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Chapter 31

Each new season of Remington Steele begins with a different opening sequence. The ’82-’83 season features Stephanie Zembalist as Laura Holt in a series of snapshots with her voiceover explaining how she came to start her detective agency and why she had to invent Remington Steele to make it successful. The ’83-’84 season features Stephanie Zembalist and Pierce Brosnan in evening attire, eating popcorn and watching a private theater screening of previous episodes of the show. The ’84-’85 season’s opening sequence is a slight modification of the previous season’s with the popcorn dropped and a few action shots addend.

The ’85-’86 season of Remington Steele is the one that seems to have left the biggest impression on Mark Fuhrman beginning with the opening sequence. If you can imagine a bright red lipstick print superimposed on part of a fingerprint as blood you may find it difficult not to see the connection to Fuhrman. The fact that Ron Goldman had lipstick on his cheek and a knife wound though it makes the blood connection to the lipstick even stronger. In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman said that he and Brad Roberts found a partial print in blood on the murder scene. He said, "Very seldom do you find a smoking gun, or even a bloody finger print."

The opening sequence of the fourth season (’85-’86) begins with a fingerprint sliding into a black background. A woman’s lip prints in red lipstick slide over the fingerprint and stop at the tip. A pistol slides into the picture over the lower part of the print (an automatic like Fuhrman’s) and fires a round. You see a flash of fire from the barrel followed by a puff of smoke. The smoke become a cloud blanketing everything on the screen briefly, then dispersing to become a thin, wavy line leaking upward from the barrel. The name Remington Steele appears between the gun and the lipstick. The camera zooms in for a close-up of the loops and swirls in the fingerprint, which is magically transformed into a negative image of Laura Holt.

The negative image becomes a positive image then turns into a positive image of Remington Steele. From there it goes into a series of scenes from past shows including a scene where Steele runs into Laura coming out of hiding between a rack of bodies hanging in plastic bags and part of a body in an elevator. Before all of the scenes have come and gone we see a picture of Doris Roberts as Mildred and a shot of Remington Steele tightening his leather gloves and sliding down a cable into a safe spot on a museum floor ringed with motion detectors. Steel catches Laura in his arms. She puts her arms over his shoulders. She is also wearing leather gloves. On her head is a cap.

That’s just for openers….

The "Steele in the Spotlight" segment of Remington Steele (’86) picks up on the VCR connection with Rebecca Holden as an ambitions TV anchor woman named Windsor Thomas playing a videotape for Steele, Laura and Mildred. The tape features Rose Mari as a former TV star called Billie Young who has disappeared. Windsor wants to find her for a reunion show of cast members from popular shows of the ’50s. The news show she hosts normally features stories like nude sky diving. Windsor desperately wants to move up to anchoring legitimate news – the way Tracie Savage did with the inside information she reported on the Bundy murders. Rebecca Holden’s birthday is June 12.

Rebecca Holden is the woman with two young children in Lover Boy (’89) who orders pizza with extra anchovies not knowing that it’s the code for the pizza delivery boy to service her sexually. She’s Stella the redheaded seductress in red clothes in the third episode of Police Squad! (’82) who gives Frank Drebin, posing as a locksmith, an envelope to send 49 copies of the key to her apartment to the Chicago Bears. She asks him to deliver one in person. When she hears the key in the lock she gets a gun and empties it into the door. You will note her smoking gun.

Shortly before O.J.’s criminal trial a murder case that Fuhrman investigated in May of 1994 had to be dismissed because he took home a door and "accidentally" destroyed it in an "unsuccessful" effort to find a "missing" bullet. This should give you another slant on Fuhrman’s statement about a smoking gun as well as a reason that Fuhrman might have taken the trouble to learn enough about Rebecca Holden to know her birthday. This alone tells you that there is more than one death involved in "Steele in the Spotlight" and more than a few links to the Bundy murders…as if the name Billie, the woman who gave birth to Mark Fuhrman, didn’t do that already. Also keep in mind the importance of early reports by the press in general and by Tracie Savage in particular to the railroading of O.J. Simpson.

