The question was whether people of all colors could imagine a scenario with a different killer—perhaps a white cop in a dark blue knit cap like Brad Dourif's character in Amos and Andrew. Could they imagine him on a cell phone coordinating his actions with a watcher on Rockingham? Could they put aside that ridiculous story "O.J." told of cutting himself on his cell phone and imagine a killer with a knife who wasn't black or motivated to kill because of his frustrated obsession with white women? Could they imagine O.J. Simpson as anything other than a black Jekyll and Hyde? These images of O.J. came straight out of the 1989 report Mark Fuhrman made to the city attorney. Though we hadn't seen or heard that report at the time, we sure got the picture. But who was buying it?

The media were buying it. They were buying it, selling it and making their own contributions to the new O.J. image. The "cut-myself-on-my-cell-phone" story, for example, didn’t come from O.J. or Fuhrman. It came from National Public Radio commentator Judy Muller. That is, it didn’t come directly from Mark Fuhrman. Who knows where she got that damaging little lie? The point is she reported it as thought it were true at a time when she had access to information the rest of us didn’t have. She did not retract it when the Lange/Vannatter interview transcript it supposedly came from entered the public domain and exposed the lie for what it was.

To this day (June 8, 1999) she has not retracted it. To this day many people who believe O.J. is a murderer count that obvious lie someone else put into his mouth as one of many he told to hide his obvious guilt.

Muller’s cell phone story was one of many such tales told by journalists and commentators with the national and international networks covering the news. They didn’t exactly report the news. In many cases they invented it or gave it a decidedly pro-prosecution spin. They did so with a "slight" misquote here, a "minor" omission there and an open contempt for any point of view that didn’t agree with the one laid out for them on the 13^th of June by Mark Fuhrman.

While most African-Americans became increasingly suspicions of the quality of evidence they were seeing and hearing a majority of whites were convinced in the first few days by the quantity alone. The thinking went something like this: There are bound to be a few errors and loose ends with so much evidence to sift through but there was so much of it that the bad stuff doesn’t matter.

For those who shared the African-American perspective, the wrong things mattered very much because they were the kinds of wrong things that made the "right" things suspect. The motive and the method attributed to O.J. by the police and prosecutors didn't ring true. There was something wrong about the cut on O.J.'s finger that was supposed to implicate the killer but nobody saw on O.J. during his flight to Chicago. There was too much evidence that fit a stereotype of black men with white women and there was no presumption of innocence for the role of the police or the prosecutors in their investigation.

For those who shared the majority opinion, the motives and the means of a police conspiracy to frame Simpson was too absurd to contemplate. The fact that so many black people did give that idea any credence was proof of their racial prejudice. The fact that a large minority of whites saw things the way the large majority of blacks did was proof to the majority of whites that celebrity status counted far more than color. It was proof that O.J.'s popularity could blind all weak-minded people to the obvious truth. Sure they believed in the legal presumption of innocence and were all for seeing that O.J. got a fair and impartial trial. But as soon as a "predominately black" jury was picked to hear the case, the media began to question that jury’s emotional and intellectual capability to render a just verdict on the evidence.

No matter what color you were you had only to agree with the minority to get a taste of "the black experience."

Thanks to Mark Fuhrman's role in the investigation, his taped remarks and the use to which O.J.'s defense team put that information, "the race card" was as familiar a part of the case as the bloody gloves and the Bruno Magli shoes. It meant that appeals to race were being used in place of appeals to reason. It's time to set the record straight.

O.J. Simpson killed no one. He was not a wife-beater and there was no evidence that he was either that couldn’t be traced to Mark Fuhrman and the movies he was most likely to

In Magic, Corky’s trunk contains a pair of boots with a distinctive tread pattern that could have belonged only to his throat-slashing dummy Fats. Under the boots is a bloody wig. So, what do we have here, beginning with the killer in the mirror and the innocent dummy who looks so guilty? We have a wig (hair that comes off); hair that comes off (knit cap with hair in it); knit cap with hair in it; (large head) and a man with a large head in a knit cap with hair that came off of his head

Isn’t it interesting how the introduction of mirrors expands the range of observable possibilities? A mirror doesn’t really give you a duplicate image; it gives you the exact reverse. A right-handed man can now appear to be left-handed, right-handed or ambidextrous depending on how you choose to look at him. And if you expand the reversal idea as William Goldman did metaphorically in Magic you can have mirrors that transform the metaphorical world of symbols into the literal world of reality. They can turn good people into evil ones, innocent people into guilty ones and victims into perpetrators. Everything with an opposite can be that opposite, a choice between them or a combination of both. White can be black, black and white can be color, male can be female.

In actor/director Kenneth Branaugh’s Dead Again (1991), private detective Mike Church got the shock of his 1991 life when he looked into a mirror under hypnosis regression and saw a 1947 female murder victim named Margaret. In 1947 the innocent man accused of killing her was her husband, a famous entertainer named Roman Strauss. Roman had told Margaret that they were two halves of the same person. Roman looked like Mike, except that Roman had more hair. Mike lost that hair as he looked at himself in a mirror every day and occasionally shed his own blood with a sharp cutting instrument. Roman had a beard.

