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Chapter 30

"Miner" Adjustments

The biggest reason this chapter isn’t titled The Real French Connection is because I couldn’t get all of the letters to fit. If you watch enough R-rated moves you notice that "French" is usually performed by the man on the woman unless the woman is a prostitute like the one who performs "French" on Officer Charlie Stewart in To Protect and Serve. Notable exceptions are Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin, Jane Fonda in Coming Home, Kathleen Turner in Body Heat, Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female, and Helen Mirren in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. Also note Melora Hurdin as Whitney in Soul Man with C. Thomas Howell as Mark.

Give you any ideas about why so many of Mark Fuhrman’s ties are decorated with white spots—particularly the ones he wore in court with Marcia Clark and the one he wore on camera with Dianne Sawyer? We’re not forgetting the fact that the white on red or white on blue-spotted tie appears on powerful figures in the movies like James Earl Jones as a Harvard Law professor in Soul Man, or powerful political figures in real life like Bill Clinton. Ever wonder why the trail of advice and betrayal that ended with Monica Lewinski saving the dress stained with Bill Clinton’s semen started with Mark Fuhrman—or did you attribute that to chance? Doesn’t the necktie he wore and the glove he found remind you of the clothes stolen by Satan worshipers in Rosemary’s Baby to kill, to blind, and to advance one man’s career by destroying another’s?

Doesn’t it bother you that Fuhrman had ANYTHING to do with the impeachment of the President, or that his national status was enhanced by what he did? Judging by the way he described himself to Laura Hart McKinney, nothing would have stopped him from demanding the sexual tribute that Charlie Stewart demanded just to "relive stress" or to show who was boss. With his attitude toward black men and white women isn’t it odd that he recorded zero references to his encounters with actual black pimps and their white whores in his ten years as an abusive street cop? Well, not so odd if they were encounters that involved shakedowns and sex. The bottom line with Fuhrman is power—money and sex as instruments of power and both as powerful motives for murder.

Back to the classroom of Murder I01….

In his third lesson, Prof. Charlie Lattimore tells his class: "When plotting a suspense story it’s a good idea to start with a double strand—the crime filament and the man woman relationship. The possibility of romance always gives the story an added element of suspense. Sex and love provide the most common motive for murder.

After Det. Dowling strangles Francesca with Prof. Charlie Lattimore’s necktie, he sees his wife Laura who got in her mail an outline for the perfect murder. She hasn’t learned of the real murder, but for all the audience of Murder 101 knows at this point, Laura—with her glasses that look like the ones on the Ryder’s living room carpet—could be the killer. The glasses are a red herring. Laura reads Charlie the paper. She thinks it has a clever twist: Woman lures man into rendezvous (Faye Resnick lured Ron Goldman into rendezvous with her and Nicole but didn’t show up—the glasses he carried were a red herring because he was going to Nicole’s condo anyway). The twist is, the man is not the target; the woman is (the twist in the Bundy case was the man and the woman were both targets with the glasses used to make it look like Ron’s appearance on the crime scene was coincidental). The killer has thus left an innocent man (O.J. Simpson) to deal with the body (two bodies).

Charlie goes back to his class and tries to see if he can extract clues to the killer’s identity from his students. They don’t know yet that their classmate was killed, that their professor was in the motel room with her at the time or that an article of his clothes was used as the murder weapon. Charlie writes "MOTIVE" on the board. He underlines the word four times and asks for possible motives for murder.

John, the student with the black beret that Charlie made fun of on the first day of class, suggests revenge. Charlie supplies the rational of a disturbed personality overreacting to a perceived attack on him and watches for a guilty response. He doesn’t get one. The girl who questioned Alden’s perfect murder hypothesis suggests jealousy. Charlie says, "Also good. Not all of us are as smart or as rich or as beautiful as we’d like to be. Sometimes this can create feelings of rage, which festers and grows until we feel the need to lash out at someone who possesses the qualities we think we lack." No guilty response there, either.

