Table of Contents

Chapter 12

The Cutting Room

At one point when I was referring to a French connection in Murder in Greenwich that I wrote about in The Smoking Gun two years before the movie was produced, I got a nasty shock. The blockbuster paragraph I was looking for was missing. I knew I had written it because of how significant I thought it was at the time and the trouble I went through to get everything right. It couldn’t have been a computer glitch because all of the pictures and paragraphs on the page I wrote it lined up correctly and all of the odd and even pages began and ended where they had to begin and end. I read the whole page where an irrelevant fragment of the relevant text remained before I realized what had happened. I didn’t recall it specifically but I do it all the time. It’s called editing. 

The “irrelevant fragment” was necessary for the transition I needed to the next paragraph and the ones after that. The missing stuff was interesting. I knew it was important. But it screwed up the spacing, required a paragraph or two of explanation and it conflicted with what I was trying to do and what I had to do with my book. I had to delete it.  

If you are reading this online in the html format you can’t see what I’m talking about because there are no odd and even pages. There is only one scrolling page with all of the pictures lined up on the left side. Depending on how your browser is set up you might see it the way I put it online and you might not. You see that formant often because everyone can access it and read it and it’s easy to modify but it doesn’t look as good as the printed version does. The cuts I made were for the printed version.  

As I pointed out with regard to Mark Fuhrman’s Hildy Southerlyn character in Murder in Greenwich, he had a similar problem with his movie. My biggest limitation was space. His biggest limitation was time. I had to add a little and cut a lot to fit in the pictures and get the odd and even pages to come out right. He had to add a little and cut a lot to fit in the commercials and make the scenes come out right. You see so much of Hildy Southerlyn because her character is essential to what he was trying to do with his movie. Every shot, every word, every long pause and every time-consuming gesture is important. You know he had to cut some things that were important to him. For the most part, you don’t know what they are. When you see the exception you’ll have a better feel for the rule.

We’ll examine that exception later. Here, I’m going to give you samples of what I had to delete and why. When you do see part of the scene we know he deleted from Murder in Greenwich, I hope it will give you a greater appreciation of what you don’t see. I should say, part of the scene somebody deleted. It didn’t have to be Fuhrman.  

I began the previous chapter with Julian Sands as Fenn Mocha and pictures of Penelope Ann Miller as Kim Hunter in Witch Hunt. I couldn’t fit that stuff in the chapters before that one because they led in directions that required House on Carroll Street, Chances Are, In Dreams, Excalibur and “Dead Woman’s Shoes” to put it in context. That’s an entire deleted chapter, which also leaves out quite a bit.  

It’s no accident that Penelope Ann Miller was cast for the role of Kim Hudson in Witch Hunt. As a topless dancer in Carlito’s Way and a meek housewife in The Gun in Betty Lou’s Handbag, she demonstrated the special range of qualities necessary for the part. The name Betty couldn’t have hurt. If you saw Helen Mirren as Betty and Susan in “Dead Woman’s Shoes” you wouldn’t have to ask why. In “Dead Woman’s Shoes Inez’s boyfriend is Carlito. 

I emphasized the submerged blonde theme because I saw so much of it in movies I linked to Fuhrman that I expected to see it in Murder in Greenwich. I missed it the first time because it happened so quickly with Martha’s head below the surface of the water in a swimming pool at the beginning of a double exposure scene transition. Nevertheless, it was there. She had to have been filmed that way and most of it had to be cut.  

The transitions I made in the previous chapter forced me to do little more with Tyra Ferrell than mention her name as the maid who hosts Susan Montgomery’s spirit. The name Ferrell links her to Fuhrman’s ’89 letter to the city attorney. She also has tie-ins to Fuhrman’s “old friend” Ron Shipp, to Cybill Shepherd and to the only black person other than in a photo of O.J. and Johnny Cochran in Murder in Greenwich. What you see of the property as she takes out trash looks enough like the front of O.J.’s home to remind you of it. The ironwork on the top of the fence is identical to the ironwork on O.J.’s Rockingham gate.

The ironwork on the fence, by the way, is another thing I had to leave out of the previous chapter. It grabbed me because the first time I saw it a stunt double for Jeffrey Tambor as Kyle, his wife’s killer, was leaping over it to evade the possessed woman in his wife’s shoes shooting at him with his gun. He hears the wail of the police sirens and hides in the bushes. This is the property that the maid emerges from to empty the trash when she finds the “Dead Woman’s Shoes”. 

