Mark Fuhrman has many signatures. He embellishes. He rearranges. He makes things up. He does all of these things in ways that are peculiar to him. That’s what makes them his signatures. But the thing he does that distinguishes him in these respects is not embellishment, rearrangement or invention per se; it’s plagiarism. You don’t have to imagine much of what Fuhrman talks about in his stories because chances are good that that you have seen some of them in headline news stories, sporting events, movies and TV shows. 

Each time Fuhrman told the story of his “domestic disturbance” visit to Rockingham “In the fall or winter of 1985” he embellished on his previous story. The day after the Bundy murders he grossly exaggerated the way O.J.’s SUV was parked and he invented the blood trail going from Nicole’s walkway on Bundy into the Rockingham driveway. Following Fuhrman’s representations of the evidence you get movies and TV shows. If you combine Fuhrman’s stories with the evidence left by the killer you get movies and TV shows. To get a potpourri of movies and TV shows out of the Moxley murder you need Mark Fuhrman’s television and video release of Murder in Greenwich. 

I intended this chapter to link the Murder in Greenwich probation office scene to Robocop: The Series, F/X 2, To Protect and Serve, Investigation of a Citizen, and The Dark Half – and maybe Illegal in Blue. But I couldn’t get Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (’43) out of my head. I didn’t recall that it was a Universal Studios release and Universal’s logo for the movie was a crystal globe with glitter inside and glittering rays extending from it.   I didn’t recall that Shadow of a Doubt was a retelling of the historical Jack the Ripper case. I wasn’t conscious of how much it had to do with the previous chapter and this one.  

I’d seen Shadow of a Doubt at lest five times. I didn’t watch it again to see if it tied into what I was working on. I was simply in the mood for a Hitchcock film and it seemed like a good choice. Besides, I was bogged down with the necktie Fuhrman wears on the back cover of his last two books, Murder in Spokane and Death and Justice. I couldn’t figure out why it looked familiar. If I got my mind off of it, I thought that the answer might come to me.  It already had. I just didn’t know it, yet.

I expected to see new things in Shadow of a Doubt, particularly with Joseph Cotton’s character Charlie Oakley and Teresa Wright as his nice Charlie Newton. The last time I checked I found a tie with appropriately spaced white dots on two detectives and a character named Herbert. Herb and Niece Charlie’s father Joseph are murder mystery buffs. They play a game of plotting ways to kill each other. Joe likes to keep things simple. Herb favors elaborate schemes that require planning and subtle clues. I thought those Fuhrman necktie associations were enough, but now I had a new necktie I couldn’t link to any character in any movie. I saw part of the pattern on one of Uncle Charlie’s neckties and the other part in an unexpected place in another Hitchcock film.  

I also got a practical lesson in the workings of the subconscious mind.   

My computer ate my original version of the previous chapter. While attempting to reconstruct it I ran across information in F/X 2 that forced me to leave out things I put in the original chapter about Fuhrman’s neckties and end it so I could put it into this chapter. My subconscious knew that I had to see Shadow of a Doubt through the prism of Murder in Greenwich to see why Fuhrman’s necktie on the cover of his newest books looked familiar and why I hadn’t found the source. Part of the answer was in Shadow of a Doubt. The other part was in a 1972 Hitchcock movie called Frenzy – a movie about a serial killer who strangled women with his neckties. Fuhrman’s new tie is a composite of Oakley’s tie and the Necktie Killer’s drapes.  

I didn’t see the connection at first because the segments in Fuhrman’s tie are small and the colors of the wavy blocks alternate between red and white with an abstract pattern in the blocks. Charles Oakley wears six neckties. But the one he wears to the bank to deposit a large amount of cash, which is also the one he wears when a Federal agent takes his picture, is the closest to Fuhrman’s latest book cover photos. It has wavy segments, only the segments are large, the waves are turned in the opposite direction and you can’t see the pattern close up. Furthermore, the colors of the wavy segments don’t alternated from light to dark.  

In Frenzy, the Necktie Killer’s drapes have the alternating red and white segments of Fuhrman’s Murder in Spokane and Death and Justice necktie but you can see the pattern only at a certain distance. When you overlay the drapes in the Necktie Killer’s apartment with the wavy segment of Charles Oakley’s necktie you get as close to Fuhrman’s last book cover tie as you are ever likely to get. You can use the drapes because the phone call scene in Murder in Greenwich tells you to use it.  

