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Chapter 25

Table of Contents

Chapter 24

Allusions

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The Bundy murder case has few puzzling questions that can’t be answered in Twin Peaks if you assume that Mark Fuhrman was the killer. You can’t 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, I’m going to give a brief rundown on them in a preceding paragraph with key items of interest in bold print. Some you’ve read in these pages before. Some you haven’t. To illustrate what I mean we’re going to look at one ninety-second scene that introduces FBI Agent Dale Cooper.

COOPER: In this example you’ll see allusions to Sergeant Rutledge, to Fuhrman’s 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. You’re 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 Dern’s mother and her character’s 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 thewpeE4.jpg (3237 bytes) Laura Palmer murder case when a teenage girl named Ronnie captured by the killer (Ray Wise) wonders blindly across the state line east of Twin Peaks along a mountain railroad track. You see Cooper for the first time in the series as he’s driving and talking into a tap recorder to his secretary. "Dianne," he says, "11:30 a.m. February 24th. Entering the town of Twin Peaks, five miles south of the Canadian border, 12 miles west of the Idaho state line he comments on trees, restaurants (where Fuhrman met Laura Hart and Nicole’s mother lost her glasses) and cherry pies. "As W. C. Fields would say, ‘I’d rather be here than in Philadelphia.’" W. C. Fields said the exact opposite.

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 sailor’s fight with the wpeE5.jpg (5330 bytes)Marine M.P. wearing the dark brown leather gloves. You might then think of Nancy Allen in Blow Out (’80) along with the prostitute and the sailor in the Philadelphia train station or the courtroom drama Philadelphia with Jason Robards Jr., Tom Hanks, Mary Steenburgen and Denzel Washington. Mary, Tom and Washington could bring to mind images of Constance Towers as Mary Beecher and Jeffrey Hunter (Fuhrman the hunter from Washington) as Lt. Tom Cantrell in Sergeant Rutledge. You may picture them in a courtroom, on a train or outside of a train station.

So, what’s in a name? Answer: Everything that’s 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. That’s 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 wpeAA.jpg (5324 bytes)Rutledge. The last time he sees her before the post surgeon shows him the bodies of rape victim Lucy Dabney and her father is at the train station where she finds the corpse of the station master and Sgt. Rutledge finds her. With one person dead and Sgt. Rutledge "policing up" the blood inside the station, Mary stands on the train tracks and looks after the Tombstone & Gila caboose, which is now only a fading whistle in a gathering windstorm.

In Chapter 21, you got your first look at Hank Warden as Laredo in SergeantwpeE8.jpg (5866 bytes) Rutledge on the caboose of the Tombstone & Gila freight train with Tom and Mary arguing with the conductor about horses that he is impatient to deliver. He is the one who left Mary stranded at the train station by waving a lantern to get the train moving before Lt. Cantrell and the conductor could find the man who was supposed to be there. You see Warden as a very old man delivering warm milk to Special Agent Cooper without ever realizing Cooper has been shot and is in need of a doctor. In One-Eyed Jacks (’61) Hank Warden is a bank robber called "Doc" who gets shot to death. You’re going to see him in Twin Peaks as the room service waiter in a hotel called The Big Northern (an old man as the chief and a boy called "Doc" in The Shining). Ben Horne runs the hotel and an illegal drug, gambling and prostitution house just north of the border called One-eyed Jacks.

Mary Steenburgen as Clara in Back to the Future 11I with her name on Doc Brown’s tombstone in 1884 is the Cara, Cal Pizza Kitchen link in Fuhrman’s 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 Palmer’s 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. You’ll 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 MartywpeE9.jpg (5082 bytes) loading the special logs labeled 3 and 2 into Doc Brown’s DeLorean ahead of a wood-fired locomotive. She is the lady on the logs behind the engine. In The Butcher’s Wife, she’s a blues singer. You can get the full rundown on Time After Time in The Smoking Gun: Mark Fuhrman’s Movie Guide to Assassination. There are enough Fuhrman links in this movie to tell you that he must have watched it and thought about it from the killer’s point of view (David Warner as Dr. John Stevens) and his pursuer’s H.G. Wells. For now the only thing you need to know about Time After Time is that a "bobby" (a London beat cop) finds the Ripper’s bloody gloves.

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 I’m 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 Nicole’s 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 wpeEA.jpg (3786 bytes)cradles in her arms like an infant. A log is where all manufactured wood products begin, products like picket fences (the stick), paper (Fuhrman’s notes) and baseball bats (Fuhrman’s first Rockingham visit) get their start. The names Cathy (the package in the Bronco) and Margaret (Margaret York) have a special meaning to Fuhrman. That makes every episode of Twin Peaks special to Fuhrman.

