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Chapter 18

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Chapter 17

More Time Travel

When you add up the number of attempts to set the clock back on the Bundy killings it becomes abundantly clear that somebody planned it that way and that a boatload of things went wrong.

Suppose you came across these items in your investigation of the double-homicide in Nicole Brown Simpson’s front yard:

• Police photos showing Nicole’s analogue wristwatch on her left wrist and the face of the watch against the sidewalk.
• Autopsy records showing the hands of the watch stopped at 10:03.
• A call to a nearby police precinct at 10:30 from a woman asking if anyone had reported a double homicide in the area.
• A call to 911 from a woman shortly before or after 10:00 asking if the police were "sitting on two bodies" in the "800 block" of Bundy.
• A splintered piece of a white picket fence photographed in front of the only suspect’s white SUV.
• A witness in an apartment overlooking the alley where the stick matches the remains of the fence reports seeing a man in a light-colored SUV somewhere between 10:00 and 10:45.
• The female victim’s dog is found with blood on its paws.
• A dog’s bloody pawprints leave a trail out of the yard and south down the block to the corner.
• A neighbor reports hearing a dog bark in the area of the killing at 10:28. The clock was set 5 minutes ahead so the real time was 10:23.
• A neighbor reports hearing at 10:20 what you’d expect to hear if the victims were already dead—a dog’s "plaintive whale."

When you add up those clues and apply a little common sense you get the time of death and a description of the getaway vehicle. You also get a false time of death created by someone’s ability to set the hands of the watch back, to arrange the phone calls, anticipate widely different reports on the barking and to foresee how selectively the DA would use them. The only other alternative is a time traveler.

In Millennium the time travelers’ mission aboard flight 835 (800 block of Bundy) fated to collide with a DC-10 killing all aboard both planes, has the effect of making the digital watches that survive run backward. The analogue watches do not survive in working order. They are stopped at the time the planes, loaded with their owners, hit the ground scattering their personal belongings all over.

Phone company records tell us that O.J. made two cell phone calls to his girlfriend Paula Barbiari on the evening of the 12^th. One was at 10:03 and the other 10:04. O.J. could not have been framed using the 10:03 time without the aid of a remarkable coincidence or a Rockingham observer relaying his estimate of the time to the killer en route to Bundy. Everyone on the prosecution side of the Simpson case ignored Nicole’s broken watch. It didn’t work with any of the "solid" evidence of his guilt apart from the way Fuhrman told the story with a "flexible" timeline.

Most of us outside of the criminal justice system don’t know how bad we are at judging time and putting the events in their proper sequence. People watching a violent two minute struggle, for example, will frequently report that it lasted ten minutes or longer. It is not unusual for people to be off by more than an hour in guessing when something started or stopped. You often get a spread of five minutes or more simply in how different people set their watches and clocks.

The barking dogs on Bundy would, therefore, have helped the killer in giving the police and prosecutors enough witness to virtually insure that one would be found to support his false timeline against Simpson. At the point when prosecutors believe they have enough information to win a conviction, building a case and justifying the arrest becomes the name of the game. If the person who actually committed the crime gets tried, convicted, sentenced and put to death where applicable, that’s O.K., too. But after the arrest, the first priority of prosecutors is to win.

Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood timeline begins with Nicole looking down on O.J. in the killer’s clothes "sometime after 10:00," through her upstairs "rear window" the way Sylvia sees the killer Chris Henderson from "The Bedroom Window." Henderson doesn’t leave behind a cap with his minority group’s type of hair in it to tell on him. His red hair does that all by itself. He also drives a Ford truck. As Fuhrman tells the story, allowing for the fact that Nicole’s watch probably wasn’t set for precisely the right time when it was working, any time between 10:02 and 10:05 would have worked. You need only make the logical assumption that O.J. placed his last cell phone call seconds before Nicole saw him get out of his Bronco and a minute or two, in real time, after he knocked Nicole to the ground with "a pounding blow." According to his story, that’s when Ron Goldman came through the front gate unexpectedly (and inexplicably) and saw Nicole lying unconscious on the ground.

The 10:03 time on Nicole’s watch fits that scenario pretty well. It shows how the watch could have been stopped as she fell before she was killed, if you’re willing to accept the idea that she fell on it again after the killer lifted her up and cut her throat.