Robert Miner, not the black actor Bob Minor who plays the hitman with the package in Acton Jackson, suggests greed. You’ll want to pay attention to this one, considering Fuhrman’s admission to having a "get rich quick" mentality, his maneuvering to put himself in the spotlight and his ambition to become a best selling writer—like Murder 101’s Robert Miner. The title of Miner’s paper on the perfect murder, which earns him an "A" in the end and a six-figure advance from Hollywood to make it into a movie, is Murder 101. We saw in an early scene that Robert knows he will make money, win fame, enhance his writing career and get an A by proving his professor was wrong about Dr. Ryder’s guilt. Expounding on the idea of greed as a motive for murder Charlie says, "That covers a wide range of motives. People could be greedy for money, or fame, or career advancement. I’ve even heard of a student who’d kill to get an A on a paper."

You know that an assistant professor named Petersham in D.O.A. with Dennis Quaid as Professor Dexter Cornell kills an "A" student named Nick to enhance his writing career. The professor’s love interest for the 24 hours he has to live is Meg Ryan as Sydney. Do these names fire off any synapses in your brain? Beginning with the money/fame/career advancement/A-paper theme in Murder 101, watch how these real and fictional names, titles, roles and the people they belong to start to run together: Charles, Dexter, Jack, Carl, Stephen, Vanity, Stone, Phil, Quaid, Michael, Miner, Ronny, Cox, Ann, Lewis, Alex and Murphy. Watch for actors with the initials MF and characters with the initials BM.

The 1986 Fortune Dane television series with Carl Withers was directed by Charles Correll and Nicholas Sgarro In the pilot film Dexter is the main villain. Sonny Landham plays the hitman in the leather gloves and glasses who kills the man and woman (two cops) and leaves his cap behind. Landham is a knife-wielding candy man (drug dealer) in Action Jackson (’88) with Carl Withers in the title role who fights him in a small room to save Sydney (Vanity). Jack Thibeau as his former partner. Early in the movie Jackson makes a joke of his old partner’s crime-solving ability. He says, "It takes some pretty sharp police work to track down a man waving a bloody knife screaming, ‘I did it! I did it!’"

According to Fuhrman’s discoveries, observations and theories, the case against O.J. was just as certain. If you’re experiencing a recall lapse we can fix that in a hurry with four of director Paul Verhoeven’s biggest box office successes. In chronological order they would be Flesh and Blood (’85) with Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruno Kirby and Rutger Hauer (John Ryder in The Hitcher), RoboCop (’87) with Ronny Cox, Total Recall (’90) with Ronny Cox and Sharon Stone, and Basic Instinct (’92). But since we were talking about Action Jackson with Sharon Stone before we got into Paul Verhoeven movies lets take up where we left off.

Sharon Stone goes from the fragile, naïve Patrice in Action Jackson to the tough, shrewd and deadly Lori Quaid in Total Recall. Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) visits a place were memory implants stand in for real experience. Ray Baker (a cop in Physical Evidence) as Bob McClane (as opposed to John McClane in Die Hard), talks him into assuming a different persona for the trip. The procedure sets off a series of events that lead to a death struggle and multiple homicide. One of his victim’s is a "friend" named Harry whose real job was to watch him. Quaid sneaks into his home, hits the light switch with his bloody hands and sees himself in the mirror as a killer as Lori picks up the phone. When he come out, she tries to kill him. In the kitchen, she picks up a butcher knife and cuts him using first one hand then the other.

You know how much this sounds like Fuhrman’s story of why Nicole left the butcher knife out in the kitchen, the phone call he said she was going to make, the blood he said he saw on the light switch and the murderer he said O.J. saw in the mirror. That much you know. Have you guessed the part where Quaid hits Lori with a pounding blow that knocks her to the floor—on her left side—with her knees drawn up? Have you guessed the part about the blood in Quaid’s sink? Maybe you would have guessed those things if I had mentioned the technical error that Fuhrman corrected with his story about the blood on the light switch.

