Table of Contents

Chapter 9

Some Murder in Greenwich scenes borrow so much from so many movies that when you see the movies you know were the scenes came from. Martha Moxley secretly observing a fight at the Skakel house between Tommy and Michael gives you one such scene. 

H. L. Mencken, the early 20^th century writer, is often quoted as saying, “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels.” Mark Twain expressed similar thoughts about self-promoting politicians of his day. A long line of storytellers before Mencken and Twain did likewise, including Shakespeare and Homer. Mencken’s remark is remembered because he summed it up so succinctly.  

Substitute religion or any “just cause” for patriotism and you can paint a picture of the same devious characters stirring up a lynch mob mentality to get personal attention or to hide their own misdeeds. The only difference between politicians who do it and private citizens is the number of people they can persecute to advance themselves.  

You don’t have to belong to a political party or to be a politician; you just have to have enough ambition and enough clout to shape the social agenda within your sphere of influence. In that sense, religious leaders, public commentators, police chiefs, prosecutors and filmmakers are all politicians. Martin Luther King Jr. was a politician. Walter Cronkite and D.W. Griffith were politicians. Mark Fuhrman is a politician. So am I.    

The differences between politicians by any name are what we seek to achieve, how we go about it and the number of people they influence. Fuhrman’s role in the O.J. Simpson case put him in the public spotlight and allowed him to showcase his talents to an audience of millions. Without the controversial name he gave himself in that case along with a name almost everyone recognized he wouldn’t have had the name recognition to launch any of the crusades he has launched since then.  

You see this name game in Fuhrman’s Murder in Greenwich movie with Steve Carroll driving him and Weeks past the woods where Martha Moxley’s body was found and you heard the cry of the raven (or is it a crow?). Fuhrman tells Weeks, “If the Kennedy’s weren’t involved there wouldn’t be a book.” You see flashbacks to 1975 of cops and civilians searching the woods with dogs. There is enough here to go into Fuhrman’s polygraph link to Sharon Stone as Catherine Trammel in Basic Instinct but I’ll save that for later.

The thing to look at now is Fuhrman commenting on the Skakel house with Carroll looking at him in his rearview mirror and Fuhrman saying, “These brain dead assholes avoid that house like it was haunted.”

The haunted house metaphor in that context takes you directly to The House on Carroll Street where dead Jews are transformed into living Nazi war criminals.

The House on Carroll Street uses the Salem witch-hunt as a metaphor. Arthur Miller used the actual Salem witch-hunt in The Crucible as a metaphor for Joe McCarty and Roy Cohn. That’s how the so-called probe to uncover Communists working as Soviet agents in the U.S. government and the news and entertainment industry came to be known as a witch-hunt.

The historical irony of those proceedings was that it hurt innocent people and helped the Communists by discrediting people who accused anyone in show business of working for the Soviet Union. During the Vietnam War entertainers like Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda openly working for the Communists  in Vietnam (Viet Cong) and Cambodia (Khmer Rouge) had a free hand. 

That predictable boomerang effect of the Congressional witch hunts is where the idea for The Manchurian Candidate came from. It's why the movie was pulled from circulation for a generation following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The studio feared that it might have given the assassin ideas and that it might give potential assassins on either extreme of the political spectrum ideas. 

It wasn’t against the law to belong to the American Communist Party anymore than it was against the law to belong to the American Nazi Party or the Ku Klux Klan. But belonging to any of those groups or allied groups put you on a list of subversives, which allowed the FBI to monitor your every move. The hypocrisy of former KKK members sitting in Congress and the U.S. government recruiting Nazis to work in the U.S. rocket program never arose as serious issues. This is where the idea for The House on Carroll Street and the composite Joe McCarthy/Roy Cohn character Ray Salwen comes from. 

You will have no trouble seeing where Witch Hunt borrowed ideas from The House on Carroll Street and where Murder in Greenwich borrowed from both movies. You should also be able to see where Mark Fuhrman’s history and ambitions with respect to O.J. Simpson, Nazis, the KKK and “the Kennedy family” crept into his movie. 

The House on Carroll Street begins in a graveyard with the nameless German youth taking information off the grave marker for a recently deceased Jew name Tepperson. The title of the movie comes from a house where the sinister Ray Salwen stashes a Nazi war criminal temporarily and gives him the dead Jew’s identity. 

