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Chapter 23

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Chapter 22

The Trojan's Horse

After ten years of stalemated battle outside the walls of Troy the Greeks finally got in by tricking the Trojans into thinking that they had conceded defeat and sailed back to Greece. To create that illusion they sailed their ships to the far side of the nearest island and left behind a gigantic wooden horse as an apparent offering to Poseidon the god of the seas, earthquakes and horses for a safe journey home. To complete the illusion, they also left behind an actor pretending to be an intended human sacrifice who had escaped and hated the Greeks for what they tried to do to him. He told the Trojans that the size of the horse was to discourage them from moving it into the city and to trick them into destroying it as an unpardonable act of sacrilege.

This ancient bit of reverse psychology worked because the Trojans didn’t trust the Greeks to begin with and the few dissenters among them were killed by huge snakes summoned from the sea by Poseidon. The priestess Cassandra had warned against bringing the giant wooden horse into the city as soon as she saw it. But her visions of the future, which always came true, were never believed. That was her curse for spurning the god Apollo after tricking him into giving her the gift of prophecy.

Most people know the story of the Trojan Horse because of the 1954 Italian movie Ulysses starring Michael Douglas’s father Kirk Douglas. In the Roman telling of the Greek Myths The Iliad and The Odyssey, Odysseus is Ulysses. The Romans also used their name Neptune in place of the Greek Poseidon for the god of the seas. Most of what you need to know about Neptune to know how he figures into the S. Bundy killings is in Ulysses. For the part about the actor and the god that my Greek Mythology professor in college said the horse was dedicated to you’ll have to see The Trojan Horse (’61) starring body builder Steve Reeves—or read the ancient Greek text. The Douglas film tells you that Ulysses was a braggart who thumbed his nose at the rules laid down by the gods. The secret of his "cleverness," was his willingness to think the unthinkable and to do it.

Sound like somebody else you know? If not, let me recommend Mark Fuhrman’s book Murder in Brentwood and the Laura Hart McKinney tapes. Between them you will get Fuhrman’s description of a sociopathic criminal suspect for whom no threat and no incentive will induce him to betray himself, and a description of himself as a cop who sounds just like the suspect he describes. He boasts about committing anti-social acts that other cops wouldn’t and his utter contempt for the rule of law.

In the early morning of June 13 1994 the lead detectives in the S. Bundy murder case were ordered to give personal notice to the former University of Southern California Trojan O.J. Simpson of his second wife’s untimely demise….

The U.S.C. Trojans were the football team O.J. played for when he set a national rushing record, was named to the All-American team twice and won the Heisman Trophy for the best collegiate football player of 1968. The number 32 that he wore as a running back with the San Francisco 49ers and the Buffalo Bills was the number he wore as a Trojan. The only Trojan as famous as O.J. Simpson is Paris, the egocentric sex fiend who started the Trojan War by kidnapping the Spartan Queen Helen. He killed the Greek’s mightiest warrior Achilles with an arrow he shot into the only vulnerable spot on his body—his heel.

Two things should come to mind right away: 1) The puzzle box that George Kennedy gave O.J. in The Naked Gun 33 1/3 with the picture of the Eiffel Tower on the lid. Eiffel Tower = Paris. Paris = Famous Trojan. Between 1968 and 1994 the most famous Trojan in the world was O.J. Simpson. It’s an inside joke like Pier 32 in the first Naked Gun. 2) The point that Mark Fuhrman makes in Murder in Brentwood of the bloody heelprint in the photo of him pointing to the bloody Aris glove. Are all of those "ironic" references to heels in the Fuhrman movie collection starting to click into place? No? Flip the Eiffel Tower upside down and what does it look like? The detached heel of a woman’s high-heeled shoe perhaps? O.J.’s Achilles heel was the New Years Day incident and Fuhrman’s letter about O.J.’s past "abuse" of the female victim who purchased Bruno Magli shoes.

Those of you who studied Greek Mythology in school probably jumped way ahead of me with my mention of the Aris glove. Neptune—Poseidon in Greek—was not the only god who took sides in the war. Some of them took an active part in the fighting including the bloody god of war himself, Ares. Though the gods were immortal, they could feel pain, be wounded, and bleed like any flesh and blood human. While Ares loved to kill and wallow in the blood of others, he was fundamentally a coward who ran away when someone drew his blood. Ares the fleeing, bleeding, cowardly killer? A bloody Aris glove left behind by a fleeing, bleeding, cowardly killer? What does that sound like to you?

