Chapter 3

 

 

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 coupled with his discovery of a matching glove on Rockingham called up images that are hard to forget. Another unforgettable image was O.J. trying on the gloves that bottomed out on his fingertips and didn’t cover his palms. Then there was the image of Mark Fuhrman taking the Fifth after getting busted on the Laura Hart McKinny tapes.

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 things that you might otherwise forget. Cochran’s words must have stuck with Fuhrman, too. In the scene immediately following Fuhrman’s sarcastic “genocidal racist” crack he does it without words using a blue pickup truck, sheep, a little boy, a toot of his horn, a bail of hey, a glass of milk (presumably cow's milk) and corn on a cob (Little Boy Blue come blow your horn... The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn).

 

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 singer on the Johnnie Carson show, which relates directly to Hildy Southerlyn’s “moonlighting” crack at the Belle Haven Country Club. In The Face of Fear (‘90”) television movie, written by Dean R. Koontz and directed by Farhad Mann, she is a torch singer named Edna Moray. She has raven hair. She wears a black dress and she is the featured singer at a nightclub called The Blue Crain Lounge. If you turn one of the “n’s” in Farhad Mann upside down you can spell Fuhrman. Add Koontz to your pool of Scrabble letters and you can spell Mark Fuhrman.

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 trick-or-treaters in Murder in Greenwich dressed as witches. A message written on a wall that looks like HALLOWEEN actually says "HELLOWEEN," an indirect reference to the Devil. You’ll get a direct reference to the Devil later in the movie with Tommy and Michael Skakel whacking golf balls with a club from their dead mother Ann’s Toney Penna golf club set.

In The Face of Fear you get a killer cop named Franklin Dwight Bollinger entering the Blue Crane lounge on a dark, rainy night to size up Edna Morey for his next kill. On a poster inside the foyer is a photo of Edna Moray in a red dress and the stylized painting of a blue crane. He walks behind a strolling  barmaid carrying a tray and sits down at the bar in his long black coat to nurse a drink as Edna sings,  “You’d Be So Easy To Love“ to a slow tempo piano accompaniment. The melody plus these lyrics of her song, “We’d be so grand at the game, so carefree together it does seem a shame…” tell you that the singer is carrying a torch. It’s a depressing atmosphere and a depressing song – a torch song. No one seems to be having a good time. 

In The Naked Gun 2 ½ (’91), Jim Abrams, Pat Proft and the Zucker brothers have fun with the aspects of Fuhrman’s Hildy that came from The Face of Fear, adding a dab of Casablanca and The Wizard of Oz. They play a rhyme game with Crane, rain and Jane. They play a name game with Franklin, Frank and Edna. They play a name game and sight game with The Blue Crane, turning the look of the stylized crane into a musical note by renaming the lounge The Blue Note. They combine the poster in the Blue Crane foyer and Edna Moray’s torch song into pictures on the wall of historical disasters. Half of the fun is guessing which movies are being spoofed.  

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 added. But if you saw The Face of Fear you know that, in the words of Mark Fuhrman, “The similarities are not mere coincidence.” Remember this when you see a depressed man at The Blue Note lighting a cigarette after you see the cigarette girl with the Hindenburg on fire in a background picture. The Hindenburg was a German dirigible and Hildy is a German name. When you see Frank alone nursing a drink at the Blue Note you know that you are seeing a spoof of Franklin Bollinger at the Blue Crane. 

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 where it was raining. The rainbow colors are on the shirt Michael Skakel wears in Hildy’s account of Michael’s motive for murder. Paramount studios released The Naked Gun 2 ½. MGM released The Wizard of Oz. Columbia released Murder in Greenwich. Columbia carries a torch. You see the ran clouds but not the rainbow around the torch in Murder in Greenwich, but you see it in Othello (’95) and other Columbia pictures released before Murder in Greenwich. Fuhrman had to use those movies to form his picture of the Columbia logo for the movie he produced.

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 875 South Bundy murder scene that Fuhrman was involved in, every aspect of Murder in Greenwich seemed familiar. I couldn’t put my finger on one item because I kept getting images of red dresses, bathing suits, singers and blondes. I was on to the rain and the “game of croquet/ “competitive croquet” rhyme schemes and intellectually,

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 Hildy Southerlyn observing the tension between Tommy and Michael Skakel at a party. You hear English songwriter, singer, and pianist Elton John singing and playing one of his hit tunes. You know it’s Hildy because you saw her face in the group photo that led Fuhrman to Hildy’s home where they watched the croquet game with the rich players and their servants in white uniforms. The young Hildy’s hair isn’t dark enough to be called raven. Ravens are dark brown – so dark that they appear to be black. You get the raven hair common to Edna Moray, Sherilyn Fenn, Monica Lewinsky, the torch singer in The Naked Gun 2 ½, Laura Hart and many Asians, from the shot of the older Hildy’s face morphing into the younger one.

