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Chapter 20

Chapter 19

Thinking Man's Motive

Mike’s Spilt Milk drink can take you in a couple of directions. I didn’t know whether to go to The Manchurian Candidate or to The Terminator until I saw how much territory I was opening up with The Terminator and realized that the slain Senator in The Manchurian Candidate (the queen in The Naked Gun) was named Jordan. The deciding factor was the number and the types of James connections to Mike in Mr. Destiny.

James is too common a name to attribute an uncommon meaning to unless something is unnatural about how it appears in a narrowly defined context. Within the context of Mark Fuhrman’s first book it’s everywhere you’d expect it to be in a logical progression of ideas from the Bundy killer’s point of view—provided he was a big fan of George Foreman, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and the movies. Heaven Can Wait has James Mason as Mr. Jordan. James Jordan, Michael Jordan’s father, was murdered in 1993. In Mr. Destiny Michael Caine changes James Belushi’s life. In 1994 Fuhrman changed Orenthal James Simpson’s.

In 1964, the murder of black civil rights worker James Chaney and two of his white allies gave them and Philadelphia Mississippi posthumous name recognition from coast to coast. Because of who they were and who was suspected of killing them, their case got national media attention that helped to end Jim Crow and to promote equality under the law. In 1994, the murder of two white people and the accusation that a famous black man did it, had the predictably opposite effect.

Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were the men who died with James Chaney. They were killed first. If Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who set them up for the Klan, was as good at framing black men as Fuhrman claimed to be and as smart as Fuhrman proved to be he could have used the media to changed the course of history. He was positioned to make Chaney look like a murderer of the worst sort and to let public opinion and a 12-man jury kill him—along with the civil rights movement. He could have been "a hero of his people," as Fuhrman said when comparing himself to Mel Gibson’s William Wallace in Braveheart, and gotten rich quickly as Fuhrman said he was trying to do with Laura Hart.

If that’s not a thinking man’s motive for murder… Well, you’d have to think like Mark Fuhrman to see how things could have been.

All of that would be purely academic were it not for the fact that Michael Paré stars in The Philadelphia Experiment and a key character named Jim is set-up to look like something he isn’t. Andrew, the main charter in Philadelphia is set up to look like something he isn’t.

With Ron Goldman as Andrew Goodman and Philadelphia as a symbol for turning back the hands to time to the era of the Jim Crow South, Fuhrman’s Wallace analogy takes on a stronger Klansman odor. You may recall the Klan link to Wallace in The Birth of a Nation, and the Wallace opposition to the civil rights movement in the "segregation forever" governor of Alabama, George Wallace. And let us not forget Forrest Gump. As a KKK booster and "somewhat of a history and a military buff," I think he reacted strongly to the name of Tom Hanks’ character in Forrest Gump (Forrest) and in Philadelphia (Andrew).

Nathan Bedford Forrest was the Confederate general from Mississippi who shaped the Klan into an instrument of violence against blacks, Jews and Catholics. In O.J. the Bundy killer had an innocent black man charged with murder. In Goldman he had a Jewish murder victim. In Nicole he had a Catholic murder victim with black children and a Jewish lover. A black, a Jew and a Catholic, the top three on the Forrest hit list.

Forrest officially disbanded The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan when Ulysses Simpson Grant became President of the United States in 1869. They came back with a vengeance in 1915 with a cross burning on Stone (Sharon) Mountain (Paramount) in Georgia (George) and the release of The Birth of a Nation. Before beating and killing became standard operating procedure for nigh-riding Klansman on horseback, they pretended to be the ghosts (Paramount’s Ghost) of Confederate dead. Their objective was to turn the clock back to the days before the Confederacy lost the war (time travel). To a large extent they succeeded.

When you think about Mike’s Spilt Milk drink in that context, and The Terminator (’84) killing Matt and Ginger in Sarah’s condo to change the future, what do you get with the killings in the front yard of Nicole’s condo? What if I remind you of Fuhrman’s "possible gunshot wound" (note 3)? How about the ice cream on Bundy and the ice cream that the little boy in the restaurant plops into Sarah’s apron pocket as she tries unsuccessfully to get a food order straight? Not exactly spilt milk, but a gunshot is not exactly a stab wound, either.

