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Chapter 4

What’s in a Name?

You may think that it’s hard to be a truly original writer but it isn’t. It’s impossible. Ideas grow out of other ideas which, in turn, have someone else’s ideas attached to them. Some you share and some are personal.  

Your ears perk up when you hear your name. Your eyes take in more light when you see something or someone desirable. You pay extra attention when you see someone like yourself, someone who suffers what you fear, symbolizes what you hate or has what you wish you had.   

Some of that is likely to show up in your writing whether you chose to make it happen or not the way “monsters from the id” show up in your nightmares. Like Morbius in MGM’s 1956 hit movie Forbidden Planet, with Leslie Nielsen and Warren Stevens we can be no more than spectators to things that may come out of our subconscious minds when our creative thouthts  are flying around on automatic pilot. 

Do you think, for instance, that all the similarities between Morbius and Altaira in Forbidden Planet, and Shakespeare’s Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest appeared by accident? Could the scene in The Naked Gun (’88) with Ted the LAPD lab guy showing Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin the Swiss Army shoe have borrowed nothing from the doctor in Forbidden Planet showing Leslie Nielsen as Commander J.J. Adams a plaster cast of the invisible monster’s foot? If not, what of the scene in The Naked Gun 2 ½ (’91) with the negative plaster mold of a man’s shoe and a dinosaur’s foot where a positive cast from wet plaster poured in a cavity should have been? If you didn’t get the joke originally, you should get it now. Just reverse what you see, like turning a girl into a boy or a comedy into a tragedy and there it is. Or you could simply compare the pictures.

Keep in mind the mirror that Mark Fuhrman wrote about in his book and all the opposites a mirror can stand for in a dream. Think of Lincoln’s dream of seeing two images of himself in a mirror, one clear and one faint. Keep in mind the pennies he saw on his eyelids as a corpse in a dream that confirmed the worst prophetic interpretation of his dream about the mirror. Keep in mind the white supremacy obsession of John Wilkes Booth, his violent hatred of “niggers” and the future he thought he was making for “the white race” by killing Lincoln. Think of what Fuhrman’s image assassination of O.J. Simpson did for Booth’s cause. 

Think of the coins Mark Fuhrman found in Nicole’s garage to support his idea of a killer in a panic—one of which was a Lincoln penny. Lincoln's assassin used a gun on him and a knife on the bodyguard who came to his rescue too late. In The Naked Gun 2 1/2 the assassin standing next to a mirror puts a silencer on the barrel of a gun. Drebin arrives in time to keep him from using it on a woman in a shower and the killer tries to use a knife on him Fuhrman's crime scene notes indicate "possible gunshot wound."

Think of the stories Fuhrman told his West Side bar buddies and his fellow Police Protective League picnickers of O.J.’s escalating violence toward Nicole that must have seemed to them on the 13^th of June 1994 like a fulfilled psychic prediction. Think of the different directions from which the stab wounds entered Ron Goldman’s body and the five stab wounds in his right cheek. Think of the fact that it was a silent kill in a small confined area where Fuhrman says Ron came to Nicole’s rescue. Think of the lost leather gloves and the hair in the lost cap that came out of O.J.’s head.  What Mark Fuhrman wrote in his notes and in his first book about why and how O.J. Simpson committed murder has too much in common with the actions and evidence he is personally tied to and movies including Then Naked Gun 2 1/2containing similar actions and evidence to be coincidental. The connections don’t exist without his history, which includes being a motion picture fan, and the things he said and did in association with the case. The operative word is “association.”

When I started looking for someone who could have framed O.J., it quickly became evident to me that if he existed, he had to have qualities most people associate with an obsessive-compulsive personality. The only person involved in the case that I knew about who fit that description was Mark Fuhrman. He also had the military background associated with silent double kills committed by one well-positioned man with two knives, and the mirrored blunt force injury above and to the rear of both victims’ ears. It struck me that only a man trained with a knife as a stunner as well as a slashing and stabbing weapon would think of using a knife in that way and have the presence of mind to do it. In the movie O.J. was making in which he slit someone’s throat, he was taught an entirely different silent kill technique.  

Two reasons I made these connections are because I can be a tad obsessive-compulsive myself and I learned a thing or two about silent kills in the Army. As an engineer attached to an infantry company in Vietnam for the first half of 1971 I often took the last place in line on various combat missions. That left me vulnerable to the kind of attack suffered by Ron and Nicole. When I saw the computer animation of the killer in action Vietnam was the first thing I thought of. The second thing I thought of was Basic Training where the Army taught me several silent kill methods, including the use of a knife to stun and to kill. I said to myself, he moves like a soldier!  