What grabbed me in Fuhrman’s description of how he would have interrogated O.J. was how he said he would have played on O.J.’s ego and called him a coward for the way he killed Ron and Nicole. That approach, as Fuhrman pointed out, would have had no effect on a sociopath like the composite person he said he was pretending to be on the McKinny tapes. Neither would it have impressed a trained soldier or marine no matter how egocentric. The job of a warrior is to kill the enemy. The surer the kill the better.

Gene Hackman as a Special Forces soldier in The Package is a closer link to the Trojan Horse than you might think until you recall the way a neo-Nazi group in Chicago was used in the movie to frame an innocent man for murder. During Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, a Nazi movement was, in fact, active in the United States, particularly in Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago. Once the media labeled the movement a Trojan Horse it could no longer sell itself to the American public as anything but a way into America for the conquering German army. As a history buff and a nazi, it is unlikely that Mark Fuhrman would have missed that anti-Nazi analogy. Had the American-Nazi leader kept a low profile in the ’30s as Hitler wanted him to do and lobbied for peace on Hitler’s terms the way Charles Lindbergh did, it might have worked long enough to give the Germans a decisive edge. Fuhrman’s carefully crafted words in Murder in Brentwood shows that if he’d been the American Nazi leader he would have known what to do.

What movie can you think of seeing Gene Hackman in with another Trojan Horse connection? Think of one with Leslie Nielsen before he starred with O.J. and George Kennedy in The Naked Gun series. The one I’m thinking of also stars Shelly Winters whose character in the Night of the Hunter gets her throat slashed from ear to ear by a hymn-singing preacher—a wolf in sheep’s clothing named Harry Powell. Maybe you can see it better if you took off the cap and gloves of the soldier and turned everything around him upside down.

Hackman is the hero preacher in The Poseidon Adventure who leads a small band of people up and out of the luxury liner S.S. Poseidon on New Years Day when a monster wave from an earthquake turns the huge ship upside down. Hundreds of people are killed as the ship takes on seawater deck by deck until it is fully submerged.

In the story of the Trojan Horse The Poseidon Adventure scenario is reversed. The hero is a sacrilegious warrior who leads a small band of men down from a huge horse sacred to Poseidon to let a sea of fellow warriors into the city of Troy. They kill the inhabitants by the hundreds.

Poseidon would never have allowed the Greeks to build the wooden horse, to hide soldiers inside of it, and to intervene as he did in the Trojan’s debate about what to do with it if he wasn’t on the side of the Greeks. The only explanation for Odysseus (Ulysses) failing to give the god of horses, seas and earthquakes his do and for smashing his statue when he destroyed Troy was a recurring theme in Greek Mythology called hubris. Extreme arrogance doesn’t go far enough to define it. Hubris is arrogance to the farthest extreme. It’s an occupational hazard for heroes and kings who have gained their status by achieving the greatest extremes of success—heroes like Odysseus, Oedipus, and Orenthal.

When Fuhrman talked about playing on O.J.’s ego to get him to crack under the questioning of a truly gifted interrogator like him, he was talking about hubris. The O.J. he describes in his ’89 letter to the city attorney is a man acting out of hubris. The way Fuhrman tells it in the letter and elaborates on it in his book, O.J. was not only threatening Nicole with a baseball bat, he was using his name as if being O.J. was enough to justify anything he did. That’s hubris.

Here again, we’re seeing a reflected image of Mark Fuhrman in the attitude he attributes to O.J. Nowhere before his 1989 report is there a record of O.J. speaking or acting the way he described. The closet thing to it was O.J.’s reported anger in ’89 that the police accepted Nicole’s explanation for her physical appearance and her behavior without even listening to him or his housekeeper. That was the reason Mike Farrell (MF), the detective assigned to investigate the incident, asked if any other officer had been called to Rockingham under similar circumstances. Fuhrman was the only one to respond affirmatively notwithstanding the fact that his story was never matched to a 911 call and the fact that he hadn’t gone there alone. The only way he could have known about the Simpson’s argument was through illegal surveillance.

Fuhrman’s report is what gives the lead officer’s account of O.J.’s words in ’89 the sound of hubris and its apparent continuity from 1985 to 1994. It sounds as though O.J. had beaten Nicole and threatened her life on a regular basis with the attitude that it was okay for him to do so because of who he was. If that’s O.J. in 1985, it’s a brand new O.J. But it’s an old M.F. going back to what he said he did in the Marines in the first half of the ’70s. It’s how he described himself to psychiatrists in 1981-’82 and what he says about himself on the McKinny tapes from ’85 to ’94. "Play acting" or not, you still have M.F. talking the way he said O.J. did.