Fuhrman’s super neat "rough" notes are full of not-exactlys that aren’t exactly rough when you look to the movies as their primary source:

• He writes his badge number so you can read # 214, but the rest is illegible. In the 1987 movie Dragnet with Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks as well as the TV series, badge 714 belongs to Joe Friday. Joe Friday is the creation of writer, producer and ex-marine Jack Webb who also created Adam-12. A 2 isn’t exactly a 7, but the way Fuhrman wrote 2 it looks like a cross between a Z and a 7 with a tale, like a type-written 2 spun upside down. Take away the tale and you’ve got a 7 for Joe Friday, the character that Fuhrman said in his book that he did not want to emulate. He said that he wanted to be like the writer Joe Wambaugh.
• Note # 3 does not exactly follow a logical progression, unless you’re talking about a composite picture of The Terminator at the door of Sarah Louise Connor, 35-year-old mother of two, and inside of Sarah J. Connor’s condo with Matt and Ginger. It begins, "Riske found front door to 875 S. Bundy wide open. Two bodies inside the walkway gate…." Ask yourself why the open gate doesn’t come first. It’s the wide-open gate that allowed him to see the bodies and the wide-open door inside. He then describes the bodies, which could just as well be a description of Matt and Ginger.
• Note # 4, which talks about music on the stereo, does not exactly follow a logical progression from the bodies outside and Fuhrman’s first impression that the victims might have been shot to death. It does follow what Ginger is doing before The Terminator tosses Matt’s body through a door then shots her to death. She is listening to music on her headphones with the volume so high that she can’t hear the crashing in her bedroom as Matt fights fiercely but futilely for their lives. Ginger is carrying an after sex snack. She is barefoot. Matt is wearing red socks (Futureworld). Goldman wore boots.
• Note # 5 is the one where Fuhrman speculates about the takeout menus on Nicole’s coffee table, the phone call that she might have been making before O.J. appeared and the food she may have been planning to order for Goldman. This is where he skips back to the outside to say that a pizza menu was by her leg. That’s not exactly true. A Thai menu was under her foot, and there was no logical reason to think that the 575-5713 number for Cara’s Pizza Kitchen had anything to do with Nicole having a pizza menu in her hand when she met her killer.

Remember the barbwire salesman sitting behind Clara on the train in Back to the Future III trying to recall her name? I think we nailed the Cara/Clara link to the pizza menu pretty well with the salesman’s first guess, but let’s not forget that his second guess was Sarah.

James Cameron’s story of The Terminator stalking Sarah Connor gives you the pizza link to Fuhrman without the tombstone. We’ve already explored one reason that the number for Cara’s Pizza Kitchen would loom so large in Fuhrman’s mind that he put it in his notes and then elaborated on it in a scenario that included O.J. as the killer. Sara is sitting in a bar eating a pizza when she hears news about the murder of a second woman named Sarah Connor. She checks the names in the phone book, sees the pattern and calls 911 in fear for her life. She gets no response. According to Fuhrman, the pattern of O.J.’s abuse caused Nicole to call 911 in fear for her life and she got no response. Her 911 calls began with his ’85 visit to Rockingham.

Fuhrman’s story has O.J. standing over Nicole’s body after he knocks her to the ground the way The Terminator stands over Ginger after he shoots her. Fuhrman then says O.J.’s "head snaps in reaction to a noise…." That, coincidentally, is what happens with the Terminator when Sarah and Ginger’s answering machine clicks on with Sarah pleading for Matt and Ginger to pick her up at a dance club. She gives them the number 555-9175. That’s not exactly 575-5713, the number for Cara’s, but you get the idea. Differences like that are exactly what give Fuhrman’s accounts of reality in the Bundy Drive killings their unique cinematic flavor. He begins with most of what is undoubtedly there (575-571_), switches one of the elements with another (555 for 575), and turns some of them around 180 degrees with only minor changes if any (from 571 to 175). He then adds or subtracts only what the facts and circumstances he cannot manipulate require (3 and 9).

If you were conducting a parapsychology test the "not exactlys" in Fuhrman’s book associated with The Terminator, Back to the Future III and other movies in the Fuhrman collection could count as hits. That’s because the tests are based on laws of probability and probability says that some similarities in unrelated events are too unlikely to attribute to chance. When you rule out chance all you have left is the paranormal—unless you missed something and the events really are related.

