Chapter 23

Mark Fuhrman said enough in Murder in Brentwood about movies and TV series for a reasonable person to conclude that he saw the movies and that he watched the series regularly. He named characters played by Dennis Franz in N.Y.P.D. Blue and Tim Allen in Home Improvement with personality flaws that you would have to see the shows regularly to appreciate. He said that he empathized with Mel Gibson’s character in Brave Heart. He gave a slightly altered synopsis of Jerry Zucker’s Ghost with Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore, Tony Goldwin, Whoopee Goldberg and Rick Aviles. To make the alteration he had to have seen the movie.

Fuhrman’s metaphors tilted toward scenes from movies in general. So did his Bundy crime scene notes, his discoveries, his theories, his accounts of his encounters with O.J. and Nicole, etc. The movies he named, the scenes from unnamed moves he describe, and the evidence he associated himself with created the first movie links. After that I usually got what I expected. Frequently I got more from unexpected sources.  

I didn’t expect to see so much of Brian Dennehy, Michael Caine, Stacy Keach, Gene Hackman, Nancy Allen, Theresa Russell, Kathleen Turner, Cybill Shepherd, Tanya Roberts, Helen Merrin or Shannon Tweed. I didn’t know why Charlotte Rampling and Barbara Hershey come up so often or why Sherilyn Fenn, Piper Laurie and Seymour Cassel keep crisscrossing in my searches for links to other people, places or things. Finding an answer doesn’t mean you have found the answer. Finding many answers doesn’t mean you have found them all. But finding a nixes like the Hunter pilot means that you have found where they intersect  

I didn’t know why Richard McGonagle, the actor playing Det. Barber in the 1985 “Knowing Her” episode of Moonlighting looked familiar until I read the long list of his credits on the Internet Movie Database. He is Det. Levine in the September 18, 1984 pilot episode of Hunter. I didn’t see that episode so I didn’t know why his face and his voice seemed familiar when I saw him and heard him in “Knowing Her” I recognized him an instant after I saw him in Hunter. In the first instant I got only the feeling that he was a real detective. As soon as he said, “warning shots,” I knew that it was a false impression and I knew where it came from.  

McGonagle looked and sounded familiar to me in Moonlighting because he appeared in episodes of Mike Hammer, Remington Steele, The A-Team and The New Twilight Zone that I saw earlier. In Hunter I was looking for something that filled blanks in other movie links to Fuhrman. Hunter represented a direct link to Fuhrman and the McKinny tapes. McGonagle was the link to Moonlighting,  

That particular Moonlighting episode gave me a Fuhrman connection to Bruce Willis, Cybill Shepherd, all the movies they appeared in, and all the actors they appeared with. It gave me the Tyra Ferrell maid link to “Dead Woman’s Shoes” and all the people associated with that episode of The New Twilight Zone. The New Twilight Zone gave me the original Twilight Zone. The original series gave me everyone associated with that series including Charles Beaumont, the author of “Dead Man’s Shoes” and “Shadow Play” and Barbara Nichols in “Twenty Two”. 

What makes Hunter a direct link to Mark Fuhrman and the tapes? The star of the show, Fred Dryer, former star defensive end for the LA Rams.  

Hunter ran from 1984 to 1991 with Dryer as a popular character, much like the one Fuhrman said he was portraying on the McKinny tapes. Fred Dryer as Rick Hunter and Stephanie Kramer as his partner Dee Dee McCall have total contempt for silly ideas like firing warning shots and getting search warrants. They harass and assault people they don’t like. They plant evidence. They kill without remorse. They do these things only to bad guys so it’s okay. On March 6, 1995, a few days before Fuhrman testified in the O.J. Simpson murder trial, Dryer reprised the role of Hunter in Return of Hunter. A few days after Fuhrman’s testimony he and McKinny met with a representative of Dryer’s production company to discuss their screenplay. 

Hunter’s partner is best described as their captain Lester Cain describes her to Hunter in the pilot episode when she was just pretending to be his partner. Captain Cain says, “You know, about 5’ 6”, dark hair, better looking than you but otherwise not all that much difference.” Her street name is “The Brass Cupcake.” Hunter’s street name is “Headhunter.” These street names are not mere reminders of the fingerprint that Fuhrman and his partner said they found on the “brass turn-type lock” on Nicole’s back gate and the fact that Nicole was nearly decapitated. They go straight to the actions of Hunter and McCall in their search for evidence against a killer of two attractive blondes between the ages of 30 and 35, a killer who slashed his victim’s throats in their own homes.  