Fuhrman’s scenario didn’t fit Marcia Clark’s theory of a killing time that began rather than ended with the barking dogs. It didn’t fit Lange and Vannatter’s theory that the witnesses who said all was quiet on Bundy before 10:30 were right about that one "minor" detail. It didn’t fit Chris Darden’s scenario of a slow-burning fuse that started when Paula Barbiari rejected O.J. earlier that day and he couldn’t reach her at 10:03 or 10:04. Darden has O.J. simmering for a long time after that while "laying in wait" for Nicole to come out of the house.

Theories aside, Juditha Brown’s telephone records prove that Marcia Clark’s start time for the killing at 10:15 was as demonstrably wrong as Juditha’s first estimate of having talked with her daughter last at 11:00. The phone records said that someone calling from the Brown’s exchange in Dana Point California connected with someone at Nicole’s exchange in Brentwood and that they talked for 11 minutes between 10:17 and 10:28. Nicole was dead before 11:00 and alive after 10:20.

In military time 10:28 PM is 22:28—the extraordinary ratio of actual votes to possible votes by which Mark "The Bird" Fidrych was named the American League Rookie of the Year in 1976. Mark Fuhrman completed his rookie year with the LAPD in 1976.

Watch for the point of no return in the 1990 Robert Zemekis film Back to the Future III. You will see it on a military-style model for a Sunday time travel operation. The operation involves a stolen locomotive, some special logs to raise the temperature of the engine’s furnace and a gull-winged DeLorian time machine on a train track. The model is not to scale, a point that Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly is unimpressed with given the artistry and elaborate detail that obviously went into its construction.

Mark Fuhrman leaves the same impression with the artistry and detail that went into some of his Murder in Brentwood drawings. Moreover, his drawing of the Rockingham estate shares some interesting features with Dr. Brown’s model in Back to the Future III. If you substitute the walls and fences going around O.J.’s property for the railroad tracks going around the model, the windmill at the point of no return starts looking a lot like an air conditioner. It’s too much like a giant fan—a fan of any sort being the closest thing to an air conditioner one was likely to find in 1885. The 22:28 time would have been past the point of no return in a murder/frame-up. And wireless communication between conspirators as you see with Marty and Doc would have been necessary for last minute adjustments to unanticipated events like an 11-minute phone conversation with a woman who was supposed to be dead.

Like The Butcher’s Wife, Back to the Future III is a comedy where nobody gets killed. That doesn’t stop it from being a rich source of ideas for a gruesome double homicide and a frame-up. Just as any falling body—from a water glass to a jumbo jet—can represent a falling human body, any life or death struggle involving two men and a woman can stand for any other. In Liz Powell’s vision, an elevator and a morgue represent an airplane—the same airplane; the nurse represents many people as well as the angle of death; the objects crashing to the floor stand for an airplane bursting into flames. That’s the nature of symbolism and why most dreams appear to be utterly ridiculous when taken literally.

Any big role for shoes or bare feet would be a meaningful link to Bundy provided there were other links to New York, Bloomingdale’s, Bruno Magli Lorenzos, O.J. or Nicole. Wet ground combined with the conspicuous sound ("Twenty Two," Ghost) or sight of shoes or bare feet (Die Hard, The Butcher’s Wife) would be significant because the ground was wet on January 1, 1989 when Nicole ran barefoot to Officer John Edwards crying, "He’s going to kill me!" It would be significant because the killing ground on June 12, 1994 was wet with the blood of Ron and Nicole, because her feet were again bare and because the prosecution of O.J. Simpson for her murder merged those two events into one.

What gives The Butcher’s Wife an extra ration of conformation for the significance of certain actors and directors to the killer is the fact that I was looking specifically for shoes with Demi Moore. Her marriage to Bruce Willis was a direct link to Bruno. Her name in We’re No Angels and Ghost was a double link to the name Molly. Blame it on Rio put shoes in her hands as a character named Nicole with a forbidden attachment to an older man. I hadn’t seen We’re No Angels, but the link to Ghost was already present in the title and in the name of her character.

