Table of Contents

Chapter 2

Priorities

Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson’s killer left so many clues to O.J. Simpson that it seemed pointless for the homicide detectives who took over Fuhrman’s initial investigation to look elsewhere for a suspect.  

Bloody shoeprints said that the killer’s shoes were O.J.’s size. The brand name was the same as the dead woman’s shoes and a mixture of his blood and hers was in his truck. A blood trail ran between his front gate and his front door. Blood spots on the murder scene suggested to Fuhrman that the killer was bleeding from the left side of his body. O.J. had a cut on his left hand finger. The blood drops matched O.J.’s blood. The first cop on the scene found a blue jean jacket on a chair in Nicole’s kitchen. O.J. wore a blue jean jacket that night. Hair in the blue knit cap matched hair on O.J.’s head. Fuhrman found a bloody glove at O.J.’s Rockingham Ave. home matching the one on the Bundy Dr. murder scene. He found socks with Nicole’s blood on them in O.J.’s bedroom.  

Have you heard of a murder case before or since with so much damning evidence pointing to one suspect? I haven’t. No one has. This was a record breaker. To find everything in the case that incriminated O.J. you’d have see the police photos, hear the courtroom testimony and read Fuhrman’s first book. But if you watch enough movies made prior to the murders that are associated with Mark Fuhrman in one way or another you will also see everything. Sometimes identities are switched. Sometimes the evidence is moved around and sometimes the sequence of events is in a different order. Nevertheless, everything is there. 

The Murder in Greenwich director, cinematographer, editor, costume designer, sound effects crew and actors must have seen some of those movies and made some professional choices. Given the script and a few “little” suggestions, it would have been hard for them to make those choices without picking up cues from other movies. No one makes a decision in a circumstantial vacuum. You don’t even have to be aware that you’re doing it. You just do it until is seems “right” under the circumstances. The “hacker” scene in the beginning of the movie with the shot of the mannequins in the dress shop window looks to me as though it could have been such a choice.

I’ll be coming back to those mannequins in that window often in scenes from related movies. Sometimes you will see one or both of them only as mannequins. Sometimes you will see them as women in red suits or dresses. In one case you will see a bald man in a red suit standing in the place of the mannequin on the right without a wig.  You will always see them in a context that relates to Murder in Greenwich.   

You’ll find a good example of this mixing and matching process in a scene from American Perfekt (’97) with Murder in Greenwich co-star Robert Forster as Jake, the homicidal psychiatrist. A con man carries a two-headed John F. Kennedy sliver dollar and speaks with an Australian or New Zealander accent. He calls himself Santini but admits it isn’t his real name. Johanna Gleason as Shirley sits at a restaurant table with Chris Sarandon (her real life husband) as Sammy, a black-haired cop. Shirley is drunk. She is also a heroine addict. 

Santini fits a cigarette into a holder as he approaches the couple. Shirley is wearing a red blouse with little white spots. Sammy wears a dark necktie. Shirley fixes her eyes on Jake. While Santini is with the cop cheating him out of money Shirley goes over to Jake who is sitting alone at the counter. He’s wearing a black suit jacket and no tie. She hands him a cigarette lighter and leans down with her cigarette for a light. The smile on Jake’s face tells you that he recognizes the sexual symbolism.  

Murder in Greenwich was filmed in New Zealand. Theresa Healy, a black-haired New Zealander actress, plays the alcoholic, middle-aged Hildy Southerlyn. That is not the real name of anyone involved in Fuhrman’s investigation. Joanna Morrison plays Hildy at 17. In a scene where Fuhrman and Weeks enter a pub with Fuhrman wearing a dark necktie, Hildy is sitting at the bar in a long black coat looking at him and smoking a cigarette with a holder. The next scene in the pub has a man in a long black coat sitting at the bar looking at Fuhrman and smoking a cigarette. Fuhrman is at a table with Weeks. Fuhrman is eating French-fries and wearing a red necktie with white spots. He and Weeks establish that a suspect named Banks was watching The French Connection on TV when Martha was murdered.

This much tells you that intentionally or not, Hildy Southerlyn has Sammy’s hair color, Santini’s cigarette holder and a slightly modified version of Jake’s suit jacket. You’ll see what Shirley’s blouse has to do with Fuhrman necktie when you see him with a man in Hildy’s place at the bar. The man is a cocaine addict.   

Sammy’s necktie relates to another movie involving a prostitute who performs oral sex on a cop and wipes her mouth with his black necktie. That’s were I drew the connection in the first Smoking Gun between Fuhrman and his penchant for wearing spotted neckties when being interviewed by women. When the Perfekt woman does her thing with the cigarette and the Perfekt shrink, the Perfekt cop’s necktie and the pattern of the woman’s blouse in the same frame make the perfect connection.  

