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Chapter 24 Allusions
The Bundy murder case has few puzzling questions that cant be answered in Twin Peaks if you assume that Mark Fuhrman was the killer. You cant get far using film, videotape or television this way with anyone else in the case except for three of the four people required for the killing and the frame up (Fuhrman, Denise Brown and Fay Resnick). Instead of repeating why every significant name in Twin Peaks is significant every time I mention an actor or a character with that name, Im going to give a brief rundown on them in a preceding paragraph with key items of interest in bold print. Some youve read in these pages before. Some you havent. To illustrate what I mean were going to look at one ninety-second scene that introduces FBI Agent Dale Cooper. COOPER: In this example youll see allusions to Sergeant Rutledge, to Fuhrmans childhood home in Washington State and to his retirement home in Idaho. Fuhrman wrote that Sandpoint, Idaho was fifty-five miles south of the Canadian border "at the base of the Selkirk and Cabinet mountain ranges." David Lynch never says what state Twin Peaks (twin mountain peaks) is in but you hear "Seattle" often and you get enough other clues to know that it has to be Washington. Youre going to see a name link to Ron Goldman and a Cooper link to Swamp Thing (the "Coopers Digger" that Ray Wise pulls out of the murky water tank for a DNA test) and a tape recording link (Fuhrman and Laura Hart) to the name Diane. Diane Ladd is Laura Derns mother and her characters mother in Wild at Heart. Cooper refers to Philadelphia by inverting a famous quote of a famous actor who had two initials for a name Kyle MacLachlan as FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper gets
called into the The name Philadelphia all by itself could trigger a slew of associated
movie memories. It could make you think of Michael Paré as the time traveling sailor with
Nancy Allen in The Philadelphia Experiment (84) or the sailors
fight with the So, whats in a name? Answer: Everything thats associated with that name on a conscious or an unconscious level. No one is immune to this kind of thought "contamination." Given any meaningful sequence of sensory input, those impressions will find expression in one way or anther. Sometimes they speak only to us in symbols in dreams or sudden flashes if insight. At other times they can speak to anyone in Freudian slips or in similar ways that can be easily traced to the source. Thats what Mary Beecher is doing on the leading edge of Twin Peaks. The first time you see "Tom and Mary"
together is on a train in Sergeant In Chapter 21, you got your first look at Hank Warden as Laredo
in Sergeant Mary Steenburgen as Clara in Back to the Future 11I with her name on Doc Browns tombstone in 1884 is the Cara, Cal Pizza Kitchen link in Fuhrmans fifth murder scene note and the Sarah link to the name Cara aboard the train. Julia Roberts as Laura in Sleeping with the Enemy (91) fakes her own death (her name is on a tombstone) and assumes a new identity as Sarah. Sarah Palmer is murder victim Laura Palmers mother in Twin Peaks. Fuhrman left flowers and a poem about mothers on the Bundy murder scene propped up against the fence like a tombstone. Youll find it in his best-selling book Murder in Brentwood. Mary Steenburgen, the Sarah/Cara link we started with in Back to
the Future 11I, is the Mary link to Jack the Ripper in Time After Time