According to my Iago hypothesis, Fuhrman used Ron Shipp for a number of things including a lookout on Rockingham and a patsy in case the frame-up failed. The closer you study the evidence against O.J. the more you see that Shipp made a better fit. He was black. He was O.J.’s height and build. He knew his way around the crime scenes. He had a bogus alibi. He could have worn the shoes. He fit the evidence so well that J. Neil Schulman, the writer of two New Twilight Zone episodes, wrote a book called Frame of the Century naming him as the killer. Shipp invited his cop buddies to play tennis on O.J.’s court and to swim in O.J.’s pool. Schulman gave a lot of weight to one incident involving the pool.  

Shipp had a thing for blondes, particularly ones who resembled Nicole. Around the time O.J. came back to Rockingham from playing golf with President Clinton, he found Shipp in his swimming pool with a blonde.  

O.J.’s youngest daughter from his first marriage drowned in that pool. Nicole dyed her daughter Sydney’s hair blonde. In Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman went out of his way to compare Sydney to his daughter. In a drawing he did of his daughter she looked like one of the little girls on a Morton Salt box, the box that says, “When it rains it pours.” Fuhrman’s drawing of his daughter that appeared on ABC’s 20/20 in October 1996, shows her with dark, straight hair. He never gave her name on that show or in his Murder in Brentwood book. In his Murder in Greenwich movie his daughter looks like Goldilocks and his wife calls her “Kelly.” Camera shots from Kelly to Fuhrman to the photo of Martha Elizabeth Moxley on his computer screen give you a comparison in Fuhrman’s mind between Kelly and Martha Elizabeth Moxley.  

Kelly and Martha had only three things in common. They were blondes. They were females. They were wearing sweaters. That was it. But that was all it took for Fuhrman to show by the expression on his character’s face that he needed no more to draw a connection between them.  

The Murder in Greenwich movie name that Fuhrman gave to his daughter flashed me back to Kelly McGillis as Emily in The House on Carroll Street. I didn’t know why until I noticed the glass of water in front of the little blonde girl’s glass of milk in the scene where Caroline Fuhrman calls her “Kelly” and tells her not to blow bubbles in her milk.  

That scene and the following one where Fuhrman is in his office packing for Connecticut last a combined total of 92 seconds and fades into the ghost of Martha Moxley describing the chaos at her murder scene. You get Mark telling Caroline, “It’s the next book” and “There is nothing to worry about.” He tells her that “Greenwich is not LA.” Caroline tells Mark, “We left LA to get away. We came here for a fresh start. You’re going to be an electrician.” You get a dirty plate, Caroline wiping her son’s mouth with a damp cloth and a barking dog. You get newspaper clippings, two references to tickets and three Murder in Brentwood books stacked on a table. Those 92 seconds extract all of these elements from twenty minutes of dialogue and action in a consecutive series of scenes from The House on Carroll Street.

The first scene in the series has Kelly McGillis as Emily and the German teenager running from killers at a bookstore. They mingle with a crowd on an intermission break outside of an off-Broadway theater. You get a fleeting glimpse of a woman in the crowd holding a ticket. When Emily and the boy try to sneak into the theater, they get busted because two other people are holding tickets for their seats. They run outside where an assassin is waiting in ambush at the exit gate and kills the boy with a knife.  

Emily tells the investigation homicide detective that the boy was trying “to get away.” She can’t tell the detective whom he was trying to get away from and Emily doesn’t recognize the names he had on a slip of paper in his pocket. He had no identification. 

The police send Emily home. She writes down the names the police gave her and adds the name “Tepperson.” Having followed the boy to a cemetery where she saw him taking the names of recently deceased Jews from grave markers, she knows that he was involved with a high level identity-switching plot. But that is as far as she can go with it. She submerges herself in her bathwater and blows bubbles.  

Ever wonder if Queen Cleopatra blew bubbles in her milk baths? Elizabeth Taylor plays the title role in Cleopatra (’63) with Richard Burton as Marc Anthony.   

Think of the names that could have been used for Fuhrman’s daughter in his Murder in Greenwich movie and the few names from movies that would be associated with a female blowing bubbles. You get Nancy and Liz from Nancy Allen as Liz trapped underwater in Blowout. You get Polly, from the Jack the ripper victim Polly Nichols in A Study in Terror (’66) blowing one last bubble of air as her life drains away below the water of a horse trough. The little girl blowing bubbles at O.J. on the train in The Cassandra Crossing is called Katarina. You get Penelope, Ann and Kim from Penelope Ann Miller in Witch Hunt. You get Goldie, Annie and Joanna from Goldie Hawn getting dunked in a rain barrel in Overboard. From The House on Carroll Street you get Carol, Emily and Kelly. That’s 12 names.  

