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Chapter 28

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Chapter 27

Train of Thought

Ever wonder where the expression "getting railroaded" comes from? I can’t tell you who coined the phrase but one look at the engine of a locomotive building up a head of steam with a long line of cares coupled to it in tandem tells you why the idea caught on. I also think it goes a long way toward explaining why you see so many trains and tracks in the Fuhrman collection.

When I was researching Iago I was struck by the extent to which the Bundy killer could count on weaknesses in the legal system to frame anyone he wanted to as long as he could point the finger of guilt first. The accusation backed by obvious evidence of guilt was all it took to start the locomotive of the Hang’m High Express rolling down the tracks. No matter what you have to show or how you show it, there is always a point at which people will not see it. No matter what you say or how you say it, there is always a point at which people stop listening. Its almost always the point at which they believe they know what’s coming because they think that they’ve seen and heard it all before.

We could look at that phenomenon through the lynching in The Ox Bow Incident (’41) with Henry Fonda and Dana Andrews. But we can stay inside the system and come closer to the particulars in the Bundy case with the testimony of the lead detective in Suspect (’87). D.C. Det. Percell testifies in "Case # 17, Carl Wayne Anderson," that murders are usually committed by the most likely suspect like the derelict accused of slitting a woman’s throat. When Cher, as public defender Kathleen Riley, tells Percell that his identification of Carl as the killer was a logical assumption, he angrily retorts that with his experience it was more than just an assumption. That’s not true, of course, but based on his experience it would have to seem true.

You can predict how professionals in any line of work are going to handle a given set of facts that are routinely seen and handle in a given way, just as the assassin Joubert observes in Three Days of the Condor. But to do so, you have to have inside knowledge of the profession. Suspect has more than that in common with Three Days of the Condor and the Bundy murder investigation. Perhaps the most important similarity involves the name Kathy, and the car they drive. Kathleen’s car is not a Bronco, but it does have packages inside and a black man who smashes the windshield. You don’t need much more than that for a composite picture of the Bronco Fuhrman said he saw the Attention-Cathy-package in the day after the murder.

Anyone named Kathy in a car associated with a bloody murder is all you need for a solid connection. Suspect gives you a woman named Kathy inside of a car the day after a woman has her throat cut. The murder victim drives a white car. Kathy gets inside of her car, too, and finds evidence that points to her killer. Most of all, Suspect gives you Meg Ryan’s (Sydney D.O.A.) husband Dennis Quad (D.O.A.) as Eddie, a lobbyist for Wisconsin milk producers. Eddie believes in what he’s doing to the extent that he goes beyond the call of duty to get what he thinks is fair. To win price supports for his clients he tells the head of a key Congressional committee named Grace that dairy farmers will dump their milk (yes, somebody else is going to die) rather than sell it at prices that are too low. When that doesn’t work he has sex with her. That works.

In South Beach, Vanity as Jennifer, goes by the name Grace on her phone sex line. That snaps us back for a moment to the story that Fuhrman had the hots for Vanity and the fact that she plays Sydney in Action Jackson (’88). Fuhrman + Sydney = Sydney Simpson’s 9^th birthday, the birthday girl in the Moonlighting pilot, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the phone sex operator in Short Cuts with Fuhrman’s birthday.

As Hedy in Single White Female, you see her obsession with Allie in a new light when you learn that she lost a twin sister (same birthday) in a drowning accident when they were nine years old—like Sydney in VR5. Knowing about the drowned twin gives you something else to think about when you see the bloody clothes floating in the water of the bathroom sink while Hedy stays under the water in the shower as though she were drowning in it. The bloody leather gloves on the rim of the sink become a possible symbol for something else. Was it really an accidental drowning or was there blood involved. Did Hedy have blood on her hands in her sister’s death?

