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Type Casting
Mark Fuhrman may have been extreme in his application of the outlawed chokehold on a black man for j-walking in a white neighborhood, but he was hardly alone in his thinking. And he knew it. During O.J.’s criminal trial prosecutors called Carl Colby as a
stalking witness against O.J. They did so because of a 911 call he made after he and his
wife Catherine saw O.J. near Nicole’s house on Gretna Green Way. The incident Most avowed white racists in America see their attitude toward African-Americans as a reflection of what most white people would say if they had the guts. It’s a claim that they have made for as long as racism has been a dirty word. It is a claim that has the disturbing quality of appearing to be true in the crunch. The angry reaction of most white Americans to the jury’s verdict in the criminal trial of O.J. Simpson was one of those times. Their attitude towards Fuhrman’s part in the investigation, which ranged from apathy to applause, was another. That attitude was the prism through which the Colbys saw O.J. as a probable criminal for looking at a house. Carl Colby learned the suspicious man’s identity when Nicole explained that he was there because she was worried about someone following her and asked O.J., among others, to look out for her. Nicole didn’t live to find out who her stalker was but she obviously knew that it wasn’t O.J. The prosecution had to know who the stalker was because when his attorney learned in June that she’d been killed he turned over to police a log that his client had kept of her activities on the 6th and 7th of January, 1994. The stalker was William Wasz, a crack-head and car thief who got busted for stealing Paula Barbiari’s white SUV later that month. Shortly after his arrest, Nicole moved one block over to 875 South Bundy. Soon after Nicole moved, police arrested Denise Brown for drunk driving. In her civil trial deposition her attorney told her not to say where she was coming from, where she was going or whether her passengers were Faye Resnick and Ron Shipp. Why would Shipp and Resnick get together with a drunk behind the wheel? Could it be that they were at least as intoxicated as she was and upset because the long-planned murder of Nicole had to be postponed? Wouldn’t you say that possibility is worth looking into? By now, you should. The plaintiffs did not call Shipp, Resnick of Denise Brown as witnesses. If you recall Denise’s "performance" in the criminal trial you know how vulnerable she was to cross-examination. You know how much her stories of O.J. the spouse-abuser sounded like the O.J. found nowhere else at the time but in stores told by Shipp, Resnick and Fuhrman. Shipp contributed his version of O.J. the Jekyll and Hyde personality to Sheila Weller’s Raging Heart book under the pseudonym "Leo." Resnick wrote her own book called Nicole Brown Simpson: Private Diary of a Life Interrupted. Fuhrman put his in his report to the city attorney. Taken separately each of these reports would seem to be independent conformation of the others and therefore a multi-perspective view of a killer called O.J. Simpson. What’s wrong here is the fact that these people are not independent of each other. Neither are major features of their stories that appeared nowhere else during the criminal trial but in Fuhrman’s portrait of O.J. and a killer who could be no one but O.J…. Well, there is another place this picture of O.J. appears. You have seen a few examples. I have referred to them collectively as the Fuhrman/Bundy movie network because of their strong connections to Fuhrman, his Bundy murder investigation and to each other. From now on we’ll just call them the Fuhrman collection. Every film in the collection has more to do with Fuhrman than O.J., more to do with his description of O.J. and his theories about the Bundy murders. They have more to do with the roles Faye Resnick, Ron Shipp, Denise Brown and Brad Roberts would have played in the murders if O.J. was framed with the evidence presented in his criminal trial. No baseless assumptions, leaps of logic or dogged quests for incriminating material were involved. The words and pictures and the connections between them speak for themselves. The same people, places and things pop up again and again, the same names, the same faces, the same numbers and themes. In some cases it’s the sheer number of times these people places and things repeat. In other cases it’s the specificity with which they combine with other movies to make a complete picture. These are all of the collection’s common characters, props and settings you need to connect to all of the others:
Addicts: Fuhrman had an addiction to power. He was also an adrenaline junkie who busted illegal narcotics junkies as a narcotics cop. Denise Brown and Fuhrman’s "good friend" Ron Shipp were addicted to cocaine and alcohol. O.J. and Nicole may have been addicted to sex. Changelings: Veteran actor Rene Aberjonois plays Odo the
changeling chief of security on Star Trek: Deep Space-9. He could assume