It stands to reason that O.J. would have had blood on his hands if he’d just dropped a bloody glove irrespective of whether he’d cut himself. In a state of panic it is highly unlikely that he would have been careful about where he put his hands from moment to moment. The light switch is a logical place to expect to see blood if Fuhrman’s scenario is correct. He said that O.J. turned on the light when he entered the room. Doug Quaid turned the light out. Well, he tuned the light in his living room out. He left the one in the bathroom on. After he hit the light switch he hit another one and another. He then went to Lori, placed both hands firmly on her bare upper arms and told her his story of the death struggle. When he took his wet, bloodstained hands away to show her proof of his violent deed, her arms were clean.

Fuhrman’s observation of blood on the light switch was a necessary improvement in the transfer of Total Recall ideas from the screen to his notes, interviews, tapes and his book about the O.J. investigation. Like Rodney, the mystery writer’s technical advisor aboard the Murder Train in Moonlighting’s "Next Stop Murder," Fuhrman was Laura Hart’s technical adviser on the proposed screenplay Men Against Women. His job was to make sure that errors like Quaid’s bloody hands coming away from Lori’s clean arms didn’t happen.

In RoboCop (’87), co-written by Michael Miner (another Miner), Detroit Police Officer Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) and his new partner Ann Lewis (Nancy Allen) track a drug gang in a white van to their hideout. They separate. Lewis and Murphy get knocked to the ground. The gang tortures Murphy the way Ron Goldman was tortured, with wounds inflicted to cause physical and psychological pain before he was killed. Murphy’s killers use guns (Fuhrman’s third note) instead of knives. The leader Clarence Boddicker (Kirkwood Smith) pins his arm to the floor and shoots off his hand. The hand flies away from his wrist. Blood gushes from the stump. He gets to his feet where the other gang members shoot off the rest of his arm and fill the rest of his body with bullets. Murphy staggers around for a long time before he falls and Boddicker puts a bullet in his head and leaves with the gang. Lewis, wearing the same kind of boots that Murphy has on, only smaller, steps in the pool of blood he’s lying in to get to him. Miraculously, he’s still alive, though barely. But the movie has a technical problem with the medical evacuation scene that even a miracle can’t explain. The rubber soles of Murphy’s boots are clean.

A 12-year veteran of he LAPD working as a technical advisor on a screenplay is no more likely to have missed a detail like that than a hitchhiker on the side of a road is likely to miss a rainstorm. When Fuhrman looked at the souls Kato’s shoes after giving him a sobriety test he said they look similar but they were too small. Remember that?

This is for those who question the relevance of RoboCop to Fuhrman’s role as Laura Hart’s technical adviser or don’t recall what he said to her about the worthlessness of a female cop fighting "a 6’ 6’’ nigger." But before I do that, I have to be sure you recall his theory that O.J. struck Nicole with a pounding blow that knocked her out. Fuhrman said that she was out when Ron entered the killing ground. Knocking out Nicole was how her killer separated her from Ron. You also want to keep in mind the fact that Nancy Allen plays characters in two movies; Dressed to Kill (’80) and Blow Out (’81) who get their throat cut.

Remember that Detroit is a French name, French is another name for oral sex, and another name for oral sex performed on a man is a blowjob. Remember Sydney’s Christmas Joke in D.O.A. about Santa’s reindeer going into town and "blowing some bucks." Remember Jain in Diary of a Hitman promising the black hitman Decker a blowjob to let her and her baby live. Remember that ideas are all about symbols and Fuhrman was big on symbolism (his explanation for the cartoon about the nazi swastika) and he was the one who found the bubble gum on Bundy that he argued may have been an important clue to what happened.

I think the bubble gum is a big clue to what happened. That is, the fact that Fuhrman thought it was so important is a big clue. When you watch the sequence in RoboCop that leads to Murphy being killed, I think you will agree….