(79) with Marty Twin Peaks has an evil spirit named Bob, a.k.a. "Robertson son of Robert," and a Bobby who wears leather gloves while planting evidence in a plastic bag. To help you keep the "Bobs" and the many other characters straight Im going to go back to the start and introduce them and the actors who play them, whenever I can, as they appear. Log Lady: Fuhrman found a sock in O.J.s bedroom that tested positive for Nicoles blood, a stick in front of O.J.s Bronco and the name "Cathy" on a package inside that linked O.J. to the murders on Bundy. Catherine E. Coulson as Margaret Lanterman, the Log Lady, is the first person you see on each episode of Twin Peaks. In an episode where a killer named Leo Johnson twirls a bar of soap stuffed in the toe of a sock like a rock in a sling and beats his wife with it, the Log Lady talks about ideas in the form of a dream. Fuhrman told his psychiatrists that he dreamed of committing extreme acts of violence on his enemies . Margaret Lanterman is called the Log Lady for the log
that talks to her and she The opening credits of Twin Peaks features a bird (one of Fuhrmans favorite athletes is Larry Bird), the Packard lumber mill and a waterfall. The only comparable waterfall in North America is Niagara Falls, between Buffalo, New York where O. J. Simpson played football for most of his professional football career and Toronto, Canada where O.J. frequented a bar called the Underground Railroad. The Packard lumber mill is perhaps the only piece of valuable real estate in Twin Peaks that isnt owned by Benjamin Horne. A major subplot of the series involves Ben Hornes attempt to acquire the mill to turn into a golf course and subdivision called Ghostwood (Brentwood) Estates. Fuhrmans reference to the movie Ghost in
O.J.s VCR in this context calls for another look at the irregular stone tile pattern
on the driveway of O.J.s Josie Packard: Fuhrman said that O.J. saw a killer in a mirror and he hinted that Nicole contributed to getting herself killed by not pressing charges against O.J. over the baseball bat incident in 84. He wrote that it happened in 85, the year he met Laura Hart, or 86, the year he met Kathleen Bell. He wrote that a maid should have been at Rockingham and the fact that she wasnt justified the search that led to his discovery of the glove. Fuhrman wrote that he knew the search was legal because he had recently read the applicable court ruling called People vs. Cain. Cain references in the Fuhrman collection, especially to Michael Caine as Mike in Mr. Destiny, as Sidney in Deathtrap and as the split personality Robert and Bobbie in Dressed to Kill, speak for themselves. Josie is the Chinese widow of Andrew Packard, the owner of the Packard lumber mill. In Andrew and his mortal enemy Thomas Eckhardt youre going to see allusions to Ghostas Fuhrman described it incorrectlyand to the resurrection theme which is common in the Fuhrman collection. You will see allusions to Nan (who kills herself) in "The Hitch-hiker" episode of The Twilight Zone, to Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct and to Liz in Whore who simulates cutting her own throat in a mirror. In Dressed to Kill Nancy Allen as a whore named Liz has nightmares of seeing herself in a mirror getting her throat cut by a transsexual doctor named Robert and Bobbie. Arnold Schwarzenegger kills four men in Total Recall. He rushes home and sees himself in his bathroom mirror. When he comes out Sharon Stone (Catherine Tramell) as his wife Lori shoots at him and cuts him with a butcher knife . The first scene in Twin Peaks begins with figurines of
two dogs, one of which Wearing dark leather gloves, Josie shoots Cooper three times but
doesnt kill him. She then goes to Seattle, pumps two fatal bullets into a man named
John who worked for Thomas Eckhardt (David Warner, Dr. John Stevens, a.k.a.