different forms so Investigators: Fuhrman was a robbery detective and a homicide detective for the LAPD. He said in that he was considering work as a private eye or an insurance investigator. Entertainers: O.J. was an entertainer and Fuhrman wanted to be in the entertainment business. Geniuses: Fuhrman had an extremely high I.Q. and often behaved as though he could outsmart anyone. Psychics: The rumors Fuhrman circulated about being Nicole’s cop and feeling guilty and responsible for her death because he wasn’t able to protect her from O.J. made him psychic-proof. Vannatter and Lange listed a call from a psychic who said the killer was a white man. Sociopaths: Mark Fuhrman showed all the classic signs of having no feelings for anything or anyone but himself and no moral breaks on doing anything that he thought he could get away with. He regarded people who did have those breaks as weaklings. Time travelers:
Fuhrman’s story of O.J. the Bundy killer required shifts in time Writers: one of Fuhrman’s greatest ambitions was to become a writer-celebrity in the tradition of Rod Serling—not Joseph Wambaugh who he claimed to be trying to emulate. Fuhrman’s stories bear no resemblance to Wambaugh’s. They have striking similarities to Serling’s—with a nazi twist. Artists: Fuhrman was an artist who drew the illustrations in his best selling book Murder in Brentwood. Bigots (see Writers) You can connect to all of the movies in the collection through London England, Paris France, Berlin Germany and six American cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Detroit and Boston. All you’ll need for a ticket to anywhere else in the universe is one of the following items: Dark brown or black leather gloves: O.J. owned both. The killer used dark brown gloves. One black glove was missing from O.J.’s bedroom after Fuhrman and Roberts searched it. A dark blue or black knit cap: Fuhrman said in his book that the dark blue knit cap near the Bundy glove was black. It was the same color as the one O.J. wore in The Naked Gun which looked black in poor light. The one he wore in The Naked Gun 2 ½ was black. Distinctive shoes or footprints: Fuhrman asked the
readers of his first book to note the unusual heelprint in blood near his pointing finger
on Bundy. No Birds: One of Fuhrman’s favorite basketball players
was Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics. His team was notorious for recruiting the best white
talent A garage: According to Fuhrman, O.J. left a panic trail from Bundy to Rockingham as incriminating as the blood trail. The coins he mentioned on driveway to Nicole’s garage was supposed to show that O.J. parked his Bronco in the alley and turned his pockets inside out in a panic to find his keys. Flowers: Fuhrman put pink and purple flowers on the murder site. Lit candles: Nicole’s bath was surrounded by lit candles. An elevator: An elevator is a useful metaphor for things as divers as an airplane and a small yard. Fuhrman thought that the elevator that took him to court was worth mentioning in his book. A narrow passageway: That’s were Fuhrman found the right-hand glove and where he said O.J. dropped it in his panic to run from the double murder he’d just committed. A bugging device: To frame O.J. Fuhrman would have required listening devises to help monitor O.J.’s whereabouts and to predict what he was likely to do next. A Stiletto knife: Fuhrman made drawings in his book comparing a German Stiletto to a Swiss Army knife to make the case that a Swiss Army knife was the murder weapon rather than the Stiletto. He did not mention the heel of either knife and the Stiletto is the only one that could have made one of the neck wounds. Had he chosen to, he could have made a convincing case for either knife. A doll: In Fuhrman’s creepy letter photo is a tiny female rag doll laying face down. A clown: Kato Kaelin as himself. O.J. Simpson and Leslie Nielsen as Nordberg and Frank Drebin. Nielsen’s character made the character Fuhrman said he was trying to create look like a clown. A bow tie: O.J. attended a charity event with Paula Barbiari on the 11th wearing black bow tie. A red tie: All the pictures of Fuhrman in his book that show him with a tie, show how with a red one. A picket fence: Fuhrman said he traced the stick by O.J.’s Bronco to an old picket fence in an alley near Nicole’s condo. A nurse: The nurse who drew O.J.’s blood sealed the tube and passed it through the system which Fuhrman knew well from his work as a narcotics officer. Fuhrman knew that the first breakdown in security was at the testing level where security was a joke. Nursing is also high on the list of professions where Munchausen by proxy is practiced. That’s where someone creates a dramatic situation of life and death importance to appear in the spotlight in response to it. A bear. Fuhrman went bear hunting between O.J.’s trials. A cat: (see Kitty Genovese in "The Queens" Murder). A dog: There are five dogs that matter in the story of what really happened at Bundy and Rockingham between 9:45 and 10:50 on the 12th of June, 1994. Fuhrman’s theory of a bleeding killer comes from his theory that Nicole’s Akita bit him, which came from his observation of the blood drops next to the shoeprints. Chances are pretty good that O.J. might have been bitten or scratched by his dog at Rockingham when he walked