Murphy and Lewis follow the gang to a vast industrial complex. They go in different directions but stay in radio contact. Lewis catches the black gang member, Joe, taking a leak. She watches him from a hiding place, chewing a wad of bubble gum and absentmindedly blowing a bubble before telling him to freeze. She makes him show her his hands, but instead of handcuffing him right away, she lets him turn around with his hands up—and his fly open. When he says, "Mind if I zip this up," and looks down, her eyes "go down." He smacks the gun from her hand and knocks her out with a left hook. When Murphy gets into trouble Lewis is unable to assist him, thus illustrating Fuhrman’s point about women cops.

The thing that struck me was the ease with which related ideas flowed into each other. When I saw the pristine soles of Murphy’s new shoes, the first thing I thought of were the bloody imprints virgin Bruno Maglis on Bundy. Then I pictured the blood drops next to them and how easy it would have been to switch the samples—something I learned in Vietnam. I did a mental rewind to Lewis watching Joe take a leak and the next thing that popped into my head was M.P. drug testing with urine samples and Mark Fuhrman’s job as an M.P. aboard ship in Vietnam.

The only way to be sure an illegal drug user didn’t switch sample with a non-user for testing was to watch him. If you can switch a sample of one body fluid for testing you can do it with another. I know that I covered that history lesson in another chapter, but the point I’m making here is specific to RoboCop, the ideas borrowed from RoboCop to make The Naked Gun 2 ½ (’91) and the ideas borrowed from both movies to frame O.J. Simpson for murder. You remember the scene in The Naked Gun 2 ½ were Nordberg’s legs and feet stick out (how’s that for an idea) from under a white bus with tinted glass (like his Bronco’s) bound for Detroit and the commercial with the urine test. I’m certain that the Bundy killer did. There is just too much that says he did and all of it fits too well.

The error of blood missing from the soles of Murphy’s brand new boots in RoboCop and the arms of Lori Quaid in Total Recall appear to have been corrected in a merging of the two ideas on the Bundy murder scene. Perhaps you noticed how distinctive the soles of Murphy’s boots are and how easy it would be to trace the bloody imprints of boots like that to a Detroit police officer. Did you picture Carl Withers in Action Jackson or Bob Minor wearing his clothes? Perhaps Bob Minor carrying the package reminded you of The Package with Gene Hackman, and the assassin who switches identities with another soldier to frame him for murder.

Hollywood hasn’t produced an abundance of movies featuring Detroit police officers. That makes it hard not to think of the few that have. Beverly Hills Cop (’84) with Eddie Murphy is one you might recall. I don’t think it’s an accident that most of these men are black, that Eddie Murphy and Alex Murphy share the same last name, or that Ronny Cox (remember Courtney Cox in Mr. Destiny?) had a big part in both smash hits. Ronny Cox starred in Beverly Hills Cop (’84), RoboCop (’87) and Total Recall (’90). He’s the guy in RoboCop who causes a young executive to wet his pants in sheer terror of his presence. He is the kind of guy that Fuhrman said he was pretending to be on the McKinny tapes. You will remember that Fuhrman called that persona a cross between Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood in Magnum Force) Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman in The French Connection) and Atilla the Hun (’54)

Anthony Quinn is Atilla. Antoni Corone is Mike Dowling in Murder 101. I was working my way back to Charlie’s classroom with pictures from RoboCop and To Protect and serve, to show why John’s black beret is a logical symbol for the knit cap in the police photo of Fuhrman’s pointing finger. Fuhrman said in Murder in Brentwood that he was one of the best shots in the LAPD. In the firing range scene of Magnum Force with David Soul as a killer cop named Davis, we learn that Davis and his rookie friends were Army Rangers (black berets). In another scene of Murder 101 John is wearing a baseball cap and the kind of gloves that don’t protect your fingers from being cut—the kind that the bleeding killer wore in Moonlighting’s "Gunfight at the So-So Corral."