After strangling a woman, stuffing her body in a potato sack and dumping it into the bed of a truck, the Necktie Killer pulls the drapes aside to look down from his second floor window at the truck. Turning away he reaches for his diamond necktie stickpin that he thought he had in his lapel. It isn’t there. He searches frantically with no success. Then, standing before the drapes, it dawns on him where it is. It’s in the death grip of the woman in the potato sack with his necktie around her neck. He runs down the stairs, just as Fuhrman does in his dramatic running-down-the-stairs scene. Only the Necktie Killer’s run is truly dramatic. If he doesn’t recover the stickpin he’s as good as convicted of murder. It bears the initial “R” for his first and last name, Robert Rusk. 

Jack the Ripper strangled his victims before he cut them up. Alfred Hitchcock knew that and he used it in Frenzy and Shadow of a Doubt. It was no accident that Shadow of a Doubt had characters named Emma, Ann and Catherine or that an actress named Janet plays a minor role. It was no accident that a major character’s name was Jack, that Uncle Charlie rips a newspaper or that the downtown clock tower strikes the same notes as Big Ben, the bell behind the clock in Greenwich England. 

The two Charlies represent the Jekyll and Hyde personality that 1888 London police attributed to the Ripper. Hitchcock even worked in a direct reference to 1888 when most of the Whitechapel murders occurred and to 40 Berner Street in St. Georges London where Elizabeth Stride’s body was found. The Oakley’s once lived on “46 Bernam Street” in St. Paul Minnesota. 

Hitchcock gave the name Jack to a detective and the name Fred to Jack’s partner. He used a clock in a bank tower to stand in for the Greenwich clock and a soft-bellied traffic cop stopping wholesome young Charlie Oakley to stand in for a tough London bobby stopping a Whitechapel whore. These techniques of hiding Jack the Ripper allusions in plain sight work subliminally to heighten suspense.  

Mark Fuhrman incorporated Hitchcock’s subliminal association techniques in Murder in Greenwich and in his necktie on the back cover of Murder in Spokane and Death and Justice. Murder in Spokane is about a serial killer who preyed on prostitutes in Spokane Washington. Death and Justice is about the Oklahoma capital punishment system that condemned innocent people to death. Hitchcock feared cops more than criminals. The desperate plight of innocent people that the police marked as criminals is a recurring Hitchcock theme.  

In Frenzy the police have so much evidence against an innocent man that they don’t even consider another suspect. This was true in many Oklahoma death penalty cases Fuhrman investigated for Death and Justice. He found proof of innocence in corrupt police and prosecution practices and in DNA. 

To see the whole picture of Fuhrman’s publicity picture neckties, you have to start with Officer Charlie Stewart in To Protect and Serve in his squad car shaking down a pimp named Teddy B. The pimp calls himself a player. Charlie receives his payoff in “French” from a hooker and in an envelope stuffed with fifty-dollar bills – the bills featuring Ulysses Simpson Grant. The woman lifts her head from Charlie’s lap and wipes her mouth with his necktie. This act gives you white spots on a cop’s necktie. White spots = semen = DNA. In the last chapter of The Smoking Gun, I wrote that I would have called it The Real French Connection if I’d had enough space.  

The great thing about simulating or symbolizing a woman giving a man “French” on film is that you can do it with no more than a cigarette, a long-necked bottle, a finger or a necktie. The great thing about neckties is that you can take them off and put them around anyone’s neck. 

The word Fuhrman used on the first Laura Hart tape in 1985 to represent “cop talk” was “cocksucker.” Seeing his comment about he and his partners killing pimps, gang members and drug dealers being played out a few years later in To Protect and Serve must have caught his attention. He and Laura had pitched their screenplay to many Hollywood producers by then. It was therefore possible that the scenario as well as the main characters for the movie were stolen from them with a few adjustments to hide the source.  

I don’t think it was possible for Fuhrman to believe that his characters and situations weren’t stolen from him and that the worst of the renegade cops like Stewart, Hall and Kazinski weren’t modeled after him. When you strip away the material that Fuhrman stole from other movies and combine what he said on the tapes with his record, the only aspect of Fuhrman you don’t get in To Protect and Serve is his racism.  