Forget the n-word for now and consider the style and substance of what Fuhrman said. He said that the rules didn’t apply to him—that he’d beat up or arrest anyone he wanted to beat up or arrest for his own reasons and make up the evidence he needed later on. He boasted of his ability to control the lives of others. He said that he was God.

In 1984 Fuhrman stopped a young man named Jarvis Bowers for jaywalking near a movie theater, subdued him with the outlawed choke hold, and threatened to kill him. As Fuhrman told Laura Heart McKinny, the hold was outlawed because of the "extraordinary" number of people who died as a result of having it used on them. When Bowers filed a formal complaint, it cost Fuhrman one-day’s pay.

It’s hard to imagine a more satisfying result for Fuhrman than an official acknowledgement that he had broken the law and put a man’s life at risk, with a penalty that could be easily made up for in a few hours of overtime. Is it any wonder that he seemed to think he had god-like powers? The Bowers case is pretty good evidence that he did. By fine-tuning his act he could relive that day with different victims and a different outcome until he got board with repeating the same routine.

In Groundhog Day (’93) Bill Murray as Pittsburgh TV weatherman Phil Connors starts thinking that he might be God— "well, not the God, but a god"—when he can find no better explanation for his apparent superhuman powers. He tells this to Rita his producer, played by Andie MacDowell, over a breakfast table strewn with a gluttonous array of food that he is stuffing himself with as he speaks. The subject of Phil’s egocentricity sprouts naturally from this setting. She calls it his "defining characteristic." If you had to pick one, that would be it.

Before the S. Bundy murders Fuhrman was the only person on record who said that about O.J. Simpson.

The night before the murders O.J. attended a formal charity dinner. The socks he wore were the ones Fuhrman said he found in O.J.’s bedroom—the ones that tested positive for Nicole’s blood. You’ll find some of Fuhrman’s story in Paris Trout (1991) with Dennis Hopper as the title character. He is so arrogant that he can’t see anything wrong with abusing his wife and committing murder. Barbara Hershey is the abused wife. Ed Harris is Paris Trout’s lawyer. In one scene you see spilt milk on the kitchen floor where she cut her foot. You see Ed Harris, the pathologist in Coma, taking the bloody socks off of her feet.

You learn why she was wearing socks from a scene in Paris Trout’s bedroom where she no longer sleeps. She had seen him bring in numerous sheets of glass and couldn’t figure out why until she crept into his room in her bare feet when he was away and saw herself in a full-length mirror as she stood next to his bed. That’s when she realized she had been set up and backed away to see the clear imprints of her feet on the glass that he had laid down like a carpet. How much does it take to imagine socks where the footprints were or bloody shoeprints on sidewalk tiles instead of footprints on glass plates?

Kato was probably barefoot when Fuhrman examined his shoes. In that context, doesn’t Trout’s glass make you wonder again why Fuhrman mentioned Kato’s shoes in his book as well as a twelve-pound trout that were both too small to keep? Doesn’t it make you wonder about the fingerprint on one lens of Juditha’s glasses and why Fuhrman repeatedly made the mistake of calling the bloody shoeprints "footprints"?

Part of the answer could be in Ulysses where the Greeks land on an unfamiliar island and discover the huge impression of a foot that couldn’t have been made by an ordinary man. If you remember nothing else about the movie you will remember Polyphemus, the Cyclops son of Neptune who made that footprint. You’ll remember his footprint and his cave in which Ulysses and his men are trapped when they walk in uninvited, ignore clear signs that they are trespassing and stay too long helping themselves to whatever goodies they can find.

You’ll remember the one-eyed Polyphemus returning to his cave and rolling a huge stone against the opening. The next time you see the movie, you’ll notice a spilt milk scene and the fact that the soldier who spills the milk is the one who gets eaten by the Cyclops. Ulysses tricks the giant into moving the stone by blunting his judgment with wine. When Polyphemus passes out in a drunken stupor the Greeks take his giant club, sharpened and burned at the tip, and shove the pointed ember into his eye. Ulysses stands next to the large stone and shouts at Polyphemus to make him think he can get at him by moving the stone. In the pain, the range and the confusion of the moment, the trick works. The invaders steal the giant’s valuables and leave him stumbling about pathetically on a cliff overlooking the sea.

