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Chapter 27Alternate Scenarios
What do you think the roles of Jurgen Prochnow and Fank Langella
in Body of Evidence have to do with Mark Fuhrman's first book
and his first movie? If you guessed that they involve interracial sex,
murder and mixing fact with fiction, you're right George Orwell’s 1984, Ray
Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World and Kurt
Vonnegut’s Player Piano are alternate scenarios constructed around the same
major theme. By 1991 few people
To quote Mark Fuhrman in Murder
in Brentwood, “The similarities are not mere coincidence.” The Random
Factor is my commentary on how I saw the media in the early ’90s. I started it as
an original work of fiction but it quickly evolved into an updated version of
Orwell’s 1984. In the age of media image
saturation and short attention spans I found it essential to use more familiar themes and
images than I wanted to use to get bundles of information across quickly. I did the same
thing with carefully selected clichés and stereotypes. To understand my reasoning,
imagine someone tying to invent poker or baseball in 1991. People learn these games now
only because they are established parts of the culture. Even if you don’t know the
intricacies of poker or baseball you know that four aces give you a poker
hand you can bet your life on and a baseball batter can’t do better than hitting a
home run. A good hand in fiction writing is
one that contains all the necessary elements to get the readers’ attention and to
hold it. A home run is when it connects with the intended audiences and they give it rave
reviews. The same is true with so-called non-fiction. While all fiction contains some
facts; some conformity to the laws of physics, probability and human nature – all
non-fiction written for mass consumption contain some fiction; some concessions to form
and entertainment over facts. You can’t make up a believable
story with rational people doing irrational or physically impossible things unless you
provide rational explanations. You can’t have coincidence piled on top of coincidence
without someone or something orchestrating them. You can’t tell a complicated true
story with all of the relevant facts without hurting innocent people or losing your
audience in “boring details.” You can bend
You can invent a story in its
entirety and sell it as true if it conforms to commonly held beliefs. In 1981 Washington
Post reporter Janet Cooke did just that with a story about an 8-year-old heroine addict.
She would have gotten away with it if her story hadn’t been so well written that it
won a Pulitzer Prize. Christopher Reeve’s character in Street Smart (’87)
with Kathy Baker and Morgan Freeman stirred up big trouble for himself and others by
pulling the same stunt with a fabricated story about a pimp. The best fiction always includes
enough facts and common beliefs to make the fiction believable. The safest non-fiction
contains enough facts to allow for a little or a lot of “creative license.”
Balancing the essential elements of fact and fiction is a proven formula for success.
Janet Cooke didn’t follow the formula. If she had only interviewed a real kid in his
environement and included some factual details, she could have made up the rest of her
story, received her rewards and gone on to greater glory. This intermingling of fact and
fiction done out of haste, laziness and “reckless disregard for the truth” in
pursuit of advancing hidden agendas was my main target in The Random Factor. PBS
was doing award-winning documentaries on Vietnam that contained all of these elements and
the public was buying them whole cloth. I saw the same thing in movies like Jane
Fonda’s Coming Home, Frances Ford Copula’s Apocalypse Now and
Oliver Stone’s Platoon. The “informed public” saw all of these
documentaries and movies as entirely or “essentially” true. Big city newspaper editors,
publishers and their TV news counterparts who insist on fair and balanced reporting are
mythical beings. Real people in these positions can’t afford to set fairness and
balance as their top priorities. Their jobs depend on getting the greatest number of
people to buy their papers or watch their broadcasts with enough accuracy to give the appearance
of fairness and balance. They do what they have to do to get the best images and sound
bites they can in time to edit them in the most entertaining way. A homicide detective who
understands this dynamic and happens to be working on a big case can therefore shape the
story to write a bestseller if he is ambitious and daring enough to feed the media’s
appetite. One element Star power is only part of the
formula for a book or a movie’s success. A competent writer with enough money to
market his books can make a comfortable living just by writing what people want to read
and rewriting every page that his test readers don’t like. You’ll never write a
classic that way or break new ground in understanding the human condition. But if your
primary goal is to make money, that’s one sure way to do it. Another sure way of making money on
a book is to get intimately connected to a news story involving a powerful politician or a
superstar celebrity, the more scandalous and sensational the story the better. If it
involves sex, murder, race, religion, politics and skeletons in the closet of a celebrity
suspect you can’t miss if you can supply the right stereotypes and clichés to go
with them. Everyone with a press card and a microphone will want to talk to you and keep
your identity secret. You can thus shape the story to your liking anonymously and emerge
later as a key player in the drama instead of its architect. You don’t have to depend
on chance or psychic visions to put you in this position if you are willing and able to
commit the murders yourself and frame the celebrity.