How do you rule out bias in your selection of movies to watch and the points of comparisons you make between them, Fuhrman and the Bundy Drive killer? It’s not as difficult a task in practice as it may seem to be in theory because of the unique qualifications of the subject and the special nature of the task. The only person you can do this with is one who has a record of interest in the movies great enough to make it unlikely that he missed all of them and specific enough to make it certain that he saw some of them. He’d have to show a clear pattern of drawing lessons from movies and applying them to his goals, a strong motive for murder and the means to make the frame-up of O.J. Simpson work.

Consider the butcher knife photographed in the lower left-hand corner of Nicole’s kitchen counter in 1994. A knife sitting in a peanut butter jar on the lower left-hand corner of Sarah Connor’s kitchen counter ten years earlier might count as a psychic hit for James Cameron were it not for the fact that Mark Fuhrman was the first detective in the kitchen. Consider the similarity in names between the butcher knife and The Butcher’s Wife. The butcher’s wife was clairvoyant, you recall. Consider the extent to which Nicole was quoted as saying, "O.J. is going to kill me," the fact that she was killed with a knife and the extremes to which Fuhrman went to associate himself with the murder weapon. Consider what Fuhrman did to make himself psychic-proof if he was the killer.

If you’re a killer or plan to become one, how do you make yourself psychic-proof? By doing the thought wave equivalent of what the soldier from the future did to confuse the Terminator’s tracking systems in the automated factory. He turned on as many electronic devices as he could.

First you have to do research on the subject to see if you have anything to worry about. You’ll find that you could have a problem if you look at the track record of some psychics. You have little to worry about from the psychics themselves because the field is littered with fakes. The legitimate ones are usually dismissed out of hand owing to the common belief that they don’t exist, and a clever hoaxter can simulate anything they can do. The danger comes from an unknown number of detectives, reporters or other investigators who might take a legitimate psychic seriously enough to follow up on a vital clue to the real killer’s identity.

This is where you can take your lessons from the movies. If it’s 1989 and recent events have persuaded you to murder Nicole Brown Simpson and frame her husband for the publicity it will give you to sell a screenplay, a book and yourself, you’re in luck. Two movies starring Michael Caine give you practical guidelines on how psychic impressions work, Deathtrap and Jack the Ripper. In both films the psychic is confused by a character in a play pretending to be a killer and a real killer pretending to be something that he isn’t who is described in a play.

In Deathtrap, gifted psychic Helga ten Dorp sees and feels almost everything of consequence that’s going to happen to Sidney Bruhl and his wife. However, she badly misinterprets some of it and can’t distinguish what her psychic eyes see in stage plays from what has happened or will happen in real life. She touches a dagger and knows that a beautiful woman used it many times to kill. She doesn’t know that the woman was an actress and the killing was an act. She sees a deathtrap very clearly and a young man in boots attacking Sidney. She sees a small black man with earmuffs named Smith Corolla committing murder. She doesn’t know that she is combining the image of a killer in boots with the small, black, Smith-Corona typewriter he uses to write a play called Deathtrap. The killer’s name is Clifford Anderson and the "earmuffs" are typewriter ribbons.

Now that you know the pitfalls of psychic revelation, you know how to avoid them, and if you know Steven Singular’s story of Fuhrman-the-white-knight, you know why it matters. Singular is the author of Legacy of Deception who gave O.J. Simpson’s defense team the story of Mark Fuhrman having an affair with Nicole and planting evidence against O.J. (here comes the good part) because he felt responsible for her death.