"Steele in the Spotlight" begins with a blond woman lying unconscious on a carpeted floor while a black and white TV in the background shows Rose Marie telling a joke about two drunks and a railroad track. The woman is wearing only a slip. Her feet are bare. Someone wearing distinctive shoes moves the body to the tiled bathroom floor, gets a razor blade from a safety razor in the medicine cabinet and does something with it that we don’t see. We can safely assume that a great deal of blood is involved. And we do see his distinctive shoes as he walks slowly away with his toes pointed straight ahead.

Steele’s addiction to being in the spotlight gets the better of him when he tells Windsor that his agency will find Billie young within "a matter of hours." He has no idea how, but he trusts that Laura does and turns that question over to her as though it were a minor detail that he is giving her the opportunity to explain to Windsor’s LA Spotlight news team. All records of Billie Young end in 1956 with no name change and no death certificate. This leaves Steele in the position of having to explain his failure to Windsor without losing face. He solves his problem by telling Windsor that he is going to turn the case over to Laura as part of her ongoing training – under his supervision, of course.

With the report that Billie Young seems to have covered her tracks deliberately, Windsor sees more potential in the story of her news team following the great Remington Steele in action than in her original idea for the reunion show. She can see it all, "Tonight on Spotlight: Beauty, talent, she had it all. What happened to Billie Young?" When Steel turns over the investigation to Laura, Windsor sees another great angle for her story. She decides to play up the fact that a woman is in charge. That’s not exactly what Steele told her. But it makes a better story.

The fawning attention Windsor had given to Steele suddenly shifts to Laura who is reluctant to stand in front of the television camera until Dennis the cameraman tells her how great she looks on TV. In no time flat Laura is transformed into a publicity junkie, exhibiting her brilliance for the world to see – the world of LA Spotlight, at least. She tells Windsor on camera that she will "question anyone who knew Billie Young; old friends, contacts, acquaintances, people she worked with. If Billie Young is out there the Remington Steele Detective Agency will find her."

A man in his early sixties reading a newspaper with the Windsor Thomas interview of Laura Holt playing in the background shows signs of being upset with what he hears. He puts down the paper, gets a pistol out of a box, tucks it into his belt, and storms out of the picture.

If you’re wondering why I underlined the name Dennis, it’s because it alerted me to look for a fatal connection to Nicole’s sister Denise. The link begins to form when Laura and Steele get a call from a woman named Patsy who stared with Billie in her television show. Patsy sings them the theme song from their show. It is called Sisters. Patsy sings, "Sisters, sisters. There have never been such devoted sisters. And lord help the sister that comes between me and my man? Substitute "money" for "man" with the Dennis/Denise shoes from Twin Peaks and you’ve got the connection to Denise Brown that the killer needed to set up O.J. Simpson for murder.

Naturally, the "Steele in the Spotlight" connection would be much stronger with a solid link to Fuhrman and Dennis the photographer on the scene of a murder. You should know by now that I wouldn’t have brought it up if those links didn’t exist.

Patsy can’t tell Laura and Steele where they can find Billie, but she knows that her disappearance is tied to the 1956 suicide of her beautiful blond roommate Sally Benson who really was like a sister to Billie. She tells them that her agent Lou Mackler hired a detective to find her but he came up empty. She also gives them the name and address of someone who can tell them where to find her, her old makeup man Tom Hogan. Denise said that she took the picture in Nicole safe deposit box that looks like she had been beaten up – the effect was created by makeup. Denise’s cousin Rolf Bower, the husband of Maria Baur told investigators that Nicole’s father Lou Brown took the picture.

On the way to Hogan’s place, Steele takes no pleasure in telling Laura, "Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson, William Holden, Paramount 1950. That’s what this case reminds me of, trapped with thirty-year-old ghosts. It’s…Well, it’s just creepy."

