Chapter 22

If you saw “The Future of Law Enforcement” recently you’ll recognize that title as the pilot episode of Robocop: The Series. You’ll also recognize how much I didn’t include in my reference to the show, like a close-up rear view of the seven flashers or their delta (v-shaped) alignment. You didn’t need to see the delta pattern of the seven paperweights on the probation officer’s desk to see only four of them from a particular angle. One shot gives you four separate paperweights on top of his computer monitor in the same view. I gave you all you needed to take you to the picture of Fuhrman approaching the parole officer’s desk in Murder in Greenwich.  

The “test” question was easy because only one of the multiple-choice pictures had enough of the essential elements, the paperweights, the necktie and the American flag. This is how it is on all multiple-choice questions and why test-wise people do so well on them – if they are given one time block to answer all of the questions.  

If you know the answer is hidden among five choices, you know that you are playing a game of deception. If you know the answer, the tester can’t trick you. If you know enough to narrow the range of options you can usually narrow them to two. That gives you a 50/50 chance of answering correctly if you do nothing more than take a blind guess. But the process of eliminating the other three gives you a plan of attack for either confirming or eliminating one of the remaining two. If you search the question systematically for clues you will eventually get the answer.  

The operative word is “systematic.” Look at the process like a contest rather than a test. The testers are not neutral parties to the proceedings. They are your opponents. Their job is to fool you. Your job is to see through the deception. You need to know that the testers don’t hold all of the cards. They have unwritten rules they have to follow and the better you understand the hidden rules the better you’ll do. The next thing you have to know is that they cheat. If you can’t see the answer and you can’t find the deception, look for the cheat.  

By deception I mean a legitimate attempt to hide the correct answer by clever wording, meaningless clutter and look-alike answers. By cheat I mean ambiguous wording, no correct answer or more than one. Your objective when faced with a cheat question or a cheat list of options becomes to find the answer that comes closest to the right one. That is, to get it right on the test, you have to pick one that you know is wrong. 

The more I looked at the evidence against O.J. in the Bundy murder investigation the more it looked like a multiple-choice test. The evidence itself was deceiving. It had the spatial equivalent of deceptive wording. It was loaded with meaningless clutter and look-alikes. It had unnecessary ambiguity, no correct answer in instances where there should have been one, or so many explanations that anyone could feel comfortable with any of the obvious choices. When I looked at those obvious choices systematically, I discovered that none of them could be right.  

Mark Fuhrman was the only person involved in the investigation and the trial who looked at all of the evidence systematically. He was the only one who demonstrated that he knew how to do it. All the others went only far enough to seize upon the answers that leaped out at them and then worked overtime to collect evidence to support their conclusions.  

This is why most people don’t do as well on I.Q. tests as their true level of intelligence should indicate. They don’t take enough time up front to understand the structure of the entire test. They don’t spend enough time on the “easy” questions to know how to answer the “hard” ones. They don’t know that they are dealing with a practical application of well-known psychology principles that professional murder-mystery writers and illusionists use – a trick that has nothing to do with intelligence.  

The Inspector in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion uses a variation of this trick to get away with murder. The I.Q. tester equivalent of what he does is to set up the right answer to look like the wrong one so the test takers will dismiss it before they begin to look for the “right” one. He deliberately leaves clues pointing to himself as the killer. He puts a strand of silk from his expensive blue necktie that the victim bought for him under her fingernail. He leaves his fingerprints all over the murder scene. He stages a robbery to look like a staged robbery and he purposely steps in a pool of the victim’s blood so he can stamp his bloody shoeprint in plain sight leading away from her body.

Instead of sneaking away, the Inspector makes sure that a man coming into the gate gets a good look at his face. He left so much evidence that other detectives conclude the killer was stupid. They dismiss evidence of his guilt because they know he is smart. They know that he would know how to do it “right.” They don’t look at him as a suspect because they are afraid of him. They can’t imagine a motive for him. He is the Inspector. He is the first lead detective on the scene and he is above suspicion. When interrogating a suspect in another murder investigation before he leads the investigation of the murder he committed, he “jokes” that he is the only guilty man in the room. 

