Harriet Bird is played by an actress named Barbara, as in Fuhrman’s first wife and Barbara Nicols, the actress who played Elizabeth Powel in "Twenty Two." The Natural has subtle references to "Twenty Two" that include a shot of the dark-haired Bird (the airline hostess in the morgue) on an elevator heading for her doom and Hobbs’ (a blond) nightmare of seeing her on the elevator. "Twenty-two" was about reading the truth in symbols that were not always literally or specifically correct. Bird dies in a long fall from a tall building wearing a black dress and a vale that lies beside her neck in a black and white police photo like blood from an open wound.

It takes 16 years to see Hobbs in a hospital bed but we see a two-cent newspaper announcing it followed by the bad guy offering Hobbs a twenty-thousand-dollar bribe. That’s a twenty and a two in the same context (money and Hobbs in the hospital). Even without the bribe money the two cents appear in the two upper corners of the paper. Erase the print in the middle and you get twenty-two. The bird in "Twenty Two" was, of course, the flight number of the iron bird that exploded on takeoff which in turn was represented by the flight attendant’s wings.

In the previous chapter you saw the white bird with the hammer, the sword and the number 33. You’ve read enough about Mark Fuhrman, the Boston Celtics and the great number 33 Larry Bird, to know why I think there’s more to Fuhrman’s interest in him than meets the eye.

You know by way of the Fuhrman Movie network why I believe Fuhrman lost big money gambling on Mark Thurmond and the Padres against the Tigers and why I think he won big with Bird and the Celtics against the Pistons. Following these movie links some themes, names and numbers are repeated so often or in such a tight circle around Mark Fuhrman that coincidence becomes an unreasonable choice of explanations for them. We’ve gone through Mark Fuhrman’s reasonable explanations for his Nazi paraphernalia collection and we’ve seen how the Nazi eagle relates to his service in the Untied State Marine Corps.

We know that Larry Bird, as a basketball superstar, meant as much to Fuhrman as O.J. did as a murder suspect. But when you see the movie Physical Evidence set in Boston with the killer holding a large ceramic bird and a man named Joe Paris that he frames for the murder wearing a pair of dark leather gloves, you have to back up and start taking notes. O.J.’s name in Goldie and the Boxer (bloody leather gloves) was Joe as was Mary Jane Kelley’s boyfriend who broke out her window before Jack the Ripper killed her. She was the one with the letters FM written on her wall above her mutilated body.

Mark Fuhrman’s sensitivity to his initials came out in the McKinney tapes when she asked him what he would do if someone called him a motherfucker. His not-so-cryptic reply was, "Are there any witnesses?" Turned around, as you would see it on a witness list, it’s FM like the popular radio broadcast mode, just as OJ is orange juice the popular breakfast drink and JO is jack-off. But no one would ever see some MFs as MFs. One is blond, number 20, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, 1976 rookie of the year pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. Of 28 possible votes he won 22. His career, certain to be a great one, was cut short by an injured shoulder.

Physical Evidence has a M.F. who takes the witness stand against Joe. Joe is a suspended cop played by Bert Reynolds. Fuhrman’s partner in the Bundy murder investigation was Brad Roberts. So, here we have an M.F. and a B.R.—with a mustache, in a movie about a man named Joe framed for murder. Physical Evidence has a prosecutor named Nicks and a female defense attorney who advises her client to wear a red tie. In other words, it has major elements of the Simpson trial with composite characters and role reversals where required to substitute for the accused and accusers in the prosecution of O.J. Simpson.

Boston is where Babe Ruth (another B.R.) and Ted (another Ted) Williams played ball. Ruth started in Boston as a pitcher. George Herman Ruth was his real name. Babe, Bambino, and the Sultan of Swat were his nicknames. Hobbs in The Natural is more like Ruth than a character call the Whammer who is clearly patterned after the Sultan of Swat. Williams’ was the Splendid Splinter. Like Ruth, Hobbs begins as a pitcher and becomes a slugger when he goes to New York. But the team he plays for is not the Yankees; it’s the Knights.