The issues were power and corruption in the LAPD. Racism would have confused those issues. When you see Kazinski spitting water on cocaine powder in a spoon to liquefy it and heating the spoon until the potion bubbles to kill the pimp with an overdose, you have to be clear about his motives. You have to know that he is doing it to protect and serve his group’s extortion racket, because he likes it, and because the system allows him to get away with it. The pimp’s color in this situation is incidental. It was the same with Fuhrman. He didn’t say that he targeted black pimps. He just said “pimps.” He said “we could have murdered people and gotten away with it.” He also said that they did.  

Little Kelly innocently blowing bubbles in her milk through a straw is not as far removed from Teddy B injecting himself with a fatal dose of cocaine at gunpoint or his whore giving a “blowjob” as you might think. The girl playing Kelly looks nothing like Fuhrman’s daughter and he never used his children’s names in his books or his interviews. He left their names out of in Murder in Greenwich. He didn’t have to give either of his screenplay kids names to do the scenes involving them but something compelled him to call the girl Kelly. Therefore the girl and the name had to be multi-purpose symbols. You can call up images of some things as easily by contrast as you can with similarity. Little Kelly is not the hooker or the pimp in To Protect and Serve. She is the contrast.  

Combining extreme contrasts with close similarities is another Hitchcock trick. In Shadow of a Doubt, Hitchcock figuratively got away with murder by turning key elements of the Whitechapel murders inside out.  

Jack the Ripper strangled destitute prostitutes and cut them up. Charles Oakley strangled wealthy, respectable widows but didn’t cut them up. Hitchcock named a good guy Jack and he gave the killer and his niece a name that most people would have associated with an aviator, a murder mystery super sleuth, a ventriloquist or an acquaintance. He turned 40 into 46, Berner into Bernam and St. Georges into St. Paul. He turned a big city in Europe into a small town in North America. He turned a flower in the title of a song into a flower in the title of a waltz. He used the name of another waltz to slip in the name of the Ripper’s last victim.  

Mary Jane Kelly was heard singing “Sweet Violets” as she entered her apartment for the last time. Charlie Newton, the epitome of wholesomeness, hums “The Marry Widow Waltz” at the dinner table with her Uncle Charlie, who has recently murdered another rich widow. She can’t place the name of the tune and she can’t get it out of her head. Her mother can’t place it, either, but she knows that it’s a Victor Herbert waltz. Uncle Charlie says that it’s “The Blue Danube Waltz.” Niece Charlie thinks at first that he is right but the real name suddenly comes to her and her uncle tips over a glass of water to keep her from getting the whole name out. Police have dubbed him The Marry-Widow Killer.  

That’s one of Fuhrman’s “Kellys.” We’ve looked at others. Before we look at another one we have to take a closer look at the glass Oakley tips over in the context of Christopher Meloni as Fuhrman tilting the glass paperweight with the sparkles suspended in water. The small decorative blisters on Oakley’s glass sparkle with the ambient light in the room as the glass tilts and the water pours out. Taking away the stem gives you a close approximation of the paperweight.

You don’t need a picture of the glitter dome in The Lady in Red with Pamela Sue Martin as Polly Franklin working at a dime-a-dance joint in her red dress. It’s identical to the one in To Protect and Serve with Christopher Thomas Howell as Phil Egan. This “glitter dome” is a rotating, multi-faceted ball unlike the one in the screenplay adaptation of Joe Wambaugh’s The Glitter Dome. It hangs in the bedroom of a dirty cop who is bludgeoned to death as a strobe light flickers. While the victim, tied to a bed by a hooker named Beverly, is being beaten in her absence, you see white spots of light reflected off the walls when the room is dark. When she returns you see her in her red dress when the light flickers on.  

The next time you see Beverly she’s wearing a red jacket with small, round studs. Eagan’s female partner puts on a wig and wears Beverly’s jacket, pants and shoes to trap him. She doesn’t have enough evidence to identify the real killer and she doesn’t seek it because the evidence she his is strong enough to make Egan her only suspect. 

I got the idea of a red dress with white spots substituting for one of Fuhrman’s publicity photo neckties from The Bad Seed (’56), with Patty McCormack as Rhoda and Nancy Kelly as her mother. Rhoda is an intelligent, prevaricating, neat freak, sociopathic, 8-year-old serial killer. 8-year old girls don’t wear neckties. The closet thing to it is her dress. Although the movie was shot in black and white you can see the white spots on the dress and the dialogue tells you that the background is red.  