As the story progresses, it’s clear that the Inspector is of two minds about getting caught. He shows the forensics expert Nicola a file that connects Nicola to a suspected subversive, his wife’s cousin. Nicola has little to do with his cousin-in-law and the Inspector never threatens him overtly. The threat is implied in the situation that the Inspector created. On the other hand, it doesn’t appear that any form of threat was necessary because Nicola has already figured out exculpatory explanations for the “mountain of evidence” against his boss. He even recalls seeing the Inspector do things during his official presence on the scene to account for his fingerprints although he couldn’t have seen him do those things then because they didn’t happen then.  

The Inspector’s ambivalence about what to do after he has succeeded in shifting blame to the victim’s ex-husband takes him in opposing directions. Part of him doesn’t want to get caught and part of him does. So he tries to have it both ways. He makes sure that the investigation gets steered toward him and he antagonizes the detectives that take over the case. But as soon as the investigators get too close, he falls back on his old tricks to alter witness memories and confuse the evidence.  

Our hero is not entirely sane. He has wielded too much power too long and it is starting to back up in his professional digestive tract. Augusta insulted him and hurt his feelings but he did not kill her in a moment of passion, as he made it appear her ex-husband did.   That was only an excuse. He did it because he could no longer tolerate the politics that controlled the justice system or his new place in it as the head of political investigations. He planned the murder and planted the evidence just to prove that he wouldn’t be caught because he would never be seriously investigated as a suspect. When he considers the full implications of Augusta’s ex taking the fall, he knows that he has to help set him free to prove he was right. He knows that he has to catch himself.  

In the final scenes, the Inspector tries to confess but he can’t get anyone to buy it. The shoes?  Lost of people were shoes like his. His affair with the victim? Hey, she was a hot babe. He had sex with her. That didn’t mean he killed her. The witnesses? They don’t remember. The incriminating evidence he sent to the reporter? What evidence?  

Yes, he was right. He could commit murder with impunity because he was above suspicion. But he was above suspicion because the system needed him to be. He was never going to be able to prove he did it because nobody in authority was ever going to admit to being wrong about giving him so much power. Nobody in authority was going to admit they were wrong about giving him so much power because nobody wanted his own power threatened by exposing the flaws in the system. 

The Inspector “joking” that he is the only guilty man in the room might have given you a flashback to Fuhrman’s genocidal racist “joke” as he signed his name to the permission slip to leave Idaho for Connecticut. The only people in the room where the Inspector told his joke that wasn’t a joke where white males – and there were a lot of people in the room. This was 1970 Italy so that’s what you would expect to see. But if you overlay that scene on the Idaho Department of Corrections parole and probation room in Murder in Greenwich, it takes on another meaning.  

This brings us back to Fuhrman’s red ink signature and the Dogtown Ripper in Robocop: The Series. The Dogtown Ripper is actually two men and a gang, Dr. Cray Z. Mallardo, OCP Vice President Chuck Chayken, and the Dogtown Boys. Chris Kennedy is Big Dog, the teenage gang leader. Big Dog is not too bright but he hates real good. He hates foreigners, blacks and “poor people.” He and his gang wear “bummy-looking” clothes. They carry baseball bats and Big Dog drives an old, yellow car with “Eat Your Young” written in red paint on the side. His boys pass out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches “On white bread, of course,” to boys who listen to his idiotic hate speech. His slogans are “Make the square whole” and “People like us.” With slogans like that Big Dog must have charisma.  

The message in red paint is not Fuhrman’s red ink link. It’s just a sign in the background borrowed from Full Metal Jacket, a movie about marines in boot camp and in Vietnam. Fuhrman was a Marine, and a boot camp instructor. He served in Vietnam as a military policeman. At the end of his second interview tape with Diane Sawyer he got into an old, yellow ocher, pickup truck. In Full Metal Jacket, the “jacket” is a bullet casing. In Robocop, it’s armor for Robocop’s arms and torso. If Fuhrman consciously borrowed the seven flasher-shaped paperweights with the delta alignment from Robocop, I think you can safely say that his brown leather jacket symbolizes Robocop’s armor. The red paint is just a reminder of the “Dog Town Ripper’s” syringe. It has a full metal jacket and a white label in red ink. 