According to Singular who only passed on what he heard from an anonymous source, Fuhrman "knew" that O.J. was abusing Nicole the way Faye Resnick claimed that he was and that Nicole was afraid he would kill her. The cops he told his story to at a West LA bar teased him about being "Nicole’s private cop." When he happened on her horribly mutilated body he assumed that O.J. did it and he planted evidence against him to make sure that a guilty man didn’t go free. He planted the Rockingham glove and the Rockingham stick. He planted the blood. Fuhrman planted the idea that he knew Nicole well enough to see the pattern of escalating abuse typical of men who go on to commit murder. As the real killer he would have been wise to plant all of those ideas.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that the metaphorical language of psychic revelation is the same as that of dreams, free association and Freudian slips. It is the language of con artists and illusionists posing as psychics with the help of private information gathered from covert operatives and informants. That’s why fakers like Oda Mae Brown in Ghost and Omar Gouse in writer Joe Gannon’s "Read the Mind—See the Movie" episode of Moonlighting (’85) can pass as the real thing and debunkers with an impressive demo can debunk anybody; they speak the language.

For most people, the deductive power of a great detective like Sherlock Holmes is barely distinguishable from the psychic power of a clairvoyant like Marina in The Butcher’s Wife or Helga ten Dorp in Deathtrap. For those who don’t believe in psychics, The Great Randy, famous for debunking all claims of ESP by showing how a demonstration of that ability can be faked, is a better role model. It doesn’t matter. All true believers are alike in the answers they are willing to accept without question. The less they understand about how the answer was arrived at the more they admire the psychic’s, the illusionist’s or the detective’s ability to do it.

That’s how many people view Fuhrman’s initial search of O.J.’s Rockingham estate without a warrant. Fuhrman himself demystifies in his book some of what he did to gain entry to the property and to discover the amazing things he did, like learning rules of search and seizure shortly before the murders from a case called Kennedy v. Cain.

Picture Michael Caine in Deathtrap with his extensive collection of guns, knives and other exotic weapons—like O.J.’s and Fuhrman’s. A true believer in Helga ten Dorp’s psychic abilities would accept her statement about a woman killing men with the dagger as a convincing demonstration of her psychic power. Irrespective of the actual evidence, the thinking would go something like this: She has proven her special talents. She had never been in the Bruhl country house and could not have known about the large weapon collection, much less so much detail about the knife.

A true believer in Helga’s ability as a con artist or an illusionist would accept her revelation as an act. Irrespective of the actual evidence, the thinking would go like this: Helga ten Dorp is a performer. She could have learned about the weapon collection from anyone who knew about it and seen the knife in photos or through opera glasses on stage.

Irrespective of the actual evidence, a true believer in Helga as a great detective would attribute her announcement to superior research, observation and deductive skill. The thinking here would run along these lines: Helga did her homework before she entered the house. She knew which successful plays Bruhl had written, what they were about and who did what to whom. When she saw the weapons on the wall she simply matched the dagger to the play.

If the facts don’t quite fit the thinking it doesn’t matter. True believers trust that the celebrated proponent of their belief knows more than they do. The second part of that equation is what makes Fuhrman’s record before, during and after his Bundy murder investigation so scary. His actions insured enough true believers in enough categories to take himself off of nearly everyone’s radar screen as a murder suspect. The next step in validating or invalidating a belief is to test it rigorously against other possibilities. True believers never take the next step. Never.

One of the biggest surprises for me in my effort to communicate what I learned about Fuhrman was the tenacity with which most people clung to their previous beliefs. Discovering the "who, when, where and why" of the story was hard enough but that was child’s play next to getting anyone to take a serious look at it. The question of whether or not O.J. was framed is basically a logic problem. Communicating the answer is a problem of culture, politics, psychology and, most of all, media access.

In an early episode of the TV series Moonlighting with Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis a popular radio talk show host named Paul McCain (not to be confused with Die Hard’s John McClane) talks to a caller about destiny. Among other things that are going on as he speaks on the air, a dairy worker is loading crates of milk cartons on a conveyer belt and a black man in glasses and a black knit cap is flipping burgers. When a woman calls in and says that she fears something terrible is going to happen to the man she loves, something terrible seems to happen to McCain. It sounds like he is being shot by an intruder. The man loading the milk spills it. McCain, Michael Caine, destiny, spilt milk…

Willis, as David Addison sees the potential in the story to promote himself as a detective by cracking the case. He tells Shepherd as Maddie Hays, "That’s what I call a case; sex, violence, hit tunes—we crack this thing they’ll make a movie about it. Mel Gibson will play my life…."

The point is, the bigger the celebrity and the more extreme the charge, the bigger the news is going to be. That means arguments pro and con. The more predictable the arguments the more predictable the outcome.