The Murder in Greenwich sequence with Kelly blowing bubbles gives you two of those names in that context, Kelly and Elizabeth (Liz). You get three if you count Caroline as a variation of Carroll and four if you count Nichols as a variation of Nicole. The 1988 Jack the Ripper movie with Michael Caine gives you every reason that you should.  

Remember that Murder in Brentwood is about Fuhrman’s role in the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson, who were killed by a man with a knife. Remember that Goldman was Jewish, Nicole was a German immigrant and Ron Shipp was a mutual “friend” of Nicole and Fuhrman. Remember that Fuhrman is a German name, his former wife was Janet Hackett and Shipp’s first cousin was O.J.’s attorney Johnnie Cochran. The picture of Martha is on the monitor of a laptop computer. Fuhrman used screenwriter Laura Hart’s laptop computer to strike up a conversation with her. Tandy made computers for Radio Shack, the electronic supply store.

The teenager from The House on Carroll Street is an illegal German immigrant. Emily knows that the man she saw in the widow spoke German and that he took the name of a dead Jew but she doesn’t know enough to get the full picture. The woman she reads for tells her that she pays an unseemly amount of attention to the house across from her garden and seems hostile to Emily’s interest. Then she offers a backhanded suggestion that Emily break into the house and look around.  

The woman is not given a name. However the actress who plays her is Jessica Tandy, the Academy Award winner for her role as a Southern Jewish woman in Driving Miss. Daisy who teaches her illiterate black chauffer how to read. The Chauffer is Morgan Freeman Jr. – another Morgan and another M.F. He’s the pimp in Street Smart with Cathy Baker and Christopher Reeve who kills Baker’s character with a knife…. 

Emily breaks into the house, finds a dirty dish on a table along with a German newspaper. A man with a knife tries to kill her. Mike Cochran struggles with him. He runs away. Emily puts a damp towel on Cochran’s forehead. She finds the Edgar Allan Poe book with the cryptic Laura Moulton inscription. Cochran drives her home. A dog barks.  

The next morning Kelly McGillis as Emily gives the book to Jeff Daniels as Cochran. He figures out part of what the inscription means. Kenneth Welsh as Cochran’s sports page-reading partner Hackett figures out the rest, after giving him a hard time about Poe with his wisecrack about the shortstop of the Tigers. Cochran discovers that Laura Molten is a ship carrying Nazi war criminals disguised as Jewish immigrants. He arrests them on a train bound for Chicago. 

Welsh is Kyle McLaughlin’s homicidal former FBI partner Harley Earl in Twin Peaks. Martha Moxley had a cat named Tiger. You heard the cry of the raven when her body was discovered. Tyra Ferrell as a maid in “Dead Woman’s Shoes” finds the shoes in a trash can which contains a section of the sports page with a headline about the Tigers. In “Dead Woman’s Shoes” she kills the man who killed the woman whose ghost possess her body. Mark Fuhrman told his police psychologist in 1981 that he would have killed his ex-wife Janet Hackett and her lover if he had caught them.

Author Jeff Toobin’s wife knew the black man Fuhrman put in a chokehold for jaywalking in 1984, called a “nigger” and threatened to kill. Fuhrman received a 22-day suspension for that act he committed while moonlighting as a private cop at a movie theater. Toobin wrote about it in his book The Run of his Life in which he concluded O.J. killed Ron and Nicole and the “black jury” didn’t have the “candlepower” to understand the evidence. Superimposed on the back cover of his book is an imprint of the Bundy killer’s shoe. He accused O.J.’s defense team of “playing the race cad” with his discoveries about Fuhrman. 

I mentioned Tyra Ferrell tie-ins to Cybill Shepherd and to the only black actress in Murder in Greenwich. The Shipp- Shepard-“only black person in Murder in Greenwich order flows from the fact that Ron Shipp hired LAPD cops to moonlight in his rent-a-cop business when he left the LAPD in 1989. Cybill Shepherd is Maddie Hays in Moonlighting with Bruce Willis as her partner David Addison. Bruce Hopkins plays the moonlighting cop Lancaster in Murder in Greenwich.  