When Laura and Steele get to Hogan’s apartment building they pay no attention to the man in the brown fedora rushing past them. He’s Jake Slater, the detective Lou Mackler hired in 1956 to find Billie. He’s the man who got the pistol when he heard Laura tell Windsor on TV what the Remington Steele Detective Agency was going to do to find Billie.

Hogan’s apartment number is 214, the same as the first numbers of Mark Fuhrman’s LAPD detective badge. Steele notices that the brass lock has been tampered with (blood on brass lock in Fuhrman's notes). He and Laura go inside. Tom Hogan has been killed. Envelopes are scattered on and around his body. Laura finds an address book and hides if from Steele. The detectives are on the scene for less than a minute when Windsor bursts through the door with her cameraman Dennis close behind, his camera lights lit up, the lens trained on the body. Steele blurts out, "Who invited them?" Laura looks a bit sheepish but says nothing.

Back at Steele’s flat, he stands by with growing anger and frustration while Laura Holt is mesmerized with seeing herself on TV being interviewed on LA Spotlight by Windsor. She doesn’t even pick up on her gaff that tells you and me what has happened to her as she sees and hears herself on television. She tells Windsor, "Patsy Vance, one of Billie Young’s former colleagues, told me…Ah, told Mr. Steele and me, actually, that we should look up Tom Hogan her former make-up man. Well, not wanting to waist any time, we came right over here only to find that someone had beaten us to him, with fatal results."

Steele has had enough. Over Laura’s protest, he shuts off the tube. He can think of only one reasonable explanation for the LA Spotlight news team’s prompt appearance on the murder scene. He accused Laura of calling Windsor from Patsy’s house and telling her where they were going. Laura doesn’t deny it. She says, "I thought Tom Hogan would make a colorful interview," not realizing that she is handling the case with her image on television ahead of everything else.

This sort of thing was one of my brother’s biggest frustrations when he was a homicide detective in Detroit. Every high-profile case he worked on was accompanied by orders from on high that put the news ahead of the investigation to make someone look like a star.

From everything I’ve read about high profile cases in LA prior to the Bundy murders that’s how things were routinely done there, too. The distorted behavior of just about everyone involved in the investigation, particularly in regard to who found what evidence against O.J. and anonymous news leaks about evidence against O.J. that proved to be false, was predictable. The people who knew they were going to be on television posed for the camera. The reporters who got "hot" tips from unidentified sources "close to the investigation" promptly reported what they were told. The most notable posers for the camera were Marcia Clark and Mark Fuhrman.

The most notable reporter of premature news was Tracie Savage. She was first to report that police found a bloody ski mask in O.J.’s closet and blood drops going into his driveway. She was the only reporter to broadcast the news that blood on O.J.’s socks tested positive for O.J. and Nicole. This report was not only fast, it was prescient, coming before the DNA testing for the blood on the socks was conducted. The notion that the Bundy killer saw a connection between Windsor Thomas and Tracie Savage is, therefore, more likely than not. The only competing explanation is coincidence.

It’s the coincidence of Laura’s relationship with Windsor and the death of Tom Holden that bothers Steele. To Laura’s statement about thinking that Holden would make a colorful interview he says, "Instead you and Windsor make a circus out of Hogan’s murder."

Laura counters, "…It’s a legitimate news story." Instead of thinking about what Steele said she goes straight for what she thinks his motive is for saying it. "You really don’t like me getting the attention, do you?"

Steele is steaming. "I don’t like the fact that in the morning you go on television broadcasting our case and in the evening one our leads turns up dead."

That does it for Laura who resents the idea that she might have had something to do with the murder. Steele tries to tell her that he doesn’t think that’s necessary true but…. Laura isn’t having any of it. "For four years," she says indignantly, "you’ve been getting fabulous press because of me and now I get one break and you feel threatened." End of conversation. Laura closes Steele down and walks out of his apartment in a huff.