The clearest example of that dynamic has to be the impeachment of President Clinton. As soon as the debate in Congress developed into a hard split along party lines and the debate in the media became a debate over the partisan split, the structure was set. In letters to the editor and in radio call-in talk shows across the country you knew what you were going to hear from Clinton’s supporters and detractors regardless of the facts in the case. That’s because you listened to the opinion leaders on radio and television and you read what they had to say in print. You knew what the best arguments were for each side, and you were hearing them whenever the apposite aspect of the subject arose.

The same thing happened with O.J. Simpson. The real Bundy Drive killer knew that it would. After watching a dozen or so criminal cases on Court TV I knew why, as only an insider would know. About halfway through his 30-year career in the Detroit Police Department, my brother put it this way: "The criminal justice system is made for professionals; professional lawyers, professional cops and professional criminals."

It’s a system for distorting the truth along predictable lines. The process is summed up nicely in a scene from the 1993 slapstick comedy Fatal Instinct with Armond Assante as Ned Ravine, Sherilyn Fenn as Laura, and Sean Young as Lola Cain. While attempting to murder her husband Ned, Mrs. Ravine accidentally kills an ex-convict dressed in Ned’s clothes. The man she kills is patterned after Max Cady, the vicious killer in Cape Fear. The prosecutor, dressed to resemble Mary Steenburgen in Philadelphia, opens with, "The prosecution will prove that the repulsion that is this degenerate woman, brutally murdered a decent, law-abiding citizen." Ned Ravine counters, "And the defense will prove that the prosecution’s allegations are irresponsible, idiotic cock-a-duty poo-poo."

Whereas the prosecution supposedly has to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, the defense has only to show that the prosecution’s case does not live up to its advanced billing. In that process, the prosecution can be counted on to seek out and assemble only the evidence that incriminates the accused and undermines the best efforts of the defense. The defense plays the same game in behalf of its client and both sides avoid introducing anything into evidence that cuts both ways. Fatal Instinct has an instructive scene on relevant facts when Ned questions Laura about one of many threatening faxes from the deceased when he was released from prison. Naturally, the prosecution objects to the "fax" being presented in the case. The judge (Tony Randall) allows the fax…but it’s a close call. This is how criminal cases are really handled. It’s no exaggeration, only a play on words. But so is the American criminal justice system.

The extremes argued by the advocates and the middle ground left unexplored gives a killer cop a structural advantage that virtually assures his success. As long as he can leave a trail of clues leading to someone else and stay close to the middle in the evidence that implicates him and the accused, no one who counts is going to look at him as a suspect.

Many people who read the preceding page fell out of there seats laughing at my use of the phrase "The real Bundy Drive killer" because they knew that the real killer was O.J. Simpson. Others got hopping mad because of one thing or another and still others quietly decided I was "reaching" for straws. The few of you who opened this book with an open mind know better. If O.J. didn’t do it only one person could have—someone who left a trail of clues leading in two directions. If you follow the trail marked by Fuhrman (Nicole’s 911 calls, the bleeding killer theory, the two bloody gloves, the stick, the parking angle, etc.) it will lead you to O.J. If you combine the trails marked by Fuhrman and the killer, it will lead you to Fuhrman and the movies.

Several movies in the Fuhrman collection are so packed with outlets for plugging other stories and actors into that they pose a special continuity problem for writing a book like this. Where do you go from a movie that can lead you in a dozen valid directions? Three Days of the Condor is one. Ricochet is another. "Twenty-two" and The Bedroom Window are two others. Three more are Ghost, The Butcher’s Wife and Mortal Thoughts. These are among the five movies Demi Moore starred in from 1989 to 1991 one of which also starred Dan Aykroyd.

If we’re talking about a movie series, we have to mention Die Hard (’88) and Die Hard 2 (’92) with Demi Moore’s husband Bruce Willis. Then there’s The Naked Gun (’88-’94), Back to the Future (’85-’92), Maniac Cop (’88,’92), Fletch (’85-’89), Lethal Weapon (’87-’92), The Addams Family (’91,’93) and The Terminator (’84,’92). Jack the Ripper (’88) and The Deliberate Stranger (’86) were two-part television movies that also qualify for main circuit board status. But, if I had to choose one movie that linked all of the other movies to each other, I’d have to go with Mr. Destiny, the one with the Spilt Milk that turns back the hands of time. Unlike The Naked Gun’s dark blue cap on Bundy, the Spilt Milk link to the murders wasn’t obvious, but as soon as I saw Mr. Destiny again after the murders I knew in my bones that the connection did exist.