This is how those elements from the movies come together with Fuhrman’s focus on Sydney Simpson and the Bundy killer’s need for Denise Brown’s help:

On August 18, 1978 she lost a half-sister in a drowning accident. Adrian Simpson would have been 18-years-old—9 years older than Sydney when Sydney was 9. Nicole’s older sister, Denise (Vanity’s real name), fits the profile of a conspirator in Nicole’s death who could have passed for her the way Hedy passed for Allie. Passing for Nicole from time to time in Fuhrman’s company was necessary to create the illusion of a relationship between Nicole and Fuhrman that corresponded to the stories he was spreading about them. He had to make that story plausible to make his inside "knowledge" of "O.J.’s escalating abuse" plausible. If worse came to worse and his part in the planting of evidence against O.J. was exposed, he could use his "intimate knowledge of O.J.’s abuse" as a plausible reason for wanting to insure the successful prosecution of her killer. But that wasn’t likely to happen if the "Hang’m High Express" left the station on time. Denise made sure that it did.

At Sydney Simpson’s dance recital someone had to be there to report on the kind of shoes O.J. was wearing. Someone had to be at the restaurant after the recital to steal Juditha Brown’s glasses. Someone had to answer the phone and scream, "O.J. did it!" when the police called the Brown’s to tell them Nicole had been killed. The only person who could have done all of those things was Denise Brown. She was, in fact, the person who screamed "O.J. did it!" when Det. Lange called her parent’s home.

I’m embarrassed to say what it took for me to see all of the trains and railroad tracks in the Fuhrman collection as a metaphor, as opposed to actual railroad tracks the Bundy killer paralleled or crossed on his way to Nicole’s condo. It didn’t hit me until I saw O.J.’s Bronco associated with an old wooden fence as the "Trojan’s horse" and began following the wooden horse links. Somewhere along the way I realized what it was about the "iron horse" in Back to the Future III (’90) that was gnawing at me from the moment I saw it pull into the station to pick up Clara. I thought I had it when the man sitting behind her on the train linked her name to Cara and, in turn, to Tombstone Pizza. The links I’d followed to Back to the Future III had to do with Fuhrman’s note about the pizza. When I found it in Dr. Brown’s tombstone, I thought I had it all.

Still, something bothered me. Now I know what it was.

Dr. Brown’s original time machine was a modified 1983 gull-winged DeLorean. In 1990’s Back to the Future III it was replaced by a modified 19^th century railroad train. I should have seen the metaphor right there. When John DeLorean got busted on a covert videotape of him making a drug deal with undercover federal agents to keep his DeLorean Motor Company afloat, most people applauded the government. When his attorney’s proved that he was approached to make the deal by the agents who arrested him, most people called, "foul!" A jury acquitted him on Aug 16, 1984, two or three months before Fuhrman paid his first visit to Rockingham. The jurors agreed that the government set him up and tried to railroad him by leaking the video to the media during the trial. A swift counterattack by his attorneys kept that train from going anywhere.

The attorney credited with getting him off was Howard Weitzman. However, his handling of his next high-profile challenge leaves a big question as to how well he would have defended DeLorean without the aid of Alan Dershowitz.

Howard Weitzman was O.J. Simpson’s attorney in the ’89 charge of spouse abuse that Fuhrman kept alive with his January 18 letter to the city attorney. That letter represented Fuhrman’s first successful attempt at time travel with a major celebrity. It demonstrated how easily proof of innocence would be dismissed in light of the victim’s physical appearance, a few conspicuous pieces of incriminating evidence and the right initial spin on the story to make O.J. look like Jekyll and Hyde. Weitzman accepted Fuhrman’s letter as true along with the apparent evidence of O.J.’s guilt without following up on the available evidence that would prove his innocent. He was so impressed with the surface evidence and the stories that Nicole and the police told (all demonstrably false) that he advised O.J. to plead No Contest. The template for a successful murder and frame-up was thus set.

Police and prosecutors in most courtroom dramas about innocent men accused of heinous crimes may seem to you like caricatures of real professionals in the criminal justice system. They looked that way to me until I saw enough real cases in person and on Court-TV with a jaundiced eye on the authorities to see the pattern.

If justice prevails in the American legal system it is mostly because the accused is guilty most of the time or the case against the accused is too weak to bring to trial. Prosecutors want prosecutions. If the police bring them a case they believe they can win the question is no longer one of determining guilt or innocence; it’s a question of convincing a jury that the defendant is guilty. The whole team typically jumps aboard to keep the engines of prosecution fueled, lubricated and on track.