Things aren’t as rosy for Windsor as they may seem. Charles Woolf (Elvira’s agent in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark/ the voice of Uncle Henry in OZ) is her boss Lou Mackler. He rose from agent to the head of the Baxter Broadcasting Group by marrying into the Baxter family. He wants Windsor to go back to doing the kinds of stories she used to do. She pleads with him to let her follow through on the story she’s doing. "Lou," she says, "When you hired me for Spotlight you knew my heart was in news. Well, this is the closest thing to a news story I’ve seen in two years. There’s even a dead body…. Come on, Lou, one chance."

Mackler gives her the chance she asked for. On her way out of his office, Laura and Steele walk in. Windsor tells Laura how wonderful her outfit is going to look on TV.

Mackler tells Laura and Steele about Jake Slater. He thinks that Slater is nothing more than and old memory with a name that reminds him of a Raymond Chandler novel. He doesn’t know that Slater has been blackmailing him for thirty years with the diary of Sally Benson, Billie’s old roommate whose murder was made to look like suicide. The diary points to murder, the motive of the murder (Lou impregnated her and she threatened to tell about it) and to Lou as the murderer. Lou thinks that the Billie is the blackmailer. He assumed that because Billie and Sally were as close as sisters Sally told her about him. She didn’t. Billie had the diary but didn’t open it until Slater found her the year she vanished.

Billie fell in love with Slater. He convinced her that the diary wouldn’t be enough to put Mackler in prison and they should hurt him by blackmailing him. He set Billie up in a remote community named Twin Pines where she lived in a cabin by a lake. Then he abandoned her. All of the blackmail money went to Slater. When Steel and Laura drop in on him he is burning letters and pictures in his fireplace. When they leave, Steele accidentally knocks over his brown fedora and puts it back with his apologies. He will be seeing it again.

The breakthrough in the search for Billie Young comes when Mildred recognizes a name in Tom Hogan’s address book as a character that Billie Young played on her show. The name is Chelsea Nash (Jennifer Jason Leigh’s name in The Hitcher). Mildred brings the book to Steel not knowing that Laura hid it from him. Steele holds up the book to Mildred, and scolds her. "You realize having this is a criminal offense. Mildred doesn’t understand his concern In the true spirit of Mark Fuhrman’s LAPD she say, "Come on chief, we do it all the time." That’s true, but as Steele says, "That’s not the point. I’m afraid LA Spotlight has blinded Ms. Holt’s judgment. I’m the last one she’ll believe about that."

Fred the limo driver takes Steele and Mildred to the Chelsea Nash cabin in Twin Pines (not to be confused with Twin Peaks) where they see a woman in her sixties getting out of a small boat with a nice catch of fish (fish blood). If you remember Rose Marie as Sally in The Dick Van Dyke Show (’61 – ’66) and from her regular appearances on Hollywood Squares in the ’80s you will know that the woman with the fish is Billie Young. You can’t prepare fish without a sharp knife.

Whatever your reaction is to Billie, you know that the Bundy killer’s reaction was much stronger when you see her on the dock wearing glasses, a black knit cap, leather gloves, a shirt like Ron Goldman’s and rubber boots. A Freudian might suspect that these similarities represent the old Displaced Aggression Syndrome with Ron Goldman standing in for someone who reminded the killer of Billie Young. We saw the same sort of thing in Chapter 1 with the body of Ralph Twice in the first episode of Police Squad!. The fact that Ralph Fuhrman and Billie Fuhrman were Mark Fuhrman’s parents is only half of the issue. The fact that Mark Fuhrman is the only person associated with the Bundy case who has that close a tie to a Ralph and a Billie is the other half.