The People vs. Cain was the California court decision that Fuhrman said he happened to read shortly before the Bundy murders. He used the case as his justification for going over the wall at Rockingham and letting the other detectives in after he discovered a stick in front of O.J.’s Bronco and a spot of blood on the door. He said that he was afraid that O.J. or the maid might be in danger.  

In the Hunter pilot, Rick Hunter and Dee Dee McCall go to the mansion of the man they know killed the blondes after McCall does some checking to determine that he is not home. Hunter plants something that looks like a spot of oil in front of McCall’s car, the car they drove up in, and says something about his duty to find the owner of the vehicle and issue a citation. Hunter, by the way, is wearing blue and white Nike running shoes.  

When the clever duo see the suspect’s open garage attached to the house, they determine that it is an open structure and they can enter the house without a search warrant. As Hunter climbs the latticework to the stone porch, McCall tells him, “You know, this is shaky PC.” In this context “PC” means probable cause. Hunter assures her that he wants to find proof of the man’s guilt to satisfy himself and if he finds it he won’t use it in court. That’s good enough for McCall. She follows him up the latticework. He climbs over the porch wall of the balcony and helps McCall over. Hunter asks her to pick the lock, one of McCall’s specialties, and she says, “If Cain finds out about this we’ll be doing weakens in the electric chair.”

Just as the Brass Cupcake is about to use her locksmith tools on the door lock, the suspect’s maid suddenly appears and opens the double doors wide. She does a little dusting and walks away oblivious to the presence of the intruders. The detectives know that the previous murder victims were country-western music fans. They know because Hunter answered the call on the killer’s second victim. They check the suspect’s bedroom. 

Captain Cain despises Hunter and gave him a wreck of a car to drive. Hunter reported that he was three blocks away so the dispatcher told him to take the call. He was three miles away. Stretching the truth to get what he wants is part of Hunter’s charm. He wants to be the first detective on the scene so he can lead the investigation. Luckily, his car, with a dinted door and bird droppings all over it, arrives in time. Hunter comes to a sudden stop and parks his car at an extreme angle to the curb. Without the police flasher on the roof you’d never know it was a police car.  

The first patrolman on the scene is black. He jokes with Hunter over the bird-bombed roof of the car about Cain and the car. The lie Rick Hunter tells the dispatcher to put him on the crime scene might remind you of the Murder in Greenwich probation office scene. It could remind you, instead, of the Investigation of a Citizen Inspector, Richard Eden as Robocop or C. Thomas Howell as Det. Eagan. The racial “signature” of the patrolman’s hair (trace evidence in the knit cap on Bundy and the leather glove Fuhrman discovered on Rockingham) could also take you to the Bundy and Rockingham crimes scenes.  

Hunter goes into the house and looks at the body of the blonde female victim laying face down with her throat slit. A man named Petrocelli is dusting for fingerprints on a closet door. Hunter opens the closet, takes out clothing on a hanger and puts it back. Petrocelli: says, “Is it true? Word’s out you teamed up with the Brass Cupcake.” Hunter sees a set of keys on the carpet and asks Petrocelli if he can get fingerprints off of them. Petrocelli says, “Nah.” Hunter says, “I’m going to take them, okay, and I’ll leave you a quarter where they were lying.”

Ron Goldman dropped a set of keys on Bundy. The door to Nicole’s jeep was ajar and coins were found between the car door and the garbage cans next to the fence. Fuhrman claimed that nobody went into the victim’s car although some evidence suggests that the Jeep was moved and Fuhrman did it, using Nicole’s keys. He theorized that O.J. pulled the coins out of his picked inadvertently when he reached for the keys to his getaway Bronco. He said that the coins should have been dusted for fingerprints. He described the type of music that was plying in the condo. 

Hunter leaves the murder victim’s house and puts the key in the car to hear what kind of music the victim’s car radio was tuned to. It’s a country-western station. Cain appears and questions him about his partner’s absence. Hunter lies. Cain knows it because he knows Hunter and McCall. They sold themselves to him as partners and he doesn’t believe for a minute that they are, which they aren’t. He is sure that they split up after roll call, which they did. Cain gives the case to another detective who came to the murder scene with his partner.  