Skeleton in your closet won’t
hurt if you manage them wisely. You want controversy. No matter how bad it makes you look
in the short run, it will put you in the spotlight and keep you there. In the long run it
will help to make you a celebrity and put your book on the New York Times
Best Seller list. It’s about formulas and the willingness to do what other people
won’t even think of doing to use them. Without Fuhrman’s racist baggage he was
no more controversial than the detectives who outranked him but followed his lead in the
murder investigation of O.J. Simpson. Witness For O.J. Simpson was in the process of
taking a lie detector test less than 48-hours after he learned of his ex-wife’s
murder when polygraph expert F. Lee Bailey stopped the proceedings. Somehow word leaked
out that O.J. failed the test. Bailey countered that the test was invalid because it
wasn’t complete and it wasn’t complete because O.J. was not emotionally equipped
so soon after Nicole’s murder to take it at all. While promoting That’s not that only
connection between Robarts’ monocle and Mark Fuhrman’s polygraph. If it were, it
would not be a valid link to Fuhrman. According to Fuhrman’s Murder
in Greenwich book and movie, the Skakel’s tutor did not kill Martha Moxley. I
tried to follow his reasoning in his book but Ken Littleton (Morris Banks in the movie)
looked like the most likely killer to me – a petty thief caught in the act of
stealing golf clubs. I checked the transcripts of Michael Skakel’s murder trial and
found that my reservations about the tutor’s guilt were based on false timeline
information in the book. Fuhrman doesn’t use the same timeline in his book that he
uses in his movie to put “Banks” in the clear and the testimony in the
transcripts is not the same as the book or the movie. Fuhrman, like the Bundy killer, is a
time-shifter first class. According to the transcripts,
Greenwich police had good reasons to believe the tutor committed the murder that Michael
Skakel was on trial for. The fact that he failed a lie detector test was only one reason. In Murder in Greenwich, Stephen Weeks tells Fuhrman that
Tommy Skakel and the man that Fuhrman calls Rob Mathers in the movie also failed the test
the first time they took it. Tommy flunked the first time because he hadn’t been
sleeping and Mathers did poorly because of the medication he was taking. Fuhrman explains
away the tutor’s failing performance on the test in his book and in his movie by
saying that his prior conviction on a burglary charge made him nervous. In the movie, the
tutor wears glasses. I was sure that the camera would zoom in on one eye – an eye
behind one lens. It did. I was sure that his alibi, like Rob Mathers and Tommy
Skakel’s, would have a French connection. It did. This is not an example of ESP or
clever deduction. It’s only the primitive reasoning of the subconscious mind putting
together various threads of words and images that converge in one place. In this case, I
believed that Mark Fuhrman reached the same conclusion about the tutor that Stephen Carroll did
in his investigation but gave him an alibi because Michael made a better killer for his
book and the media. Does this sound to you like Fenn
Mocha’s rational for framing Hypolyta Kropotkin rather than Kim Hunter in Witch
Hunt? It did to me. Did it remind you of the lens missing from Mocha’s glasses
and the raven that flew from Lovecraft’s mouth and plucked out one of his eyes? Did
you remember Tyrone, the kid who told Lovecraft that he could have put his eye out by
flicking a lit cigarette in his face? Did you recall the lens missing from the glasses on
the Bundy murder scene? I did. I had no conscious
Cigarettes can serve many useful
functions in a movie. In Murder in Greenwich they are used as French connections.