To see the whole picture of the O.J. frame-up as the killer would have seen it through the movies, you have to see Hobbs in right field like Reggie Jackson, the one-gloved assassin in the Naked Gun. You have to see him in The Natural wearing his dark blue cap and his dark brown glove. After that, you have to see him racing home and coming to a sudden stop without his cap or glove. You have to see his dark blue socks and recall that Fuhrman identified the dark blue cap at Bundy as being black. You have to remember the black socks that Fuhrman said he and Roberts found on O.J. Simpson’s Oriental rug.

Hobbs leaves something else at home that will stick with anyone who has seen The Natural. It’s the splintered bat he carved from a tree as a child—the one he called Wonder Boy and burned the lightning bolt into the barrel. If you recalled that scene while watching a movie set in Boston you might think of the Splendid Splinter, Ted Williams.

That Splendid Splinter business works well with Fuhrman’s sinister spin on the incident with Nicole, O.J. and the baseball bat. It works with the splintered piece of wood near the curb in front of O.J.’s home. It would work better with Physical Evidence if there was a specific reference to baseball and somebody named Ted or William. Does Physical Evidence have anything like that? Only if you count a picture in Joe’s apartment of the Splendid Splinter himself in association with a search of Joe’s apartment and a light-colored vehicle parked at an extreme angle in front of the suspect’s house. To make things really tough, why don’t we insist on putting a homicide detective like Fuhrman on the premises with a partner like Roberts?

Fuhrman stands 6’ 3" and Roberts about 5’ 9". The detectives in Physical Evidence who search Joe Paris’ messy room fit that much of the real detectives’ description. The tall one even parts his hair near the middle the way Fuhrman did when he searched O.J.’s estate. They awaken Joe from sleep the way the detectives at Rockingham awakened Kato Kaelin. They can see by the mess and the empty beer cans that Joe has probably been drinking too much, so there is no need to give him a sobriety test. There was no need for Fuhrman to give Kato one either but if his mind was on the movies you can see one source of his inspiration.

The tall detective in Physical Evidence makes his racial attitudes known with a gratuitous ethnic slur. He then wonders off by himself and finds one of Joe’s shirts with his own blood on the cuff of a sleeve and the murder weapon coated with the murder victim’s blood in the tight space between his refrigerator and the wall. Joe has a cut on his head that he can’t account for just as O.J. had a cut on his finger that he couldn’t account for. Fuhrman found the bloody glove near the wall-mounted air conditioner in the narrow passageway between the house and the fence.

Fuhrman didn’t find the murder weapon but he said he found the knife box it came from. He also said that he and Brad Roberts saw the black socks on the rug next to O.J.’s bed. He said that they stood out because they didn’t match the rest of the room, which was extremely neat. Joe’s room in Physical Evidence is a dump but the socks of the man on the rug stand out because they don’t match each other. Joe Paris doesn’t have an Oriental rug like O.J. had next to his bed but the colors are a close match.

In the words of assistant District Attorney James Nicks, "There are no other suspects. The murder was committed by one man, the defendant, Joe Paris… We will show that he had a long history of violent association with the deceased and threatened his life many times… We will show that the murder weapon was in Mr. Paris’ possession at the time of his arrest and that it was covered with the blood type of Mr. Farley and also that of the defendant..." Farley’s throat was slit with a wire. He was killed on the 23^rd of September. Later in the movie a man and woman are murdered in a botanical garden with her head near his feet. But before then you get to see how filmmakers go around the legal requirements of paying a superstar for the use of his name while getting the full benefit of it.

Physical Evidence never shows you a picture of Larry Bird. You never see his number 33 on a green and white Boston Celtics jersey or jacket. But you see the guy with the huge, unexplained, ceramic parrot. You see a painting of bluebirds in the house of the man and woman who get killed in a garden. A character puts on a Celtics jacket without a number to attend a game at Boston Garden. You see a green and white basketball jersey hanging in Joe’s room at such an angel that the number could be 33, 38, 83 or 88. You can’t read the name over the number but a basketball fan will see Bird over 33 anyhow because it’s the closest thing they know to what they can make out. My favorite is the lawyer that you know will win the war giving her answer to the lawyer you know is going to loose the war when he wins a battle and tells her that she’s playing for high stakes. She flips him the bird.

