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Introduction
In my introduction to The Smoking Gun 2 I wrote, "Real life never has as many parallels to teleplays by chance as it does to conscious or subconscious design." The same goes for imitations of teleplays, screenplays and news stories in other teleplays, screenplays and news stories. You can test this proposition by comparing the original event to the suspected copy, checking the dates and doing research on the people involved. You can see where art imitates life and where life imitates art. In copycat crimes from news stories you can see where life imitates life. The copy is by definition close enough to the original that you know where it came from if you know enough about the original The movie Double Indemnity was
modeled after a news story in which a woman talked an insurance agent into killing her
husband to collect on a double indemnity clause in his life insurance policy. Psycho
and Silence of the Lambs came from the real case of a man in Wisconsin who talked
to his dead mother, killed women and skinned them to become a woman. A gang of teenage
girls who raped another girl with a stick told authorities that they got the idea from a
1974 TV movie with Linda Blair called Born Innocent. The Colubrine High School
killers modeled themselves after Christian Slater’s character in Heathers.
Just because a crime has similarities
to a movie that proceeded it doesn’t mean that the criminal got the idea from the
move. How do you know that the criminal saw the movie? How do you know that the
similarities are not mere chance? You can’t know unless you can find clear links to
the crime, the suspect and the movie that go way beyond chance. Mark Fuhrman makes
an ideal subject
for such a study. He referred to movies and move characters repeatedly to explain what he
saw, how he felt and why he used the raw, violent and racist language he used on the
McKinny tapes. He said that he tried to model himself after successful crime writer and
screenwriter Joseph Wambaugh. He gave specific examples of what he took from
Wambaugh’s work. He said that he took a little of this and a little of that from
different people and characters and put them into composite characters. He associated
himself with certain themes, props and clothing in the O.J. case that are common to murder
mysteries and thrillers. He sometimes mentioned them inappropriately.
“If” is a word you use to
test an assumption. You assume that a crayon box contains crayons. If you open the lid to
see what’s in the box and draw something with the waxy colored sticks that look like
crayons you know that your assumption was correct. I assumed that certain movies contained
links to the Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson murders that only Mark Fuhrman could
have drawn if he murdered them and framed O.J. Simpson for his crime. Using the
devious mind of Shakespeare’s Iago as my guide, as many modern writers have done in
similar scenarios, I started with the knit cap on Bundy in the photo of Fuhrman pointing
to the bloody glove. If someone partly inspired by O.J.’s
appearance in The Naked Gun series killed Ron and Nicole and planted the cap to
frame O.J., I reasoned that there should be more links in that series to the murder scene
and the killer. Strong ones. If Fuhrman was the killer, there should also be links to him and to other movies where a cop or a criminal leaves a false trail of evidence to frame an
innocent man. There should be links to the Bundy murders in other O.J. movies as well as links to actors, producers and directors in those movies. There should be links to the writers, the actors or characters in the
movies that Fuhrman went out of his way to mention in Murder in Brentwood. There
should be ghosts, bloody gloves, golf clubs, cats, incest, distinctive shoes, baseball
bats, incriminating “matches” and important men in red ties with white spots. If my assumption about the way those connections were formed in Fuhrman’s mind was correct I reasoned that I should also find links in movies to Fuhrman that I didn’t expect. I looked for things that meant nothing to me but must have meant a great deal to Fuhrman if he was the movie inspired killer because they appeared so frequently in movies associated with him, Nicole or O.J. I found rain, trains, buses, tombstones, psychics, blood mixed with water, witches, gold, glitter, fire, rainbows, wings, horses, people putting themselves in other people’s shoes and “French connections.” You’ll find them, too, in producer Mark
Fuhrman’s made for USA Network Television and video movie Murder in Greenwich. If Fuhrman used moves for specific ideas to commit the Bundy murders and frame O.J. Simpson, I reasoned that he would do the same thing to make his movie. He did. —Jasper
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