let’s see how much stretching we have to do to picture him in Michael Caine’s part with his "incidental" remark to Lange and Vannatter about O.J. and the baseball bat incident in 1985….

Mike: You see Larry one’s destiny is a very complicated thing. Every incident in a person’s life affects everything else that follows. Instead of missing the baseball, however, you hit it. Then you became a hero. You married the prom queen and so on, and so forth until you find yourself exactly where you are. So you see, hitting that baseball has spun your life off in an entirely new direction.

Mike, a.k.a. Mr. Destiny emphasizes the point with swirling points of light that explode like fireworks from his fingertip as he points at Larry. Have we just witnessed another change? Is James Belushi now Orenthal James Simpson? Or should we be asking, has L.J. now become O.J., the man with the bat on Rockingham, the sports hero company president in the beautiful frame with the beautiful wife and the two young children?

Larry: Are you an angel or something?"

Mike: Not exactly.

Larry: Then what are you?

Mike: Have you ever been faced with a decision and you weren’t sure what to do?

Larry: Yeah, sure. Plenty of times.

Mike: And then something inside you made you chose one direction over another?

Larry: Yeah. So?

Mike: So, that’s me. I make the suggestions and you make the choices. That’s how destiny works, Larry, very subtlety.

Everywhere Mark Fuhrman went with respect to O.J. and Nicole, people chose to do things that had the cumulative effect of making O.J. appear to be a wife-beater and a killer. Nicole started calling 911, Det. Vannatter signed a phony search warrant and Marcia Clark obscured exculpatory evidence. A subtle suggestion from Fuhrman could have done the trick every time. By the time I got to the part in his book about the-killer seeing himself in the mirror, I was pretty sure that Fuhrman was seeing himself as Mr. Destiny changing identities as easily as he changed ties.

If Fuhrman could see himself as Mike in that scene what do you think he’d see in the Heaven Can Wait version with Warren Beatty as Leo Farnsworth looking in the mirror at himself and James Mason as Mr. Jordan? Joe has just entered Farnsworth’s body so he is dumbfounded to see himself in the mirror instead of the man he’s impersonating. Mr. Jordan assures him that everyone else will see him as Farnsworth. While he’s waiting for the butler to arrive on the crime scene, he turns around and you can see that the monogram on his robe is a fancy "F" for Farnsworth. But depending on how you look at it, the "F" could stand for Fuhrman. It could be a "J" as in James or Jordan.

Could the makers of Mr. Destiny have missed all of the "James" connections to James Belushi as Larry Burrows? I think not. James Stewart, James Mason, Laurence Jamieson… Oh, that’s one we missed, but not one that a fan of Michael Caine would have missed when the writing and casting for Mr. Destiny was being done in 1989 or the early part of 1990. Caine played Lawrence Jamieson the suave French Riviera con man in the 1988 film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. Jamieson had a different identity for every occasion. When a jailed American con man was trying to remember his name he called him James. In another scene he called him Larry.

Assuming that the Bundy Drive killer saw James Belushi as Larry in Mr. Destiny, do you think he could have missed the final James link to Orenthal James Simpson? The question arises because there are more good reason to believe that he did than to assume that he didn’t. Consider this line from Hart Bochner as Niles Pender, who bears an uncanny resemblance in some views to Ron Goldman in his glasses, "It’s very simple really," the police will think he happened into the wrong place at the wrong time and became the poor innocent victim of murderous thieves."

With Bochner as the victim instead of the killer and one minor adjustment you have the official story of how Goldman came to be killed by O.J. Simpson. Simpson is the adjustment. Instead of murderous thieves we have a jealous man in a murderous rage. With two other minor adjustments we have damn near the entire apparent story of Goldman’s "bad timing" including the kind of weapon that killed him in his left hand. Instead of wearing glasses, Goldman was carrying them in an envelope. That envelope ended up in the photo of Fuhrman pointing to the killer’s bloody glove. If you look closely, though, you can see that there is a cluster of evidence around Fuhrman’s finger pointing straight to O.J., like the points of light around Mike’s finger that point to Larry.