In one episode of the TV series Magnum P.I. (‘80-’88) Tom Selleck as Thomas Magnum meets Lou Whitaker, 1978 American League Rookie of the Year, and Alan Trammell, Most Valuable Player of the ’84 World Series (won in 5 games on October 14). Magnum wears a Tiger baseball cap. To understand how all of these things are related you have to know that C. Thomas Howell wears a baseball cap in Protect and Serve. You have to know that C. Thomas Howell appears in The Hitcher with Rutger Hauer as John Ryder and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Nash. The chase scene with Lewis and Murphy in RoboCop has Joe in the black beret in the same frame with Bobby (Dressed to Kill) in the gray knit cap. Ray Wise, the guy without a cap (O.J. was supposed to have lost his) was my inspiration for the hitchhiker in the rainstorm metaphor. His character’s name is Nash.

All human beings make associations the same way I made mine when I was searching for a metaphor to say how unlikely it was for Fuhrman not to have noticed the clean soles of Murphy’s shoes. That process had to be at work in Murder in Brentwood when Fuhrman made three movie links in six consecutive paragraphs. Page 82 is where he calls himself one of the best pistol shots in the department with Brad Roberts a close second. Two paragraphs later, at the top of page 83 he makes a cop movie analogy followed in three paragraphs by an analogy to being on a movie set. It was like watching Clint Eastwood and David Soul as the ex-Marine and the ex-Ranger in Magnum Force, Mel Gibson as the ex-Green Beret in Lethal Weapon and Peter Weller as the dead cop resurrected to become RoboCop. The same association process had to be at work when Fuhrman linked the story of O.J. killing Ron and Nicole with the story he told for the first time in 1989 of O.J. breaking the windshield of his car. These things have all become action movie cliches.

The broken windshield is as much of an action movie cliché as the knit cap, the leather gloves and the three-way death struggle with a handsome hero coming to the rescue of a beautiful woman in distress. That’s Fuhrman’s explanation for the items so close to his hand in the pointing finger photo—the knit cap, the leather glove, the envelope with the glasses inside, the blood drops and the bloody heelprint.

Note how many of those elements are present in the chase scene with the gang’s white van in RoboCop. The guy in the knit cap is also wearing leather gloves. His feet are the only ones you see kicking down the doors of the van (Bundy gate). Note how close his left hand with the leather glove is to his right heel. Murphy shoots him in the right leg. Boddicker (Kirkwood Smith) orders his men to pitch him out of the van into the windshield of the pursuing police car. Note how close the glasses are to the knit cap and the leather glove of the bleeding man? Note where is left glove is on the ground in relation to his knit cap.

Paul Verhoeven uses the city of Detroit as a metaphor for all of America’s crime ridden inner cities. I did the same thing in my first novel, The Random Factor, because the image of the city is has so often been used as a subtle racist code and image warfare is a theme that runs through all of my books. Being a resident of Detroit gives me an advantage in capturing a realistic sense of place. Verhoeven didn’t even want to create a realistic sense of place. Unlike the maker’s of Action Jackson and Beverly Hills Cop who included enough Detroit landmarks to set the stage for where the action was supposed to be taking place, Verhoeven didn’t bother to use anything but the name. That was enough to call up televised images of the city from the ’67 riots to the violence outside of Tiger Stadium following the 1984 Tiger’s World Series victory over the San Diego Padres.

It was probably around that time that Fuhrman dropped in on O.J. and Nicole when O.J. cracked the windshield of his Mercedes Benz with the baseball bat. It’s probably one reason the Fuhrman collection contains so many references to Detroit. Fuhrman never does anything for one reason. Nobody does—but most people think that everybody does. I don’t think that Fuhrman’s decision to frame O.J. for murder had anything to do with the World Series victory of the Tigers in 1984. I don’t think he even knew what he would do to capitalize on O.J.’s name until the incident of New Years Day 1989 gave him a structure for manipulating the media that he could build on. I think that the ’84 series made a connection in his mind to O.J., Nicole and Jessica Savage that he couldn’t break.