If the computer model was anywhere near accurate it meant that the killer had to think like a soldier. That meant he had to have practiced like one well in advance. It meant that most of the wounds to Ron and Nicole other than the ones a soldier would deliver as sure kills were put there to camouflage the nature of the assault, the killer’s real expertise and his true state of mind.  

Shortly after that eye-opening discovery, I learned that Mark Fuhrman had been a marine. He was, in fact, in training with the Marines the same year I was in combat with the Army. How could he not have known what I knew about silent kills…and how much sense does it make for the rage killing he attributed to O.J. to have been carried out in virtual silence? 

If Fuhrman was the killer, we had something else in common that answered the question of why the killings took so long. It’s called a combat high. Trust me, there is nothing in normal human experience to compare with it. To give you some idea of what an ecstatic experience it is, consider what Chuck Yeager said when he was asked about his most exciting experience. He didn’t say it was breaking the sound barrier in the X-15. It was aerial combat fought to the death in World War II.  

For some people a combat high can be as addictive as crack cocaine. The trouble is you have to expose yourself to life-treating challenges to achieve it, preferably against another human being…or two…or more. When I realized to my horror that I could have become a combat junkie if my whole unit hadn’t been returned to the States six months into my tour, I saw a lot of things differently. I saw how little separation there was between an ordinary man and a madman given the right genes to begin with and the right circumstances to put them in charge.  I saw what it could do without a strong sense of moral obligation to keep it in check 

Perhaps a similar insight moved Robert Lewis Stevenson to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Perhaps that’s why the writers of Forbidden Planet gave Morbius a murderous alter ego and why we were ready to believe on the strength of the shakiest evidence that O.J. had one, too. Perhaps that’s why it’s such an enduring dramatic theme. It touches a cord deep inside many of us…Some of us more than others.  

Mark Fuhrman talked a lot about his love of danger. On the McKinney tapes he talked about thriving on situations where he might be badly outnumbered by “niggers.” He talked about relying on his own resources to pull him through (like the tall, smart, , handsome blacksmith in Birth of a Nation who tracked Gus the renegade negro to a gin mill and beat up a dozen “black men” who seem to come out of nowhere before one of them shot him in the back). To eliminate any question about the role he later said he was “play acting” he said something else to underscore his love of danger. It was more than mere talk to impress his public. It was talk that could have landed him on death row if the wrong people picked up on the thread of associations it was attached to and gave it a good tug.

In the ’56 version of The Bad Seed, Evelyn Varden (The Night of the Hunter) is Monica Breedlove, Christine (Nancy Kelly) Penmark’s, landlady. She has been psychoanalyzed extensively “from New York to Los Angeles.” Monica’s analyst showed her that her “whole trouble was associating  ideas with words and names. “My marriage to Fred Breedlove, for example. He said I married Fred because of the combination of ideas suggested by his name. The last syllable, love; romantic, eternal. And the first syllable…Umm. That is rather obvious, isn’t it.”  

Monica loves murder mysteries and has a highly successful crime writer as a guest. She says, “he thrives on buckets of blood and sudden death.”  Her tenant and friend, Christine Penmark, has an aversion to violence of any kind. To help her get at the root of her condition, Monica suggests that she listen to the writer’s account of an infamous serial killer—a practical nurse named Anderson who poisoned nine people—and “associate.” Christine asks her what she means. She says, “Just speak up because any idea that comes into your mind will be an associated idea.”  

Anderson is associated with The Bad Seed and Forbidden Planet only by way of Mark Fuhrman’s 1989 poison pen letter to the city attorney about O.J. and Nicole. Richard Anderson plays Chief Quinn, one of 19 “competitively selected, super perfect, physical specimens,” aboard Leslie Nielsen’s spaceship. All of them are, coincidentally, white males. The evil self of Morbius literally steps out of a nightmare and murders Quinn. Quinn had a shipmate named Nichols and a superior officer named Farman played by Jack Kelly. Farman tangles with the monster when the juice from an electric barrier makes it visible and it kills two of his shipmates. 

In the 1956 version of The Bad Seed, Rhoda Penmark takes her vitamins and tells her mother Christine, “I like the juice.” Those are a hell of a lot of name associations, not counting Chris, as in Christopher Reeve, as in Superman. More about “Chris” later. For now, we want to concentrate on the concept of free association as a gateway to the subconscious mind. In Tarzan’s Desert Adventure, Nancy Kelly plays a magician who is framed by a Nazi for murdering a man with a knife. Former LA Laker, Ervin Johnson who shared O.J.’s number 32 as a superstar in Mark Fuhrman’s favorite sport was better known as Magic Johnson. Magic is by that measure synonymous with the number 32.  