Through Bird there is another link to O.J. that an LA-based basketball fan and narcotics cop with personal contact with the former football great would have noted. Bird did "buddy" commercials for Coca-Cola with LA Laker Magic Johnson, # 32 before he started doing similar commercials with Chicago’s Michael Jordan # 23. Coke is short for Coca-Cola. Coke is also short for cocaine. O.J. was suspected of cocaine trafficking when Fuhrman, on duty as a narcotics cop, showed up on his Rockingham estate on a phony domestic dispute call.

Among all the possible two digit combinations in the Fuhrman movie network the numbers 11, 12, 22, 23, 31, 32, and 33 show up in context more than all others by a wide margin. We said that USMC Sgt. Lloyd, the killer mailman in Three Days of the Condor, wore size 11 shoes. The dime and penny someone subtracted from the photo of coins on Nicole’s garage floor gives us 11. In keeping with the idea of looking at things in reverse, what single digit numbers could you add to make 11?

In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) a Scripture-quoting drunk in the Bodega Bay bar says, "Thus sayith the Lord God…Behold I, even I shall bring a sword on you and I will devastate your high places—Ezekial, chapter 6. When a waitress makes a wisecrack about his drinking habits he adds, "Isiah, chapter 5—It’s the end of the world." 6 and 5 are 11. Detroit Piston superstar Isiah Thomas wore number 11 when the Pistons and Celtics squared off in one of the most famous basketball playoff games in history. The Pistons were ahead by one point in the closing seconds of a hard-fought game when Larry Bird stole an inbound pass from Isiah Thomas to Bill Lambier. He passed it off to Dennis Johnson for an easy lay-up and a spectacular win.

Oh yeah…Isaih’s nickname was Zeak. That’s short for Ezekial. We can make logical connections between Fuhrman’s part in the Bundy case and ideas taken from the movies by Fuhrman and the killer only by following strict rules of logic ourselves. The fact that the drunk in The Birds added 5 to 6 is why we can do it. The fact that the Bundy/Rockingham crime scenes are loaded with things straight out of the moves and the movies are loaded with "Fuhrman’s" ideas, observations and metaphors give us all of the logical connections we need.

The socks, for instance, on the Oriental rug that ended up with Nicole’s blood on them are a logical extension of elements from seven movies with a blood link to the real world and a familiar-looking pair of glasses.

Futureworld (1976) sets the stage with Blythe Danner who could be Tracie Savage, Juditha Brown and Nicole in one. She plays a character named Tracy described by her boss as "a glamorous, highly paid television correspondent." In the same scene, she "loses" her glasses in a continuity error and makes a slit throat sign across her throat with her finger. Later, in a dream sequence, you see her as a dance hall girl (prostitute) with a red choker dancing with a killer in a black cowboy hat. Her former boyfriend played by Jane Fonda’s brother Peter gives her the nickname Socks because of the red socks she wore when they first had sex. In the 1972 movie, 1776, Danner plays Martha Jefferson. Martha (Emma Turner) Tabram may have been Jack the Ripper’s first victim. Danner is Molly in Lovin' Molly ('74).

We know how important Juditha Brown’s lost glasses were in the initial reconstruction of the crime. We know that Tracie Savage, a glamorous, highly paid television reporter like Peter’s make believe girlfriend

Danner in Futureworld and his real life sister Jane in The Electric Horseman, was tipped off about Nicole’s blood on O.J.’s socks. And how is this for continuity from one movie to another: Danner in Guilty Conscience is a murder victim lying dead at the foot of her stairs in one scene and dead on her side like Nicole in another. In the final act you see her as the murderer planting false evidence of a murderer’s identity on an Oriental rug.