Fuhrman was attracted to symbols of greatness. Ty Cobb, a hardcore racist, was one of the greatest baseball players ever to put on a Major League uniform. On his cap was the Old English D of the Detroit Tigers. Fuhrman was also sensitive about his MF initials. Only one MF in history was named Rookie of the Year, Tiger pitcher Mark Fidrych.

To Protect and Serve (’87) is the kind of mystery thriller that Charlie Lattimore in Murder 101 was teaching his students to write. It features Soul Man’s C. Thomas Howell as Phil Eagan, a cop in conflict with himself after watching fellow officers beat a robber to death with their night sticks and plant a knife on him (Fuhrman shot an ATM robber five times in 1987 and planted a knife on him). Eagan is something of a cowboy (Howell was a champion rodeo cowboy in real life) and he has an ex-girlfriend who is given to him as a partner to keep him in check. Note the Detroit Tiger baseball cap he’s wearing and the glasses he takes off when he gets into the car with her. The glasses that Ron brought to Nicole’s the night they died were found by a waitress next to a curb where she saw Lewis, Juditha, Dominique and Denise Brown getting into Dominique’s Jeep. Does the name "Lewis" remind you of RoboCop? Do the glasses remind you of Murder 101? Doesn’t the whole damn case look like the applied lessons of Charlie Lattimore?

Charlie says, "When plotting a suspense story it’s a good idea to start with a double strand—the crime filament and the man/woman relationship. The possibility of romance always gives the story an additional element of suspense. Sex and love provide the most common motive for murder." Fuhrman’s stories before the murders of being Nicole’s secret lover and afterwards of O.J. killing her in a jealous rage also follow the rule. Many other parts of his stories are variations on Murder 101 themes including the part about the real killer being the secret lover, a family man with a girl about Sydney’s age and the lead detective in the case

It may appear that we have taken another sidetrack to Murder 101. We have only made a stop on the same tracks running through To Protect and Serve to pick up a passenger. You’ll know him when you see him in the context of Charlie’s escape when the authorities think he’s a killer.

Charlie switchs clothes with John and has John wear his hair like Charlie. John, hiding his face, walks like Charlie to Charlie’s office past a staff worker while Charlie walks past the cops and escapes in the trunk of Laura’s (Dey Young) car (Fuhrman’s suggestion that plastic in the rear cargo area of O.J.’s Bronco was for a body). A cop (Jack Thibeau of Action Jackson with Carl Withers and Bob Minor, and The Hitcher with C. Thomas Howell and Jennifer Jason Leigh) stops Laura at a roadblock and finds a man’s shoe in the back seat. He lets her go when she tells him that the shoe belongs to her brother.

Here we have the old switch-a-roo again, with police following clothes without questioning who’s wearing them. In the Bundy case, police did the same thing with the shoes, the cap, and the gloves that they presumed were O.J.’s because of where they found them. That’s what happens to C. Thomas Howell as Jim in The Hitcher and why you may be getting flashes of the TV series Twin Peaks.

Twin Peaks? Where the hell did Twin Peaks come from?

Think about all the names and actors we’ve seen in this chapter. Think of all the "French connections" and how all of that comes together with Fuhrman’s theory of O.J. planning to wrap Nicole’s body in the plastic that he found in the storage compartment of the Bronco. Jack Thibeau’s role in Murder 101 connects him to Laura and a body in a trunk. The Hitcher connects him to Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a murder victim. Her name connects her to Nash, a brutal killer in RoboCop. Ray Wise who plays Nash the killer in RoboCop is Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks—the father of Laura Palmer. For most of its 29 episodes it’s a series that asks the question, who killed Laura Palmer? Her father killed her. Her body was found wrapped in plastic. Series regulars include Lara (remember the names Laura and Sara in Sleeping With the Enemy?) Flynn Boyle and Sherilyn Fenn (Laura in Fatal Instinct) as Audrey.