Willis’ nickname is Bruno. He was born in Germany. The actor who plays Fuhrman has an Italian name. Bruno Magli is a German–Italian name. In case you forgot, that’s the brand name of the Bundy killers shoes as well as the brand name for the shoes Nicole bought for herself. She wasn’t wearing shoes when her dog led a couple to her body. 

In the Moonlighting series you see a lot of Maddie Hays’ shoes.  

Before we get too far away from “Kelly Fuhrman” I should point out that the name Kelly doesn’t have to relate only to a female blowing bubbles. In Forbidden Planet Jack Kelly is Lt. Farman. The “Dead Woman’s Shoes” link in that movie is his costar Warren Steven. Stevens plays a derelict who puts on the shoes that cause his body to be possessed by the spirit of a dead man named Dane in the original Twilight Zone’s “Dead Man’s Shoes” written by Charles Beaumont.  

James Beaumont is the adult Rob Mathers in Murder in Greenwich (Rob-Bob-BM-Bruno Magli). Leo Brettkelly Chalmers is the “22-year-old” Robert Mathers, the one playing cards with his mother with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk in front of him. In his book Fuhrman says the man Rob Maters represents was 26 when Martha Moxley was killed. In the transcripts of Michael Skakel’s murder trial he was 24.  

The New Twilight Zone’s 11-22-85 “Dead Woman’s Shoes” undoubtedly borrowed some material from Moonlighting’s 11-12-85 show “Knowing Her” with Dana Delaney as a killer posing as a victim. Harlan Ellison is the creative consultant on “Dead Woman’s Shoes”. A man named Harlan is the murder victim in “Knowing Her”. Tyra Ferrell has a small part as a low-class prostitute brought into the police station and handcuffed to a bench next to Cybill Shepherd as Maddie. She turns to Maddie and says, “What? They raid the Belle Air Hotel, too?”  

That’s when David comes out of an office with the detective on the case and says to him, “I’ll have to get back with you on the name of the Jetson’s maid.” You can’t tie Tyra Ferrell any closer to the maid in “Dead Woman’s Shoes”. Moreover, Dana Delaney, Cybill Shepard and Bruce “Bruno” Willis’s in “Knowing Her” give a composite of shoes linked to Fuhrman in his Murder in Brentwood book and Murder in Greenwich movie. Again, the context is what gives these things meaning.  

The caption below a photo of Fuhrman pointing to the bloody leather glove in Murder in Brentwood is the context. You see the gate post, the blue knit cap, a plant, dirt, leaves, twigs, sidewalk tiles, blood stains, part of an envelop, part of Goldman’s boot, Fuhrman’s hand, the leather glove and a clear heel print in blood. You see blood between the tiles channeled from a large puddle of blood flowing out of Nicole’s neck wound. The caption says, “A close-up of the same glove and the black knit cap (note the distinctive heel impression in the foreground).”  

The back of that heel impression shows a pool of blood in the shape of a heart (valentine) bisecting the perimeter of the heel at the cleft of the heart. You have to split the heart down the center in your mind to see the full shape of the heel print.  That’s where you would see a metal stud on the heel of a tap dancer’s shoe. To see all of this clearly in Murder in Greenwich you’ll need help from Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer and her cousin Maddie Ferguson in Twin Peaks. A Ricochet sequence that we will get into later should also help. For now we heave to look at what happens when we go from Tyra Ferrell in “Dead Woman’s Shoes” to Ferrell and Shepherd in “Knowing Her”.  

“Knowing Her” opens with a rainy scene outside of the office building housing the Blue Moon Detective Agency. The scene switches to the elevator. The door opens. You see Maddie from her knees down with wet, torn, stockings and a broken heel on one of her soggy shoes. She leaves wet shoeprints in the hall carpet as she hobbles to her room past two other people. Like the opening sequence of “Dead Woman’s Shoes”, you see them only from their knees to their shoes. All the while Gene Kelly sings “Singing in the Rain” from a musical where he clicks his heels and splashes in puddles as he tap dances in the rain. If you saw the movie you would “see” the irony in Kelly’s jaunty song and Maddie’s knee-to-shoe appearance as well as hear it.  

I knew many famous people who tap-danced in movies but the two I flashed on in 1997 when I saw the close-up photo in Murder in Brentwood and read the caption were Gregory Hines and Gene Kelly. I didn’t know why until two paragraphs ago. 