In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, a magician attacks a young man and woman with a knife over the possession of an older woman’s glasses. He works for a gloved Nazi named Hartz who leads the investigation of a grand murder plot that he, himself, devised. A plastic heart was found on Bundy. Fuhrman’s introduction to Hollywood producers was through Laura Hart. O.J.’s Bronco on which Fuhrman found the blood drop that lead to the search of O.J.’s home where he found the bloody glove was owned by Hertz Rent-a-Car. The knife attack in The Lady Vanishes takes place in the crowded space of a boxcar filled with luggage and magic props.  

The lady who vanishes in The Lady Vanishes is Mrs. Froy. For a while, Hartz the Nazi convinced the heroine of the movie that she existed only in her subconscious mind as a composite of people who did exist. Free association is one of Sigmoid Freud’s proven techniques for delving into the subconscious mind, a strange landscape populated by fears and longings sometimes hidden behind masks of symbolism like some of the sexually suggestive scenes in The Naked Gun 2 ½. As far as Freud was concerned, nearly everything a human being said or did could be interpreted as sexually symbolic. Then again, as he said with a smile between draws on his trademark cigar, “sometimes a cigar is a cigar.”  

Free association is where the phrase “Freudian slip” comes from. It’s why Mark Fuhrman’s words and deeds associated with the Bundy Murders and the Juice, as he called O.J. in his book, are so revealing. We can link Mark Fuhrman to Mark Hamel’s Ted Bundy in The Deliberate Stranger because Fuhrman called the killing of Ron and Nicole “the Bundy murders” and made references to the crime that were a closer match to scenes from the movie than to the crime scenes. He called the bloody shoeprints on Bundy “footprints” twice. The only footprints to appear in Fuhrman’s Bundy killing scenario are in werewolf movies and in John McClane’s panicky flight from Hans in the 1988 classic blockbuster movie Die Hard (chapter 14).   

The name John is also meaningful in the context of free association when you factor in Mark Fuhrman’s sensitivity to his oedipal initials and his idea of O.J. being the reverse of what he appeared to be. Reversing the letters in O.J. you get the first two letters in John – the unique transformed into the common. You also get a logical transition to O.J. by way of John Walker the character that O.J. played in Capricorn I, and the “walker” on Bundy who left the bloody shoeprints. It’s hard not to make the connection between O.J. the walker on Bundy when you see him as a character in a wheelchair named Wheeler in No Place to Hide.  

Most Americans have three initials. Mark Fuhrman had two – the last two that any American male would want to be associated with. Orenthal James Simpson had three but he was known with admiration and respect all over the world by the first two. Freud would have had a field day with M.F.’s obsession with O.J. 

Let’s not forget Mrs. Breedlove’s problem of “associating ideas with words and names” and the words she extracted from the syllables of her husband Fred’s last name. Fred Aberline investigated the murder of Jack the Ripper victim Catherine Eddows. Kathryn was the name of Marcus Allen’s white girlfriend when Kathleen Bell touched off Mark Fuhrman’s violently racist tirade by comparing the two men to each other. Marcus was black. Kathryn was white. Let’s not forget the “rater obvious” consequences of interracial breeding. Let’s not forget that Mrs. Breedlove was talking to Christine Penmark, the mother of a little girl who beat a little boy bloody on a pier (O.J. in The Naked Gun) with the heel of her shoe over a penmanship medal she thought was rightfully hers. The butt of the knife that battered Nicole’s skull is also called a heel. 

The notes Mark Fuhrman penned on Bundy were the neatest anyone had ever seen – as was the case with the letter and the post card scholars attributed to Jack the Ripper. Whoever the real Jack the Ripper was, he could have won a penmanship medal.  

In the 1985 remake of The Bad Seed the boy murdered for his penmanship medal is named Mark. His killer’s treasure chest contains not only his gold penmanship medal but a lot of paper money and many coins that may or may not belong to her. Blair Brown plays Christine. In the 1980s grown up Patty McCormick, who played Rhoda in 1956, was playing a homicide detective in one TV episode of Murder She Wrote and an innocent murder suspect in another.  