For my French Connection hypothesis to be correct, any reference to oral sex would have to involve Sherilyn Fenn’s character (Diary of a Hitman) Audrey. What do you think of this: When Special agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) asks Audrey whether she prefers her ice cream in a cup or on a cone she tell him that she prefers the cone. She says, "I like to lick."

Now ice cream becomes a French connection. We know that Nicole stopped for ice cream with the kids on the 12^th. The kind of ice cream she had probably didn’t matter to the killer as much as the fact that she went to the ice cream parlor that night, which links her to the ice cream parlor scene with Nick Nolte, Juliet Lewis and Jessica Lange in Cape Fear. Until I reached this part of this chapter I never would have given Nicole’s or Jessica Lange’s ice cream a Freudian interpretation. Now when I think what Lange licked off of the straw in that scene I don’t think, milkshake. I think, French Vanilla milkshake—and the milk that has to spill into the ice cream to make it. That’s how the Fuhrman collection’s spilt milk relates to the ice cream on Bundy and to Fuhrman’s explanation that had it in her hands. He says she put it down to pick up one of the kids—an eight year old girl or a six year old boy.

In that context milk isn’t milk anymore and ice cream isn’t ice cream. What do you think now of Fuhrman’s advice about the Presidential "cream" on Monica Lewinski’s dress? That was the third thing I thought of when I saw what Jessica Lange—wearing a thumb ring like Nicole’s—did with the milkshake on the straw. The second thing I thought of was the scene in The Terminator where the boy drops a scoop of ice cream into the pocket of Sarah Connor’s apron. I went back to the tape and checked the sequence for anything relevant to Nicole. I found it in the date on Sarah Connor’s time card (5/19/’84 – Nicole’s birthday) and the other Sara Connor, age 35 (Nicole’s age when she died) and mother of two that the terminator kills. The first thing I thought of was the prostitute in To Protect and Serve wiping her mouth on the cop’s tie.

Consider the scene in To Protect and Serve, where a prostitute runs out of a client’s apartment barefoot too see about her car being towed away. When she returns, the client has been killed and a nightstick shoved in his mouth. She flees, leaving her shoes behind. Later, Det. Eagan (C. Thomas Howell), who has been set up to look like a murderer, gets a call that brings him to the hooker’s apartment. He follows a woman dressed like her to an alley where she reveals herself as his partner Harriet (Lezlie Dean) wearing a wig and the prostitute’s clothes. The real killer is their police captain who appears from the shadows and knocks Harriet to the ground. She falls to her left side. In one freeze frame the wig covers her face (like Nicole’s hair) and the position of her body is nearly identical to one in Fuhrman’s book of Nicole’s body, only you can see that she is wearing shoes. In another scene she takes off her shoes—which is consistent with the recurring Fuhrman collection themes of ghosts, walking dead (D.O.A) and the resurrected dead. Fuhrman is the only person connected to the case who talks about Nicole taking off her shoes.

If we added the pool of blood and the position of Nick Nolte’s body lying on his side in the blood in Cape Fear we’d have another significant component of the picture in Fuhrman’s book of Nicole’s body on the murder scene. Take another look at the position of Nicole’s body in the pool of blood and the position of Harriet’s body as a decoy cop wearing the prostitute’s clothes in To Protect and Serve—the prostitute who took off her shoes before going outside and becoming involved in a murder. Remember Maria in The Legacy (’79), the Italian former prostitute (pizza menu under Nicole’s feet) drowned by black magic in Jason Mountolive’s swimming pool? If we put her swimsuit on the cop posing as a prostitute in To Protect and Serve, how close do you think we’d come to the crime scene photo of Nicole in the pool of blood? Factoring in the position of Maria’s body on the bottom of the pool and Fuhrman’s references to O.J.’s swimming pool where his two-year-old daughter drowned in 1979, which explanation makes more sense, coincidence or inspiration through the Eyes of Laura Mars?