In Suspect the railroading process appears to have begun with the police detectives who added two and two and got seven. They were searching the area of the Potomac where a group of swimmers called Polar Bears found the murder victim’s body after stripping on the dock and taking a dip. You may be thinking about O.J. creeping around Pier 32 in The Naked Gun and stepping in the bear tap before falling overboard. You may be thinking of Mark Fuhrman’s phone message about going bear hunting before his perjury conviction. Perhaps it’s the dark blue jogging suit that caught your attention, the black socks that the Polar Bear takes off or the wet imprints of his feet on the dock when he comes out of the water. Maybe it’s the fact that you wouldn’t know what cooler he was by looking at his feet if his hadn’t taken off his shoes and socks. But for the cops in Suspect it was the violent derelict with the knife who had the dead woman’s purse in his makeshift home.

The last thing the prosecutor wants is a fair jury. He wants one that will see the crime, the evidence and the Suspect on trial the way he wants them to. He wants to see the suspect hanged, shot, electrocuted, gassed or poisoned. Knowing that the death penalty did not apply in the nation’s capital, he asks a prospective juror if he believes in the death penalty. When Kathy objects, the judge lets everybody know where he stands with a comment that tells them he would impose the death penalty if he could.

Kathy has done her job as well as she can in preparing her client’s defense. She knows that his Constitutional rights have been ignored. She knows that the evidence against him was obtained in an illegal search. She knows that he had every right to defend himself against the police who invaded his home without a warrant. She knows that the motions she has prepared to have the case dismissed on those grounds are not worth the paper they are written on. With the judge she has to make her case to and the appeals court he answers to, a poor, inarticulate, unsympathetic Suspect arrested under the circumstances of his arrest has no Constitutional rights.

That was the real difference between a "liberal" and "conservative" court in 1987. Liberal courts favored the rights of the accused, many of whom were known criminals. Conservative courts favored the best judgment of the police and prosecutors to safeguard the public. That leaning, in effect, awarded the presumptions of guilt to the state. Class mattered whether anyone wanted to admit it or not. It was as Fuhrman said on the Laura Hart McKinny taps about being a switch hitter. He told her that a cop had to treat people in better neighborhoods with respect. For people in lower class areas he said, "Mostly you use your stick."

It comes down that way with Carl Wayne Anderson. Following a brief scuffle with police, he is subdued with nightsticks and taken to jail while the police gather other evidence of his guilt. Sure enough they find it. Where they don’t find it on the suspect’s knife, the coroner shades his testimony to make it appear that he got rid of the evidence on the knife.

O.J.’s critics have argued that he had nothing to complain about because he got the star treatment from police and prosecutors going all the way back to Mark Fuhrman’s kind treatment of him in 1985. The truth is, Mark Fuhrman had no business on Rockingham in 1984 or ’85. He wasn’t called. He wasn’t wanted. Nicole was not being abused or threatened. Things were not what they appeared to be in 1989 and O.J. was hung out to dry because his only witness was his housekeeper. Nobody waned to hear what she had to say. The housekeeper and the groundskeeper before her had no stories of abuse to tell, either, and nobody wanted to listen to them. The same was true for the housekeeper next door and the man who washed cars, both of whom were ignored by the police, and savaged by the prosecutors for telling stories that supported O.J. innocence.

On the other hand, no story told by the police was too absurd to accept. Consider the story of Mark Fuhrman finding the "shiny, sticky" glove on Bundy seven hours after O.J. was supposed to have dropped it. Consider his reply to F. Lee Bailey when Bailey clearly surprised him with the question, "Did yo have your gun drawn?" He said he didn’t remember. Do yo believe that? Does anyone in the world believe that?

Fuhrman could not have planted the glove himself, but his partner Brad Roberts could have. Somebody did. Even if you don’t think that Det. Fuhrman and Prosecutor Clark railroaded O.J. with the blood trail and the glove, you have to admit that there are peculiar things about their early collaboration. There was something peculiar about "the killer’s blood trail" leading into O.J.’s front door and Brian Kaelin’s three thumps leading Fuhrman to the leather, right-hand glove on the narrow path next to his wall. There was something peculiar about the key evidence (O.J.’s blood containing the preservative EDTA used by the LAPD lab to store O.J.’s blood sample) found inside of the glove and about Mark Fuhrman calling himself "the key witness" in the case because of his association with the glove.