Here we have the man who used the ploy of the wooden horse to get into the city of Troy, using a wooden stick in the eye of a giant to leave his cave with his property. We can look at that scenario two different ways with respect to the June 13 search of O.J.’s home. We can look at it from the standpoint of the trick used to get inside or the trick used to leave with the bloody glove and O.J.’s dress socks.

In the first instance, Justice is often personified by a blindfolded, larger-than-life icon. Blind justice is supposed to be another way of saying "impartial" justice. But a justice system blind to the human element within it can be tricked into doing the bidding of the trickster. Mark Fuhrman used a pointed piece of wood plus the Trojan’s "horse" (O.J.’s Bronco) and a lie (concern for O.J.’s safety) as an excuse to get inside the walls of O.J.’s Rockingham estate and open the gates for the LAPD. The stick can stand for either the wood that Ulysses’ Trojan Horse was made of or the pointed stick that he used to blind the son of Neptune.

Another way of looking at Ulysses, the Trojan Horse, and the sharp, glowing stick in the drunken Cyclops’ eye is through Fuhrman’s actions after using the stick, the Bronco and the lie to get into the estate. Kato Kaelin was the first person the detectives saw. He told them straightaway that O.J.’s oldest daughter Arnelle was the best person to answer their questions. Three of the four detectives went to see her. Fuhrman’s excuse for staying with Kato was his appearance, in Fuhrman’s opinion, of being intoxicated over and above what one would expect from a man who has just been aroused from sleep. Fuhrman decided to test him for sobriety by following his eyes as he waved his penlight in front of them. Not exactly a sharp stick in the eye, but close enough to roll away the stone that blocked the detectives from leaving the house with anything of value in the prosecution of O.J. Simpson.

The metaphorical stone, of course, was the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution that the four detectives had already violated with their bogus excuse for invading O.J.’s home. It was an obstacle that only a justice system blinded and confused by the excitement of the moment could move. Fuhrman asked Kato whether he’d heard anything unusual the night before. Kato told him about the thumps and the rest is history. Fuhrman found the bloody Aris glove, Det. Vannatter got a search warrant, and Det. Fuhrman found the socks.

Every important thing that Fuhrman said, did and wrote about in the murder investigation that led to O.J.’s arrest had a familiar ring to it. His reference to the movies were particularly striking when he went out of his way to work them into his account of what he did, why he did it and what it meant. A good example is his comment on the video Ghost that he found in O.J.’s VCR. In Murder in Brentwood, he wrote that it had "no evidentiary value." Yet, there it was in his book to conjure up images of "Bruno" and "Molly" and Nicole’s "voice from the grave" on the 911 tape. The ghost associations don’t stop there. You see them again and again in the Fuhrman collection from movies as diverse as Ghostbusters, Gotham, Child’s Pay, Maniac Cop and Ulysses.

Ghost has history connections to Ulysses and Fuhrman that most people wouldn’t notice. They have to do with the name of the ghost in Ghost and the name of the general who led Federal troops to victory in the American Civil War. Sam was the murder victim in Ghost. Ulysses S. Grant was called Sam by his friends. Sam was also the son of white supremacist Randy Weaver. He was the boy who was killed at Ruby Ridge Idaho by Federal officers in 1992. Grant’s real first name was Hiram. But no one ever called him that. The middle name he is best known by was his mother’s maiden name—Simpson.

These are things that Fuhrman, a war and history buff with a white supremacist history of his own, must have known when O.J. appeared for the last time as Nordberg in the movies and for the first time in real life as a killer. The odds that he didn’t are probably as high as getting all of the digits right in a state lottery.

What do you think the odds are that all but one of the numbers in the lottery that Nordberg and the other detectives in The Naked Gun 33 1/3 rush back to the squad room to hear would be present in the S. Bundy murders? 12 (the killer’s shoe size and the month when Nicole purchased Aris Light gloves), 22 (the change found in the driveway), 18 (the 18^th President of the United States Ulysses Simpson Grant) and 9 (O.J.'s day of birth, July the 9th).

You may detect a double meaning in the last digit  when you watch O.J.’s reaction as each set of numbers he reads. You can see that he has 12, 22, and 18 by his tense, wild-eyed, fist-shaking enthusiasm. His frozen, deflated body language makes it just as clear that he doesn’t have the 9. Then again, maybe he does have a 9 but sees it as a 6—as in June, the 6^th month of the year and the number of basketball legend Julius Erving, Dr. "J." O.J.’s dyslexia is a running joke in the series. The "dyslexic" POLICE SQUAD sign on the door of the squad room is an example. It’s no accident that O.J. and the sign are framed in the same shot as often as they are in The Naked Gun series or that you see his silhouette through the frosted glass as he closes the door behind him in The Naked Gun 33 1/3.