Some evidence pointing to a Fuhrman’s necktie in a red dress is in American Perfekt where Joanna Gleason’s blouse is linked to her real life husband Chris Sarandon’s tie. Neckties and guns are phallic symbols. You see Gleason as Elizabeth Kennedy linked to Brian Dennehy’s necktie in F/X 2. Later, when Dennehy as Leo, an ex-cop and her ex-lover, is showing her how to use a 22-automatic, he tells her to “cock the sucker.” She pretends to miss the bawdy play on words, but you know she got it when she holds the pistol to his head and says, “I cocked the sucker.”

These scenes don’t prove that Joanna Gleason and the hookers in To Protect and Serve have anything to do with each other or Fuhrman’s spotted neckties. But when you factor in Christopher Meloni as ex-cop Fuhrman wearing a red tie with white spots telling Rob Mathers (R.M.) what he heard about a used condom, the case gets tighter. When you factor in Taking the Heat and Mathers telling Fuhrman about an encounter with Greenwich police where a cop calls Tommy “a good ball player” and treats Mathers “like Charles Manson,” it tightens up more.  

The next scene showing Fuhrman wearing the tie and using a fork to eat a hamburger from a plate filled with french-fries, seals it. McDonalds fast food restaurant is best known for four things: golden arches (a stylized M), Ronald McDonald (R.M.), hamburgers, and french-fries.  

To Protect and Serve has Charlie Stewart receiving “French” from the “player’s” whore while he tells him that if he can’t come up with more money he should “get a job moonlighting at McDonalds or something.” Seconds after he makes that remark he reaches an orgasm. A few seconds later you see the woman with her lipstick smeared wiping her mouth with the cop’s necktie.  

I wrote about To Protect and Serve links to Fuhrman two years before he produced Murder in Greenwich. I watched it because Fuhrman used the title phrase in Murder in Brentwood and because it starred C. Thomas Howell. I followed C. Thomas Howell links because of the “French connection” and the necktie connection to his role in Soul Man with future wife Rae Dawn Chong and his role in The Hitcher with Jennifer Jason Leigh. In The Hitcher, Jennifer Jason Leigh is Nash. Robocop has a character named Nash. In To Protect and Serve, Egan’s captain tells him that he isn’t Robocop. Peter Weller is. Weller is also a homicide detective who has sex with a woman who becomes a murder victim and wears one of Fuhrman’s neckties in Rainbow Drive. 

Howell and Leigh converge in Fuhrman links to neckties and women performing “French,” Nicole Simpson’s preferred sexual practice. It’s tough to find a movie released before Fuhrman’s 1992 boasts of having sex with Nicole where a woman performing oral sex on a man doesn’t have distinguishing links to Fuhrman’s stories. You find them in Whore (’91) and Eureka (’84) with Theresa Russell; Crimes of Passion (’84), The Man With Two Brains (’83); and Body Heat (’81) with Kathleen Turner. In Night Eyes (’90) with Tanya Roberts as Nikki you get more of them. Again, these are not simply “French connections” they are movie connections with clusters of specific references to Mark Fuhrman.  

Roy Schider is Gene Hackman’s partner in The French Connection. In 52 Pick-up (’86) Kelly Preston is Cini. Roy Schider’s character calls a pimp who uses Cini to blackmail him a “cocksucker.” The pimp calls him “Sport.” In Hunter, Garret Morris is a pimp called Sporty James. In Taxi Driver Harvey Keitel is a pimp called Sport. In Murder in Greenwich Fuhrman calls Lancaster Sport. Kelly Preston also connects to Fuhrman in the props and people surrounding her at a party for porn stars with real porn stars sporting surgically enhanced breasts. Vanity, as Doreen, is Cini’s best friend. “Someone” started rumors that Fuhrman couldn’t be a racist because he had the hots for Vanity.  

Here is a list of movies where an actress simulates performing oral sex, talks about it or symbolizes the act in a context relevant to Murder in Brentwood and Murder in Greenwich – the book and the movie:  

Tanya Roberts as Kay Egan in Sins of Desire

Theresa Russell as Mary Ann in Flight of the Dove

Goldie Hawn as Judy in Private Benjamin

Shannon Tweed as Zoë in Night Eyes 3

Tracy Tweed as Dana in Night Eyes 3

Tessa Richarde as Billie in Cat People.