Salwen unwittingly plants the seed for his grand scheme’s failure and his own demise by implicitly labeling Emily a Communist sympathizer and getting her fired from her job. 

To pay the bills Emily answers an ad from a woman with failing eyesight who wants someone to read to her every day. Emily isn’t familiar with the New York City neighborhood and starts asking people on the street for directions. A young man in his late teens tells her in a German accent that the street she’s looking for is one block over. He goes up the stairs he was in front of when Emily accosted him, past an older woman we will discover is working for Ray Salwen. Neither Emily nor the youth know of the other’s connection to Salwen until a coincidence like the ones involving the solitaire game and the red queen in the Manchurian Candidate bring them together again. 

Emily’s employer falls asleep while she is reading to her so Emily takes a break in the backyard. Birds are chirping. Piano music drifts through the air. Emily takes a draw on her cigarette and hears a familiar voice. Like Martha in Murder in Greenwich she creeps through the wooded yard pushing tree limbs aside to get a look at the source of her distraction. She sees the teenager who gave her the directions standing in an open window translating for an older man. He calls the older man Dr. Tepperson. Tepperson is shouting angrily in German. Salwen steps into the window frame calmly telling him through the interpreter that “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” 

Emily stares in fascination until “Tepperson” looks out of the window and sees her. She withdraws quickly but the incident was so bizarre that it stirs her curiosity and prompts her to pursue the matter. 

The next time Emily sees the young German on the street it’s not by accident. She reminds him of their first encounter, introduces herself and asks if he lives in the neighborhood. She and the youth have books with them. Emily tells him that hers is by Emily Dickinson. The young man asks to see the book. Emily shows it to him and he shows her his Poe book. He tells her that he uses it to practice his English. He recites a passage from a poem about bells and comments that he thinks the words have a beautiful sound. Emily complements him on his English and asks if he works as an interpreter. Their pleasant chat takes a nosedive.

The young man wants to know why Emily asked that question. She tells him about the conversation she overheard and names Tepperson. The young man recoils in fear, tells her that she made is mistake and beats a retreat. She calls after him, asking about Salwen. He tells her sternly that she is mistaken and hurries away.  

The older American woman at the house on Carroll Street, acting as a guardian for the German Nazis and a spy for Salwen, sees Emily and the young man talking for the second time. She slaps him in the face so hard that he staggers backward and wipes his upper lip as though he had a bloody nose. He assures her and Salwen that they spoke only of Dickinson. Salwen doesn’t buy it. He uses his governmental influence to put FBI pressure on Emily and arranges for the interpreter to be killed. 

Kenneth Welsh as FBI Special Agent Hackett and Jeff Denials as his partner Special Agent Mike Cochran had already been conducting covert surveillance on Emily because of the senate committee hearing that cost Emily her job. Having found nothing incriminating about her they merely go though the motions of searching her home when they are ordered to do it. Cochran gets emotionally involved with her. After the interpreter is stabbed to death and Emily breaks into the empty house he lived in to search it, Cochran is there to save her from a man who attacks her with a knife. The man escapes by kicking Cochran in the balls. If you saw Murder in Greenwich, you might know why I used the word “balls.” If you don’t know, you will.  

Before I start with the House on Carroll Street links to Murder in Greenwich let me show you the House on Carroll Street links to Witch Hunt where you can see the same pattern and some of the same ideas.  

The House on Carroll Street is a serious movie with lots of symbolism. The more you know about Roy Cohn and the Salem witch-hunt of 1699 the better equipped you will be to interpret the symbols. Salwen lighting the candle is an easy one. You only have to scale up the candle in his hand to the size of an execution stake. You don’t even have to turn it upside down to get the fire under the stake because Salwen tilts it down to light it from the flame of a candle that is already burning.  

A test for witches when they were believed to be consorts of the Devil was to throw the suspect into deep water. Witches floated. Therefore, the suspects that drowned were innocent. In a clever scene that might have been mistaken for gratuitous nudity, Emily submerges herself in a clear tub of water. When she surfaces, Salwen is standing outside the door to learn what she knows about his clandestine operation. He tells her that he was in the neighborhood.  