Look at this syllable by syllable the way Mrs. Breedlove would and see what you get when you combine the last syllable of Fuhrman’s name with other words and names that had special significance to him. Right away you get Gold and man as in Goldman. Brown, as in Nicole and Denise stands on its own. But when you combine Pen-man-ship with poison pen, (Fuhrman and Faye Resnick) Fuhrman and Ron Shipp (the spouse abuse and forgery expert who called Fuhrman at O.J.’s house the morning after the murders) you’ve got yourself some pretty good ingredients of a frame up. You’ve got all three victims (Goldman, Nicole and O.J.) and four of the five conspirators (Fuhrman, Resnick, Shipp and Denise) who would have been required to do what the evidence says O.J. and Nicole did. 

You heard Fuhrman’s theory about the coins that he discovered in Nicole’s garage and you saw the picture of the coins in the treasure chest where Blair Brown as Christine Penmark found Mark’s gold metal. You saw the photo with Mark Fuhrman’s hand near the bloody heel print of the killer. You know about his aspiration to be a writer and the book he wrote base on a real multiple murderer. But did you know that Christine Penmark took notes about a real multiple murderer under the pretext that she was writing a book about a murderer?  

Among other things she learned that the type of killer she had a deep, personal interest in could have started as a child and that person could “…present a more convincing picture of virtue than normal folk.” But such children had no sense of morality whatsoever. It was as though “they were born blind and you could never expect them to see.” Christine Penmark was played by the same actress who played the part on stage, Nancy Kelly. Mary Jane Kelly, who liked to be called Marie Janette, was Jack the Ripper’s last victim. Among other things, he cut her heart out.

Perhaps you’ve noticed all the references in this chapter to the real Jack the Ripper and four of the five women he killed whose cases were investigated by Fred Aberline. Those you haven’t heard a lot about up till now you will be hearing a great deal about in the chapters to come. For now, you need only remember that Mary Ann Nichols was the first. 

Jack Kelly as Lt. Farman, played the part of the odd man out in a love triangle between Leslie Nielsen and Ann Frances in Forbidden Planet. Fuhrman argued that O.J. killed Nicole and Ron because he knew he was the odd man out when he saw Nicole with Ron. According to Fuhrman, O.J. could only have imagined them in a lover’s embrace because he had already knocked her cold with a pounding blow before Goldman arrived. The blow Nicole suffered to the back of her head was hard enough to cause brain damage. He did not say what O.J. hit her with. His arthritic fist? A disappearing rock? His shoe, perhaps. 

In The Bad Seed (1956) you might recall Leroy telling Rhoda about a “stick bloodhound” that was going to find the bloody stick she hit the boy with. She calls him a liar and tells him, “What you say about me is all about you.” Remember him trying to frighten her by telling her about the small blue electric chair for little boys and the pink one for little girls? Remember him saying, “When that juice hits you, it parts your hair neat like lighting struck you”? Remember what happened when Leroy noticed that Rhoda was not wearing the shoes she used to wear and revised his scenario of her as the killer to say the blood was on the shoe rather than the stick? Remember the stick that Mark Fuhrman said the Juice snagged under his Bronco in an alley after he committed the murders and the white picket fence he said it came from?  

Between the end of O.J.’s first trial and the start of his second one, Fuhrman left a recorded message on his telephone saying he was going bear hunting. Do you think he could have avoided envisioning O.J. in a bear trap like the one O.J. as Nordberg stepped in after a long series of comical false steps in The Naked Gun? I don’t. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Faye Resnick described the key ring that she said O.J. stole from Nicole as having a little bear on it that no one else ever saw or heard of. The bear, like the blue knit cap and the dark blue coat, is a key to the subconscious mind where visions of O.J. dressed like the murder we were told to imagine are permanently etched on the minds of millions.  

That brings us back to Edward Morbius (called by his last name), Altaira Morbius (called by her first name) and Freud. When you factor in Forbidden Planet’s allusions to Greek mythology—where Shakespeare got some of his best ideas—Morbius’ relationship to Altaira takes on some heavy Freudian overtones. That, in turn, makes Morbius an ideal model for Othello, an older man enamored of a much younger woman driven by a savage, unreasoning beast within himself to kill the woman he loves. Loving father that we know Morbius is, makes him an even better model for the O.J. Simpson we are supposed to see as a split personality with an especially savage other self. 

With the monster coming to kill Commander Adams and Altaira, Adams spells it out for Morbius, who cannot believe he would harm his own daughter. “Now she’s defying you Morbius. And even in you, the loving father, there still exists the mindless primitive more enraged and more inflamed with each new frustration. So now you’re whistling up your monster again to punish her for her disloyalty and disobedience.”  

It’s a tough sell but the sheer weight of evidence causes him to pronounce sentence upon himself. “Guilty,” he cries. “My evil self is at the door and I have no power to stop it!”