In Mr. Destiny Larry is the target of the murder plane that goes awry when Hanson shows up in the time and place Pender expects to ambush Larry. Hansen, too spineless to tell Larry in person that he has been fired for cheating on his daughter, is carrying an envelope with the message inside. He plans to drop it on Larry’s desk when no one is around. Pender, laying in wait for Larry kills Hansen by mistake, but makes the most of the situation when he finds the envelope and sees how he can use it to frame Larry. Pender arranges for security guards to be handy when Larry can arrives and times it so that they will see Larry bending over the body. Again taking advantage of the situation as he finds it, Pender sees that Larry is holding the golf club that he (Pender) hit Hansen with and points at it while "warning" the guards that Larry is holding the murder weapon.

Fuhrman’s pointing finger being photographed in the center of an evidence cluster like the lights around Mike’s fingertip is supposed to be a coincidence. It appears less coincidental with Fuhrman as a composite of Mike and Pender. Ron was hit in the head with a blunt instrument and killed with a knife held in the killer’s left hand. An envelope was found near his body. In Mr. Destiny, the man who gets killed only because of the envelope he’s dropping off as the result of a woman’s phone call passes a statues of a baseball player on his way to his death. Ron Goldman played baseball on the day he died.

The prosecutors were so sure that O.J. murdered Ron and Nicole with the Stiletto he bought from Ross Cutlery a few weeks before the murders that they had to argue something akin to magic to explain why they couldn’t find it. Fuhrman used the missing Swiss Army knife.

The "disappearance" of the Bruno Magli shoes is another matter. The fact that Nicole was the only one who could be traced to any style of Bruno Magli shoes didn’t stop the prosecutors from arguing that O.J. wore the Lorenzos when he killed her. In Mr. Destiny the camera zooms in on the feet of would-be killer Courteney Cox who exits her car like The Terminator in search of Sarah Connor and walks as Schwarzenegger and the Bundy killer did, with her toes pointed straight ahead. With Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor in The Terminator) being the cause of it all, you know that the similarity is not coincidental. With Rene Russo as Cindy Jo you also get the name of a woman that could be the name of a man.

All of which might remind you of a passage from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels in which Lawrence Jamieson’s accomplice André suggest a way of getting rid of a rival con man. André tells Jamieson (Michael Caine), "Rene The Knife is a master with ze Stiletto and an absolute magician at hiding a body...as police inspector, I give you my word the case will be investigated in a very slipshod manner."

The Bundy Drive killer was a magician at hiding the clothes that were on his body, the knives that were in his hands and the shoes that were on his feet. He did not have to be a police inspector to guarantee that the case would "be investigated in a very slipshod manner." He needed only to be the first homicide detective on the case. That’s what Mark Fuhrman was and that’s what his work in that capacity did. By the time he finished moving evidence, devising theories and making suggestions that committed everyone around him to "minor" acts of perjury against the obvious suspect, a competent investigation was out of the question.

Comparing the language he used in the McKinny tapes to the composite of characters he said he was posing as for a screenplay, Fuhrman was the one who said, "The similarities are not mere coincidence." He was the one who introduced the subject of movies on video and cable TV. He injected a slightly altered version of the movie Ghost into his story of the Bundy Drive killings. He was the one who compared himself to characters played by Gene Hackman and Dennis Franz, both of whom are connected to Michael Caine by way of movies or videotapes.

The Hackman connection is an especially revealing indication of the Bundy killer’s source of inspiration owing to the roundabout way I found it. To begin with, Fuhrman said that his character was part "Popeye Doyle," the character that Hackman plays in The French Connection. While there is a French connection in nearly every movie in the Fuhrman collection, and plenty of Gene Hackman in other significant roles, there is virtually no Popeye Doyle. Something along those lines is also true of Forrest Gump, a movie that Fuhrman compared to Huckleberry Finn in defending his use of the n-word. Nothing in the movie compares to what he was supposedly talking about. But the movie and its star Tom Hanks did win Oscars. Hanks has that in common with Philadelphia. Another thing he has in common with Philadelphia is Mary Steenburgen….