In the case of Morris Banks it’s his French Connection movie alibi. Body of
Evidence lifts the bad heart from Witness for the Prosecution and turns the
cigarette into an inhaler to kill a man with a combination of sex and cocaine. Body of Evidence has Madonna as You can see how Agatha Christie
reshaped Double Indemnity (’44) in her 1949 television play Witness for the
Prosecution by using a man’s seductive powers in place of a woman’s to get
money for murder. She uses a will in place of an insurance policy as Leonard
Vole’s
motive. Billy Wilder carried over these elements in his 1957 movie adaptation of
Christie’s TV play adding Charles Laughton’s wife Elsa Lanchester to the cast as
a new character, Sir Wilfred’s nurse, Miss. Plimsoll.
Body Heat evolved from Double
Indemnity with a lawyer in place of an insurance agent who helps a woman commit murder
to collect on a will. In Basic Instinct a woman writes a book as her alibi for a
murder and uses the sexual obsession of a cop to get away with two more murders and write
another book. You can see how Body Heat with Kathleen Turner evolves into Basic
Instinct with Sharon Stone using a cop in place of a lawyer. In all three cases the
woman uses her body indirectly as a murder weapon. If you got flashes of Niagara, which The
Conversation is built around, or The Postman Always Rings Twice with Lana
Turner or Jessica Lange it won’t take much for you to see where they fit. Body of Evidence takes sex as a murder weapon
combined with cocaine straight to the point using the sex and cocaine from Basic
Instinct and the bad heart from Witness for the Prosecution. Just by swapping a
few roles, and changing a few details you get the impression that you are seeing a new
movie rather than a reconfiguration of old ones. The incidents you anticipate as Body
of Evidence rolls along depend on whether you have seen the movies that comprise it
and how well you know the formulas producers rely on for box office success. The extent to
which Body of Evidence succeeded is the extent it was
able to hide
Prochnow’s part had to be
bigger than it looked in his brief visit to the witness stand. You can get a good actor
for much less money to play a part like that. The German movie star’s talents came in
handy in his next two appearances. Tape recordings Paley left on Rebecca’s phone
answering machine made him look like a monster when he was recalled to the stand and set
him up for a perjury conviction. In the climactic scene we discover that he made the tapes
and set himself up to go to jail for lying to clear Rebecca, the woman he loved. Christine
Vole used letters she wrote to a fictitious lover to accomplish the same thing. The Laura Hart McKinny tapes and
the love letters to Fuhrman that he said his wife found tell you where the ideas came from
for turning the trial of O.J. Simpson into the trial of Mark Fuhrman. The letters
don’t make sense in Fuhrman’s story. They do make sense in Body of Evidence and
Witness For the Prosecution. Fuhrman’s twist on the tapes and the letters was
to set himself up for a perjury conviction with the tapes and to use the letters to show
how much his wife loved and trusted him. He turned his wife, his first alibi for the Bundy
murders, into Christine Vole as she really was, not as she appeared on the witness stand. With Fuhrman’s wife as his
only alibi for a timeline of the murders beginning after 10:30 he needed a stronger alibi
in case anyone looked at the evidence against him. O.J.’s lawyers were Fuhrman’s
prosecutors. He used them to argue that he planted the Rockingham glove. But the plant was
so obvious that no one would think a cop who knew how to do it “right”
wouldn’t have done it “wrong.” After seeing how the Los Angeles
County District Attorney’s Office routinely processed tainted evidence to make
convictions I saw that “the wrong way” to plant evidence was the best way. It
made no difference to the prosecutors that the glove had to have been planted. They used
it anyway. Only an insider could have known they would. If worse came to worse they could
argue that O.J. planted it himself to claim that the police framed him. The problem with
that scenario, of course, is that the prosecution was arguing O.J. left so much
incriminating evidence on the murder scene and at this home that it indicated he was in a
state of panic. You can’t argue panic in one breath and careful planning in the next.