Making the Dogtown Ripper’s metal syringe in the pilot episode of Robocop: The Series connection to Fuhrman in the probation office scene more apparent requires a few pages of prep work. 

In Murder in Greenwich, only two jackets have any links to Fuhrman’s public record. The brown leather jacket Christopher Meloni as Fuhrman wears in the probation office is the one Fuhrman wears in the segment after his first 20/20 interview where he climbs into his yellow ocher pickup truck. The blue jean jacket on the man with the blue knit cap sitting behind him in the probation office is like the one O.J. wore to his daughter’s dance rectal the night her mother was killed. Robert Riske, the first officer in Nicole’s condo when her body was found, said that he saw a blue jean jacket on the back of a chair in the kitchen. When Fuhrman left the kitchen, the jacket disappeared.   

I don’t believe that Fuhrman made any incriminating aviator jacket/pilot movie associations consciously. I think he used his aviator jacket for his character in his 2002 movie because he wore it in his 1997 TV interview with Diane Sawyer and his role in the movie is set in 1997. I think he bought the aviator jacket for the same conscious reasons anyone else would: It caught his eye. He liked the way it looked on him. He thought that it would keep him warm. The price was right.

Fuhrman might have had vague notions about where he had seen the jacket before, and perhaps a specific recollection like Dean Profit’s jacket in Overboard. But it takes months to find, untangle and put into context all of the jacket associations and other association that came with it. Nobody has that kind of time.  

In the pilot episode of Robocop: The Series an eight-year-old girl named Gadget is wearing a blue jean jacket and a blue knit cap when she sees Chuck Chayken plunge the syringe into Henry Aaron Winkler. You get the birthday link to Fuhrman not only in the victim’s name but in the baseball bat you see in the hand of a Dogtown Boy who is holding the man for Chayken. The liar link is Gadget, an orphan and a runaway from OCP’s Family Services facility. Family Services is run by Fanny LaMour, who plays a guitar in the “Rainbow Playroom” with children gathered around her and sings “Hug the children. Hold them close to you.”  The playroom has a big plastic car, a playhouse and a stuffed white toy that looks like a lamb. 

In Murder in Greenwich The first thing Fuhrman does when he returns from the probation office, drives past the sheep and parks his truck is hug the children.  

Fanny LaMour is another liar link. The children in her playroom are male and female of all colors and various ages. She says in her ads that contributions to Family Services are for children regardless of “race, creed, color or gender.” Off-camera she behaves more like an orphanage administrator in a Charles Dickens novel. Chayken is her secret lover. Among other pet names, he calls her “Pumpkin Pie.” Family Services is a front for her real operation. She uses the facility to promote herself and recruit children of the right age and color for the Dogtown Boys.   

When Gadget reports to Sgt. Parks, her favorite policeman, that she saw the Dogtown Ripper, he thinks she’s lying because she often comes to him with lies to get attention. The last time he saw her she clamed that bank robbers were going to cut her throat if she didn’t get police protection. You can tell that she looks upon the sergeant as a surrogate father and he looks at her as he would his own daughter. Sgt. Parks is a natural authority figure for Gadget, a steady presence, a leader, a protector and a likable guy. But for Fuhrman there is a huge problem with this relationship.  Gadget is white. Sgt. Parks is black.  

In Goldie and the Boxer (’79), O.J. as the boxer has a surrogate father-daughter relationship with a little white girl.   

Kathleen Bell’s comment in the Marine Recruiting Office about the type of men her white friend Andrea Terry liked is what sent him into his genocidal racist rant. Bell said that Fuhrman looked like Andrea’s type. Her mistake was in using O.J.’s black football player friend Marcus Allen as her example of Andrea’s type. You should recall that incident when Fuhrman “jokes” about the people of Greenwich seeing him as a “genocidal racist” and sighs his name to the travel permission form in red ink. You see Belle Haven – in blue ink above the probation officer’s blue ink signature. The probation officer supposedly wrote the destination but Fuhrman didn’t say he was going to Belle Haven. He said, “Greenwich. A young girl was murdered there twenty-two years ago.” 