"Shadow Play" has an Oriental rug near a fireplace and a man tried, sentenced and executed in one day the way Fuhrman described what Marcia Clark did to him. Three Days of the Condor shows a slain woman’s feet on an Oriental rug. Physical Evidence gives you socks that don’t match on a rug the same colors as O.J.’s rug. The Dark Half has a woman in one scene with the knife that Fuhrman said Nicole picked up to protect herself from O.J. She wears socks in another scene as she sits on an Oriental rug. If any gaps are left between the rug in the movies and the one on Rockingham, The Birds fills them in.

The Bundy murder case is a coherent arrangement of mosaics within mosaics made up of hundreds if not thousands of tiles from the movies. The Birds is one of the smaller mosaics and the scene with a dead man’s feet on the Oriental rug is a coherent arrangement of tiles within it. The man’s feet are bare the way Nicole’s were and the way O.J.’s would have been if he had taken off his socks where they were photographed. They are laid out the way the socks were and they have blood on them. Now, what do you think of Fuhrman’s "discovery" of the socks on O.J.’s rug?

Can coincidence or clever editing on my part explain all of that? No. Who could begin to calculate the odds of coinciding interrelationships that numerous and that complex? And I ain’t that clever. Nobody is. There is, however, an explanation that requires no supernatural intervention or superhuman intellectual prowess. In Fuhrman you have a man with the moral sensibility of a switchblade. You have a man who watched a lot of movies with his mind set toward writing a successful screenplay, and a rogue cop who prided himself on his ability to get away with planting evidence. You have a celebrity wannabe with an artist’s eye for composition who would have had to improvise to plant the socks. How is this for a down-to-earth scenario:

While searching O.J.’s bedroom for either the German Stiletto he purchased five weeks earlier or a Swiss Army knife that will match the wounds in the bodies of Ron and Nicole, Fuhrman and Roberts come up empty. There is nothing out of the ordinary inside the house—nothing at all. Without the knife or something amiss in the house all of the evidence outside will look suspicious. Fuhrman can’t tell how long he and Roberts are going to be alone so he has to act swiftly. The place has a familiar look and feel about it. He’s never been here before so he chalks up the sensation to deja vu and never realizes why the rug keeps catching his eye or where he gets the idea to check the laundry hamper and plant the socks. It just comes to him. When he plants them they look "right." He thinks it’s because of his superior eye for composition.

The spot of blood that Fuhrman found near the handle of O.J.’s Bronco door may or may not be linked in his mind to the bloody hand reaching for the handle of a shudder in The Birds. But sometimes the parallels between "our" ideas and someone else’s are so close that there can be only one reasonable answer. In my novels you can see the influence of Richard Wright, John Hersey, James Clavell, Rod Serling and Reginald Rose—if you know their work. And in their work you can bet there were influence you can’t see because you don’t know the source. Did you know that Romeo and Juliet is based on the Greek myth Pyramus and Thisbe? Many of Shakespeare’s characters could double for the fickle gods, flawed heroes and conniving villains of other Greek myths. The Greek myths, in turn, borrow heavily from tails told in the ancient cultures they absorbed.

The point is, what I’m doing with Fuhrman and the movies is not new. Storytelling is a human imperative. We even tell ourselves stories when we sleep. Those stories are full of symbols because symbolism is the language we were born with. It’s the language of dreams, the language of primitive thought before and after the words and symbols of acculturation become attached to them. Dreams are perfectly logical in that there are no physical or cultural laws that constrain them. Once you know what the symbols stand for in the dreamer’s universe that is governed by physical and cultural constraints, they always make sense.

The dream sequence in Futureworld is easy to interpret for anyone who has seen Westworld and early western movies. In old westerns the bad guys wore black hats. The re-creation of old movie clichés like that mean that the guest at the exotic Westworld resort can tell the bad guy just by the color of his hat. Because you know the man wearing the black hat in Westworld is a killer when you see him dancing with Terry in Futureworld you know it means that she is dancing with death.

To get complex ideas across quickly you can’t beat stereotypes and clichés. As a practical matter you cannot avoid them. My first novel has a character frightened by three loud thumps, a handsome hero coming to the rescue of a beautiful woman and a well-known black man who kills people with a knife. The first two items are deliberate movie clichés. The third is a composite character I modeled after my father and various instructors I had in the Army. The action was driven by cycles of history in which the image of black people gets manipulated for political and financial gain the way the image of Vietnam vets was manipulated during the Vietnam War.