The Butcher’s Wife, set in New York, was release in 1991, the same year Bloomingdale’s in New York first sold Bruno Magli Lorenzos. Mark Fuhrman became a homicide detective in 1991. If he made that career move to frame O.J. with Bruce and Demi in mind and his eyes mostly on their feet, it had to be apparent in The Butcher’s Wife. We’re talking about a ’91 Demi Moore movie with her as a blond and a title as evocative of a bloody killer as you can get. That’s why The Butcher’s Wife was a good place to look for her doing something with shoes that were evocative of Nicole’s Bruno Maglis and why I got what I expected.

Mary Steenburgen’s role in The Butcher’s Wife served as another check on my approach to Fuhrman and the movies. If time travel loomed as large in his mind as I thought it did, the fact that Back to the Future III was her second time travel movie and she was the voice of. Mrs. Brown in the ’91 animated series, had to be a big part of his timeline for Bundy. In The Butcher’s Wife, Molly the character who insured that her character would become the butcher’s wife with a charm that sealed their love forever. Forever is a long time—unless you have a time machine.

In Back to the Future III, Mary Steenburgen plays Clara Clayton, the woman fated to become Dr. Emmett Brown’s wife in 1885 California and for all time before and after. I wasn’t looking for a wild horse or a horse tied to a white picket fence, although it would not have surprised me to see a white bronco kicking down a white picket fence. Nor was I looking for or would I have been surprised to see an explosion with pieces of a white picket fence flying through the air. Back to the Future III has something very close to that. But I wasn’t looking for that, either.

Perhaps you can guess what I was looking for? I’ll give you a hint….

In the timeline before Doc. Brown saves Clara Clayton for the first time in Back to the Future III, she fell to her death in a buckboard pulled by runaway horses. Mary Steenburgen as Clara Clayton appears to be headed for the same fate in an "iron horse" diving in flames into a deep ravine until Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Emmett L. Brown comes to her rescue again. The time traveler’s intervention in that wreck links Steenburgen as Clara to the airline stewardess’ in Millennium and Christopher Lloyd to the NTSB plane crash investigators Kris Kristofferson and Lloyd Bockner. That’s three time travel links to Mary Steenburgen all joined by her role in Back to the Future III as Clara.

I knew that a California setting meant as much for the Clara link I was seeking as New York had been for Mrs. Bruno’s shoes. Something about Clara Clayton and going back in time seemed to be present in Fuhrman’s private life as well as his official involvement with Nicole. It wasn’t the obvious chain of associations between Barbara, the name of his first wife, and Barbara Hershey as Harriet Bird falling to her death in The Natural, or Barbara Nichols as Elizabeth in The Twilight Zone’s "Twenty Two." I didn’t understand, at first, why I flashed on Hans (alias Bill Clay) plunging to his death from 30 stories up in Die Hard before I pictured the flying car on fire in The Package. I wondered if John unfastening Holly’s watch that Hans was holding onto like a safety belt had anything to do with it.

As much as the flaming car in The Package resembled the flaming locomotive in Back to the Future III, I quickly realized that Holly’s watch was as important a link to "Twenty Two" as anything could be. It was as important as Clara standing in the door of a flying machine like a flight attendant with Doc. wearing a brown leather glove and holding a package containing an 1885 picture of him, Marty and the tower clock in a frame. All of these movies at some level are about seeing the future and changing it. You don’t have to see Holly’s watch hit the ground to know that it stops when Hans does. On Bundy you have a watch that appears to have stopped when Nicole hit the ground. But in Fuhrman’s notes, he mentions something by her left leg that wasn’t there—a pizza menu.

If Steenburgen’s role as Clara made all of the connections in Fuhrman’s mind that I thought they did, I was looking for something that combined the name "Clara" (close to Cara) with "pizza" and Nicole’s dead body. A tall order to be sure, but one demanded by Fuhrman’s combination of Cara and pizza in his fifth note ("CARA 575-5713 CAL PIZZA KITCHEN"). Any way you slice it, Cara California Pizza had to mean a great deal to Fuhrman or he wouldn’t have written it down and assigned a place for it next to Nicole’s body that didn’t exist in the real world.

If I was correct in using the line of reasoning with Clara and the pizza in Back to the Future III that I used with Demi More and the shoes in The Butcher’s wife, the link had to be there. It had to be there in a way that was as obvious and important to the plot of Back to the Future III as the shoes were to the plot of The Butcher’s Wife. I went past it three times before it jumped out at me in the name on the bottom of Emmett Brown’s tombstone illuminated in the darkness by his flashlight. It says, "Erected in eternal memory by his beloved Clara." That was it, Tombstone Pizza.