Jack Things dont go according to plan for Andrew. Josie kills Eckhardt and dies supernaturally of unknown causes when Cooper and Sheriff Cooper rush into Eckhardts room after she fires the fatal shot. At the moment of her death Cooper has a vision of Bob, the evil spirit that inhabits the bodies of innocent people and thrives on torture and murder. Eckhardt, however, has the last laugh with a package he leaves for Andrew and Catherine. In the package is a key to a safe deposit box. Andrew steals the key from Catherine and goes to the safe deposit box in the bank with her husband Pete where Ben Horns daughter Audrey has chained herself to the bank vault gate. Andrew opens the box long enough to see that he has triggered a bomb. The bomb blows up the entire bank. Ron Goldmans killer tortured him mentally and physically. Someone stole the key to Nicoles rear gate. You see the comic version of Fuhrmans bomb threat story with Bonnie Britton as Lana the bomber with the mens shoes and leather gloves in Police Squad! (Chapter 9). In 1988 Fuhrman shot ATM robber Joseph Britton five times. Britton had a butcher knife. When Fuhrman and other officers ran after him he threw the knife away. After Fuhrman shot him, he planted the knife next to his hand. You see a similar act in To Protect and Serve with C. Thomas Howell as an LAPD cop who wears a Detroit Tigers baseball cap. Special Agent Cooper learns from Mel Ferrer (MF) as a
forensics expert named Ed ORoss is an assassination victim in Action Jackson. In The Hidden (87) with Ed ORoss as a cop and Chris Mulkey (Hank Jennings in Twin Peaks) as a bank-robbing serial killer named Devries, Kyle MacLachlan is a space alien posing as a dead FBI agent named Gallagher. He has taken the body of the dead mans dead partner, Special Agent Stone. Sharon Stone has no role in Twin Peaks. But, for reasons
that will become Native Detroiter Diana Ross married a Norwegian Shipping magnate in Switzerland and made New York her home in the 1980s. LAPD detectives purchased a German Stiletto that matched some wounds on Ron Goldmans body at Ross Cutlery. Other wounds in Goldmans body matched t the Swiss Army knife
that Fuhrman proved was one of the murder weapons. In Scissors, a
Ross Cutlery store sits next to where Sharon Stone as Angela Anderson
buys the scissors that she uses to wound her redheaded attacker. The
attacker wears latex gloves and a dark knit cap. Her psychiatrist, Dr.
Carter, knows that the red hair is associated with the name Billy. He asks her if Billie
could be a woman (like Mark Fuhrmans mother). He knows that Angela was the victim of
an incestuous stepfather by that name and that her mother stabbed him to
death with a pair of scissors.
Ronnie Cox (a LAPD detective in Joseph Wambaughs The
Onion Field) as Dr. Catherine Martell: Red-haired native Detroiter Piper
Lori is Aunt Em Blue in Return to Oz (85). David Warner (Thomas
Eckhardt) is In Twin Peaks Catherine Martell hates Josie for
trying to kill her brother Andrew. Josie thought that she did kill him when she paid
professional hitman Every major character in Twin Peaks has his or her own story that begins to come together with Pete Martells discovery of Laura Palmers body. So do a wealth of details in the discovery of Nicole Brown Simpsons body on Bundy and the investigation of her death by Mark Fuhrman. You know Fuhrmans story about the butcher knife on Nicoles kitchen counter and the fact that O.J. was accused of butchering her and Ron Goldman. Demi Moore as Molly in Ghost (90) and Marina in The Butchers Wife (91) is connected to a butcher knife. In Ghost Tony Goldwyn threatens to cut her throat with a butcher knife. In The Butchers Wife, she uses a butcher knife to slice meat in her husbands butcher shop. George The actor playing her husband is one of Catherine Tramells stabbing victims in Basic Instinct. The woman truly intended to be the butchers wife is played by Mary Steenburgen. David Warner, who is Thomas Eckhardt in Twin Peaks, threatens to cut her throat as Jack the Ripper in Time After Time 79). You see the strain in Pete and Catherine Martells relationship right away from Catherines icy refusal to return Petes attempt at an early morning greeting. Pete just says, "Gone fishing." Catherine sits there with a cup of coffee in front of her and says nothing. Pete gathers his fishing gear and walks outside where you can see the body in plastic on the beach in the background behind him. Pete doesnt see it at first because hes looking the other way, and its too far away for us to identify. It does, however, appear to be out of place like the evidence that Fuhrman said caught his eye when he answered the phone call about a womans murder and left his home by the ocean in Redondo Beach to investigate. Pete Martell evokes images of Mary Beecher (Mary-beach-her) looking after the train in Sergeant Rutledge and hearing the train whistle when he hears a foghorn and says, "A distant foghorn blows." He then turns his head, sees the object on the beach by the lake and goes to investigate. It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of Jack Nance