I started writing The Random Factor because I was seeing those patterns again in popular culture with black men as the target. When I saw what happened to Denzel Washington’s character in Ricochet I knew I wasn’t alone in my vision of the media as a weapon. The only thing stopping someone from using it on a black politician like Collin Powell or a movie star like Washington were the brains, the desire and the will to do it.

The more I looked at the similarities between Ricochet and The Random Factor the more I appreciated how simple logic demanded them. Many of the specific things I wrote had to be that way to conform to the laws of Einstein physics once the general parameters were set. Likewise the evidence in the Bundy case that spelled frame-up. The evidence that said, "O.J. did it," followed the logic of dreams, with a heavy accent on stereotypes, clichés and familiar elements from a lot of popular moves.

Alfred Joseph Hitchcock was born on August 13, 1899 in London England. That means the Whitechapel murders were only 11 years older than he was and the killer still at large, for all he knew, when he made The Lodger in 1926. That Jack the Ripper story told by a doctor/detective named Forbes Winslow who was reported in the New York Herald Tribune as having a pair of Jack the Ripper’s bloody boots with rubber soles. You can see one source of Hitchcock’s focus on suspense right there and one of his secrets to becoming its master. He simply used the bits and pieces from real life with the right thoughts and feelings already attached. A little of Jack the Ripper is in many of Hitchcock’s films.

Hitchcock was five years old when his father had him put in jail to teach him a lesson. He never forgot it. A year or so earlier an innocent man had spent 11 years in prison for the April 23^rd 1891 murder of a prostitute named Carrie Brown attributed to Jack the Ripper when he visited the United States. The governor of New Jersey gave Ameer Ben Ali his freedom when he learned that the blood evidence used to convict him was "accidentally" put in his room by police and reporters. Lessons like these also occupied large sections of Hitchcock’s work.

When you think about it, popular movies, like big news stories, history lessons, folktales, legends and myths, are the closest things a culture has to collective dreams. They are the dreams we all see and interpret through the prism of our own personalities and experiences.

The first time I saw The Birds I didn’t notice that the actors were all white and the birds weren’t. I think I would have if I had been a white bigot afraid of what would happen if America became a true ethnic melting pot. If you were the kind of bigot Mark Fuhrman said he was, how would you view the scenes in The Birds where crows (Heckle and Jekyll—Jekyll and Hyde) attack Bodega Bay schoolchildren?

How would you have seen The Birds if you were a white bigot who killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson to frame O.J. Simpson and write a best selling book? Would the killing involve victims with neck wounds? Would there be a place for blood on a leather glove? Do you think you might do something with the white picket fence, the woman’s body at the foot of the stairs or the four Ripper connections to two of its female characters—Annie and Cathy (Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catharine Eddowes and "Marie Jannette" Kelley)?

Suzanne Pleshette plays Annie. Pleshette, a French name, rhymes Jannette just as Fuhrman rhymes with Berlin which takes us back the Jennifer 8 and the two men named John. John McCarthy was Kelley’s landlord. Her body was found by John Bowyer, the man that he sent to collect the rent. The initials FM scratched on Kelley’s wall is believed by some scholars to stand for Florence Maybrick, wife of suspect James Maybrick. The "J" in O.J. stands for James.

Early in The Birds, Rod Taylor as Mitch draws a parallel between a bird in a San Francisco pet store and a woman named Melonie played by Tippi Hedren. That’s the first clue we have that Hitchcock intended his audience to anthropomorphize the birds in his movie. It’s a very subtle way of making the action in the movie personal. Depending on who you are the birds will have different meanings. Mitch wears boots with rubber souls. He moves Annie’s body at the foot of the stairs. Bleeding from his left hand, he sees himself in a mirror

We’ve looked at some of those meanings from the point of view of Mark Fuhrman and the killer with a few pointed reminders in The Birds of Jack the Ripper. Not the least of them is a dark brown leather glove precisely where it has to be to make the connection to the leather purse in Jack the Ripper and "Twenty Two." They all add up to the same guy, Mark Fuhrman.