After breaking the "pizza" code with Steenburgen as Clara in Back to the Future III, I realized a birthday in the Fuhrman collection could stand for more than one thing. It’s the first date on a tombstone. But I wasn’t looking at that. I was looking for actresses like Mary Steenburgen who appeared in more than one time travel movie. Linda Hamilton was the only other one I could think of until I saw Rene Russo again in Mr. Destiny and remembered that she was the female lead in Freejack (’92).

Then, with Courteney Cox in The Terminator’s shoes, so to speak, and all of the indications that the Bundy killer obtained his Bruno Maglis shortly after they first went on sale in 1991, I saw another pattern worth tracking—androgynous names. Courtney B. Vance is a black male actor you’ll see in Hamburger Hill (87). He is the Army medic called Doc who tells newcomers to the Screaming Eagles to put a dog tag in one of their boots in case they get their heads blown off. In The Adventures of Huck Finn (’93) with Elijah Jordan Wood as Huck, Courtney B. Vance is Jim. Lesley Ann Warren as Molly in Life Stinks (’91) helps Mel Brooks with a pair of shoes when his shoes are stolen. The camera stays on Leslie Nielsen’s shoes in The Naked Gun during a segment in which he is trying to figure out who framed his partner Nordberg, played by O.J. Simpson.

Glenn Close came to mind because of what Mr. Destiny borrowed from The Natural. However, shoes seemed to be the common denominator in this male/female name game and I could think of no male counterpart who had any relevant connection to the killer’s shoes. If Nicole’s Bruno Maglis meant as much to the killer as I thought they did, the only Glenn connection that mattered had to be directly related to the victim’s or the killer’s shoes. So, with all of these qualifications is there are link to a male actor or character named Glenn in Mr. Destiny?

No. But there is another female link to Michael Caine and Warren Beatty. Glenne (pronounced Glenn) Headley is Tess Trueheart opposite Beatty in Dick Tracy (1990) and Janet opposite Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. She stars with Demi Moore and Bruce Willis in Mortal Thoughts (1991). Bruce’s name in that movie is James.

Now for the Gene Hackman connection to Mr. Destiny—I told you it was roundabout. Glenne Headley led me to Hackman by way of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. If her role in Fuhrman’s mind was as big as I thought it was, I expected to see something as telling in that movie as I did in Mortal Thoughts. As Fuhrman suggested, I visited a video store and rented Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. There was the Hackman link attached to the front of Caine’s movie in the form of a preview for Mississippi Burning.

Mississippi Burning is based on the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia Mississippi, a young black one named James and two Jewish men. The first name of one victim was Mike. The last name of the other was Goodman. They were killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, aided by a deputy sheriff. In the Hollywood version of the case, William DeFoe tells Hackman, "The moment those three kids disappeared it was news." Hackman retorts with a vital distinction, "The moment the three civil right workers disappeared it was news."

The difference was in where the television cameras were looking. In the ’50s and ’60s they were looking at civil rights workers in the Jim Crow South. In the ’80s and ’90s they were looking at the black celebrities who’d made it. O.J. was, in that sense, an ideal target of image assassination. That was the name of the game in Half Moon Street with someone setting up Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine for a headline grabbing double murder that will kill the man and his reputation in one stroke. The man sent to kill Weaver and Caine (the 1990 version of Mr. Jordan who serves Larry the Spilt Milk) uses a silencer on his pistol.

In The Manchurian Candidate a Medal of Honor winner kills a United States Senator and his daughter. He is the woman’s husband. He uses a silencer. Like baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson in The Naked Gun (no coincidence), he is not in his right mind. The actor is Lawrence Harvey. The character he shoots in the chest through a carton of milk is Senator Jordan. Does the double murder make headlines? What do you think?