her around the block. Whether she bit him or not, an observer would have had good reason to think that she did. A wig: A wig might be described as hair that can be taken off and put back on like a cap. The hair identified as O.J.’s in the cap was missing one important thing it should have had for that time of the year—dandruff. For O.J.’s hand hair to be found in the killer’s cashmere-lined brown leather gloves they didn’t have to come directly from O.J.’s hand. If you extend the wig idea to the glove you’ll see that you need only to have one of O.J.’s cashmere-lined gloves to put the hair anywhere you desire. After Fuhrman and Roberts searched O.J.’s bedroom the next police officer to search the room could find only one of O.J.’s cashmere-lined black leather gloves. A mirror: Mark Fuhrman is ambidextrous and switches into the language of mirrored images as easily as he switches hands. He said that O.J. looked into the mirror and saw a killer, but the wounds the killer left on the bodies were those of someone with the ability to use both hands the way O.J. would be able to do only if his mirrored image came to life. Mark Fuhrman was a walking mirror image of himself. Cigarettes: Mark Fuhrman somehow missed the cigarettes that Dr. Lee found on Rockingham and Bundy. No one who may have smoked them was ever sought by police or identified in public by anyone else. A chauffeur-driven limousine: To frame O.J. someone would have had to follow O.J.’s limo driver from the Torrance/Redondo Beach border where Town and Country was headquartered to Brentwood. Mark Fuhrman Lived in Redondo Beach and took the same freeway to work every day as Allan Park did on the evening of June 12, 1994. A railroad: The evidence uncovered and theories put fourth by Fuhrman in the first six hours of the investigation were ideal for insuring a rush to judgment. O.J. wasn’t just framed; he was railroaded. Some of these things are so common that they would not be worth
mentioning were it not for the uncommon qualities they share with the only scenario of the
O.J. had one photo of himself in a tie like that. Fuhrman has three in his book. One of them is every bit as interesting in black and white. A color photo shows that the tie is, in fact, black and white. Ron Goldman had one like that, too—same pattern, same black and white colors. I saw him wearing it in a home movie E! TV used in its re-creation of the Bundy killings. Is it possible that Mark Fuhrman didn’t see Ron Goldman or Fred MacMurry as the killer Walter Neff wearing "his" necktie? Sure. But is it likely?
Recurring themes include: A killer with a Jekyll and Hyde personality Fatal neck wound Killer’s footprints or shoeprints Bodies or outlines of bodies in poses similar to Ron’s and Nicole’s Bodies or taped outline of bodies at foot of stairs Bloody stabbing or slashing attacks in tightly confined places Cars parked at extreme angles to the curb Panicky flight from murder scene Electrocutions Hangings A killer posing as the person he frames for murder Killer cops or killers posing as cops Where do we put killers with leather gloves posing as cops in a garage
where Here are some recurring names associated with those recurring themes: Adam (name on murder scene letter in Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood) Andrew/Andrews, Andy (Rosemary's Baby) Ann/Annie (three of Jack the Ripper's victims) Barbara (Mark Fuhrman's first wife) Bill/ Billy/Billie (Billy Dee Williams/Billie, Mark Fuhrman’s mother) Bobby/Bobbie (male of female name/an English patrolman) Brad (Mark Fuhrman’s partner) Brown (Bundy murder victim’s maiden name) Catherine/Katherine (Catherine Eddowes—Jack the Ripper victim/ Catherine Genovese/see "The Queens murder") Carol/Caroline (Mark Fuhrman’s third wife) Chris/Kris (male or female name like Fuhrman’s mother Billie) Denise (Nicole Brown’s sister/Vanity’s given name) Elizabeth (Elizabeth Shue, Elizabeth Stride—Jack the Ripper victim) Faye (Faye Resnick one of O.J.’s chief accusers) Fred (Fred Goldman—Jack the Ripper lead detective Fred Aberline) Gus (the renegade negro/white actor in blackface/Fuhrman as a child) Hart (Laura Hart McKinny—male deer—Fuhrman was a deer hunter) Jack (Jack Webb, creator Badge 714 and Adam-12/ Jack the Ripper) James (O.J. Simpson’s middle name) Jane (Mary Jane Kelly, a.k.a. Marie Janette, Jack the Ripper victim) Janet (Mark Fuhrman's second wife. He said he would have killed her and the man she was having an affair with if he’d caught them) Janice (Janice sounds much like Janet and women named Janice are sometimes misidentified as Janet) Joe (The first two letters backward are O.J., a two-letter name. In Goldie and the Boxer he plays the boxer, Joe Gallager ) John (O.J.’s name in Capricorn One. John’s wife played by Denise Nicholas calls him Jack) Larry/Lawrence (Larry Bird, Lawrence Harvey) Laura (Screenwriter Laura Hart McKinny) Mike (Michael Jordan, Michael Cain, Michael Douglas) Mark (Mark Fuhrman) Nicole/Nicoles/Nick (Bundy murder victim—Jack the Ripper victim) Pete (Pete Rose—famous baseball player, infamous gambler) Robert/Roberts (Fuhrman's partner Brad Roberts) Stone (Sharon, Oliver) Sydney/Sidney (Sydney Simpson) Ted (Ted Bundy, Ted Turner) Turner (Ted Turner, Kathleen Turner, Lana Turner, Emma Turner, a.k.a Martha Tabren—Jack the Ripper victim) Some names appear repeatedly because they belong to actors on a short list of stars that everybody wants see in their movie credits. Some names are too common to put on any list unless they appear again and again in the context of something Fuhrman said or did that describes the movie better than it describes the evidence. Others make sense only if you follow them from movie to movie like electro-chemical impulses passing from one brain cell to the next. That, in fact, is how I found every movie in this book starting with the blue knit cap O.J. wore in The Naked Gun: In Fuhrman’s crime scene note number 17 he identifies one glove and misidentifies the cap as a ski mask. The next day the media reported that "police" found a bloody ski mask in O.J.’s bedroom closet. Police found nothing incriminating in O.J.’s bedroom closet but, as you know, Fuhrman was there. Some actors get typecast on the strength of one role that must have left a big impression in somebody’s mind. Seeing Three Days of the Condor and Eyes of Laura Mars back to back you see how Faye Dunaway got to play the photographer Laura Mars. Hearing Brad Dourif in Eyes of Laura Mars, and seeing the Stiletto he carried you can take a good guess as to what landed him the role of Chucky in Child’s Play. Paul Shenar plays a rich and jealous husband named Collin in The Bedroom Window and gets cast as a rich jealous husband framed for murder in a 1996 episode of Diagnosis Murder. Had Sharon Stone not appeared in Scissors where she bought a two bladed murder weapon from Ross Cutlery—where O.J. bought his Stiletto, the Bundy murder scene may have had a somewhat different look. But you can bet that O.J. would still have been cast as the killer, the knit cap would still be there and it would still be called a ski mask in Mark Fuhrman’s carefully written notes on June 13, 1994. To frame O.J. with the evidence Fuhrman presented in his book, the killer had to have acquired it from a public storehouse of information and made small changes to distance himself from the source. But when you see enough of any pattern you don’t need the whole thing to know the source. Take the cigarettes on Bundy and Rockingham, for example, combined with the knit cap, allegations of stalking, the supposed sexual motive, the notion of Goldman being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and color of the female victim and the accused and what do you get? You get a link to the murder of an ordinary woman that belongs in a category of its own for the sheer evil of the active violence done by one monster with the passive consent of at least 38 "good citizens." The Queens’ murder: The public reaction to the Bundy murders didn’t take the shape it has today until the facts and allegations of that case took on the physical and emotional shape of the Queens’ murder. The stalking, stabbing, torture, mutilation, rape and murder of Catherine (Kitty) Genovese took place in Queens New York on March 13, 1964. She was the white victim of a black sociopath named Winston Moseley. She screamed for help for over 30 minutes while at least 38 of her Kew Gardens neighbors looked, listened and did nothing. She died in a confined space at the foot of a neighbor’s stairs. Moseley wore a knit cap like O.J. in The Naked Gun to keep warm. He took it off when he broke of the attack the first time and put on a fedora to hide his face before he resumed. He had scratches on his hand, like O.J. He drove a white car like O.J. The case was called the Queens’ murder (The Naked Gun). He had a wife and two children (like Fuhrman). He worked as an electrician (like Fuhrman). He was sentenced to the electric chair (the Juice) but the sentenced was overturned on appeal. His attorney was Sidney (like Simpson) Sparrow. Knowing that much about the ’64 Queens’ murder how does this 1987 telling of a similar story from a witness point of view grab you: The movie is The Bedroom Window with Steve Guttenberg as
Terry, French actress Isabelle Huppert as Sylvia and Elizabeth McGovern,
who played Mary, The movie was filmed in Baltimore MD and Winston-Salem NC. Winston Moseley didn’t know Kitty Genovese. She did nothing to provoke him except to be a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. He wanted to pay back somebody for something terrible that happened to his mother. He broke off his attack three times when people in the apartments overlooking the well-lit scene opened their windows or turned on their lights. Her screaming meant nothing to him because, as he told police, he knew that no one would do anything. Moseley was way ahead of the social scientists of his time, none of whom had studied the phenomenon he took advantage of in Kew Gardens, Queens until the inaction of the witnesses got their attention. The result was a study by psychologists Latane and Darley published in 1968. It describes four stages of the process: 1) Notice the incident. 2) Interpret as emergency. 3) Assume responsibly. 