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Name That Tune
When you make a spoof of a movie or a whole movie genre you do more or less what Mark Fuhrman did in his notes, his sworn testimony, his first book and in the rumors he circulated about O.J., Nicole and himself. You give it a name (Badge # 214 ), characters, plot points, props, settings, and other elements evocative of the movie or category of movies youre spoofing. With numerous sight gags and plays on words, a few composite names and characters, a minor alteration here, a major exaggeration there, and some top-to-bottom/left-to-right inversions, rotations and spins here and there, youve done the job. The title Fatal Instinct (93) lets you know that
you are going to see a silly amalgamation of serious suspense thrillers like Fatal
Attraction with Glenn A scene beginning with the shoes of an unidentified character is a
cliché that you know youre going to see. Usually, the director gives you enough
clues in the The fact that the picture was in your head before you saw it is one of those crucial facts that most people never stop to think about. The Bundy Drive killer gave it a considerable amount of thought. Only he wasnt imaginative enough to use that knowledge without drawing straight lines to the movies he borrowed his best ideas from the way that Carl Reiner did in Fatal Instinctwithout the laughs. Take any movie in the Fuhrman collectionMortal Thoughts
(91)for In the carnival sequence of Mortal Thoughts where Demi
Moore as Cynthia Fuhrman said something similar about an eyewitness a couple of blocks away who said that he saw an SUV in an alley. According to Fuhrman, the man said that he thought the vehicles color was blue. Fuhrman theorized that the man saw O.J.s white Bronco, but that it only looked blue because of the poor lighting. The International Harvester Scout that Fuhrman drove on the 12th was pea green and white. The moral of those stories is simple: Depending on the lighting conditions, the view of the observer and the description your audience wants to hear, the color of a motor vehicle at night can be whatever you say it is. No one in the criminal justice system puts a hell of a lot of weight on discrepancies in what witness say about a car or a trucks color unless it helps them make their case. People often get the colors wrong. Right or wrong, if other circumstantial evidence is strong enough, and the color doesnt fit that evidence, it will be ignored. This is not news to an experienced police detective. In the late 70s an innocent Tennessee man was convicted of rape and imprisoned for five years largely on the basis of the white, hardtop, government jeep he drove to deliver mail. The real rapist also drove a jeepa commercial, dark green convertible. Mortal Thoughts would be instructive enough for the magic
color change and Eight detectives in all searched Orenthal James Simpsons
property. One room We cant forget that Cynthia Kellogg is really Demi
Moore, that James is really Bruce Willis and that they were married to each other
in real life when they Now lets look at the other half of the couple and see what we
have that fits the bloody shoe evidence at 875 South Bundy. Actually, we dont have
to go any farther than his nickname, Bruno, and the blood trail he made in Die
Hard. We The truth of what happened in the van isnt that straightforward. The victim was an abusive SOB who shot hoops when he should have been working, roughed up his wife, stole her money, embarrassed her in public and tried to rape her best friend. Thats what he was up to when she killed him. If the two women hadnt driven away from the hospital until they were sure that he had bled to death, then conspired to cover up what happened, Cynthia might have gotten a medal instead of a long stretch in prison. On the other hand, as the movie ends, there is no sure way of knowing
that anyone but the woman she blames for the murder is going to do hard time. It Once again, were talking about the free association of ideas and a man who got his association of ideas for murdering two people and framing another from the movies. Mark Fuhrman is never more than one movie or one actor away from his personal history and his story of the murders, the events leading up to them and his part of the investigation. They are all linked in an unbroken chain like charms on a bracelet. The "Twenty Two" episode of The Twilight Zone
is one of the charms that The idea for this book came from my sister Saras independent
observation that Fuhrman had no imagination with respect to the movies and her impression
that he saw himself as Tarzan. That was her reaction to my first draft of
the Fuhrman at the Movies chapter of Iago in Brentwood and to what shed heard
him say We all know now that his second wifes name was Janet. What threw me was her second name, Hackett. Joan Hackett was an actress. Considering the context in which Sara and I were speaking, you can see exactly were "Joan" slipped into my thinking. By looking at the context in which certain names appear in the Fuhrman collection you can zero in on where they slipped into the evidence left behind by the Bundy killer and where that evidence converges with Fuhrmans record. The names of all three of Fuhrmans wives converge with the Bundy
murder scene and an O.J. impersonator in the link between "Twenty Two" and Tarzan
and the Leopard Woman (45). "Twenty Two" gives us his first wife
