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Rhyme Schemes
Mark Fuhrman’s female alter ego is consistent with his history of assuming various identities for specific purposes. It’s consistent with the charge I made in Iago in
Brentwood that he assumed the role of O.J. Simpson to murder Ron and Nicole and to frame O.J. It’s consistent with Birth of a Nation where white men play black men and a
black woman. Regarding the screenplay he was writing with Laura Hart McKinny he wrote in Murder in Brentwood, “I envisioned the film with a female role-model hero.” He wrote on
the same page that his characters “were composites of many people” and he was posing as a composite character as he spoke on the tapes. He wrote, “When I was making up dialogue, I
spoke in the first person. But these weren’t my own words, my own experiences or my own sentiments. They were the words of fictional characters I had created based on my imagination
and experiences.” Come on now. He can claim that the words of his character were not his sentiments but how can he claim that they weren’t his words? He put those words into their mouths.
That’s what he did with Hildy Southerlyn. The closest real person to that character was Julie Skakel’s friend Andrea Shakespeare but Hildy definitely isn’t her. It’s Fuhrman speaking
through her in the first person to advance his theory of Michel Skakel’s motive for murder. As a key witness to an event dramatized in the movie Andrea Shakespeare should have been
there. On the other hand, he had good reasons for wanting to avid the names Andrea and Shakespeare.
Fuhrman refers to the Skakels as “Kenneys” because Ethel Skakel, the sister of Michael’s father Rushton, married Robert Kennedy. In Overboard the actor who plays one
of Dean’s children is Rushton…. The photo of Mark Fuhrman pointing to the bloody glove on Bundy
He claimed that he invented his character on the tapes from bits and pieces of other
characters plus his own imagination. He said he was “play acting” to shock Laura Heart.
In Overboard, Joanna Stayton’s doctors believe that she lost her memory from bumping her head or from the shock of the water. She helps Dean sell a miniature golf
course idea to investors. Fuhrman used amnesia to explain his sworn statement to F. Lee Bailey that he hadn’t used “the n-word” in ten years. He used it over 40 times with Laura Hart
before she got married and became Laura Hart McKinny. He didn’t recall using the word with Natalie Singer. He recalled that he used offensive language to annoy her because she annoyed
him – just as he uses intentionally offensive language to annoy Hildy when she annoys him. In Bronco Billy, a character says “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Singing
testified that Furman told her, “The only good nigger is a dead nigger.”
Before the McKinny tapes became public Kathleen Bell wrote a letter saying that Fuhrman talked about killing “niggers” the way Hitler talked about killing Jews before he did
it. The McKinny tapes backed up Kathleen Bell’s picture of Fuhrman as well as Natalie Singer’s in his own voice and his own chilling words. His relationship with Laura Hart lasted over
nine years. Could he have forgotten that? I don’t think so. In Johnnie Cochran’s O.J. murder trial summation he said something that stuck with the jurors. When he called Fuhrman a genocidal racist he also drove home the point with a reference to the glove demonstration that he prodded Chris Darden into challenging O.J. to give. He said, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Fuhrman uses the rhyme scheme trick in the Idaho Probation Office scene where Christopher Meloni as Mark Fuhrman makes his first appearance with a cautionary rhyme on a calendar illustration.
Rhyme schemes make it easier to remember
His wife wraps it up by saying, “We left LA to get away.”
With Fuhrman, Hildy and the game of croquet you get Edna Moray, Faye
Dunaway and Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-de-a.
Between 1962 and 1979
Donna Theodore appeared seven times as a I started noticing what you could do with anagrams when I tried to read Fuhrman’s name and badge number scrawled at the top of his murder scene notes in Murder in
Brentwood. The first three numerals of his badge number are 214. The way he writes it, you could mistake it for 714, Joe Friday’s badge number in the old TV series Dragnet.
Each episode ends with a sweaty hand pounding a Mark VII stamp with a sledgehammer. The rest of the numerals in Fuhrman’s badge number are difficult to read. The way he writes them,
they look like 666 – the number of the Devil.