To cover his lie Hunter has to tell McCall that Cain is on to them. Now they have to make their marriage of convenience work. But they do not work on the cases they were assigned. They work on the murder case Hunter got relieved of. You don’t hear them lying about it but when you see what they do, you know that they will. They will have no choice. 

Hunter gets McCall to use her breaking and entering skills on the previous victim’s house. He wasn’t assigned to that case, either, but he is sure the same killer is responsible because the killer’s MO and signature are the same. He stretches the meaning of the yellow “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS” tapes to talk McCall into the break-in by implying that it doesn’t mean them because they are cops. She knows that he really means the cops assigned to the case are incompetent. As the Brass Cupcake picks the brass lock, she tells Hunter that Cain is going to find out. Hunter replies, “Not if we don’t leave fingerprints.” In this illegal search the partners find evidence that the first blonde victim was also into country-western music and she frequented the Black Stallion.

McCall finds an appointment book that tells her nothing but makes her wonder aloud why the killer struck on Wednesdays. All she can think of is “the day doctors play golf.” Her mention of doctors reminds Hunter that he has an appointment with the new department shrink, Dr. Bolin.  

Capt. Cain has made it clear to Hunter that his “Wild Bill Hickok” act will no longer be tolerated. He has scheduled biannual sessions with the doctor for all of his officers to insure that they are mentally sound. He makes early appointments for Hunter and McCall because he is sure that they aren’t. He calls them “Bonny and Clyde” and wants to get both of them off the streets. Hunter reports to the doctor’s office because he has to. He is on de facto probation and Bolin is his de facto probation officer. 

Brian Dennehy, an ex-marine and the co-star of Best Seller with James Woods is Dr. Bolin. Bolin is an intelligent, charming, sociopathic liar. He is also the Wednesday Cowgirl Killer. When he does his thing with his double-edged knife, he wears a cowboy hat, distinctive cowboy boots and sheepskin gloves. Hunter doesn’t know any of this as he sits down to an hour-long session with Bolen who “misdiagnoses” him as a borderline psychopath and schedules weekly sessions. He needs three sessions to kick Hunter off of the force. 

In the context of Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich parole office visit all these lies and liars stand tall. Fuhrman, the best-selling author of Murder in Brentwood, is there because he has to be. The probation officer’s comment about him being a convicted perjurer is inextricably tied to the McKinny tapes. The tapes are inextricably tied to Fred Dryer as Hunter.  

In The Tapes chapter of Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman tells where he thinks the defense got the anonymous tip about the tapes’ existence. He says that Laura Hart McKinny took their screenplay to several producers and he went with her to sell himself as a technical advisor. He says that he gave them the “Dirty Harry meets Attila the Hun routine.” He says, “At one point during the trial, we had a meeting in Westwood with Laura and someone else whom I believe was connected in some way to actor Fred Dryer. Laura’s agent had previously contacted Fred Dryer’s people and given them the screenplay to read. They seemed interested in it, and wanted me to meet with Fred Dryer. I didn’t think it was a good idea, but said I’d talk with one of his representatives.” 

Fuhrman stops short of saying why he didn’t think it was a good idea to meet with Dryer although he suggests that Dryer wanted to meet with him. And the meeting with Dryer’s representative, where McKinny kept the mini-recorder in plain view, doesn’t explain why he thought that individual had anything to do with telling the defense about the tapes. Unless Fuhrman made a blatant racist remark or said too many things that sounded like Capt. Cain’s image of Hunter, there was no reason for the reprehensive to think anything of it. No matter how I looked at it the only thing that made sense was that Fuhrman set up his own bust.  

That’s not as crazy as it sounds if Fuhrman committed the murders primarily as a publicity stunt. His racist baggage was going to come out one way or another. His comments to LAPD psychologists in 1981 and 1982 about assaulting and killing people became public record in 1983 when he lost his appeal for the disability retirement he sought in ’81. Although Judge Ito ruled that they could not be used in the O.J. trial there was no way to know how an appellate judge would rule if O.J. were convicted. Releasing the tapes turned the O.J. trial into the Fuhrman trial and allowed Fuhrman to put his violent, racist comments in a “fictional” context. He could explain the rest of it in a book and the controversy over the tapes guaranteed that his name would make it a bestseller….  