In Murder in Greenwich, Theresa Healey’s Hildy does a long distance version of Johanna Gleason’s Shirley routine after leaving Chris Sarandon’s cop when she looks straight at Christopher Meloni’s ex-cop Fuhrman and slowly blows smoke in his direction. As Hildy leaves the pub a man in the foreground lights a cigarette with a lighter. His face blurs immediately and Hildy’s face comes into focus above the flame in the background. You have confusing thoughts of a man lighting Hildy’s cigarette but you see that your impression is only a mind trick.    

It doesn’t take much to create the illusion that you saw something you didn’t see or that what you are seeing is original. A restaurant becomes a pub, a counter becomes a bar, a blouse becomes a necktie and the retreads look new. You see a man striking up a cigarette lighter followed by a woman you have seen smoking a cigarette and you immediately make the wrong connection. If you are not paying close attention your original impression would stick. You can’t link something you see to something you can’t see unless you know the thing that has to be linked. You have to know that you are being tricked and you have to know why it matters. You have to know which details matter and which ones don’t. 

Most people who saw the 1960 movie The Outrage never saw that it was an American western version of the 1952 Japanese move Rashomon because they never saw Rashomon. People who haven’t seen The Outrage or Rashomon don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.

That’s how it is with Hildy Southerlyn. The name means something to Mark Fuhrman. The character means a lot of things to him. Whatever those meanings are, they had to have been high priorities for Fuhrman when he made Murder in Greenwich. You don’t invent a character to take up time unnecessarily when time is at a premium.  

American Perfekt is not the only source of material for Fuhrman’s Hildy Southerlyn.  You get more of Hildy from singing barroom characters in The Naked Gun 2, A Study in Terror and The Face of Fear. “Singing” happens to be a slang word for informants like Hildy and the smoking man in the black coat. You see some of Hildy in Silver Streak with Jill Clayburgh, Overboard with Goldie Hawn, an episode of Colombo with Faye Dunaway and Penguin Pool Murder with Edna May Oliver.  

O.J. Simpson played golf with President Clinton shortly before Fuhrman found the bloody glove that linked the murders on Bundy Dr. to O.J.’s Rockingham Ave. estate. O.J. loaded golf clubs into the limo that took him to the airport that night. Hildy is a black-haired, Catholic alcoholic who is always seen in black clothes. So was Nicole’s German sister Denise when she testified against O.J. at his trial.  

The sultry music that introduces Hildy to the audience in the Greenwich tavern is played with a saxophone. At the time that scene was set in, Bill Clinton was President of the Unites States. During his first Presidential campaign he played a saxophone on the Johnnie Carson Show. Around that time Mark Fuhrman was moonlighting as a bodyguard for Carson. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, Fuhrman’s press agent Lucianne Goldberg said that she called him to ask him about getting DNA evidence from dried semen on Monica’s dress, the result of her performing oral sex to climax on the President. According to Goldberg, Fuhrman advised her to tell her Monica go-between Linda Tripp to tell Monica to hold onto the dress. The rest is history. President William Jefferson Clinton was impeached.   

Although Monica is infamous for her blue dress with the white semen stain, during and after the scandal she wore black dresses, black suits and jackets with black slacks and white blouses. That’s all Hildy Southerlyn wears, which gives us the saxophone, the black hair, the clothes and the “French connection” to Fuhrman. You’ll see him with Hildy later on wearing a blue tie with white spots.  

How about the moonlighting? 

Fuhrman and Weeks crash a Belle Haven country club cocktail party. A piano player in a black tuxedo is tinkling the ivories. You see red drapes and a small lamp.  Fuhrman introduces himself to Hildy. She says that she read about him in the papers. Bruce Hopkins who appeared with raven-hared Lucy Lawless in Xena, appears on the patio as a private guard named Lancaster. He tells Fuhrman that he is on private property. Hildy tells him that Fuhrman and Weeks are on the guest list. When Lancaster leaves Fuhrman tells Hildy that he was the cop who gave them the Moxley report. Hildy says, “What’s the mater detective? Didn’t you ever do moonlighting when you were with the LAPD?” 

The next time you see Hildy you again see the lamp. You also see red drapes, which play a key role in Twin Peaks with Sherilyn Fenn as a 17-year-old girl who shows her proficiency at giving oral sex by bending a cherry stem into a pretzel using only her mouth and tongue.  

In Silence of the Heart (’86) Sherilyn Fenn is Monica. In Diary of a Hitman (’91) she is a targeted murder victim named Jain. “Like rain,” she says, “J-a-i-n.” To save her life and the life of her baby she offers to give the assassin a “blowjob.” In Cement she is a cheating wife who embraces her boyfriend and sinks down until her face is at crotch level, giving him a preview of things to come, so to speak. Chris Penn is her homicidal cop husband. He kills her boyfriend after he catcher him in bed with her smoking an after-sex cigarette. In an adult TV series called Rude Awakening (1998-2001) she’s an alcoholic named Billie Frank whose sex life appears to revolve mostly around performing oral sex.  Billie Fuhrman is Mark Fuhrman’s alcoholic mother.  