The numbers on Brown’s tombstone, with September as the 9^th month, give you the time travel dates of 1985 (Fuhrman first contact with Nicole) to 1885. You need to make only one pertinent adjustment to match all of the numbers on Nicole’s handwritten note. In Psycho Marian sits at a small table prior to her unscheduled date with Norman Bates doing the figuring you have to do to match the numbers on Nicole’s handwritten note—the note Fuhrman found on her coffee table. In Back to the Future III Clara sits at a small table writing something. We never learn what it is so we can take nothing from it to change the number on the tombstone that we need for Cara 575-5713 Cal Pizza Kitchen. Brown’s tombstone has 8s but no 3s. To get the 3 you have to erase part of an 8. The point of Marty going back to 1885 for Doc Brown is to erase the date of death on his tombstone "erected by his beloved Clara."

Before we continue, we should recap what Fuhrman said about Nicole’s last few minutes of life. He begins "Sometime after 10:00" with Nicole on the phone preparing to order a takeout meal. Takeout menus nearby suggests that Cara’s California Pizza Kitchen number was the last thing she wrote before she saw O.J. Fuhrman imagines her going to the kitchen and picking up a butcher knife. For some reason she lays it on the kitchen counter and goes outside to talk to O.J. They get into an argument. He loses his temper and knocks her to the ground….

Now, back to Clara coming to the door to talk to Doc Brown…They argue. She hits him. She goes back into the house and falls on her bed sobbing. With a little Psycho here, a little Candyman there, you have enough of everything else you need in that sequence to tell Fuhrman’s whole story of the pizza menu by Nicole’s left leg that wasn’t there.

Tombstone Pizza had been around for 33 years when it sponsored a series of baseball cards in the spring of 1994. Tombstone Pizza was a subsidiary of Kraft foods which was a subsidiary of Phillip Morris Tobacco Co. Phillip Morris made Marlboro cigarettes. A Marlboro cigarette that Fuhrman neglected to mention in his book was found by Vannatter and Lange on Rockingham where Fuhrman said he found the glove and the stick from a broken picket fence. A "Marlboro Man," coincidentally, uses leather gloves to mend broken fences of another sort. Barbwire fences. Fuhrman made quite a bit of a wad of bubble gum, like the gum that used to come with baseball cards, but said nothing about cigarettes and took pains not to call himself a cowboy.

We haven’t finished with Cara. We’re just setting the sage for the coup de grace with Fuhrman’s pizza note at the center and the Marlboro Man riding tall in the saddle. Do you recall that TV commercial? You would if you were Fuhrman’s age, if you were raised in Washington and dreamed of moving to Idaho, living on a ranch and riding horses. You’d remember the Marlboro Man if you wanted to be remembered as well as he was and be as successful at selling premature death. You might think of him when you see the barbwire salesman in Back to the Future III who sits behind Clara on the train not knowing who she is and tells of a man’s broken heart over a woman whose name he’s trying to remember. He gets it on the third try. His second recollection is Sara. The first name out of his mouth is Cara.

Cara brings the "iron horse" to a sudden stop, races to find Doc. and eventually marries him. Nicole’s German name was changed to Brown when her mother married Lou Brown. In a scene early in the movie Doc tells Marty that his family name was changed from Von Braun to Brown. In a 1985 TV mini-series Steenburgen plays Nicole Warren.

In Back to the Future III, Marty drives the DeLorian time machine into a storm of galloping Indians in 1885 and has his fuel line punctured by an arrow. The loss of fuel necessitates an inventive way to push the DeLorian up to speed for "the juice" in the vehicle to kick in and return Doc and Marty to their temporal starting point of 1985. They learn that a contemporary locomotive under the right conditions will work. One of those conditions is a super-heated boiler for which Doc. Brown has manufactured three specially treated logs to fire sequentially, in escalating bursts of heat until the train literally blows its top. The logs we see on the seat of the DeLorian when Marty lifts the gull-wing door are 3 and 2. 32. The Juice.