It’s astonishing how many times O.J. is framed in a shot that has special significance to the evidence in the murder charge against him. The Naked Gun has O.J. sneaking around at night in dark clothes and a dark blue knit cap. In The Naked Gun 2 ½ you see him under a truck on a wooden board with wheels and an abandoned leather glove near his kicking feet. In The Naked Gun 33 1/3 his head is literally framed in a frame between a pair of shoes belonging to someone else who walks the way he does. He wears a surgical cap and gown with rubber gloves that he snaps at the wrist. That’s where his blood was on the leather glove that Fuhrman found on Rockingham.

A frame of some kind figures prominently in the Fuhrman movie collection. Take for example the scene where Phil Connors meets Ned Ryerson (Steven Tobolowski) in Groundhog Day for the second time in years. For Ned, a life insurance salesman, it’s the first time in years. The explanation for that apparent contradiction is in the fact that Phil is caught in a time warp that he alone is aware of. The first time around Ned had to go through many contortions to get Phil to remember him, including taking off his hat to reveal a balding head. When Phil calls his name this time, Ryerson says, "Bing! Right out of the box." The Bruno Magli shoes that left the bloody imprints on Bundy were brand new—right out of the box. Keep in mind the fact that Phil Connors is played by Bill (O.J. was a Buffalo Bill) Murray (BM) which makes anything he does that’s associated with wet shoes significant.

One frame of the Ned Ryerson Groundhog Day sequence includes five major elements of the S. Bundy murder scene. As Ned shakes hands with Phil, you see dark leather gloves, glasses and a hat in the foreground. Similar items were photographed in Nicole’s front yard. In the background, you see a man with one hand in his pocket giving a beggar some change (a beggar was one of Sherlock Holmes’ favorite disguises) as a black utility truck rolls by. The change on Nicole’s driveway in back of her house was photographed next to her dark green Jeep—a green so dark that it looked black. For most of the scene you see the name of a clothing store in the background. The name of the store is Frame’s.

The Ned Ryerson sequence concludes with Phil (Bill Murray) stepping off of a curb into a pothole filled with icy water. As he stands there in disbelief at what has just happened, Ryerson stands back pointing and laughing. "Watch out for that first step," he says belatedly, "It’s a dozy." Phil gets to the Town Square where the Groundhog Day ceremony is taking place stomping his wet foot as he goes. He tells Rita and Larry, their channel 9 cameraman, that he was attacked by a giant leach.

Did you get all of that? Leather glove, pointing finger, hat, glasses, wet shoe, attack by giant leach. Leach = bleeding. Giant leach = lots of bleeding. The S. Bundy killer had to make two trips to the pool of blood on Nicole’s sidewalk to leave two sets of shoeprints. Phil Connors stepped in the water-filled pothole three times. Students of psychology may find that "dozy" of a first step intriguing in concert with the picture of Fuhrman pointing to the bloody glove and the early conclusions the police and prosecutors made based on that kind of evidence. It’s a phenomenon known as The Primacy Effect, which says that the first step you take in evaluating the truth of a situation can be so influential that it sets the course for every step you can take from that point on. In other words, watch out for that first step. It’s a dozy.

The first impression given by the evidence at Bundy and Rockingham was that O.J. Simpson murdered two people. The age and sex of the victims, the nature of their wounds and the woman’s relationship to O.J. told them right away that he was statistically more likely than not to be the killer. The evidence in Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo sealed it—the dark brown leather glove like "Rita’s" (Fuhrman had his picture taken with one and Vannatter had a picture taken of the other) and the dark blue knit cap like "Larry’s" in Groundhog Day sealed it.

We have to pause here for a quick look at another movie in the Fuhrman collection. This should smooth the way to understanding what "Phil" most likely meant to the American nazi who masterminded the frame-up of O.J. Simpson, moved to Idaho and bought two horses. In The Philadelphia Experiment II a fugitive in a society where time traveling Nazis have won World War II drops his baseball cap. The man on the run has a unique blood chemistry that propels him through time against his will but will allow someone who knows how to use his blood to regain the lost secret of time travel. The tag inside the cap tells the American Nazi leader that it was made in the USA at a time when the USA no longer exists. The Nazi leader appears in several shots with statues of two horses. He plays Country/Western music and in one scene he wears a ten-gallon cowboy hat. In short, this is a guy that two-horse Idaho cowboy Mark Fuhrman could relate to.