4) Try to help. The third stage is where everything goes haywire with too many witnesses. Latane and Darley call it Diffusion of Responsibility. You saw the same phenomenon in the Rodney King beating tape were over two dozen cops stood by and watched two fellow officers swing away on the helpless King. The police "code of silence" doesn’t quite explain it. Diffusion of Responsibility does. The greater the number of witnesses the less likely any of them will assume the responsibility of taking action. The vast majority of people are more concerned about any small amount of harm that may befall them for getting involved than any great amount of harm they know will befall someone else if they don’t. You must have noticed that Denise and Collin are key names from the Simpson trial and that O.J. was said to have worn his Naked Gun cap as a disguise and had it snatched off by Ron Goldman when they fought. The Bedroom Window is loaded with names, props and situations associated with the Simpson trial. Brad Greenquest plays the killer Chris Henderson. He stabs Sylvia to death at a ballet performance (dance recital) in a way that implicates Terry and clears him. Reading the credits from top to bottom you see the name Brad and the name Robert directly under it for the actor playing the DA. Henderson drives a Ford pickup truck. The Production designer is Ron Foreman and Terry has a death struggle with a character played by an actor named Mark. What you don’t see of the Queens’ murder in the Bundy murders you see in the movies and in a Winston cigarette ad slogan that reflects the influence of Fuhrman’s initial reports: "It’s what’s up front that counts." |
occurred early in January, 1994 and proved to be highly embarrassing
to the Colbys. Like Phil and Judy Gillman in Amos and Andrew, he made the
emergency call only because the man that he and his wife saw was black and they reasoned,
as the Gillmans did, that a black man in their neighborhood had to be up to no good. But
let’s not be too hard on Carl and Catherine. Any bigot would have made the same
mistake.
convincingly that you’d never guess what the real Odo was
like. In Eyes of Laura Mars he performs the amazing feat of making police think he
is Faye Dunaway simply by dawning clothes that looked like hers. They were shocked to see
how little it took to fool them. One of the most shocking things for trial watchers in the
O.J. case was the extent to which Mark Fuhrman the choirboy on the stand transformed
himself on the McKinny tapes into one of the devil’s own.
that someone tried hard to make with Nicole’s broken
wristwatch, calls about the murders before they happened and a witness who saw a man with
a light-colored SUV in an alley southeast of 875 South Bundy. Fuhrman’s story of he
stick and the glove could only be true if O.J. had been capable of traveling back in time
like Rod Taylor’s character in The Time Machine (1960).
expertise was required to see how distinctive—and
how photogenic they were. Where you don’t see the heals you hear them. More often
than you would expect, they are associated in some way with a stalker like the nurses
shoes in Dressed to Kill (1988), a killer in someone
else’s shoes and New York where the Bundy killer’s Bruno Magli Lorenzos were
purchased. Where you don’t see the shoes or the heels you see the footprints of a man
you think you know transformed into something else, usually the exact opposite. 
available and enjoying incredible success, especially
at home in Boston Garden where the officiating was as notorious as Boston’s
recruiting practices and Larry Bird could do no wrong. You see birds in the Fuhrman
collection in movies as varied as Tarzan and the Leopard Woman and Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). Birds are often shown in the movies as
symbols in dreams and omens of death.
Bundy murders that fits all of the evidence. To appreciate what is
on that list, once again, you have to consider what isn’t there. Striped ties of all
colors, for instance, are far more common in the real word than red ones with white spots.
But in the Fuhrman Collection, you see the red one with white spots so often on killers,
prosecutors, criminal masterminds, and high-powered execs like the President in The
Naked Gun 2 ½, that you come to expect them from time to time.
one of the killers has a mustache, the other one is clean-shaven and the
clean-shaven one wears a red tie with white spots? The Package (1989) with
Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones has all of that. It’s about an assassination plot
involving corrupt local cops, neo-Nazis, an identity switch, a victim with enormous
symbolic importance and an elaborate frame-up aided by corrupt individuals in powerful
positions in the federal government.
the white victim of Bigger Thomas in Native Son, as Denise.
Sylvia witnesses Denise being attacked from behind by a tall man with red hair and ghostly
pale complexion. She sees him from exactly twenty-two yards away when she opens a window
in a fourth floor apartment and he looks up at her before running away. He attacks another
woman in the next block thirty minutes later. He kills her outside of her apartment and
stuff’s her body in a dumpster. The attacks are sexually motivated. The attacker
doesn’t know either woman. He targets them because of what they symbolize to him.