There’s almost no end to what you can do with mirrors and good reasons for Fuhrman to find the magic-in-the-mirror idea so compelling. With it, wimpy Clark Kent, when he loses his glasses and parts his hair on the right and he becomes Superman (1978) with his hair parted on the left. If you can do all of that with little more than hair and glasses, think what else you can do. Think what Corky did with Fats.

You know that Fats the Dummy couldn’t have stabbed the ex-football hero with the dark blue knit cap in the abdomen and cut his throat. It had to be Corky. Yet, for a moment—perhaps a long moment, it sure as hell looked like Fats was the one who did it. Why, apart from the menacing way he was made to look when the knife appeared to be in his hand?

Fats…that is, Corky speaking for Fats, had an answer. He said that he didn’t do magic; he did tricks. "You don’t know how many people want to believe in magic."

O.J.’s prosecutors accused his attorneys of using "smoke and mirrors" to hide the truth of their client’s obvious guilt. It was a poor analogy. Magicians use the obvious to make the smoke and mirrors work. That’s what "Fats" was talking about when he said, "I’m the misdirection, dummy." The more Corky was able to focus the audience’s attention on him, the less able the audience was to give their attention to what Corky was doing. It’s like pointing your finger in the direction you want someone to look, the way Fuhrman did on Bundy and Rockingham. The natural response is to do just that. Once you do, it becomes an enormous challenge to see what else might be going on to give you a false sense of reality. If you accept what appears to be true on its face,

Once Fuhrman’s pointing finger became the center of a cluster of evidence that included a men’s size 12 Bruno Magli Lorenzo heel print no smoke or mirrors—or computer-generated photos were necessary. He had already proposed a bleeding killer theory to explain the blood drops next to a similar pattern of shoeprints. Now, all he needed was a witness to tie O.J. to the killer’s shoes. Denise Brown was that witness. There could have been dozens of others depending on how many people noticed the kind of shoes he wore  to his youngest daughter’s dance recital the night of the murders.

Put yourself in Fuhrman’s shoes—size 12, whatever-you-want-them to-be. You want to be rich and popular like O.J. Simpson. You want to be seen on television like O.J. Simpson. And you want to write a screenplay that will make you as well respected among "your people" as Simpson is across the board. You know you’re smart because of your ability to anticipate important events that catch others by surprise, your ability to understand the vital significance of details others dismiss, and your ability to see meaningful patterns where others see chaos. You consistently get the right answers that other’s get wrong.

Your name is Mark Fuhrman.

Your only major drawback is your lack of originality. You have learned to compensate by mixing and matching characters, props and situations the way Hollywood does to create the illusion of something new. Above all, you have the guts to do what others only fantasize about doing to get what you want. Most people regard that separation between thinking and doing as an essential part of being civilized where some thoughts and actions are concerned. Most people call it social responsibility. Some call it a social conscience. You don’t know what it means to have a conscience. To you, conscience is just another name for weakness.

Now, let’s ask the question again: Can a cop be a killer? If the cop is Mark Fuhrman, what’s to stop him?

John Carpenter’s Eyes of Laura Mars co-written by David Zelag Goodman, Det. John Neville is not only a killer cop, he’s a killer cop with a split personality who stabs people to death and frames an innocent man. He’s the lead detective on the case of a woman he murdered with a pair of scissors (two knives in one). The woman’s violent death, coinciding with the release of the book The Eyes of Mars, a photo essay by photographer Laura Mars filled with carefully posed scenes of violent death, sends book sales soaring.

Though she doesn’t know what had been happening to her for years until someone she knows gets killed, Laura has been literally seeing the killings through John’s eyes as they happened. Oblivious to the fact that John is the killer, she uses a video camera and a television monitor to explain her visions to him. She shows him how the killer’s field of vision as seen through the camera superimposes itself on hers so that what she sees is like the image on a television screen. Unfortunately during those violent spells when she can see what he sees, he never looks in a mirror.

In the climactic scene where Tommy Lee Jones as John reveals his other self to Laura, he lets us in on the ttraumatic event that made him the way he is. You see, his mother was a prostitute in Washington DC who neglected him as a child. What happened to her made an indelible impression on him—the way Fuhrman’s encounter with O.J. and the shattered glass of the Mercedes made and indelible impression on him. John recalled his father, that is the father of his other self, killing their mother. "Outraged by the condition of the child, he slashed her pretty throat for her right on the spot."

Don’t let any of this confuse you with all the hollering O.J. did in the background of Nicole’s 911 tape about her sexual conduct in front of the children and Fuhrman’s contributions to the idea that O.J. slit their mother’s throat. Forget the two selves John sees in the mirror as a possible allusion to two children as well as two adult personalities inside of one man’s body. Don’t consider what a nazi would think of a white woman with two black children (the ultimate form of child abuse). Forget the fact that John smashed his way into Laura’s apartment or that she called 911.