If you need somebody other than Dominick Dunne and “Billie Frank” to link Fuhrman to Sherilyn Fenn and his brunette, alcoholic Hildy, try Mario Van Peebles. For a season of Rude Awaking he co-starred as Billie’s boyfriend Marcus. In Gang in Blue (’96), Peebles is Michael, an LA cop who discovers a group of murderous cops with a racist agenda and compares one of them to Mark Fuhrman.  

If Sherilyn still doesn’t sound enough to you like Southerlyn, try playing a game of anagrams. Starting with Sherilyn, as Fuhrman would have had to do to turn her name into Southerlyn, you just have to drop the “i”  to get all the letters you need. I noticed the odd spelling because the character’s name sounded like Sutherland, as in Donald or Kieffer Sutherland. I thought it was Southerland until I read the credits.  

The closest I came to Sherilyn Fenn was the prequel to Twin Peaks call Fire Walk With Me with Chris Isaak as an FBI investigator and Kieffer Sutherland as a forensic pathologist. Sutherland’s character performs an autopsy on a 17-year-old murder victim named Theresa Banks who was bludgeoned to death and her body dumped in a river. Where have you seen those names before? Fire Walk With Me connects to Murder in Greenwich but although Sherilyn Fenn’s name appears in the opening credits she does not appear in the movie. That’s why I decided that Fuhrman linked Sherilyn, not Sutherland to Hildy. Where you see Theresa Healy as Hildy you twice hear the name Morris Banks as a murder suspect. The real name of the person behind his character was Ed Hammond. Fuhrman named Hammond in his book. 

Now that I knew what kind of name game I was playing with the composite character of Hildy Southerlyn I began looking for Hildegarde links I hadn’t already discovered. I hit pay dirt with Hildy Parks as Doris Courtier in The Night Holds Terror (’55). Don’t let her blonde hair or her character’s last name mislead you. The real person Hildy Parks’ character is based on had very dark hair. On the movie’s black and white film it looks black. Her real name was Croquet.

Obviously the name alone doesn’t link Hildy Parks to Hildy Southerlyn. Neither does the real Doris Croquet’s hair color. I watched the movie after I saw Murder in Greenwich only because the synopsis listed Hildy Parks and Jack Kelly as the stars. Jack Kelly interested me because his initials were, J and K, as in Jack Kennedy and he starred in Forbidden Planet with Leslie Nielsen, Ann Frances and Warren Steven. Nielsen and Frances appeared with O.J. Simpson in different movies and Stevens holds a special place in a Twilight Zone episode called Dead Man’s Shoes. In Forbidden Planet Kelly plays an astronaut named Farman.  

These connections mean nothing unless you see them in a context that holds special meaning only to Mark Fuhrman. Similarities alone won’t get it. If you look hard enough you can find similarities between popcorn and razor blades. But the instant you try to think of something dissimilar to popcorn you find yourself trying not to think of things like peanuts (snack food) and bullets (popping sound when “fired”). That’s why it’s so hard to borrow one idea without picking up “trace evidence” of where it came from. It’s built into the way the human brain is wired. Sometimes the wires get crossed and associated ideas get confused. It’s bad for memory but great for imagination and eclectic thinking that passes for imagination. Fuhrman is an eclectic thinker.  

In The Night Holds Terror you see a photo of the real Croquets, and a voice-over gives their real name. I’ll use the real name for a good reason. You’ll see it see when I make the Murder in Greenwich connection.   

Jack Kelly as Gene Croquet picks up a carjacker in a leather jacket who mistook his Mercury for a Lincoln. Leather Jacket has friends who want to kill Croquet when they discover their mistake but when they learn that his father is wealthy, they turn the carjacking into a kidnapping. The telling scene in The Night Holds Terror takes place in the last few minutes with Mrs. Croquet in her home talking on the phone to s kidnapper in a suit and tie. The police listen in. Her job in this deadly game of cops and kidnappers is to keep the line open while the police run a phone trace. The kidnapper’s job is to collect the ransom money without getting caught. Mr. Croquet stands in the rain outside of a phone booth near a railroad crossing. The cops arrive. Shots ring out. The kidnappers get hit and fall dead in the rain.  

Look at the details the way Fuhrman did in his notes and in his books. You will notice that Hildy Parks as Mrs. Croquet is wearing a wedding ring and pearl earbobs. You’ll notice that the kidnapper in the suit and tie is inside the phone booth when he makes the call and neither Mr. Croquet nor Leather Jacket is wearing a tie. You will notice Mr. Croquet standing in the rain. You’ll notice that the phone booth has a glass door. You’ll remember the gunshot exchange. When you’re looking for “trace evidence” small things like these are enormous.  