Ground Hog Day (’93) gives you the game of croquette rhyme scheme and a scrabble game with a character named Nancy sitting in front of a diner window in a read dress. She works in
a dress shop. Martha Webster is a waitress (no anagrams necessary). Outside of the diner is a pothole filled with water. Down the street on the same block is a mailbox. You’ll see what
all of this means in the next chapter. Here you need to know that Marita Geraghty is Nancy and of the 55 actors listed in the credits her name is the only one you can play anagrams with to spell Martha.
In Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow (MF) is the wife of Guy Woodhouse played by John Cassavetes, the kidnapper with the suit and tie in The Night Holds Terror with
Hildy Parks and Jack Kelley. Rosemary discovers that Guy has made a deal with the Devil to advance his acting career when she uses Scrabble game pieces to decipher an anagram in a book
called All of Them Witches.
Because Martha Moxley’s body was found on Halloween you see
In The Face
In The Naked Gun 2 ½ (’91), Jim Abrams, Pat Proft
and the Zucker You get the first hint that the Blue Note scene was lifted from The Face of Fear in the first fifteen seconds. You see the outside of the club through a driving rain (which includes a mailbox you will see in Murder in Greenwich through the spray of a garden hose). You see the
barmaid carrying a try of drinks turned into a
cigarette girl carrying a tray of suicide weapons that include a pack of cigarettes. The singer wears a black dress and the slow tempo lyrics of her song begin, “I’m feeling blue. Thinking of you. I get out of bed, wish I was dead and I
hope you do too.”
A few things get changed in The Naked Gun 2 ½. A few things are When you see Frank talking with his partner Ed about Ed’s wife Edna and the torch Frank is carrying for Jane you can see the link to Edna Moray. In the first Naked Gun Ed’s wife is Ethel. When you see Frank with Jane in a black dress and the black piano player in a white suite you know that you are seeing Fuhrman and Hildy in a composite of the bar scene, the country club scene and the croquet scene.
Frank and Jane have an argument over a rain forest in The Naked Gun 2
1/2. Just as Hildy leaves Fuhrman
sitting at a table alone, Jane leaves Frank. Frank asks the piano player to play a song, as in German occupied Casablanca, and he breaks out
with “Ding-dong the witch is dead” from The Wizard of Oz. Christopher Meloni, who plays Fuhrman, stared as a
prisoner in HBO’s adult series OZ.
Rainbows come with rain. Fuhrman left Dorothy’s house to go to Hildy’s Fuhrman could not have missed any movie studio link to his movie. He has them all covered. If you feel you need an MGM connection to Columbia and Fuhrman’s Hildy, you’ll
find it in MGM’s Overboard. One of the miniature golf course attractions that “Annie” designs for Dean is a replica of the Statue of Liberty – Columbia. You don’t need a studio
link to Edna May Oliver as Hildegarde in Penguin Pool Murder because Penguin Pool Murder was a Columbia release.
Like every aspect of the
I thought I had it all with trains, Janes, Ednas Joannas, Lauras,
Hidlys, oral sex symbolism, singers, mailboxes, wet streets, garden hoses and rain. I had something from Moonlighting,
Diary of a Hit Man, Overboard, North by Northwest; Silver Streak,
the last two Naked Gun
movies, Fear, The Face of Fear and A Study in Terror. Nevertheless, something in the back of my mind told me I was missing a biggie.
I put my feelings on the back burner and
watched
Chinatown (’74) for the first time after seeing Murder in Greenwich. This time I was looking for important details that weren’t important before
Fuhrman’s movie came out. Specifically, I was looking for an incest link to the character Fuhrman called Rob Mathers. I found stronger water links, sheep links and an indirect
Wizard of Oz link. Few of them appeared in a context that gave them meaning to Fuhrman apart from a woman “in another woman’s shoes” and a pair of glasses found at the murder
scene.
I found my own first name – which I use as a control to test for random links to me as I use other names to test for random links to Fuhrman. Like me, the Jasper in the
movie was a war veteran. Like me his name appeared in an obituary (My uncle Jasper, a WW II vet died). Like Jasper in Chinatown, my mother died in a nursing home. Like my mother, a
woman in the nursing home made quilts. But those links didn’t appear in any special context related to me and they led nowhere else.