Sherilyn Fenn as Jain in Diary of a Hitman

Melora Hardin as Whitney in Soul Man

Sally Kirkland as Lee in In the Heat of Passion

Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest

Lauren Bacall as Marie in To Have and to Have Not

Pricilla Presley as Jane in The Naked Gun

Faye Dunaway as Bonny in Bonny and Clyde

Sharon Stone as Catherine in Basic Instinct

Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedra in Single White Female

This is a partial list. It doesn’t include Helen Mirren as Georgia in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Jill Clayburgh as Hilly in Silver Steak or Allie Sheedy as Casey in Fear. A comprehensive list would be twice as long but you don’t even have to see the movies on the list to appreciate how many elements you get to choose from to tell your own story just by piecing them together. And these are only the “French connections.”  You’d be amazed at how far you can go simply by zooming in on particular items like the blue jean jacket or the domed paperweight with gold glitter suspended in water in Murder in Greenwich. You’d be amazed at how many of them are crammed into six minutes or less. 

You don’t have to take anything out of context to make these connections. Indeed, if you did take them out of context they’d be meaningless. That’s why I imposed a time limit on grouping Murder in Greenwich film and television links. A nine-minute rule would have narrowed the odds of grouping them by chance to an insignificant fraction over one in ten. But in scores of randomly selected test clusters I didn’t find a single cluster that extended past six minutes.  

Some links composing a cluster appeared at first to be scattered throughout Murder in Greenwich. That was because I hadn’t identified the nexus in the cluster and the movie links that sprouted from it. When I found the nexus I saw that individual links were not scattered but the clusters were. They were scattered because there was too much stuff pointing to specific segments in other movies to fit into one Murder in Greenwich segment in a way that told the story he wanted to tell. But he couldn’t resist getting in as much as he could so he put extensions of the clusters somewhere else, just as I’ve done here.  

I don’t believe Fuhrman was conscious of all the borrowed movie elements he put in a cluster. I think he planted some of them because he knew his subconscious would plant others and he needed safety valves like the crystal ball in Eureka in case he got caught. I don’t believe that he was conscious of the Theresa Russell “French connection” much less the Gene Hackman French Connection or the incest connection in Eureka. I don’t believe his C. Thomas Howell links to the probation office scene extending to the bubble-blowing scene with little Kelly were intentional. I don’t think any of his Kelly links were intentional. I’m certain, however, that a Robocop: The Series link was.   

You get so many sparkling dome links in so many movies that you’d think they would be difficult to isolate. In Murder in Greenwich, Fuhrman makes it easy. Before I end this chapter with the Robocop: The Series link I’m sure was intentional, I want to insert another one. You’ll find it in Millennium (’89) with Cheryl Ladd as chain smoker Louis Baltimore and Kris Kristofferson as Bill Smith in a Minneapolis motel room. She implores him to “just walk away” from his job.  

Bill picks up his wallet and the key to his rented room. He walks a few steps down the corroder. You hear metal tinkling against glass as a man passes him with a tray. He goes back to the room. Louise is gone. She has traveled to the distant future through a time gate that looks like a sparkling dome. There, her personal robot Sherman says something that offends her. She tells him that his mother was a cash register. Her boss tells her that she dropped her calling card. Soon after that Sherman waits for her while she is in a shower with a glass door. He then prepares her for a mission to 1963 with an accelerated course on the times including news clips featuring John Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  

Some of this will come back to you when see the Murder in Greenwich “say nigger” scene. If you are “test wise” you know what I’m getting at.  Most people aren’t. The Bundy killer was. Mark Fuhrman is.  

This paragraph is wrapped around a picture of a Detroit Police Department squad car from the pilot episode of Robocop: The Series. You see four flashers but as the camera angel changes you can tell that there are seven of them. Dr. Mallardo, the man with the necktie Robocop is putting in the car, is a liar and a killer. A Lincoln pulls up with an American flag on the fender. It carries a convicted felon and a man known as the Dogtown Ripper. Can you find a similar picture in the previous chapter? Yes, this is a test. I bet you pass.