The unlikely sequence of events that Mark and Marcia wanted the world to believe sounds more like a role reversal version of what happened in Suspect with Eddie, the proactive juror, and Kathleen, the dedicated defense attorney. They learn that a key witness to the woman’s murder named Michael is likely to be found in the Railway Express Building of Union Station. In an earlier encounter with the man, a religious lunatic, he had called the killer the Angel of Death and shown them a key that the killer dropped attached to a crucifix that belonged to Michael. He cut Eddie with a razor and escaped with the key. Now that they know where to look for him, Eddie goes to the Railway Express Building. A black man in a knit cap shows him the body of the witness with his throat slashed. He retrieves the key and the crucifix and manages to show them to Kathy in court. When court adjourns he signals her where she can find the key as he goes past her and down an escalator behind the real killer bay slapping his left-hand glove against his right palm three times. She finds the glove that he planted in his seat in the jury box with the key inside.

An escalator is a good symbol for any narrow path, especially one with a fence like the one on Rockingham where Fuhrman, supposedly following the steps of O.J. who slit the throat of Nicole and Ron, found the glove. Suspect has a man and a woman with their throats slit and too many symbolic similarities and factual reversals to be purely coincidental.

The jury box, for example, where Kathy finds one of the gloves closely approximates the dimensions of the killing cage on Bundy just as the escalator where Eddie slaps the other glove approximates the length and width of the path on Rockingham. Everything else is reversed. The jury box and the escalator were inside the killing cage and the narrow path were outside. The left-hand glove was dropped on Bundy. The right-hand glove was left on Rockingham. Fuhrman’s partner planted the glove. Fuhrman found it. The dedicated defender was an unscrupulous prosecutor and the proactive juror was a killer cop. The real killer in Suspect is the judge who gives himself away when Kathy cuts him as he attacks her from behind. He leaves a blood trail right to his bench. O.J.’s door, where the killer’s blood trail supposedly ended was near a bench.

Let’s go back to the jury box for a moment. I’m not going to get into Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men, though it wouldn’t hurt for you to keep his story with the knife, the movies and the train in mind as we wrap up Suspect. What I want you to think about is the glove in Eddie’s seat. Think about the gloves, the shoes and the socks of the man sitting in that seat and the knit cap of the parking lot attendant who gives him the license plate number of the car on the lot on 12/18 when the woman was killed. He wrote 587 but sometimes got numbers mixed up. 12/18 was the date that Nicole bought the Aris gloves (with the V in the palm).

The parking lot attendant in Suspect is Michael Beach, the man in Short Cuts who is running late for LAX. His apartment is the one that Jennifer Jason Leigh’s friend is housesitting when Leigh tells her about virtual reality. No, we’re not going to get into Lori Singer’s character Sydney in VR5 again. But now is a good time to say that Eddie’s last name is Sanger. Mark Sanger is the actor who stars with Faye Grant in the TV mini series V. It’s Michael Beach we’re talking about now. We want to remember David Addison in Moonlighting’s "Gunfight at the So So Corral" coming up with a great idea for "a beach movie" called Parking Lot, starring Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray and Jessica Lange. We want to recall the kind of hair that would be left in Beach’s knit cap.

Some people won’t see a connection between a knit cap in Suspect and the one the killer left on Bundy unless it’s dark blue like the one O.J. wore on the dock in The Naked Gun or black like the one he wore in the Naked Gun 2 ½. Some might insist on seeing it on a black man where one of the bodes was found. There is a black man in a knit cap where each of the bodies is found. But only by the dock where the Polar Bears found the woman’s body do you see a black man with a black or dark blue knit cap. Some people still won’t see how the photo of Fuhrman pointing to the glove next to the cap and his act of pointing out in his book the distinctive heelprint has anything to do with Suspect unless they see the gloves and the heel in the same place. Suspect has that, too.