Fuhrman traveled back in time from 1989 (Millennium) to 1985 by way of his report to the city attorney on his first attempt to rescue Nicole Brown Simpson from O.J.’s violent temper. That letter was crucial in the LA County District Attorney’s case of murder against O.J.

Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, looking uncomfortably like Mary Steenburgen and Obba Babatunde in Philadelphia (1993), from a frame-up artist’s point of view, argued that it was a murder fueled by jealousy. The story they told of O.J. abusing Nicole over the years, began with the 1985 baseball bat incident (log one), built up to the beating he allegedly gave her in 1989 (log two), and culminated in the 1994 murder (log three). From somewhere other than the evidence they presented in court, they drew a picture of O.J.’s frustrated lust for two white women burning hotter and hotter until he flew over the edge of civilized conduct and killed one of them in a fiery rage.

Clark, by the way, is Clara with a "k" in place of the final "a."

"K" in baseball is a strikeout. A strikeout is a pitcher’s (Mark "The Bird" Fidrych) single-handed victory over the man with the bat (O.J. Simpson). It is theoretically possible for one pitcher to chalk up 27 strikeouts in on game. But in all of recorded major league history no one has ever done it.

One telltale sign of a frame-up in the Simpson trial was the number of "K’s" delivered by the prosecution—way too many. The closer you look at them the more you see how slanted a view you have to take to see any of them. That’s where Fuhrman, Steenburgen and Clark intersect in Philadelphia, with Jason Robards as the man she’s pulling out all the stops to defend. Robards is the most powerful figure in the case—the man who engineered the frame-up that Steenburgen presents in court as the truth. He’s the man in the red tie with small white diamonds that look like dots.

Philadelphia, stars Tom Hanks as Andy, an attorney illegally fired from his job because he has AIDS (O.J.’s home was illegally searched), and Denzel Washington as a homophobic attorney who is eventually persuaded to help him. At the heart of things in Philadelphia is the idea that people ascribe to individuals the traits they see in unsympathetic group (wife-beaters, people who engage in taboo sex). Washington was a DA in Ricochet and a reporter in The Pelican Brief, a movie featuring a murder in a gay porno theatre. A common theme in pornography is "forbidden sex" between black men and white women.

The unsympathetic group in Philadelphia is homosexual men. Blood evidence is a big part of the case regarding the issue of responsibility in contracting and passing on the deadly disease. To prove the part of her case dealing with Andy’s recklessness and responsibly for his illness, Steenburgen’s character questions him in open court about a sexual encounter he had at a gay porno theater called the Stallion (O.J.’s Bronco was supposedly at the scene of the crime. He supposedly cut his victims and himself, and his sexual preference for white women was broadly hinted at as the cause of his downfall).

The shameful incident took place "in ’84—or ’85. Never would have guessed that, would you?

Fuhrman’s book Murder in Brentwood features a picture of Marcia Clark, Chris Darden, Phil Vannatter and Tom Lange. Marcia is holding a copy of Gordon Allport’s book The Nature of Prejudice. In researching for Iago, that book was one of the things I was looking for to confirm my guess that Fuhrman did a heap of research in mass psychology. I did not expect to find it so easily, but for him to have masterminded the killing and the frame-up I knew that it had to be somewhere in his bag of tricks.

In the 30 years since I first read Allport’s book I’ve seen little evidence that anyone else got the message until I saw Marcia and Chris in action. No, they didn’t get it, either. The man who handed them their case on a platter of stereotypical evidence did. Leaders of organizations like Jason Robards’ character Charlie Wheeler in Philadelphia use it all the time to defend against  illegal discrimination suits. It’s no coincidence that one of his lead attorneys is a female and the other is black. It’s a formula. The image speaks before they do and colors all input that follows.

I saw this act up close and personal in my race discrimination suit against Ford Motor Company. Ford has actively and creatively discriminated against African-Americans, Hispanics and Jews in key positions for as long as I can remember and used high profile members of those groups to do it. The Ford attorney who took my deposition in 1995 was a Hispanic Jew. Another of Ford’s lawyers in the case was a woman. Most people see success stories like theirs as proof that organizations like Ford give preferences to minorities and that the charge of racism is likely to be a smokescreen for the accuser’s egregious behavior.