Fuhrman didn’t have that
problem. If he were accused of planting the glove, “common sense” would tell
most people that he didn’t. Besides he could prove that he didn’t do it –
personally—and he did prove it. At the same time O.J.’s defenders were looking
for anything they could find to show that O.J. was framed. The glove was a “perfect
fit” for Fuhrman as the man who planted it. All of these moves and countermoves
were predictable and Fuhrman was ideally situated to predict them. He had to know how the
California criminal justice system always worked with respect to dramatic evidence. His
documented racism combined with rumors that he planted the glove, that he had an affair
with Nicole and that he felt guilty about not protecting her from O.J. gave him two
motives for doing it. The prosecution got what it wanted in the glove. The defense got
what it wanted in evidence of a frame-up. Fuhrman got what he wanted in an alibi for the
murders and tons of advanced publicity for a sure-fire best-selling book. The idea for how
and when to use the tapes could have come from Body of Evidence. All things
considered, I believe it did. Mark Fuhrman definitely used
Langella’s character Jeffrey
Roston in Body of Evidence is a damaging prosecution witness but not the one
Charlie Biggs is pointing to on the tape. His testimony made it appear that Rebecca tried
to kill him using the identical M/O she used on Andrew Marsh, the man she is on trial for
murdering. The prosecutor argues that she left Roston when her murder attempt failed. But
Rebecca “reluctantly” reveals on
the witness stand why she “really” left him. She caught him in bed with another
man. His credibility is destroyed. The prosecution’s case is weakened and only the
cocaine angle links Rebecca to the murder of Andrew Marsh. Dr. Paley’s perjured testimony
puts that aspect of the case against Rebecca in doubt and the videocassette Biggs
discovers along with a credit card receipt for Marsh’s inhaler in his
secretary’s name clenches it. Ann Archer’s character Like a combination
The name Braslow might somehow seem
connected to the movie Ghost. That’s because it is pronounced like the name of
the woman playing the cemetery ghost in Ghost, Sharon Breslau. Some of you got here by skipping
everything without a directly to Mark Fuhrman. Spotting his name in a quick scan of this
chapter is the only reason you’re reading this paragraph. Anyone who wonders how he
could use so much from so many movies to commit murder, frame a wealthy celebrity and
write a string of bestsellers can take a lesson from this pattern. Actors like Stan Shaw make it easy
to see some Smoking Gun links to Fuhrman. As boxers Jack Jenkins in Harlem
Nights and Joe Louis in The Court-Martial of Jackie Robinson he gives you
Fuhrman’s bloody glove discovery and the bloody sport of his favorite athlete. Shaw
gives you a black cavalry sergeant in Buffalo Soldiers and every actor linked to
him in Hill Street Blues, Matlock, and Murder, She Wrote. As Pvt. Tyrone
Washington, a drug-smuggling marine in The Boys in Company C, Shaw gives you the
criminal counterpart of Marine M.P. Mark Fuhrman. In Tough Enough Stan Shaw is P.T. Coolidge on the
Tough Man competition circuit with Dennis Quaid as his country-western singing friend Art
Long. Art has a son named Christopher. His wife is Caroline. Bruce McGill (BM/The Last
Innocent Man) is a promoter. P.T. is Art’s corner man and trainer. They go to
Detroit for the championship bouts. They ride a. trolley When
Dreams Come True
features Cummins as an art museum security guard named Jack. In that movie Pegasus first appears in a dream with Stan
Shaw, Lee Horsley, David Morse, Cindy Williams and Eli Cummins in a low-hanging
blue moon – as in Moonlighting’s Blue Moon Detective Agency. Stan Shaw in Body of Evidence gives you Anne Archer, which gives you her character Beth Gallagher in Fatal Attraction with Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and a character named Hildy. Murray Southerland is an actor in Tough Enough. Stan Shaw as LAPD Det. Webber in Fear gives you Ally Sheedy as psychic detective writer Cayce Bridges. As Dallas Police Det. Harry Jinks in When Dreams Come True, he gives you a distinctive shoe heel, an artist, a ghost, a pentagram and a Jekyll and Hyde killer who wears leather gloves and uses a knife. He gives you a bleeding killer a partner named Alex and the value of x.
Contact the author:
Jasper Garrison Copyright © 2004 Smartfellows Press
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could see that
Orwell’s vision of the future, based on his observations of the technology of his
times and the people who controlled it, had come to pass. After observing bad reporting on
the ’67 Detroit riots, the Vietnam War throughout the ’70s and ’80s and
Ford Motor Company’s manipulation of the media in the early ’90s, I decided to
write my first novel. I invented a new mass medium and turned Ford Motor Co. into a
mass disinformation media corporation. Observant readers familiar with 
Rebecca Carlson