Remember the ratty soles of Quade’s shoes in D.O.A., in contrast to the pristine soles of Mel Brooks’ wingtips in Life Stinks. Put the distinctive quality of Quade’s soles together with the new and expensive quality of Brooks’ and you’ve got a general description of the Bruno Magli’s that left the bloody shoeprints on Bundy. In D.O.A. Quade is wearing glasses when Nick is killed. In Suspect you see part of where Mel Brooks may have gotten the character of Molly in Life Stinks when Eddie makes a deal with a bag lady for a cufflink bearing the Presidential Seal (wingtips). She refuses to sell it to him but she trades it for his shoes and socks. He was wearing black socks. He leaves the pier in his bare feet. For the record, the woman that Carl is accused of killing was Elizabeth.

I’ll understand if the bare feet and black socks near the water remind you of Moonlighting’s third episode (3-12-1985) "Read the Mind…See the Movie." That’s the show in which David and Maddie pull surveillance on a professional psychic. Carl Baker, a wealthy client of the psychic, is carried into the house by his son Brian (as in Brian Kato Kaelin) and the chauffeur (as in Allan Park). Carl and the psychic discuss a gate and a bright light. Carl thinks he sees the ghost of his dead wife Elizabeth when he’s actually seeing Maddie. David is wearing leather gloves, a black knit cap, rubber-soled shoes, and black clothes. This, according to the abandoned gloves, the abandoned, cap, the bloody shoeprints and the fibers on Ron Goldman’s shirt is what police say the killer wore to 875 S. Bundy. The blue-black fibers on O.J.’s socks together with Nicole’s blood, tie O.J. to the killer’s clothes and his murdered ex-wife.

Fuhrman tells his story of O.J.’s clothes in his flight from Bundy and his arrival at Rockingham as though he were reading his mind. You see much of that story in "Read the Mind…See the Movie." When Maddie on the rooftop of the psychic’s house tries to lower David by his ankles to get a look into the window, his shoes come off in her hands. He survives the fall and hurries back up to the roof on the white steps of a pipe in his stocking feet. But soon afterwards he is scampering around for a way out. He and Maddie look down and see a cook, a butler and a maid. From another location, Brian, a guard and the chauffeur look up and see them. To escape they strip down to their underwear. David leaves behind his black outer garments, leather gloves, knit cap and the shoes. When Maddie says she doesn’t want to get killed in her underwear, he says, "Look at it this way, there could be no pool—or a pool and no water. On Bundy there was no pool—except a pool of blood. David keeps on his black socks when he jumps into the pool.

They get out and dash away, leaving behind two sets of wet footprints (O.J. as Lee Hays/Wills as "Bruno," husband of "Molly"). He gets into Maddie’s 1985 Corvette. David’s black socks had to be on the carpet.

The rest of Fuhrman’s story about the clothes goes like this: O.J. flees in panic. He leaves behind the shoeprints from a pool of blood. He leaves his own blood drops from having cut himself in the attack next to the shoes. When he gets home, he sees the chauffeur and tries to sneak into his house from the swimming pool area in back but runs into the air conditioner. Fuhrman imagines that he drops his remaining glove when he reaches for his key to unlock the door to the maid’s quarters. He goes inside, blinds himself with the bright light that he turns on to see himself in a mirror, and goes back outside, around the front and into the house. He takes his shoes off in the foyer, dashes upstairs where he leaves his socks on the rug and finishes taking off the rest of his clothes as he approaches his bath. "Bath" is the word Fuhrman uses.

Fuhrman said that his partner Brad Roberts found the killer’s clothes in the washing machine. The other detectives found only Arnelle Simpson’s wet underwear (Maddie’s wet underwear). They also found a double set of wet transfer stains from the Bruno Magli’s on Bundy leading away from the pool of blood they came from. Fuhrman offers no explanation for the double shoeprints—which he repeatedly called footprints in court—but the writers of "Read the Mind…See the Movie" do. In fact, with a few composite characters and rearranging sets and props, you get a composite of Fuhrman’s explanation for the killer’s clothes.