Barbara and the leopard skin. The leopard skin takes us to Tarzan and the Leopard A stick, multiple slashing wounds and a glass heart were included in the Brentwood crime scenes. Mark Fuhrman was still collaborating with Laura Hart McKinney on "his" screenplay. The Bundy crime scene included evidence of one male attacker and one male and female victim. Only this time the attacker won. The killer assured the success of his attack on Ron and Nicole by hitting them in the head to start with. A careful examination of all the evidence says that Ron must have been hit first. Fuhrman somehow figured that it was Nicole. There was no locked gate in the Tarzan movie to interfere with the logic of Fuhrmans scenario. There was on Bundy. The evidence says the gate must have been locked if he was right, but if the gate was locked he could not have been right because Ron could not have gotten inside. Once people were convinced that O.J. was the killer there was no limit to the exculpatory evidence or flaws in logic they were willing to overlook. Tarzan faces a similar situation in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman
when he notes that the wounds on a dying man that were supposedly inflicted by a
leopard The Leopard Woman devises a simple plan to discredit Tarzan before he can figure out who the real killers are. She says, "No enemy is more harmless than he who has been killed by ridicule." By having her men release hungry leopards on a column of hunters that include Tarzan and the district commissioner, she convinces everyone but Tarzan that he was wrong. But Tarzan still doesnt have the whole picture until he hears a bird (where have we seen a bird before?) imitating the notes that Boy plays on a flute. Tarzan sees the flip side almost immediately and declares, "If animal can act like man, man can act like animal." Jane and Boy, who where there when the real leopards attacked the hunting party, still think hes seeing something in the evidence that isnt there. As a prank, boy throws Janes leopard rug over his head and crawls though the jungle near a clearing where Tarzan can see him. Tarzan, primed to see a man who kills people dressed as leopard, springs in to action. When he sees how easily he was fooled by Boy in Janes leopard rug, he gives up and joins the laughter at his own folly. Jain, the murder target of Forrest Whitakers
character in Diary of a Hitman On her way over to Jaines place some animal rights advocates had spray painted her coat red and she spends more time than Dekker can afford trying to get the stain out. She doesnt know how close she comes to becoming a murder victim just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She doesnt even know that Dekker is in the apartment until he shows himself to expedite her departure. That may not be the smartest thing for him to do, but he has not been
himself lately and has gone as far as to see a psychiatrist about the nightmares that are Since were talking about Forrest Whitaker and Sharon Stone, whose last movie before the 94 murders in Brentwood was for Paramount, perhaps we should list a name that gives us another link to the 64 murders in Philadelphia Mississippi. The name is Bedfordas in Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. The middle name fits in Diary of a Hitman at a point that has special significance to Mark Fuhrman because of his well-researched attempt to get a fraudulent psychological disability pension from the LAPD. He boasted of killing people, of beating up blacks and dreaming of doing other violence to them. That is the Klan philosophy. It was Nathan Bedford Forrests philosophy. John Bedford Lloyd plays Dr. Jameson, the psychiatrist that Forrest Whitakers character goes to see. He is Andrews Brother in Philadelphia. Tom Hanks, of course, is Andrew. In Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd, John Bedford Lloyd is Andrew. We havent forgotten the "Twenty Two" link to Tarzan
and the Leopard Woman and Diary of a Hitman, nor have we wandered away from it
with more talk about the 1964 murders in Philadelphia Mississippi. They all meet in the
Bundy killings and in Mark Fuhrmans associations to those killings. John Which Philadelphia, you ask; the one in the state where Diary of Hitman was filmed, or the one in the state where Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered by the Klan? In the language of big dreams, the two are interchangeable. Look at it this way Suppose you had to identify the city with a symbol that any literate person would understand. In Dan Aykroyds Ghostbusters II (89) the Ghostbusters use the Statue of Liberty to rally the people of New York to their cause. If the Statue of Liberty stands for New York, what would you use for Philadelphia? What do they use in the movies? In Changing Places Dan Aykroyd uses the Liberty Bell. Now that were talking about a bell as a symbol for something much
bigger than a city we can expand that concept to include the bell at the fictitious
College of Looking for something about the Klan? Will something about a clan, do it for yousomething to do with white racism in America? On a television talk show where kooks or all sorts are encouraged to
step up and speak their mindsso the host can ridicule themAndrew makes a