At 15, Martha Moxley could have been called a girl, a teenager or a young woman. She was not a young girl. Gadget is. You’ll find 22 and 15 together on the wall of an abandoned warehouse where Big Dog is delivering his speech. Yvette Nipar as Officer Madigan has raided the clubhouse looking for clues into the disappearance of “Old Hank” As she walks around a corner you see the number 2215 painted in red on the wall. When she announces her presence, Big Dog smashes the only light bulb in the place with his baseball bat, plunging the meeting room into darkness.  

This is a much closer link to Fuhrman’s version of Martha Moxley than you might think if you didn’t see Murder in Greenwich and Robocop: The Series. In Murder in Greenwich the kids of Belle Haven wear bummy-looking clothes on Hacker Night much like clothes the Dogtown Boys wear. They drive a yellow pickup truck and they smash pumpkins with baseball bats. Martha Moxley was killed on that night and Fuhrman uses the boys smashing pumpkins with baseball bats as a metaphor for Michael smashing Martha’s skull with a golf club.

Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich “hackers” dress and behave too much like Dogtown Boys to be coincidental. In a 13-second segment, you see Christopher Meloni as Fuhrman retracing the events of Hacker Night. You see the yellow pickup truck with a kid in the back tossing a role of toilet paper into a fire. You see a kid swinging a baseball bat at a milk carton at the base of a stone wall with the word “Helloween” painted on it and another kid with a bat throwing an egg at the wall. At the end of the sequence you hear a barking dog, you see a Lincoln and three boys running out of the Skakel house to drive away in it. Weeks calls one boy as Larry Morgan.   

In Robocop: The Series, The Dog Town Boys in their yellow car chase down Old Hank through a lot strewn with trash and fires burning here ant here. They corner him, pin him to the stone wall and OCP Vice President Chip Chayken pulls up in his Lincoln to inject him with a paralyzing agent. Chayken has the Dogtown boys put Old Hank in the trunk of his Lincoln so he can take him to Dr. Mallardo to remove his brain.  

The Robocop: The Series Lincoln/Morgan connection to Murder in Greenwich is William “Pudface” Morgan. Chayken springs him from the Henry Ford Institute for the Morally Challenged to kill Robocop and teams him up with the Dogtown Boys for the fiery climactic scene with Madigan sticking Chayken with the metal syringe he used on Old Hank. Morgan is the convicted felon in the Lincoln that drives up to Robocop while he is putting Dr. Mallardo into his police car – the car with the seven flashers on the roof.  

Now, we’re ready to connect the “Dogtown Ripper’s” syringe to Mark Fuhrman at his probation officer’s desk and his signature in red ink… 

In Fuhrman’s second interview with Diane Sawyer he claimed that he saw a Swiss Army knife box on the rim of O.J.’s bathtub. He claimed that it was big enough to contain the knife he said O.J. used to kill Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson. He said that the box was empty but it had a recessed area that fit the shape of the knife. He showed a fuzzy photo of the box with no feature in the photo of known dimensions to calculate its size. Nicole was immobilized before she was killed. She was hit with something hard enough to cause brain damage.  

Dr. Mallardo needs a living brain to complete his artificial intelligence system that marries the speed and computing power of computer with the learning power of the human brain. Making it work is a delicate business, which has resulted in twelve failures in a month. Mallardo has narrowed down the cause of failure in his previous attempts to intelligence.  

Chayken, the man Gadget identified as the Dogtown Ripper, selected Old Hank because he was a chess player. To immobilize the victim without damaging the brain, Mallardo supplies Chayken with a paralyzing agent used in surgery. Mallardo gets the encapsulated agent and the syringe to inject it out of a box with recesses for the agent and the syringe. The lid is clear so you can see trough it to the letters in red ink on the label. The Swiss Army knife box is readily identifiable by the red cross on the lid. It’s the Swiss Army logo – its commercial signature.  

Let’s not forget Fuhrman’s “genocidal racist” crack or the incident with Kathleen Bell regarding her friend Andrea Terry that triggered his genocidal racist tirade. Robocop: The Series covers that, too. 