Start with Carl and Elizabeth in Suspect and in "Read the Mind…See the Movie." The fact that Elizabeth in both cases is dead and her husband on Moonlighting sees her as a ghost makes a strong link to Bruce "Bruno" Willis as David in Moonlighting and Demi More as Molly in Ghost. But to make the case for the kind of moving-things-around that Fuhrman did using basic elements from "Read the Mind…See the Movie" you can’t beat what happens just before David and Maddie’s first encounter with the psychic when the drapes close by themselves. David strikes a pose like Rod Serling as the host of The Twilight Zone. He vocalizes the theme music from the show and says, "You are about to enter a world, a world of wondrous imagination. Not only of sight and sound but of mind, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into …Moving Furniture."

The visual elements of Serling’s introduction in its various incarnations are never what they seem to be and never stay in one place for long.

"Shadow Play" and "Twenty Two" begin with a sun setting in a nebulous field of light and shadow as a black line travels from right to left across the lower part of the screen. The theme music plays, the sun sinks, the line becomes the horizon. The nebula turns to stratus clouds. Serling’s words span the transition. "You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind, a journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead. Your next stop—The Twilight Zone."

The words to Serling’s second version of the introduction are the same in "To Serve Man," First broadcast on 3/2/1962, except that Serling deleted the "signpost" line. The graphics show an apparent cone of concentric black and white circles with the point making clockwise orbits within the outer rings as the cone recedes into a starry background

Serling’s last intro begins with a house door floating in space. He says, "You unlock this door with the key of imagination (as Fuhrman does with the key in his imagination to get O.J. into the maids quarters). Beyond it is another dimension, a dimension of sound (when the door opens you think you are looking at glass in a window frame. You can’t tell if you’re looking through the glass or seeing a reflection, but when you hear the sound of shattering glass it crumbles, frame and all, like broken plaster). A dimension of sight (a doll’s eye opens as Fuhrman says Nicole’s did before O.J. killed her). A dimension of mind (Einstein’s theory of relativity floats by followed by a wooden artist’s mannequin on its side with something coming out of its neck that could stand for anything. You see a clock with its hands spinning forward at an impossible rate). You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas (all requirements to frame O.J.). You’ve just crossed over into—The Twilight Zone." The actor who introduced the Twilight Zone movie with those words was Burgess Meredith.

With all of these variations on the original theme to work from, David Addison did a great job of evoking the whole run of the series with fewer words and all the images associated with them already in our heads. The Bundy killer did the same thing with respect to the movies and the TV shows his ideas came from. Only his act included Addison’s version of Serling’s introduction with respect to the position of Nicole’s body, the 22 cents that became 11 cents, the socks on the rug and the photo of Fuhrman’s finger with the constellation of shifting clues around it.

The bigger the clue on Bundy or Rockingham, as characterized by Fuhrman, the more specific or repetitious it is on film and television. You see the same reversible elements like the initials BM (Bruno Magli) or MB (Mercedes Benz) an inordinate number of times. You see a lot of knit caps—a lot of black ones and dark blue ones. You see a lot of leather gloves, rubber gloves and bloody gloves. You see frequent references to the same numbers—1, 5, and 9 for single digits, 11, 12, 17, 18, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33 and 52 for double digits. You see trains, railroad tracks and death or someone associated with death in a mirror.

In The Twilight Zone’s "Number 12 Looks Just like You" Marilyn is notified about undergoing a transformation at the age of 18. She has different bodies to choose from. Her best friend Val is model number 8 (8/18 is when O.J.’s daughter Adrian drowned). The most popular female model is number 12, her mother’s, their maid’s and the nurse in the clinic. The only male body you see is number 17, the model number of her father, her uncle and the doctors. Marilyn doesn’t want to be transformed. She suspects that it will mean the death of her essential self. She fears that she will be railroaded into being transformed if she doesn’t escape. You know that her worst fears are true when the doctor tells her, "No one has ever been forced to take transformation if he doesn’t want it. You see, the problem is simply to discover why you don’t want it and make the necessary corrections."

Looking for an escape route, Marilyn goes into a room where she is stunned by a light. The doctor and the model-12 nurse scoop her up and the doctor tells her that she has chosen number 8. In the final scene, she bounds happily in front of a mirror and says to her friend, "And the nicest part of all Val, I look just like you.