last-ditch effort to expose the sinister dealings of the Brotherhood. A black man in Remember the Leopard Womans observation, "No enemy is more harmless than he who has been killed by ridicule"? That, of course, is what happens to Andrew and Chief Wabensi as Bart Harris, the host, knew it would because thats the way his show is structured. When the chief gets done, a woman calling herself a patriot takes his place with accusations that Andrew is a Jew whose real name is Abraham Warsaw and the real evil conspiracy is one run by Jews. When she finishes making an ass of herself, which she is as oblivious of doing as the self-aggrandizing Chief Wabensi is, Bart gets a "sudden thought" about a Catholic conspiracy. When his audience begins to boo, he turns on them and tells them how stupid they are for buying any conspiracy claim. He calls Andrew a ding-a-ling and shakes a bell at him util Andrew loses it and attacks. The only possible winner, of course, is Bart. Thats a Jew (Ron), a Catholic (Nicole), an image assassination (O.J.) and a sure-fire formula for stifling intelligent discussion of racism or conspiracy in the double homicide of two white people allegedly at the hands of a black man. Just mix it up in the same pot and let the "kooks" do the serving for the other side. The Bundy Drive killer left enough clues behind to keep conspiracy theorists going in different directions forever, and to keep conspiracy bashers laughing at them. It was easy. A minimum of five people had to be involved to account for all of the evidence of a frame-up against O.J. Simpson. As far as I could see, Fuhrman and Roberts may have been able to carry out a workable murder/frame-up themselves. Given Fuhrmans intelligence, he may even have been able to do it alone. But once I started doing radio interviews, I saw the advantage of a conspiracy involving at least five active people. You cant get anyone in the media who counts to stop laughing at the idea long enough to examine the evidence. It works in real life the way it does in The Brotherhood of the
Bell. Chief conspirator Dean Jagger turns the question of a small
secret society working In Chapter 8: Twenty Two, I made quite a bit of the toy leopard that
Barbara Nichols as Liz Powell dropped in her panic-driven flight away from the airplane Although TVs and VCRs allow us to see movies out of sequence, we cant act on them before they were made. That bit of common sense combined with the records of when certain items of evidence were purchased or offered for sale allows us to get a sense of when the killer made up his mind to plant particular pieces of evidence. The killers Aris Isotoner Light gloves had the same 70263 style number as the mens Aris Isotoner Light gloves that Nicole purchased a week before Christmas in 1990. The sales clerk entered the number by hand and typed in "8" by mistake instead of "3." That is a common error, especially with dyslexics who occasionally see the 3 and its mirror image at the same time. Dont forget that O.J. was dyslexic and that the killer knew it. Mel Brooks is billionaire Goddard Bolt
in Life Stinks (91) who accepts a bet When I saw the name, the first thing I thought of was Pep in Dragnet. While dressed as gang members, Joe and Pep are pulled over by PAGAN members driving a police car and dress as cops. When they leave Joe says, "Bogus cops. No matter how many times I see that little maneuver it never ceases to disgust me." Pep replys, "You mean people dressed up in strange clothes pretending to be something they arent?" They are on their way to the PAGAN convention in the desert. There, they jump into a water-filled pit to save the life of a woman who is going to be sacrificed to a deadly snake. Substitute "phony cops" for a "phony O.J." and real cops using strange clothes to implicate O.J. and youve got Mark Fuhrman leaving the PPL seminar in the desert to take two lives. You have him and Brad Roberts together at Bundy and Rockingham on the night of June 12, 1994. Whats supposed to put O.J. on Bundy are the Bruno Magli (Molly) shoes, O.J.s blood, and the bloody leather Aris Isotoner lightsthe Christmas gloves with cashmere lining and a V stitched in the palm. For the Bundy killer, V could easily stand for Victor, especially if he
were in the Mens shoes belonging to a woman named Molly played by a woman
named Lesley? Did a light just go on? Remember, the reason I started looking for matches
to androgynous names in the movies was to learn Unlike Simpson and Nielsen, five out of six men are under 6 tall.
Few of them wear size 12 shoes. Fewer still could have afforded to buy Bruno Magli
Lorenzos in 1991 or 92 and wait util 1994 to wear them. Only 299 of them were sold
in the United States and the only place they were sold was at The rare, size-12 shoeprints on Bundy made by a man over 6 tall
who stepped in blood and walked with his toes pointed straight ahead practically rules out
a coincidental match between O.J. and the killer. It matches up extremely well to For those of you who still think Im reaching with Michael Caines Spilt Milk drink in Mr. Destiny, and the idea that the Bundy killer could have substituted blood for milk, Mark Fuhrmans screenplay with its strong female lead should settle that question. Has there ever been a stronger female lead than Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in the Alien series? Well, maybe Linda Hamilton as Sarah in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
In Mr. Destiny, Hamiltons maiden name is Ellen Ripley. The
two leading men that So, now we know why the liquid on the bottom of Goddard Bolts shoes was likely to have made an impression on the Bundy killer. How about other evidence on Bundy that relates to the moves and to Fuhrman? In his book, Fuhrman expressed great interest in the FBI/ BATF shootout with white supremacist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge Idaho, 40 miles south of the Canadian border. Fuhrman mentioned that his Idaho home was 50 miles south of the Canadian border. Weaver became a fugitive in 1991 and put under surveillance for 18
months. He was shot on August 22 92. He surrendered 11 days after the raid began on
the 21st. In Life Stinks, Sailor tells Bolt that the cords on the
back of a mans neck
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