I’d felt that way almost from the start about movie links to the shoeprints, the envelope, the plastic sheet and shovel, the bloody leather gloves and the vehicle that was supposedly parked at an extreme angel to the curb. But there was no mystery about where those feelings came from because they were cinematic clichés like the killer’s ski mask and the stopped wristwatch that was supposed to show when the death stru died. The Manchurian Candidate and The Terminator told me that Mike’s Spilt Milk drink had more to do with the watch than the ice cream. The scene in Dragnet where Joe and Pep crash into a milk plant in an armored police vehicle like the one used in Die Hard and The Naked Gun gave me the Fuhrman connection.

Joe and Pep are Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks. Aykroyd is the link that joins Demi more as Molly in Ghost (’90) to Cynthia Kellogg in Mortal Thoughts (’91). He stars with Moore as a homicidal justice of the peace in Nothing But Trouble (’90). Hanks, of course, is Andrew in Philadelphia and the title character in Forrest Gump. He’s Pep in Dragnet. Aykroyd is Joe. They go undercover to break up a gang of evildoers called PAGAN in a place where there’s a big gathering of police cars and a barbecue the police union seminar and barbecue that Fuhrman said he attended as a leader in the PPL on June 12, 1994. Christopher Plummer plays the PAGAN leader. The name Christopher is significant to Fuhrman and the PPL in that Fuhrman was one complaint short of being included in a report on excessively violent cops by a panel of inquiry called the Christopher Commission and PPL members handled the records. An unknown number of Fuhrman’s records disappeared.

Dragnet ends with Joe Friday telling us that it’s—January 15^th. What does that have to do with Fuhrman on June 12? January 15 is Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, the birthday that got Fuhrman suspended from the police force in 1987 because of what he did to let his boss Lt. Peggy York know that he was the one who wrote KKK on a poster honoring King’s birthday. He denied it just as he denied putting a swastika in the locker of a cop named Andrew who married a Jew, but in a way that left no doubt that he did do it. He lost that test of power to York. He won one through the intervention of his PPL union representative. On June 12, 1994 Fuhrman was a PPL union representative. He was driving a SUV—which might remind you of what Sarah Connor was driving in The Terminator when she pulled up to a gas pump in the desert. Fuhrman said that he left the seminar before the 8:00 barbecue started. The alibi he gave for the time of the murders was that he was on his way back home "in the desert" where he stopped to buy gas and a soft drink.

Black LA police officers called the union that Fuhrman served that June night "a bastion of white supremacy." That is what the "ghosts of Confederate dead" (KKK) was envisioned to be on the June night it was founded and what it became with a vengeance under the leadership of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Who knows what the Klansmen were thinking when they murdered Mike Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman at night on June 21, 1964. But, if a thinking man like Fuhrman could have traveled back in time he could have turned it to the Klan’s advantage as well as his own. When you see James Belushi in Mr. Destiny playing with a model of a gull-winged Mercedes while Rene Russo as Cindy Jo looks on, how can you not think of Doc Brown’s gull-winged time machine? How can you not think of Mark Fuhrman’s trip back in time to report on the incident with O.J., Nicole, the baseball bat and the broken windshield of the Mercedes?

Through testimony like this combined with photos and tapes purporting to show that O.J. had beaten Nicole and that she predicted he would kill her, the prosecution claimed Nicole’s ghost as a witness against O.J. who couldn’t lie. In Mr. Destiny, Michael Caine stages a return from the dead to kill his wife. In Ghost, Patrick Swayze returns from the dead to save his wife from Tony Goldwyn who threatens to cut her throat. In Gotham Tommy Lee Jones falls for the ghost of Virginia Madsen. He is told that ghosts can’t lie. He asks Fredric Forrest as Father George, if that’s true. Father George tells him, "My friend, telling lies is their business."