Consider the fleeing Elizabeth (Ripper victim Elizabeth Stride) in "Twenty Two" and remember the narrow pathway on which she was running when she fell and dropped her leather purse. Remember the

leather purse in Jack the Ripper arranged at the feet of Annie Chapman in the same relative position as the glove in the photo of Fuhrman pointing to it on Bundy. A purse has something else in common with a glove that I didn’t think of until I saw the bar scene in The Birds with an actor named Lonnie Chapman giving change to a character called Mrs. Bundy. Naturally Mrs. Bundy had to put her hand inside of her purse to give Chapman the dollar bill. Chapman put the change into Bundy’s leather-gloved hand.

Annie Chapman was destitute and the elaborately arranged contents of her purse did not include money because she spent the little change she had on booze in a bar earlier that day. Like all of the Ripper’s victims and Mark Fuhrman’s mother Billie, Annie Chapman was an alcoholic. Her pockets had been turned inside out.

Look again at Fuhrman’s story of O.J.-the-killer in his panicky flight from the murder scene. Look again at Fuhrman’s story of the Bundy killer with one lost glove turning his pockets inside out and spilling 22 cents in change on Nicole’s garage floor. Consider Fuhrman’s presence on the scene when the two dimes and two pennies turned into one dime and one penny. A belated fear that someone would see the connections between "Twenty Two", The Birds and the Bundy killer? Was he plying the kinds of mind games with the evidence that the Whitechapel killer played in the neatly written letters he sighed "Jack the Ripper"?

Orenthal is a hard name to match up with anyone but O.J. in any movie. The Birds comes damn close with Mrs. Bundy. She’s an ornithologist—and O.J. is dyslexic? If you saw The Birds, and read Chapter 6: Give the Man a Hand, you may be way ahead of me. Once again we have a movie version of Fuhrman’s story about Nicole on the telephone when O.J., the Bundy killer, shows up dressed oddly in a cap and leather gloves. Instead of Helen seeing Candyman, The Birds gives us Melanie on the pone when Mrs. Bundy walks into the Bodega Bay bar and grill wearing a cap and dark leather gloves. The ornithologist is carrying a dark handbag. Cigarettes are important because Denise claimed that O.J. used physical violence against Nicole when he caught her smoking. Cigarettes are also used to inhale cocaine—as any narcotics cop who served in Vietnam after 1971 would know.

Mrs. Bundy gets change to buy cigarettes from the vending machine (In 1963 twenty class-A cigarettes would have cost her about 20 cents). While purchasing the cigarettes, she sees herself in a mirror and returns to the bar without one of her gloves as waitress orders 2 Bloody Marys. The bar area outside of Kato’s room is where Fuhrman was questioning Kato when he found out about the noise that led to his discovery of the bloody right-hand glove that matched the left-hand glove still on Bundy.

The Birds gives new meaning to the incident with Fuhrman and the letters KKK written across Martin (a bird) Luther King’s birthday—ten days later than Fuhrman’s. At a KKK cross burning ceremony following the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education desegregation decision, a Klan leader said this, "Out here in the wildwood the beasts don’t integrate. For (unintelligible) of the fishes that the river don’t integrate. The fowl of the air—they feel safe segregated. They got more sense than a bunch of Supreme Court judges up there…"

A man who expresses "genocidal" attitudes towards birds will soon get firebombed at a gas station (Fuhrman’s alibi was that he was at a gas station) and circumstantial evidence will cause Melanie to get blamed for all of the deaths. In the meantime, when Melanie speaks of attacks by gulls, swifts, ravens and crows, Mrs. Bundy tells her she is mistaken. She explains that a bird’s brainpan is too small to make the kinds of organized assaults Melanie spoke of. That’s not the half of it. "I have never known birds of different species to flock together," she says. "If that happened we wouldn’t have a chance. We couldn’t hope to fight them." That was when the drunk piped up with his lessons from the bible on what the mixing of the birds meant. "It’s the end of the world."