Gregory Hines is an expatriate American tap dancer in White Nights released 11-22-85 – the same day “Dead Woman’s Shoes” first aired. Isabella Rossellini is his Russian wife who began her association with him as his interpreter. You might have seen her in a couple of David Lynch films along with several actors who appeared in Twin Peaks, including Kyle McLaughlin. White Nights also stars Mikhail Baryshnikov as Nikolai and Helen Mirren as a Russian ballet instructor.  

In 1992 Fuhrman circulated a rumor that he was having sex with Nicole. When she was murdered “someone” started a rumor that he planted the glove he said he fond on Bundy. According to that rumor Fuhrman felt guilty about not protecting Nicole from O.J.’s “continuing abuse” that she told him about and acted as a “white knight” to insure that the man he knew killed her would be punished.  

Back to “Knowing Her”…

Maddie goes straight to her private office without a word to anyone and closes the door. When David learns that she has made it to work he pops into her office to give her a hard time. The door to her washroom is closed. You hear water running as David smugly taunts her for being three hours late.  When she has all of his jabbering she can stand, she burst out of the washroom with her hair wet and stringy, her soiled dress and her tattered pantyhose below her knees. She’s furious. David is startled but amused at his normally nattily attired partner’s bedraggled appearance. He jumps out of his seat and exclaims, “Wow! It’s a whole new you.”   

Maddie complains that she had to change a flat tire in the rain and not one man stopped to help her. She asks, “What happened to the white knights?” If you know the show you know that this remark is all David needs to thrown the women’s liberation movement in Maddie’s face and for her to give a rebuttal that David doesn’t buy. If you’ve ever changed a tire you know that you need a jack and a tire iron to do it.  

This segment of the show went past me the first time I saw the links in it to Mark Fuhrman because I was looking only for links to the Bundy murders. The white knights remark wasn’t enough because it seemed to stand-alone. Looking at the whole show through the prism of Murder in Greenwich, A Study in Terror, “Dead Woman’s Shoes”, the KKK and a 6-iron instead of a tire iron, the weak links became strong ones.  

A scene that we know was cut from Murder in Greenwich has two fists plunging into a sink full of clear water. You see this from below the surface in a drain’s eye view. After the billows of blood explode in the water, you get glimpses of the fists and a distorted view of the killer’s face. This shot combines the water in Nicole’s bathtub that vanished after Fuhrman’s visit to her bathroom and his story of O.J. washing his bloody hands in the maid’s sink.  

Fuhrman argued in Murder in Brentwood that O.J. cleaned up this way after killing Ron and Nicole with a knife. In his Murder in Greenwich movie, the outtake shows you how he wanted to say Michael Skakel cleaned up after killing Martha. You see the snipped clip in the USA Network trailer. It’s not in the movie. It is in A Study in Terror with three minor differences; the killer has one fist wrapped around a knife handle and he is wearing a fingerless glove. The killer is Jack the Ripper. You see him stabbing into the water from his victim’s perspective looking up to the surface. Moments before, she boasted that she wouldn’t “be carved like poor Emma Smith.” Smith is sometimes confused with the second Whitechapel murder victim and possibly Jack the Ripper’s first, Martha Tabram who was also know as Emma Turner. 

Groundhog Day (’93), Suspect (’87) and Under Suspicion (’91) have multiple links to Mark Fuhrman and the Bundy murders. In a Groundhog Day shot that’s similar to one in Murder in Greenwich, Bill Murray as Phil brings a homeless man to a hospital where Dianna B. Shaw as an ER nurse tells him the man died. Phil awakens every morning on Groundhog Day to the same Sonny and Cher song and the same DJs. Rob Riley is one of the DJs.  In Suspect with Liam Neeson, Cher is Kathleen Riley. In Under Suspicion Liam Neeson is an ex-cop suspected of killing a black woman’s rich white husband.  

The last Tyra Ferrell link in “Dead Woman’s Shoes” to Mark Fuhrman and Murder in Greenwich is the adult Rob Mathers’ secretary. Her only qualification would be her color except for the fact that Ferrell’s maid character doesn’t have a name. Neither does Mathers’ secretary. That means the name of the actress who plays the secretary has to be a close match to Tyra or the name of a real maid associated with O.J. Simpson’s Rockingham estate. It can be only Tyra, Maria, Rosa, Gigi or Michelle. It's Michelle.  

When you read about interracial sex in Taking the Heat remember that the Michelle scene in Murder in Greenwich starts the same way, with a Brooklyn Bridge, Pier 17 view of the New York City skyline.

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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