portraying a In Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman says he was eating a tuna fish sandwich when he "realized" why his testimony about finding the glove was so important. He used the barking dog to chastise Marcia Clarks rigid timeline and to create a mental picture of the dog that howled on Clark St. in Chicago after the 1929 St. Valentines Day Massacre. His mental picture of The St. Valentines Day Massacre appears to include elements from the TV movie with Ralph Meeker (Sgt. Dekker in Not for Hire and Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly) as Al Capones intended victim George (Bugs) Moran. Morans birthday is the same as O.J.s, July 9. Remember that the next time you see the name "Moran." I introduced Jack Nance in Chapter 18 as the man in Whore who finds Theresa Russell as Liz lying raped and beaten on her side in an almost identical position as Nicoles body was photographed in on Bundy. Fuhrman said that he didnt know who Nicole was because her hair covered her face. Nance finds Liz in a field by a railroad track with her hair covering her face just as Laura Palmers hair covers her face. Ill have more on that in Chapter 27 when I get into Charlies Angels with Cheryl Ladd as Kris Monroe posing as a prostitute to catch a killer. For now we want to concentrate on the characters in Twin Peaks. Lucy, Harry, Andy and Doc: In Sergeant Rutledge (with former pro football star Woody Strode) Lucy Dabney and her father the major are homicide victims. Twin Peaks does not have a Lucy and a major who get killed but it does have a Lucy and a major who participate in a murder case. Kimmy Robertson is Lucy Moran. Don S. Davis is Maj. Garland Briggs (Judy Garland is Dorothy Gail in The Wizard of Oz). You are going to see an early allusion to Ghost and Bruno Magli shoes on Bundy by way of Kimmy Robertson. In a 1992 episode of The Simpsons she is the voice of Samantha (Sam in Ghost). In an 89 episode of Married with Children (with Al Bundy the shoe salesman) shes Molly. The Majors link to Fuhrman comes late in the series. You see him on a fishing trip with Dale Cooper wearing a black knit cap like the black one that O.J. wears on the yacht in The Naked Gun 2 ˝ and the dark blue one that he wears on the dock in The Naked Gun. In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman misidentifies the blue knit cap as a black one in the police photo of him pointing to the leather glove. In his notes he called it a black ski mask. In Twin Peaks its the sheriffs black hat. When Pete Martell calls the Twin Peaks Sheriffs
Department, Kimmy Remember all the phones in use around the time of Nicoles murder?
Lucy is holding a pencil (for making hand-written notes) when she relays
Petes message. A lawman drinking an early morning cup of coffee or getting a call that wakes him from sleep shouldnt mean a thing. It simply isnt distinctive enough to link to anyone in particular. Vannatter and Lange mention the call and the coffee in Evidence Dismissed but that is where it ends with them. Only with Mark Fuhrman do you get the whole story of Twin Peaks with the call, the pencil (hand written note), the coffee and "the little table" (more about that with Scissors in the next chapter). Fuhrman also begins his story with a phone call that rousted him out of bed the way Andy Griffith begins so many of his murder cases as Ben Matlock. Fuhrman wrote that he took his call in the kitchen. His only mention of "coffee" comes in the context of Nicoles coffee table, a handwritten note and his visit with a small town lawman. Writing in Murder in Brentwood about his attempt to escape media harassment, he mentioned a trip to Ukiah, CA to stay with an old partner named Kevin Devries who was now a Ukiah police officer (Yukima is in Washington). This is where he wrote about how he used to like to go to the airport early to drink a cup of coffee and make a game out of seeing what he could deduce by observing how people dressed, walked and groomed themselves. Fuhrman made such a production of the note he said was handwritten on Nicoles coffee table that it must have had a production-worthy meaning to him. Associating the note on the table with her phone allowed him to tell his story about Nicole talking to someone on the phone and writing her last words when she heard a car in the alley. He says that she looked down from her upstairs window and saw O.J.s Bronco. This is his story of Nicole spotting O.J. in the cap and gloves. Its his story of her coming down the stairs to the kitchen, picking up a butcher knife (like Joseph Brittons) to defend herself if he got in the house, and then putting it down to go outside. Fuhrmans story continues with O.J. losing control and hitting Nicole with "a pounding blow to the top of her head" that causes her to collapse like Bob Ray Lemon in Wild at Heart. You will see allusions to all of these things in Twin Peaks. Meanwhile, lets return to where we were with Harry and Lucy in the Sheriffs office Harry Truman picks up the correct phone and gets the