A recent case went something like this: A black woman claimed race discrimination when she was fired from her job in a bank. Her employer claimed that she was fired because she was incompetent. No one disputed the fact that she performed well in the job she was hired to do or that a new supervisor referred to her repeatedly as a nigger, reassigned her to a job that she could not do well, then fired her for incompetence. The Supreme Court ruled that incompetence was reasonable grounds for dismissal and that she had no proof of being fired because of her race.

Justice Thomas, the only African-American on the High Court voted with the majority.

The fact that the woman’s employer set her up to be fired because of her race didn’t count. For poof she would have required someone in a decision-making capacity to step forward with proof that the company conspired to fire her for that reason. If her employer had called her a nigger and then fired her for being one, THAT would have been illegal. As long as an employer labels the target of its discrimination incompetent the way Charley Wheeler did to Andy Beckett, the Supreme Court says it’s all right. This is the same Court that said it was all right for the State to execute people who have been proven innocent after their conviction as long as it can show that they had a fair trial.

In that legal environment why wouldn’t a Charlie Wheeler think he could win with bogus evidence against a "pervert"? Why wouldn’t a Mark Fuhrman think he could win against a black-on-white "spouse-abuser"?

Had Wheeler been played by anyone but Jason Robards the associations between Philadelphia, the Bundy murders and Marcia Clark would be greatly diminished. Keep in mind the fact that Marcia, against all advice to the contrary, not only used Fuhrman as a key witness against O.J. she defended him. She used his report on the baseball bat incident. She used the socks that he found on O.J.’s bedroom rug—the socks O.J. wore the night before to a formal (black bow tie and tux) affair with Paula Barbiari (Italian name). She used the leather glove. She savagely attacked those who called Fuhrman a bigot and a liar. She used as her best timeline witness the only person to call the Akita’s barking "a plaintive wail" Sounds like what you’d expect to hear if the victim’s owner was already dead, doesn’t it?

Here’s the problem…Robards plays Al Capone (a.k.a. Al Brown) in The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1968). In that movie, you see him on a moving train wearing one leather glove about to cut a man’s throat with a straight razor. You see him dressed in formal attire preparing to commit a bloody murder with a baseball bat. You see the dog belonging to a victim of the massacre on Clark Street go to the bodies after the slaughter. You hear the dog whimper. The real Clark Street dog in Chicago on Valentines Day emitted a cry that was more like a plaintive wail.

When you see Steenburgen and Robards together in that context, the civil suite in Philadelphia has to look more like the criminal case in LA. Marcia Clark was a Jew. Mark Fuhrman was a nazi. Chris Darden was a racist—a white racist. To believe that these people would not collaborate in the prosecution of a rich, popular and innocent black man for murder is to misunderstand the nature of prejudice. Fuhrman demonstrated in his book and in his interviews that he understood it perfectly.

Before you start thinking that Fuhrman could not have predicted the role of Marcia Clark and Chris Darden in the prosecution of O.J. Simpson, think back to what Joubert in Three Days of the Condor said about professionals. He said that professionals were easy because they were predictable. In given situations they can be counted on to behave in given ways. The LA County District Attorney’s Office was organized in such a way that a killer who was also the lead detective in the case could shop for the lead prosecutor of his choice. He could do so by his choice of victims, by the circumstances he contrived for their deaths, by the clues he chose to leave behind and by the conduct of his investigation.

Bill Hodgman, the lead prosecutor until his health forced him to turn over the reigns to Marcia never showed any leadership. He deferred to her every whim from the start and allowed her to handle the most important aspect of their case—the involvement of Mark Fuhrman. He was never a relevant factor in the case and the politics of the situation, as certain as the hand of Destiny guaranteed that he was never going to be.

Some of you knew where this chapter was going to end when I mentioned Philadelphia. You are the ones who’d seen the 1984 time travel movie with the fight scene in an elevator between a. sailor and a Marine MP wearing dark brown leather gloves. You know that Fuhrman was an MP in the Marine Corps and O.J.’s last part in a movie was that of a sailor. You know that O.J. is a big black guy and you know what a nurse in an elevator means in the Fuhrman collection. The elevator in this scene has a big black guy a patient who brakes a glass IV, a blonde woman with a knit cap, and a doctor. It’s called The Philadelphia Experiment. In The Philadelphia Experiment II, Nazis rule the world.