Displaced Aggression is only one of many issues wrapped up in the Bundy killer’s choice of victims, the way they were killed, the positions of their bodies and the clues to the killer’s identity he left behind. The clues that point to O.J. appear to be conscious choices. The clues that point to Fuhrman appear to be mostly unconscious. These are the ones we’re tracking through films and TV shows in the Fuhrman collection.

For instance, you may think that implied fish blood represents a weak link to Ron Goldman and Mark Fuhrman until you read Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood. Optometrist (doc/glasses) Ron Fischman is mentioned once. The subject? A blood drop that Fischman found at Bundy and Fuhrman went to Bundy with Ron Phillips to check out.

On the next page of Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman talks about finding the bubble gum with the impression of adult molars. In the 1980s Rose Marie appeared in television commercials for a denture cleaner.

One of the most interesting things about Murder in Brentwood has to do with the names Fuhrman does not mention. Faye Resnick is one. Nicole’s sister Denise Brown is another. Someone had to supply the killer with the brown leather glove and the knit cap he left on the murder scene. The best candidates happen to be Faye Resnick and Denise Brown. When the woman in the knit cap tells Mildred and Steele that Chelsea Nash moved away two years ago, they come dangerously close to buying her story until Steele notices the name on her fishing boat. The name is "Sisters."

Steele and Mildred tell Billie that they know her secret and promise not to reveal it. When they tell her about her murdered friend Tom Hogan she asks to be alone. Shortly after she walks away into the woods. Steel sees the white LA Spotlight truck roaring up the road to the cabin and tells Mildred to have Fred bring the limo around to pick up Billie. Before she can do that someone takes a shot at Billie. The would-be assassin makes a hasty retreat in his car but leaves behind his hat – Jake Slater’s brown Fedora. The limo pulls up. Fred the chauffeur is wearing black leather gloves. Steele gets into the limo with the hat and tells Billie Jake Slater shot at her.

Back at the office Fred tells Laura about Billie. Laura angrily confronts Steele about going behind her back and spiriting Billie away. She wants to know where Billie is. Steele refuses to tell her because of the irresponsible way she has behaved on the case. Laura tells him, "I’ve been doing a job." Steele replies, "Yes, a splendid job of self-promotion while our case blows up around us…. There is a killer on the loose and all you can think of is ‘news at eleven.'"

Mark Fuhrman was the killer on the loose in the Bundy case, doing a splendid job of self-promotion and taking Gil Garcetti the DA and Marcia Clark, Garcetti’s real lead prosecutor, along with him. Like Laura, Marcia fell in love with seeing herself on camera and using all the power at her command for photo ops and showing the world how smart she was. She got into the case convinced that O.J. was a wife beater and killer. Instead of looking for the killer she did everything she could to convince "her audience" that her first impression was right and she was doing the job of bringing him to justice. All of this was predictable given Marcia’s perfect record, her step down a few weeks before the murders to take the job under William Hodgman as his assistant DA and her special qualifications in the area of spouse abuse and DNA evidence….

Jake Slater’s hat jolts Laura back to reality. She now knows that Slater lied to her and Steele about not finding Billie Young in 1956.

Steele says, "Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, RKO 1947. Mitchum plays a private detective hired by Douglas to find Jane Greer. He does, only he falls in love with her. Then he doesn’t tell Douglas that he found her."

Laura looks confused. "I don’t get it," she says.

Steele says, "Neither do I, exactly, but I’ve got a strong feeling this revolves around Jake Slater and Billie Young.

Steele and Laura are standing in front of the elevator. The door opens and there stands Windsor, microphone at the ready, her cameraman Dennis behind her with his camera rolling, their attention focused on Steele. Steele brushes her off. Windsor turns to Laura who tells her, "That isn’t going to work anymore." Laura pushes past her as she steps out of the elevator and Laura and Steele get on. Windsor reminds her, "We had a deal." Laura says, "Deal's off." That’s not good enough for Windsor. "Since when?" she asks. Laura tells her, "Since I realized all this publicity was making me just like you.