You can find connections like these at random if you are looking for any connection at all. That’s why they mean nothing outside of a timely, personal and exclusive context.
In my case, for example, the quilt had to be linked to the Boy Scouts circa 1958 to mean anything to me and the China Town producer’s had to know it. Even a movie with the name Mark and
Fuhrman plus a double homicide and bloody leather gloves gives you nothing unless both names connect to the homicides and the gloves.
I saw a lot in Chinatown that meant something special to Fuhrman in the context of his Bundy murder investigation, his books and his movie. But I had nothing to
connect him to Hildy Southerlyn’s croquet scene until Jack Nicholson as Jake the detective repeated a Japanese gardener’s “glass” pronunciation of “grass.” The gardener, who worked for
Hollis and Evelyn Cross Mulwray was trying to say that salt water in the pond was bad for the grass. Hollis, Evelyn, Cross, Mulwray and Fay Dunaway as Evelyn, give you a lot of
Scrabble letters to work with – but not enough to spell Hildy Southerlyn. If there was a connection between Hildy Southerlyn and Chinatown it had to be specific to a game of
croquet and Fay Dunaway. That’s it! I thought, a game of croquet and Faye Dunaway.
My gut feeling was right. I didn’t have it all. But the game of croquet and Faye Dunaway rhyme scheme was only part of it. There was also some Joanna Stayton and Edna Moray.
In Murder in Greenwich you see Joanna Morrison
as the young
Now that you have the connection to Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray Let’s start where the croquet scene starts, with Hildy in a fancy chair on In “All in the Game”, Peter Falk as homicide detective
Frank When Fuhrman talks to Hildy on the patio of the Belle Haven Country club he comments that it’s cold as he tosses an olive pit into the bushes. She holds up a glass of gin or
vodka and says, “Antifreeze.” Staton. Swimming pool. Remind you of Overboard’s Joanna Stayton in You see Hildy’s Fay Dunaway isn’t much of a singer. She proves it in “All in the Game” where her A scene in “All in the Game” where Laura Staton gets her butler to How hard can it be to turn super rich Laura Staton’s circulation problem into super rich Hildy’s drinking problem, especially with so may links to super rich Joanna Stayton
and her “alcoholic mother” in Overboard?
You see Joanna and her mother in the same room for the first time in Stayton. Singer. Piano player. Formal attire. Moon. How can anyone keep all of these elements together, match them, switch them and assemble them so neatly in one character
called Hildy Southerlyn? As Sherlock Holmes would say, “It’s elementary.” It happens automatically.
In A Study in Terror, Sherlock Holmes does say, “It’s elementary,” when his companion, partner and biographer Dr. Watson asks how he deduced where his missing pipe
was. Before that, Watson was reading a newspaper about a grisly murder in the Whitechapel district of London. Watson couldn’t imagine how Holmes knew she was a prostitute. When Holmes
explained it, telling Watson in the process approximately when the body was discovered and when she was killed, it was elementary.
According to A Study in Terror, released by Columbia in 1966, Polly Nichols was the second Whitechapel prostitute murdered within a week. Emma Smith was first. The
historical Polly Ann Nichols was probably the Ripper’s first victim. The second was Annie Chapman. Elizabeth Stride was third. Then came Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.
I began my first Smoking Gun book with Fuhrman’s version of the Bundy murders that paralleled too many aspects of the 1988 Jack the Ripper movie with
Michael Caine to be explained by chance. I found similar parallel clusters in other Jack the Riper movies, all of which managed to give at least one shot of Big Ben in Greenwich. My research on the real Jack the Ripper case showed me that the movies had far more in common with Fuhrman’s role in the Bundy murders than the real case.
Emma Smith, who was almost certainly killed by a British soldier, is often confused with Martha Tabram. The murder weapon used on Martha Elizabeth Moxley came from Michael and Tommy Skakel’s dead mother Ann. Tommy is a nickname for a WW II British soldier. Many Sherlock Holmes moves starring Basil Rathbone are set in WW II. A Study in Terror, which gets most of its title from Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet,
is no exception
Contact the author: Jasper Garrison Copyright © 2004 Smartfellows Press
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