Andrea Roth as Chip Chayken’s secretary Diana Powers has no clue that the disappearance of twelve homeless men in Dogtown have anything to do with her boss or Dr. Mallardo. She knows only that Chayken has invited Mallardo to make a presentation to the OCP board of directors and she thinks his utopian ideas for an automated system of regulating public services are inhuman. She tells him, “Your idea of Utopia sounds more like something a dictator like Hitler would come up with.” Mallardo is insulted by the comparison. His vision is much bigger. He says, “Hitler was an amateur.” He means it.   

Robocop’s Detroit is a burro of OCP’s gleaming new Delta City. OCP runs the Detroit Police Department and all of the city’s transportation and utility functions. The new system that Dr. Mallardo proposes to the OCP board of directors eliminates ten thousand jobs by instantaneously directing power and services where they are needed supposedly without human input. To make it work, however, he does need one human brain. When his attempt to use Old Hank’s brain fails he realizes that the flaw in his process is not his subject’s level of intelligence but the level of stress that has been put on it by too many years of harsh living. He needs a young brain that has not been corrupted by the rigors of a marginal existence. Dana Powers fits the bill nicely.  

In Robocop 2 the developers of a new Robocop prototype ran into a similar problem. An unscrupulous psychologist solved it by using the brain of psychopathic drug addict named Cain. The side affects were disastrous for Detroit, Delta City and OCP.  The side affects of using Dana Power’s brain in Robocop: The Series are disastrous for Mallardo and his “Dogtown Ripper” team. Mallardo did not expect Dana’s consciousness and character to survive but it does. It comes back as a ghost in the machine that exerts its own will when it discovers how it is being used. Andrea Roth as the ghost of Dana Powers and Maggie Grace as the ghost of Martha Moxley in the transition double exposure shots are a strikingly similar.  

During the O.J. trial it became increasingly doubtful to me that O.J. was guilty. All of the big evidence and all of the details flowing from the big evidence said that he did it. But something was wrong with all of the big evidence and the “little” evidence flowing from the flaws pointed to someone else – someone who got his ideas from movies. Following this chain of evidence, the only person it could have been, with the help of four others, was the first investigator on the scene, Mark Fuhrman.  

I knew that the methodology I used in The Smoking Gun and The Smoking Gun 2 was sound. If the killer left evidence from the movies and the detective discovered, interpreted or invented evidence from the movies all pointing to the same innocent man, what were the odds that they were different people? I found the movies that matched the evidence and Fuhrman’s interpretations of the evidence in scores of movies with enough additional details to isolate each source. I found repeatedly that many of the movie scenarios would have worked in the real world for reasons that I didn’t know about until I tried to get people interested in the book. Nine out of ten dismissed the idea out of hand. 

This was one of the recurring movie themes. Somebody comes to the police, the media, his or her parents or friends with the truth and nobody listens. Why don’t they listen? Because they “know” the story can’t be true. They firmly believe that creatures like the truth-teller describes don’t exist, that the story is too complicated or too farfetched to be true or that the truth-teller is lying or imagining things for obvious reasons.   

In the movies, the truth tellers usually win because somebody finds something in their story interesting enough to follow up on or subsequent evidence or events prove that they were telling the truth. In the real world, every effort to determine the truth stops with the first clear impression of the truth and the people who hold that impression fight hammer and tong to prove they were right.  

The only way to prove to myself that I got it right was to bend every effort toward proving I was wrong. It should have been easy to do, particularly with movies I hadn’t seen or actors I knew about only from what I saw in the movies they appeared in. But when I followed links that required the name George linked to a pair of leather gloves, I found “George” linked to a pair of leather gloves (Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Jack the Ripper). Where I needed a killer wearing a dead man’s shoes, I found one (Warlock). When I needed actress Marry Steenburgen and the name Cara linked to a pizza in Back to the Future III I found her as Clara linked to a tombstone and to the name Cara.  

Ghosts, trains, rain, birds, psychics, knit caps, moonlighting, signatures in blood, burning candles, cowboy boots, Nike running shoes, satanic symbolism and the number 22 came up big. “French connections” and the initials MF, MM, MB, BM came up big. The list of these repeated references was so long and so specific that the only way to prove Mark Fuhrman made the same connections I did was for him to work most of them into a subsequent project. He did. He produced Murder in Greenwich and worked in all of them.