I saw The Legacy shortly after reading the book. I thought that Katherine Ross as Margaret and Sam Elliot as Pete were miscast. Also, the way Maria drowned was so original and surprising to me that I had to read the passage two or three times to be sure I got it right. She bumped her head on the hard surface of the water. It was as though the surface had suddenly become an impenetrable layer of ice like the Detroit River in Hudini. In the Legacy movie it looked like a flexible plastic sheet. The clouded color and diffusion of the water as her body settled to the bottom only reinforced the idea that I was seeing her through a sheet of plastic.

The book also made it clear that Maria had been the lowest kind of street whore before somehow rising to the level of the highest class of madam. She was the first to die. The question of how she was killed and who might have done it was thus wrapped up in the question of whether or not her past or present occupation had anything to do with the killer’s motive. None of that came across in the movie. What came across to me in the position of Nicole’s body was that it was carefully posed. I thought at first that the killer’s inspiration came from the famous Mathew Brady photo of the dead Confederate soldier in the Devil’s Den at Getteysberg.

The drowning scene in The Legacy gave me another candidate for the killer’s inspiration. Fuhrman’s idea of the body wrapped in a plastic sheet lent more credence to that idea—an idea that had to have come from the movie, as opposed to the book. But the fact that the murdered woman and her murderer were Devil worshipers linked Brady’s Devil’s Den photo to the movie in a way that few people would have been able to see. Mark Fuhrman did not say he was a Civil War buff. He kept his interest in war and history as general as possible by saying only that he was a "war and history buff." Seeing Charlotte Rampling, who shares Fuhrman’s birthday, in the role of a Devil worshiper and astrologer named Margaret answered any question I had on Devil links to Fuhrman and the "artistic" placement of Nicole’s body at the foot of her stairs.

I started this exploration of Fuhrman and the movies with Jack the Ripper, the 1988 television movie about the 1888 unsolved murder of prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of London, England. In the first half hour I saw so many links to Mark Fuhrman’s description of himself that I knew in my bones there would be many more. My bones didn’t lie.

The picture of the stereotypical black pimp abusing his white whore that Fuhrman drew of O.J. and Nicole in the baseball bat incident had bull shit written all over it. His description of O.J. as a Jekyll and Hyde personality had a much truer ring to it, but only because I had seen that character so many times in the movies. When I saw him again in Jack the Ripper along with a lead detective with dark brown leather gloves who was as brilliant as Fuhrman claimed to be, I knew I had something. The display of Annie Chapman at the foot of her stairs (Nicole’s body) and the particular constellation of clues at her feet (the items at Ron Goldman’s feet) made Jack the Ripper the smoking gun. In almost every movie I tracked there, there was another smoking gun. The position of Harriet’s body in To Protect and Serve is just one more. Mark Fuhrman got his ideas for the killing and the framing from the movies.

Here’s another smoking gun from the same movie. Rabbits abound in the Fuhrman collection. In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman found an excuse to mention a prize-winning rabbit named Cookie, the name of Charlotte Rampling’s daughter in D.O.A. Her character has the initials M.F., like Mia Ferro in Rosemary’s Baby (MF as in motherfucker—which is what Miguel Ferrer as Bob Morton tells RoboCop he’s going to be). In To Protect and Serve, rabbits are drug runners. The station wagon they are going to meet has the license plate number 2K OJ 779. I don’t know what the 2K could have meant to anyone, but the OJ is self-explanatory and the 779 couldn’t be more O.J. The seventh month is July. Seven is the date he sometimes gives for his birthday. His real birthday is the ninth. And what of the station wagon? How do you think the driver parks it when the police come to investigate?

Take a wild guess.