Another easy to interpret symbol is a bottle of ketchup that Salwen uses in his next meeting with Emily to illustrate the spread of Communism in the world. He doesn’t use the word Communism. He doesn’t have to. Another name for Communists was “reds” and the color of the ketchup he splashes across the restaurant table linen is enough to make the point. It also serves as a useful allusion to The Manchurian Candidate where Salwen’s counterpart Sen. Iselin settles on 57 as the number of Communists he claims infiltrated the US government. Iselin’s scheming wife, the “red queen,” gets the number from the label of a Heinz 57 ketchup bottle.  

To get the most out of that scene in The House on Carroll Street with respect to Witch Hunt, you have to know that the waiters wear red jackets, the curtain behind Salwen is red and he quotes Shakespeare.  

You have to know that Hypolyta Kropotkin quotes the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth with her resurrection incantation and that Lady Macbeth can’t wash her murder victims’ blood from her hands. You have to remember that Sen. Iselin’s wife in The Manchurian Candidate is Lady Macbeth without the guilt and with a little Jocasta (Oedipus’ mother) thrown in. You know about the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the murderous machinations of Richard in Shakespeare’s Richard III and Iago in Othello. Try to keep them in mind, too, when we examine the Witch Hunt links to Murder in Greenwich.  

The only time you see Emily Crane wearing a pink dress is when she is snooping around in the Carroll Street house. No gunshots are fired in the movie and the only reference to anyone taking a shot at somebody is after Mike Cochran struggles with the man wielding the knife and the man gets away. Crouching over Cochran, who is incapacitated and lying curled on his left side, Emily asks Cochran why he didn’t shoot the man. Cochran tells her that he doesn’t carry a gun because it’s too heavy and when he did wear it he ended up walking bent over from the weight.  

Emily spots the dead boy’s Edgar Allen Poe Raven book and hides it from Cochran. Cochran drives her home in his car. You can see by the wet street that it has been raining. He parks to let her out and asks her for the book she lifted. She gives him her Emily Dickinson book and keeps the Raven Edition of Edgar Allen Poe overnight. She gives the book to Cochran the next morning as she is about to board a bus.  

Cochran and his partner Hackett are at a table in a bar. A baseball game is playing on the radio. Cochran is puzzling over the inscription in the book written in modern ink. When Cochran mention’s Poe's death in 1949, his partner jokes, “Poe, he's the shortstop for the Tigers, right?”

The Tigers were an American League team in 1951. Baseball fans are notoriously partial to either the National or American League and know only star players in the other league. Baseball fans will get the joke. Cochran and Hackett have a bet going on the National League pinnate race. Hackett wants to make another bet about whether Stan Musial or Duke Snider will win the National League batting crown. Cochran wants to talk about the book. 

The name Laura Mouton is inscribed in the book along with the date 1851. But the Raven Edition was published in 1904 and Poe died in 1849 so it doesn’t compute. Cochran theorizes that the date could stand for a month, a day and the last two digits of the year 1951. The current month is July but the dead boy was German and Europeans put the day ahead of the month so he figures that the date stands for something that is going to happen on August 1 involving a woman named Laura Moulton.

Hackett gives in and walks his partner through the logic of the evidence. They have determined that something important involving Laura Moulton is imminent and the only logical answer to the riddle is that the name written in modern ink is not a woman.

If you saw The Prize (’63), you know that the German word for bird, which was central to the identity-swapping plot, turned out to be the name of a ship. The “I Luv You” was the name of a ship in The Naked Gun (’88) that O.J. Simpson’s character observed through covert surveillance smuggling illegal drugs. The sequel to The Naked Gun involved an identity-swapping plot. In both cases the professors being impersonated are German.

After seeing The House on Carroll Street (’88) and Twin Peaks (’90) you realize where the name Earl Hacker came from in the Naked Gun 2 ½ (’91). It’s a composite of the names Harley Earl and Hackett with the “r” in Harley replacing the “tt” in Hackett. Actor Kenneth Welsh is former FBI agent-turned sadistic killer Harley Earl in Twin Peaks. In The House on Carroll Street, he’s Joe Hackett. If you know this when you see how Hackett deduces that that Laura Moulton is not a woman, you won’t be surprised to see that it is a ship. Emily and Cochran watch from the pier as Nazi war criminals debark with the names now on tombstones that have transformed them into Jews. In Witch Hunt the ship becomes a pink convertible and the transformation of its passenger is supernatural and unmistakable.