That 1963 episode began with a mirror image of the door like the maid’s entrance in Cape Fear (’91) with Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, Robert DeNiro and Joe Don Baker. Remember The Twilight Zone title, "Number 12, Looks Just Like You" and remember that the mother, the nurse and the maid are model number 12. Remember the man who wore the size 12 Bruno Magli’s (Nicole’s brand—Nicole hated O.J.’s maid Michelle). Fuhrman said that O.J. had them on when he went into the maid’s room, left blood on the light switch, got blinded by the light, looked at himself in a mirror and saw a murderer. Remember the nurse’s shoes in Dressed to Kill with Michael Caine and Nancy Allen.

Robert DeNiro, Lucifer in Angel Heart, is Max Cady in Cape Fear. He cuts the maid’s throat and strips off her sweater, dress and shoes. Joe Don Baker, as the PI, thinks Cady is outside and sets a trap to catch him coming in. But Cady is already in the kitchen (Cara’s California Pizza Kitchen) laying in wait. When Baker enters the room and stands near the light switch (where Fuhrman says he found blood in the maid’s room), he sees Cady from behind in the maid’s clothes and assumes that it is the maid. He turns his back on her killer, pours himself some Jim Beam and Pepto-Bismol (Mel Brooks in Life Stinks), and gets his throat with a piano wire.

That’s Fuhrman’s killer in the maid’s entrance—not O.J. Simpson.

In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" The doctor assumes on sight that Marilyn is eager to be changed into a beautiful model 8 or 12. He says, as though reading her mind, "…And then she looks at herself in a mirror. From pure perfection of body, face, limb, pigmentation, stance, carriage, she looks at herself and she’s horrified…" In Murder in Brentwood Mark Fuhrman completes the doctor’s picture of him (Fuhrman) by describing what he looks at when people-watching at the airport.

Now tell me this next part of the doctor’s "mind reading" act doesn’t sound like O.J. from Mark Fuhrman’s point of view: "You see, the poor child says to herself, "why should I be so hideous, so awkward, oversized, unbalanced, so full of revolting skin eruptions." Read black skin in place of "revolting skin eruptions" and you’ve got it.

How then do you interpret Fuhrman’s story of big, black O.J.—who walked with an awkward gait because of arthritis—how do you interpret his story of O.J. in the maid’s room when you see the ceiling light in Cape Fear reflected in a pool of blood? Doesn’t any of this remind you of dream symbolism? A door that the maid goes into before she dies in her underwear, a door that mirrors the one that opened the "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" episode of The Twilight Zone.

These features of The Twilight Zone, Cape Fear, and Moonlighting’s "Read the Mind…See the Movie" could not have gone into the Bundy killings as well as Fuhrman’s "mind reading" act with O.J. by chance. When you factor in the androgynous names (Nick/Nicole, Joe/Jo, Robert/Bobbie) and birthdays of the three male principles. The names mean they can stand for men or women in "Number 12 Looks Just Like You." The birthdays assign them their roles. Nick Nolte was born on February 8. Joe Don Baker was born on February 12. Robert DeNiro has the number of the father, the uncle and the doctors. His birthday is August 17. February is the month in which Mark Fuhrman was born (February 5). August, the 8^th month, is the month in which Adrian Simpson drowned (August 18). DeNiro, as Max Cady drowns in Cape Fear. The 17^th is the day Sydney Simpson was born (October 17). Day of birth + day of death = tombstone. Nicole’s day of death is 12 (June 12).

The fact that North Carolina (the home state of Laura Hart McKinny) is the setting for Cape Fear gives Mark Fuhrman a better reason than most to take a special interest in that movie as a source of ideas. Look at the killing in the kitchen: Two bodies, a man and a woman, both with their throats cut. A pool of blood with Nick Nolte’s face in it. Blood in "the maid’s room (the room that the maid is in)." And let us not forget "the Baker" with the cut throat as in Kathy Baker whose character gets her throat cut by Morgan Freeman’s character in Street Smart.