Now, back to Groundhog Day….

Larry arrived in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania with Phil and Rita on the 2^nd of February to cover the annual story of Punxsutawney Phil. He’s the groundhog whose legendary power to tell how long the winter will last rests on whether or not he sees his shadow. Notice how closely Brian Kato Kaelin’s story of the three thumps on his wall parallels the thumps in Groundhog Day. Notice the man’s stick (Fuhrman’s excuse for checking out the Bronco), his hat (the cap), his leather glove (the second gate) next to where the sound comes from (the Rockingham glove), his formal attire (O.J.’s socks). Note the tree stump (the first gate to the south path was anchored to a tree). The actor making the thumps is Brian Doyle-Murray.

This is why we took that detour through The Philadelphia Experiment II. Look at the word games you can play with Phil using the Bronco, the Philadelphia Phillies and the story of Fuhrman and the gloves as your guide. Bronco = horse, horse = filly. Philadelphia has a professional baseball team called he Phillies. Split Phillies down the middle with a space between the two halves and what do you get? You get Phil lies.

Groundhog Day has two Phils. Phil Vannatter and Ron Phillips shared the name; Fuhrman had the "defining characteristic." Phillips had to lie about why he called Fuhrman first, which meant he had to lie about being his partner. To get the search warrant for O.J.’s home under questionable circumstances, Phil Vannatter had to be counted on to take over from Fuhrman, to lie and to go along with Fuhrman’s lies. It was the only sure way of getting Marcia Clark involved early in the investigation. She specialized in spouse abuse and cleaning up bad search warrants for her police friends. Vannatter and Marcia had worked together before. Fuhrman had inside information on O.J. that he knew they’d want.

Vannatter was the only detective from the Robbery/Homicide Division that Fuhrman had personal knowledge of through their mutual interest in playing basketball. Because Fuhrman’s attempts to be assigned to RHD failed, Vannatter was his ticket to staying involved in the case for as long as he needed to be. The trick was to find out as much as he could about Vannatter and about how cases were assigned at RHD, then to schedule the killings to match. As long as the assignments were handed out in a systematic way they could be predicted. If they could be predicted, events surrounding them could be manipulated. With a lot of patience and a little fine-tuning on the fly, it had to pay off sooner or later.

When Groundhog Day was released, Fuhrman was at a point in his life where every day was the same and nothing he did mattered. That’s how Phil Connors describes his situation to Ralph and Gus in a bar on the third day that February 2^nd repeats. In real time, that would have been February 4^th, the eve of Mark Fuhrman’s 41st birthday. It’s on this occasion that Gus trots out the old "half-empty/half-full" analogy to say what kind of guy he thinks Phil is. Half-empty/half-full evidence was all the S. Bundy killer needed to persuade the police, the prosecutor and the vast majority of the public of O.J.’s guilt. That, too, was predictable, but only by an expert.

Experience is what makes an expert an expert. Halfway into the movie, Phil Connors has relived Groundhog Day more times than he can count. For everyone else the day is spanking new each time. Phil steps out of a Mercedes Benz (the ’85 incident) dressed like Clint Eastwood in A Fist Full of Dollars and tells his date to call him Bronco. When he says hello to a woman named Nancy, you know that he knows a considerable amount about her. Phil knows what everyone is going to say and do because he’s seen and heard it before. Unless he intervenes in their lives they will do the same things every time. That is the lesson he learns on his fourth repetition of February 2^nd when he wakes up in his hotel bed after driving recklessly and getting tossed in jail the night before. From now on (beginning with the day that would have been Fuhrman’s birthday) he uses his knowledge to his advantage without fear of the consequences.

The S. Bundy killer could only stack the odds in his favor by doing his homework. The use of O.J.’s Bronco as a Trojan Horse and the theft of Juditha Brown’s glasses were inspired. But when you know the story of Ulysses and his wife Penelope—when you hear Phil tell Rita that a waitress’ dearest wish is to see Paris before she dies—and when you see a bag lady in Adventures in Babysitting stealing Penelope Ann Miller’s glasses with a derelict (Sherlock Holmes?) in the background wearing a dark knit cap—you know where the killer’s inspiration came from.