The first clue on the Bundy murder scene that I linked to a move was the blue knit cap. I followed the cap to O.J. as Det. Nordberg on a dock in The Naked Gun. The dock link soon turned into doctor links and the doctors soon turned into psychiatrists and psychologists. The knit cap turned into surgeon caps, baseball caps, derbies, wigs, fedoras, sombreros and Stetsons. The common denominator was that the killer left headwear on the murder scene. In the pilot episode of Hunter, Dr. Bolen enters his psychiatrist’s apartment planning to kill her. He gets decoyed into a confrontation with McCall and Hunter. He slashes McCall with his knife to incapacitate her and has a long, ferocious fight with Hunter. McCall and Hunter live. Bolin dies. He leaves his hat behind. 

So far, Dr. Bolin resembles a dozen killers in movies that parallel Fuhrman’s account of O.J.’s assault on Ron and Nicole. It appeared that O.J., welding a sharp knife, incapacitated Nicole and had a long, ferocious battle with Ron. Like many other villains in this situation, Bolin falls to his death from a great height (metaphorically, O.J. fell to his professional death from a great height). The list of comparable movies gets shorter with the addition of Bolin’s leather glove holding the knife. The list shrinks to one with Bolin leaving his fingerprints on the turn-type brass lock of his intended victim’s door. This is what he does before he puts on the gloves. He’s wearing the gloves but not the hat when he produces the knife and falls to his death.  

Sorry to leave you hanging so long with Hunter and McCall searching Bolin’s apartment, injecting other scenes out of sequence and spoiling the end. To tell my story of how one link leads to another and sometimes yields surprising results, I had no choice. This is what Fuhrman did to tell his stories because this is the only way it can work. You take a little from here and a little from there and put it where it fits. If you have something important that you can’t fit completely in one place you have to put it in another place. This is why Murder in Greenwich has so many internal and external links and Hunter has so many external ones.  

Hunter saves the killer’s identity and the way Rick and Dee Dee catch and punish him for last to introduce characters, render their personalities, build suspense, setup action sequences, snappy patter, etc. This exercise is about identifying the actors, characters, costumes, props and action in Hunter that tie into one Murder in Greenwich scene. It’s about a big surprise that involves actor Brian Dennehy in the role of Dr. Bolin.  

Let’s rewind to the circumstances that unite Rick Hunter and Dee Dee McCall as partners… 

Hunter is in trouble with Cain because Cain has recently been demoted and he has a bad attitude about cops that make his political ambitions within the department more difficult to achieve. Hunter is the son of a prominent mobster. His uncles and cousins are mobsters and he gets along fine with all of them. They have no problem with him, either. Why would they? They think the way he does. They obey some laws and break others to make money. He obeys some laws and breaks others to make amends for his family’s sins and to harass, beat, incarcerate, cripple or kill people he doesn’t like.  

Cain has issued Hunter a wreck of a car and refuses to let him roll on serious police calls. His partner, like all of his previous partners, has ended up in the hospital with a job-related injury and Cain assigns him a partner that Hunter thinks is a moron. He can’t do the kind of work he wants to do without a partner and everyone else in the precinct is smart enough not to want to work with him.  

Dee Dee McCall is in the same fix. She is posing as a hooker to nab a vicious big-time pimp named King Hays. Hunter’s appearance on the street where McCall is pretending to hustle customers is inopportune. A pimp named Whispering Willie is about to drive away with an Asian hooker just as McCall is about to use him to lead her to King Hays, the pimp who stabbed her partner. She goes to Willie’s car window. In a censer-proof way of sneaking in a reference to a mainstay of prostitution, a car horn blows and Willie says, “I hear your tune being played.”  

You could get around the specific sexual implication of that remark if it weren’t for Hunter asking McCall, “What do you get, fifty bucks an hour? Will a sawbuck buy five minutes of your time?” If you follow enough “French” connections from Fuhrman to the movies you know that Hunter is going to buy McCall a hotdog, a Popsicle or something to drink though a straw or a long-necked bottle. He buys her a Popsicle. A sawbuck is a ten-dollar bill. When you put the sawbuck together with the phony hooker and the horn blowing you get Kathleen Turner as a dress designer in Crimes of Passion posing as a hooker named China Blue to work out her sexual hang-ups.   