These were the characters that Officer John Edwards described when he answered the 911 call at Rockingham in 1989. That call came from the maid’s room.. The size 12 Bruno Maglis and the switch of blood samples in the lab made the killer look just O.J. Simpson. O.J. was arrested on the 17^th (the model number of the men in "Number 12 Looks Just Like You") or that Fuhrman’s letter to the city attorney that transformed O.J. into a monster was written on the 18^th (Marilyn’s transformation age).

I’m not saying that the killing, the timing of O.J.’s arrest and the date of Fuhrman’s letter to the city attorney were all orchestrated by Fuhrman to match the salient features and numbers in Moonlighting, Cape Fear and The Twilight Zone. I’m saying that some of these things showed up in the murders, some showed up in the letter and they all showed up—in context— in Mark Fuhrman’s number one best-selling book.

It was no accident that his book made the best-seller list. He followed a proven formula that Hollywood studio execs have been using for years. Take two or more moneymaking story lines with superficial changes in names, characters and settings sprinkle liberally with the clichés audiences have come to expect and add a big-name star. You can’t lose.

Mark Fuhrman made an unintentional allusion to that formula in Murder in Brentwood. His advice about visiting the video store was supposed to show that the language and situations he used on the Laura Hart McKinney tapes were consistent with "cop movies" that producers wanted to see. But if you follow the blood link from Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd in Candyman (’92) to Michael Madsen and Laura Johnson in Fatal Instinct (’92) you see something else. First is the Fatal Instinct title which is the same as the 1993 Carl Reiner spoof of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Sleeping with the Enemy and Cape Fear. Then there are the trailers, Excessive Force with Tony Todd (where the hero wears Bruno Magli Lorenzos), a cemetery scene with Lawrence Fishburne in Deep Cover, and a host of stars from the Fuhrman collection in Robert Altman’s The Player (’92). The stars include Cher (Suspect), Malcolm McDowell (Time After Time), Nick Nolte (Cape Fear) and Burt Reynolds (Physical Evidence).

Tim Robbins (Sort Cuts, Bob Roberts, "Gunfight at the So-So Corral") is a studio executive in The Player. He rejects pitches from screenwriters that don’t follow a winning formula. He drives an expensive new car (the opposite of Fuhrman’s). He talks on his cell phone quite a bit (which the Bundy killer had to do to coordinate his actions with the latest intelligence on O.J. and the murder victims). As he spies on a woman through her window, he speaks to her on his cell phone. Then, he meet her man and kills him in a parking lot. The voiceover for the trailer tells his story—and Mark Fuhrman’s pretty well…

"Griffin Mill is a hot shot studio exec. He’s heard every pitch. He knows all the angels (writer pitching him an idea says, "This is a tough story, a tragedy not unlike Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate.")…and all the players. Now he’s about to star in his most unforgettable story yet. Only it’s not a movie it’s his life."

Rent The Player. Look for a black SUV (Nicole’s Cherokee), a white SUV (O.J.’s Bronco), an outdoor restaurant (where Fuhrman met Laura Hart), a chauffeur-driven limo, LAX, and a rejected screenwriter angry enough to kill. Look for Griffin Mill driving recklessly in a panic (because of a rattlesnake). See him come to a sudden stop at an angle to the curb extreme enough to fit Fuhrman’s description of how O.J. parked his Bronco after the murders. He kills a writer in a murderous rage, moves the body and manipulates evidence to make it look like a robbery gone bad. Where did his ideas come from? Straight from the movies.

A movie idea he accepts with some formulaic changes stars Julia Roberts as an innocent woman put to death by a DA "at a moral crossroads). With a guilty black man on death row, the image-conscious DA decides that the next person to die should be smart, rich and white. The writer, who did not want any big names—until he saw how much more money it made for his movie, says, "That’s the reality. The innocent die." Another star tapped by Mill against the writer’s original wishes to make the story a sure-fire box office hit is Bruce Willis (I bet that was a big surprise).

Memorable lines include this exchange between Mill and a Pasadena detective played by Whoopee Goldberg. He says, "I’d hate to get the wrong person arrested." She says, "Oh please. This is Pasadena. We do not arrest the wrong person. That’s LA." And this exchange between Mill and his date at a candle lit dinner. She says, "Do places like this really exist. He replies, "Only in the movies."