Now that you have the connection to Faye Dunaway as Evelyn Mulwray in Chinatown, you notice something else. The Murder in Greenwich servant you see in every clear shot of the croquet game in the rain holding an umbrella over the head of a bald, heavyset player walks like a Chinese woman in Chinatown. She also has Chinese features. The link to Dunaway’s character in Chinatown is obvious. But there are Murder in Greenwich links to Goldie Hawn’s Joanna Stayton, Edna Moray the singer, the piano player, and Laura Hart that aren’t so obvious. You’ll find them in a 1993 Colombo episode with Faye Dunaway called “All in the Game”.  

Let’s start where the croquet scene starts, with Hildy in a fancy chair on her patio watching the game. You see Fuhrman in the foyer looking at her high school photo. He sits across the table from her to question her about the murder victim. When she says, “Detective, have you ever witnessed a competitive game of croquet?” he quips, “Not in the rain.” You see the servants holding umbrellas over the players’ heads. Then you see Fuhrman moving his seat. This scene is strikingly reminiscent of an incident in the back yard of O.J.’s home between his tennis court and his swimming pool. Marcia Clark met with Fuhrman there at a table with an attached umbrella to question him about the murder of Ron and Nicole – “Nicky.” When Marcia first questioned Fuhrman on the witness stand in the O.J. murder trial she was wearing a black jacket over a white blouse. 

In “All in the Game”, Peter Falk as homicide detective Frank Columbo visits Faye Dunaway as Laura Staton at her home to question her about a murder victim named Nicky. She takes him out on her patio where they sit at a table. Columbo tries to question her. The sun bothers him so he gets out of his seat long enough to unfurl an umbrella on a nearby table to keep the sun off of him. He notices that she holds a cup of hot coffee to keep her hands warm. She admits that she has a circulation problem, which keeps her cold. He comments that his wife has the same problem. He says, “She’s always cold. That woman takes forty minutes to get in the swimming pool. I’m exhausted from swimming and she hasn’t got her knees wet yet.”  

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 her white swimming suit? What if we add a photo of Laura Staton in a white suite? To link it to the photo that Fuhrman looks at in the lobby of Hildy Southerlyn’s home why don’t we put the photo of Laura Staton in her foyer? We don’t have to make up either of those things. They’re in “All in the Game”. It even has the plant in Hildy’s foyer, Laura sitting in a fancy chair and a comment from Columbo about the foyer. By they way, you see that Hildy is sitting in a fancy chair only when she walks away from Furman and goes past the glass French doors into her foyer.  

You see Hildy’s raven hair and the black dress in the subsequent scene with Laura walking from a public phone booth to a store to buy shoes. A mannequin in the store window has a black or dark brown wig under a hat. A mannequin next to the one in the wig has no head. You’ll see why this matters, if you haven’t seen it already, when we get into the red dress that ties Faye Dunaway closer to Edna Moray in The Face of Fear. On the poster in Moray’s Blue Crane foyer she wears a red dress.

Fay Dunaway isn’t much of a singer. She proves it in “All in the Game” where her character throws a party to give her an alibi for killing her charming, cheating, controlling and abusive boyfriend Nicky, an Italian gambler. She joins the party in progress wearing a red dress and singing a song to the accompaniment of a piano player in black formal clothes like the piano player at the Belle Haven Country Club. She mingles with the guests and excuses herself with a headache so she can slip out and kill Nicky with her daughter’s help. It’s a great plan and it would have worked if Columbo hadn’t noticed her cold hands and the hot coffee she held to keep them warm.  

A scene in “All in the Game” where Laura Staton gets her butler to tell Nicky that he is not on the party guest list becomes the Murder in Greenwich scene where Hildy tells Lancaster that Fuhrman and Weeks are on the list. It’s the scene where Hildy calls alcohol “antifreeze” and Hildy leaves to mingle with the guests after her “moonlighting” crack. All Fuhrman did was turn a butler into a rent-a-cop and reverse Laura Staton’s “not on the list” lie into an “on the list” lie. Combining the sequins on Laura’s red dress with the color of the butler’s jacket for Hildy’s black sequined dress is a no-brainer. 

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 Overboard when “Annie” becomes Joanna again and tries to return to her role as a debutant. In this scene where everyone is formally attired, the singer and piano player is her psychiatrist Dr. Corman who assures her mother and her husband that she knows who she is. He sits at a piano in his tux aboard the Stayton yacht smoking his pipe. Just before Joanna enters the room he say, “She even remembers the session when I wrote this…” as he plays the melody of his song on the keyboards he sings, “I love you madly, though you treat me badly…” Joanna’s husband stops him. “Dr. Corman, we need analysis not ‘Moon River’.”  

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 to Jack the Ripper movies that leaked into Murder in Greenwich. The scene that put me onto the competitive croquet rhyme scheme for Moray, Mulwray and Dunaway begins in a Whitechapel tavern. The street outside is wet from a recent rain. A black-haired singer inside with a piano accompaniment cavorts with British soldiers in red jackets and sailors in black uniforms. She sings, “I’m game for almost anything that ends up in a diamond ring. I love to have my little fling and when I do I always sing – Ta-Ra-Ra Boom-de-a.”