You will see a lot of The House on Carroll Street in Witch Hunt and Mark Fuhrman's Murder in Greenwich. You have already seen a lot of Witch Hunt in Murder in Greenwich. What you don’t see of The House on Carroll Street in Witch Hunt, you will see in Murder in Greenwich.

The house on Carroll St. is a house of transformation. So is the house on Glendower Ave. in Witch Hunt where Lovecraft gets the raven Mickey and the Skakel house on Otter Rock Dr. in Murder in Greenwich. Small details, casual remarks and metaphors in one movie grow in size, take on new meanings or become literal in another. For instance, Salwen’s comment to the senator he works for, a senator who expects to become the President, is that he is helping him reach the “pentacle.” The pentacle in Witch Hunt is the name of N.J. Gotlieb’s movie studio.

In other words, you have to look for transformations in movies and between them. Look for things like the flower drawn between the lines of the “Mothers” poem that becomes a real one on the ground and sacred worry beads in The Rosary Murders that become a magic worry doll on Bundy and worry beads again in Murder in Greenwich.   

One chapter of Iago in Brentwood and all of my previous Smoking Gun books connect Fuhrman’s ambition to become a screenwriter to crime scene clues from film and television. The House on Carroll Street had enough to get my attention. It had Nazis (Fuhrman’s swastika’s, daggers and medallions), a knife killing (Ron and Nicole), a ship (Ron Shipp), a Laura (Laura Hart), and a bird (Larry Bird). It had covert surveillance (a necessity for killing Ron and Nicole and framing O.J.) and the victim of a knife attacker lying incapacitated on his left side (combination of Ron and Nicole). It had baseball references (the baseball bat incident on Rockingham) and a train leaving on track 32 (O.J.’s football number) for cities including Buffalo New York (O.J.’s first pro football team).  

I’d seen all of these things in other movies. Nothing in particular indicated that the killer got anything from The House on Carroll Street until Mark Fuhrman produced his Murder in Greenwich movie.  

Witch Hunt appeared to represent a fatal flaw in my movie link approach. It had strong links to Fuhrman that my methodology told me could have come only from the movie but the fact that it followed the killing meant that they couldn’t have. After I saw Murder in Greenwich, I went back to The House on Carroll Street and Witch Hunt and saw why the links in Witch Hunt pointed to Fuhrman better than the ones in The House on Carroll Street. Most of them were taken from The House on Carroll Street and those that weren’t revolved around a new frame-up subplot and the new Julian Sands character Fenn Mocha and Dennis Hopper’s character Phil Lovecraft. There is no counterpart for either of them in The House on Carroll Street but there is in other movies.   

My research for the original Smoking Gun produced several surprises. The pizza connection to a tombstone was one of them. Trains, rain, crucifixes, resurrections and black birds (crows and ravens) were five more. Then there were unexpected means of death with falls from great heights, burning and drowning hot on the heels of stabbing, slashing and shooting deaths. A drowning death figures prominently in Witch Hunt.  

Go back to the scene in The House on Carroll Street where Emily submerges herself completely in her clear bath water and surfaces to see the senate prosecutor Ray Salwen standing outside her open door. Witch Hunt moves Salwen’s counterpart Sen. Larson Crockett into the bathroom with a nude woman submerged in the clear bathwater. Only this time, the bad guy is holding the woman’s face below the water in rough sex play that seems to get out of hand. Marie is a make believe victim. She pretends to drown so that Fenn Mocha can shake down the senator.

Crockett believes that N. J. Gotlieb is blackmailing him so he kills N.J. by shrinking him to the size of a Mexican worry doll and letting his dogs tear him apart.  

Lovecraft follows Kim Hudson to a drive-in movie where she is watching herself on the big screen opposite Richard Conti as a gangster with the law closing in on him. She is wearing a pink dress. Marie hops in the back seat of the car. She is so preoccupied with something she wants to tell Kim that she doesn’t realize at first that Kim has a front seat passenger. Conti begins shooting. The bullets come out of the screen toward the car. Lovecraft and Kim bail out of the car and run for cover, bending over behind another car until the man on the screen is out of bullets. Lovecraft can’t fire back because he doesn’t carry a gun.  