essential information from On the Laura Hart McKinney tapes Mark Fuhrman said that he and his most trusted partners could get away with murder. In Murder in Brentwood he writes, "people get away with murder every day." The title of this book and the one before it comes from something he wrote in Murder in Brentwood in the paragraph on page 56 where he explains how and why solving crimes depend on focusing on details. He writes, "Very seldom do you find a smoking gun " I knew Id found the smoking gun when I saw the photos of Fuhrman pointing to the glove. It was the final piece of a complex picture that could have been "sketched in" only by the killer at the time of the murders and detailed by the same man when Rolph Rokahr took the photos. Whoever left Nicoles body, the evidence below Goldmans feet and the coins by Nicoles dark green Jeep had a photographers eye for composition and Fuhrmans eye for detail. You see it most starkly when you compare the elegant position of Nicole body to the awkward position of Rons. When I say "elegant" I mean that strictly in the sense of graphic proportions, smooth flowing lines and the optimum use of positive and negative space. I kept tying to figure out how Nicoles body could have been positioned better for the camera if it has been deliberately posed, and I couldnt do it. It looked like something borrowed from the Civil War photographs of Mathew Brady. His famous photos packed the kind of punch they did because he posed the bodies to produce the intended effect. Then when I saw the before-and-after photos of Fuhrmans pointing finger (various items in different places), I knew that Nicoles body and the items by her head and Goldmans feet were carefully positioned by the same man. The only person who could have done it was Mark Fuhrman. At that point I was in a logical bind because I thought Fuhrman had an alibi and I didnt know he had formal artistic training as well as natural artistic talent. I wrongly assumed that O.J.s layers would have made an issue of Fuhrmans height and shoe size if he was close to O.J.s height and could fit comfortably into a pair of size-12 Bruno Magli Lorenzos. I did not know about Kathleen Bell, the swastika incident with Officer Purdys locker, the story about Fuhrman claiming to have had an intimate affair with Nicole, or the Laura Hart McKinny tapes. I could not imagine why anyone with Fuhrmans racist baggage would want to call attention to himself if he were the killer and it seemed highly unlikely that he would show off his artistic sensibilities even if he had them. By the time I learned that Fuhrman did not have an alibi, that he was roughly O.J.s height, wore size 12 shoes, etc., I had seen enough movies to tell me where many of his ideas came from for the killing and the framing. The full body photo of Fuhrman squatting down to point at the leather glove appears to be natural until you try to simulate it. You then see not only how unnatural it is to do, but how difficult is to make it appear natural. It is as though he was looking at himself through the lens of the camera, like an actor directing himself in a movie. In Twin Peaks, Harry Goaz as Deputy Andy
Brennan has the job of Andy Brennan is an artist and therefore a good choice to
take the pictures, There is an ongoing conversation here with Andy apologizing repeatedly while Harry asks, "Is this going to happen every damn time?" so we know that the gloves on Andys hands are there because of a continuity error in the production. Somebody screwed up. Thats what Fuhrman said O.J. did with all of the evidence he supposedly left behind because of his emotional state. We saw this kind of continuity error as a key part of the plot in the "Murder According to Maggie" episode of Murder she Wrote (90). In that show a pencil that was there one minute and gone the next is what trips up the killer. Bruce Kirby, the father of Jennifer Jason Leighs old boyfriend Bruno, is the killer. His name is Andy Butler. Fuhrman worked out of the police station on Butler Street. Sheriff Truman sends Andy away to get a stretcher from the
coroners van while
Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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