All of the publicity that Marcia Clark got on the Bundy case made her just like Tracie Savage who was using the case to promote her own career. It worked for Savage. Her news exclusives on the investigation of O.J. Simpson put her in the spotlight and led to her job of covering the Heidi Fleiss trial as well as the O.J. murder trial….

Billie is staying at Mildred’s place. Mildred goes to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Billie slips away while Mildred is talking to her. When Laura and Steele discover she is gone they figure correctly that she has gone to confront Jake Slater. They get to Slater’s house just in time to keep him from shooting Billie. Slater runs. Steele gives chase. He hops a cyclone fence. Steele goes over the fence after him.

Slater runs to a playground and dies next to a Jungle Jim like the one in O.J.’s playground for his kids on Rockingham. Laura gets there less than a minute later. A few seconds after that Windsor and Dennis show up with Windsor immediately giving instructions for Dennis to film the body with Laura and Steele standing next to it. Laura picks up a stick as big as a baseball bat and smashes the camera, sending glass from the lights flying everywhere. If this doesn’t remind you of the baseball bat incident on Rockingham with Mercedes Benz and the Juice, as Fuhrman called O.J. in Murder in Brentwood, the next sequence will.

As Laura and Windsor argue about the smashed camera, a shot rings out in the direction of Slater’s house. A woman screams. Laura and Steel rush to Billie’s aid. She’s shaken but unhurt. A car speeds away. It’s a black Mercedes Benz. Steele gives chase in his white, 1936 Auburn. The Mercedes alludes him by making a sharp U-turn that the Auburn’s long turning radius won’t allow Steel to make. However, Windsor, driving her LA Spotlight truck, foils the escape attempt by forcing the Mercedes though a sign and into a wall. In the process a high voltage wire gets broken sending sparks from "the juice" flying dangerously around the car.

The car has a broken windshield. The driver is unconscious and bleeding.

Steele cautiously moves the high-voltage wire and opens the door. He is astonished to see Lou Mackler, Billie’s former agent and Windsor’s current boss. Windsor is not at all surprised. She recognized the car. She also recognized when she saw the car that Mackler had been using her the way she used Laura, to satisfy a hidden agenda. It was Mackler’s idea to do the reunion show. His real aim was to find the woman he thought was blackmailing him for thirty years so he could kill her.

When things have quieted down, Billie tells Laura, Steele, Mildred and Windsor the whole story. Mildred asks, "Why didn’t you tell us this before?" When you hear the first part of Billie’s answer you might think of Faye Resnick, who called herself Nicole’s "best friend." The rest of her answer is the exact opposite of what happened to Faye after set up the deadly meeting with Nicole and Ron Goldman on the 12^th of June and wrote a book about the most intimate aspects of Nicole’s sex life. Billie says, "I betrayed my best friend. I was betrayed. I lost everything. And I’ve hated myself ever since."

In that the 12^th of June is the birthday of Rebecca Holden, the actress who plays Windsor Thomas, a couple of notes about Windsor and her real life counterpart Tracie Savage are in order:

Downtown Windsor, Ontario is a five-minute drive from downtown Detroit where Tracie Savage got her start in broadcasting as an intern at WJBK-TV in 1984. In 1985, Savage was a reporter, a photographer and an anchor at WEYI-TV in Flint and hosted a public affairs show. Before she began her broadcasting career she appeared in one TV show, six made for television movies and two feature films. She’s Liz in Hurricane (’74), young Lizzie in The Legend of Lizzie Borden (’75), Mattie in Friendly Persuasion (’75) and Peggy in Once an Angel (’76). In Terror on the 40^th Floor (’74) she appeared as Cathy along with John Forsythe (Charlie in Charlie’s Angels) and an actor with glasses that you might know as Ozzie the Answer in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (’84-’85). "Ozzie’s" real name might also sound familiar. It’s Danny Goldman.

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