Crimes of Passion premiered earlier in 1984 than the Hunter pilot. You can and should read all about it in the Thar She Blows chapter of The Smoking Gun. There you will find a link to the ten-dollar bill, the bubble gum that Fuhrman said he found among fallen leaves near a planter on Bundy and to his first talk with Steve Carroll in Murder in Greenwich.

Carroll pulls up to the Hospitality Inn on a pavement strewn with fallen leaves. When he tells Fuhrman that he worked on the Moxley case, Fuhrman offers to buy him lunch. Carroll says, “Why would you want to have lunch with a brain dead asshole?” In a surprisingly clever and self-deprecating reply Fuhrman says, “Professional courtesy?” Carroll is not amused. He tells Fuhrman that his rental car keys are on the seat. Fuhrman walks back to the steps of the inn where Weeks is gathering their baggage on the steps near a planter and says, “He doesn’t know anything.” Weeks says, “Neither do you gumshoe.”  

In the opening segment of Hunter you see the planter as Cathy O’Neil goes to the door of her home. You see one of Bolin’s gloves on the hood of his Bronco. Then you see his boots as he approaches Cathy while she is fumbling with her keys, only you’re not supposed to know he’s the killer. His character hasn’t even been introduced yet. The only suspect is a man named Jessie who wears cowboy boots, blue jeans and a dark brown leather jacket – as Fuhrman does in the professional courtesy/gumshoe scene of Murder in Greenwich. Jessie is the last innocent man to see the victim alive.  

Cathy doesn’t see Bolin. It looks as though she is going to make it when he pushes open the door, springs the knife blade open and cocks his arm to cut her throat. Forty-three seconds later you hear Hunter grumbling about his beat-up car and the calls he is not allowed to respond to. He says to the dispatcher, “What am I doing out here, chasing gumball bandits?” She switches him to another radio frequency and tells him that Cain is “chewing on everyone.” 

Fast forward to Whispering Willie’s arrest… 

McCall tells the hooker she can go. Hunter adds, “It’s sort of a courtesy, one public servant to another.” After the Popsicle scene McCall is riding with Hunter in his newly issued wreck when the murder call comes in and he lies about how close he is to the murder scene. He calls his lie, “a professional adjustment.” Now you know where Fuhrman’s clever “professional courtesy” line comes from and you might be able to figure out why you see the newspaper with O.J.’s photo and Fuhrman’s burning in the barrel a few seconds later.  

The “Disgraced Cop” headline above the photo of O.J. who supposedly got away with murder and Fuhrman who was disgraced by telling a lie about his use of the n-word is supposed to be ironic. How can a gruesome murder of two innocent people compare to an innocent lie told by a cop who did nothing wrong in his investigation of the killer? Yet, the headline is about a man convicted of perjury for lying about using a racial slur, even though he used it the way Mark Twain used it in Huckleberry Finn and Joseph Wambaugh used it in The Choirboys. That’s what you’re supposed to see and that’s what you will see if you read Murder in Brentwood or watched him on TV with Diane Sawyer.  

Lillian Gish, by the way, stars in Huckleberry Finn (’85). She is Hillie in Hambone and Hillie with O.J. Simpson and the star of Birth of a Nation.

Fuhrman’s 1989 letter to the city attorney paints a picture of O.J. treating Nicole like his property. The way Fuhrman tells it, O.J. comes off like a stereotypical black pimp abusing one of his women the way one-eyed pimp King Hays does in Hunter. He first describes O.J. as a black male, which is fitting for a police report on someone you don’t know. Only it isn’t a report; it’s a letter. He wrote it specifically to describe an instance where he said he answered a family dispute call and saw evidence of O.J. abusing Nicole. 

Hunter and McCall have nothing to go on to determine why the killer picks his victims on Wednesdays. Hunter says that it could mean anything to the killer from a bad day in high school to a birthday. But the discovery that both victims were urban cowgirls who frequented the Black Stallion bar inspires them to use McCall with a blonde wig as a lour at the Black Stallion while Hunter trails the man who follows her home. He sees a black Bronco following McCall’s car and the man inside wearing cowboy attire. The man driving the Bronco is Dr. Bolin. Brian Denney has more in common with O.J. than his role in Hunter. O.J. birthday is July 9.  So is Brian Dennehy’s.