Furman looks at a picture of Martha with a group of other high school kids. One face looks familiar. It’s Hildy Southerlyn.  

In the next shot Hildy, as always, is nursing a drink with a slice of lime and smoking a cigarette with a cigarette holder. She’s sitting on a patio. You see people dressed in white doing something on a lawn in the rain. Hildy is wearing a black casual outfit with black pants and a white blouse. She has a pair of pearl earbobs but no wedding ring. The ring’s absence is a continuity error. As the scene continues, she is wearing it.  

Fuhrman stands in a foyer with red drapes and a little lamp on a table like the one at the country club behind him. He walks past a glass door onto a patio and sits down opposite Hildy. He waves away a servant and tells Hildy that he noticed she was the only person in town willing to speak with him. She tells him that he is welcome and he tells her that he is not thanking her. He says that he wants to know why. He brings up Martha Moxley. Hildy changes the subject by asking him if he has “ever witnessed a competitive game of croquet.”  You now see that the people on the lawn in front of the patio are playing croquet.  

You can tell the white-clad Croquet players are wealthy because servants trot behind them holding umbrellas over their heads.. Between pauses in the conversation Fuhrman is trying to drag out of Hildy you see croquet players taking shots. You see the mallets hitting balls and you see the shoes of the players. Fuhrman tells Hildy, “It's a good thing he didn't us a Croquet mallet on her. There would have been nothing left to identify.” In Stephen King’s book The Shining, a black man is murdered with a croquet mallet. In the movie, the mallet became an ax. In Mark Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood book he wrote about a man who was bludgeoned to death with a hammer. If you read both books you probably made the connection between King’s mallet and Fuhrman’s hammer.   

To appreciate what happens next in Murder in Greenwich you have to remember that Mark Fuhrman was one of three boys. You have to know that his father was a carpenter and Mark was working as an electrician and a carpenter when he moved to Idaho. In Murder in Brentwood he wrote about hunting dear, bear and elk. You have to recall the yacht you saw for a half a second in a cove at the beginning of Murder in Greenwich and the mixing and matching of clothes in American Perfekt. 

In Overboard Kurt Russell is a widower carpenter named Dean who recently moved to Elk Cove in Oregon with his four boys.  He wears a hammer on his tool belt. Goldie Hawn is Joanna Stayton. English actor Roddy McDowall is her servant Andrew. Within a span of sixty seconds you see that the yacht has red drapes, Joanna wears a wedding ring, speaks French, and smokes cigarettes using a cigarette holder. You see that she is a rude, arrogant bitch. In Murder in Greenwich, Steve Carroll calls Fuhrman a “rude, arrogant son of a bitch.” Fuhrman calls Hildy a “lonesome alcoholic with too much money and too few distractions.” Dean says something strikingly similar to Joanna when she refuses to pay him for his work.  

Joanna summons Dean to her red-draped yacht to handle an “emergency.” She tells him that she needs a new shoe rack and “…drawers for my lingerie.” She is wearing a white swimming suit with a white jacket over her shoulders. Dean is working on her closet. Andrew brings her a bowl of caviar on a silver tray. She spits it out and tell him, “Caviar should be round and hard and of sufficient size, and it should burst in your mouth at precisely the right moment.” Dean’s retracting tape measurer is extended over a foot. When he hears the remark he snaps the release.

The sexual symbolism is not the most important thing to look for here. If you substitute Dean’s hammer for a croquet mallet and scale up the round, hard caviar to sufficient size you get a croquet mallet and croquet balls. You can’t do that without a hammer and with oysters or shrimp.  

When Joanna falls overboard and loses her memory, you get strong links between her character, black hair, rain and more red drapes. You get links to Hildy in other Overboard scenes. They include the saxophone music, the piano player and the beer that Fuhrman orders when he sees Hildy for the first time in the pub and when he crashes the country club cocktail party. You get links to Fuhrman’s version of the night Martha was killed and when her body way found thought a school teacher who gets toilet-papered by Deans kids and Deans comment that she looked like “night after Halloween.” You get links to Fuhrman though Dean’s old, blue pickup truck, his beeping horn as he comes home, the haystacks in his yard, his checkered blue shirt, cowboy boots and brown leather jacket.  

Goldie Hawn as Annie, the name Dean gives her when she loses her memory, also has links to Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich version of Martha Moxley’s murder. Dean convinces her that she is his wife, a poor, miserable, slavish creature from Idaho. Joanna Stayton is not an alcoholic but Dean convinces “Annie” that her mother is an alcoholic.