The House on Carroll Street attacker runs away on foot. In Witch Hunt Marie drives away in Kim’s car. The next time Lovecraft sees her is when the police call him to the pier. A crane (as in Emily Crane) is pulling Kim’s car out of the bay with Marie’s body at the wheel. Somebody turned her into a porcelain doll. Lovecraft says, “Somebody put the whammy on her. She thinks she’s at the Rose Parade.” The detective in charge, Lt. Bradbury, thinks that Kim killed Marie and N.J. Larson Crockett killed N.J. and framed Kim. Fenn Mocha killed Marie. They work together to frame Kropotkin because, “the witch made a better fit.”

Fenn Mocha is an Irish-Catholic rogue. He works part time for a female impersonator named Vivian Dart who owns the Glendower house and lip-syncs to Nina Samoan’s “I Put a Spell on You”. Dart’s specialty is transforming women into anyone her customers desire. Her piano accompanist starts as a staid white woman playing dull music. On the whim of a customer she turns into a hip black man playing the piano with feeling. A few magic words transform an innocent-looking, flat-chested girl into a sophisticated, buxom beauty.  

Lovecraft reports to Kim Hunter. She is lounging by her swimming pool in a blue bikini with a neck strap drinking something with a slice of lime. She is drunk and getting drunker. This is after her losing verbal fight with N.J. at his office She tells Lovecraft listlessly the he is fired and that she is fired. But when he mentions the house on Glendower, she sits up angrily calling an unnamed person a “cow.” Before Lovecraft can find out whom she’s talking about she gets a call from the police informing her that N.J. is dead. She faints.  

Murder in Greenwich has Martha sitting on the rim of the Belle Haven Club swimming pool in a blue bikini with a neck strap sipping soft drinks with her friends Lucy and Charity. Martha’s friends tell her to stay away from the Skakels. They talk about premature deaths associated with the family from airplane crashes, assassinations, choking and drowning. Lucy says, “Bad vibes emanate from that house. They have a whole Irish-Catholic curse thing going on.”   

Bad vibes emanate from Dart’s houses in With Hunt. Dart, Kim, Marie, Crockett and the Irish-Catholic spell caster Fenn Mocha are at the center of it. Lovecraft last saw N.J. alive when he followed his Lincoln to Dart’s house. N.J. had someone with him but the rain obscured Lovecraft’s vision so he couldn’t tell who it was. The next time he sees N.J. he is leftover dog food, reduced by witchcraft. Lt. Bradbury tells the coroner’s people who enter the crime scene to remove his body to forget the gurney. They can pick it up in a lunchbox.  

Murder in Greenwich turns the comedic Witch Hunt crime scene with the doll-sized body, the dogs and the coroner’s gurney into a serious piece of audio and visual drama in twenty seconds. You see a close-up of the Skakel family tutor as Martha’s ghost says, “It was his first night in the house. The police questioned him, too, but he didn’t become a suspect for another eleven months.”

Now you see the trick-or-treaters. Note the little girl on the far left dressed as a witch. She is carrying a plastic bucket the size of a lunchbox. The kid next to her is dressed as a white rabbit. Then you see the coroner’s people, dressed in white like the coroner’s people in Witch Hunt, taking Martha’s body away on a gurney. While you are looking at this you hear Martha’s ghost say, “My body was removed from the crime scene – the scene of the crime – in my backyard where I played with my dogs…”  

Remember Witch Hunt’s blonde-haired Kim Hunter at poolside in her blue bikini with the neck strap? Remember The House on Carroll Street’s Emily Crane in her blue dress introducing herself to the nameless German teenager? Emily deduced that he had a hard time growing up, which he did, and in her effort to help him she gets him killed.  

If you wanted an actor to play his part in 2002, you couldn’t do better than the actor who plays Michael Skakel in Murder in Greenwich. At poolside, Martha’s friend dares her to speak to one of the Skakel boys, “If you’re worried about their welfare.” Martha accepts the challenge and in a mirror image of Emily’s introduction to the nameless German youth in The House on Carroll Street, she introduces herself to Michel. According to Mark Fuhrman, the pity she took on him eventually led him to kill her.  

I could easily use up another two pages with words and pictures from The House on Carroll Street, Witch Hunt and Murder in Greenwich to show how they relate to each other. However, the Witch Hunt scene you should pay particular attention to is the burial service of N.J. Gotlieb. Before it’s over, Kim rehires Lovecraft but tells him to stay away from the house on Glendower. He tells her, “The police are only going to work as hard as they have to. If the frame fits, you’re going to wear it.”

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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