The opening credits of Twin Peaks features a bird (one of Fuhrman’s 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 isn’t owned by Benjamin Horne. A major subplot of the series involves Ben Horne’s attempt to acquire the mill to turn into a golf course and subdivision called Ghostwood (Brentwood) Estates.

Fuhrman’s 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.’swpeEB.jpg (3088 bytes) Rockingham estate. In Ghost, Patrick Swayze as Sam the murder victim, learns how to manipulate physical objects in a New York City subway (underground railroad) to save the life of his girlfriend Molly (the "Magli in" Bruno Magli is pronounced "Molly"). As he leaves the subway he pushes a shoe off the top of a trashcan, draws false mustaches on a group picture and bounds past a poster for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats. In The Wiz, with native Detroiter Diana Ross (Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues), trashcans in a New York City subway turn into monsters with shark-like teeth and you see the same tile pattern on the subway floor.

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 wasn’t 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 you’re going to see allusions to Ghost—as Fuhrman described it incorrectly—and 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 whichwpeEC.jpg (3246 bytes) appears to be howling (Jack Nance in Wild at Heart: "My dog barks some."). The camera pans to Joan Chin as Josie Packard looking at herself in a mirror. Laura Palmer tutored her in English. Pete Martell, who discovers Laura’s body, is Josie’s brother-in-law by way of his marriage to her husband’s sister Catherine. Josie, Pete and Catherine live in the same house. If you’ve been following the mirror links in the Fuhrman collection you know when you first see her lone reflection in the mirror that she is a killer. All that’s left to learn is whether she kills herself or someone else.

Wearing dark leather gloves, Josie shoots Cooper three times but doesn’t 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 wpeED.jpg (3293 bytes)the Ripper, in Time After Time and Jennings the photographer in The Omen). Eckhardt ordered Josie to kill Andrew Packard (Dan O’Herlihy, the white-hared head of OCP in RoboCop). Andrew surprises Eckhardt in an elevator (an area the size of the killing cage on Bundy). Eckhardt tells him that he does not believe in ghosts. Taking advantage of Eckhardt’s love for Josie and his jealousy (Fuhrman wrote that the movie Ghost on the video in O.J.’s VCR was about "love, jealousy and murder") Andrew tells Eckhardt that Josie betrayed him. Thus, Andrew sets up Eckhardt to murder her and take the fall.

Things don’t go according to plan for Andrew. Josie kills Eckhardt and dies supernaturally of unknown causes when Cooper and Sheriff Cooper rush into Eckhardt’s 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 Horn’s 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 Goldman’s killer tortured him mentally and physically. Someone stole the key to Nicole’s rear gate. You see the comic version of Fuhrman’s bomb threat story with Bonnie Britton as Lana the bomber with the men’s 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 namedwpeEE.jpg (4067 bytes) Albert that the bullet that wounded him came from the gun that was used to kill the man in Seattle. Cooper finds Josie’s leather gloves on a hanger draped by a plastic cover from the cleaners. He plucks rare fibers from Josie’s coat that match the fibers found in the hallway outside of the room where he was shot. Powder marks on the gloves match the gun. A witness to the murder in Seattle saw a woman who matched Josie’s description getting out of the victim’s car. The Rockingham glove that Fuhrman found in the passageway outside of O.J.’s home had "rare" fibers on it that matched the carpet of O.J.’s Bronco.

Ed O’Ross is an assassination victim in Action Jackson. In The Hidden (’87) with Ed O’Ross 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 man’s dead partner, Special Agent Stone.

Sharon Stone has no role in Twin Peaks. But, for reasons that will becomewpe7C.jpg (4074 bytes) obvious, we should look at her now, not only as Catherine in Basic Instinct but as Patrice in Action Jackson (set in Detroit) and Angela in Scissors. Scissors is set in New York City. Ron Goldman’s stab wounds matched the blades of two different knives. Scissors have two blades. The Swiss Army knife that Fuhrman said was the Bundy murder weapon has foldout scissors.

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 Goldman’s body at Ross Cutlery. Other wounds in Goldman’s body matched t the Swiss Army wpe7D.jpg (5560 bytes)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 Fuhrman’s 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 Wambaugh’s The Onion Field) as Dr.wpeAB.jpg (3529 bytes) Carter wears a red wig with a false moustache and beard to attack her in the elevator and to threaten her at a French movie theater (Liz in Whore). The man he stabs to death with Angela’s scissors has red hair, a red moustache and a red bead. The man was having an affair with his wife Ann (Fuhrman’s ex who had the affair was Janet). Ronnie Cox is Dick Jones in RoboCop, the OCP executive who has the crime boss of Old Detroit plant a bomb to blow up Mel Ferrer (Albert in Twin Peaks) as his young, ambitions rival Bob.

Catherine Martell: Red-haired native Detroiter Piper Lori is Aunt Em Blue in Return to Oz (’85). David Warner (Thomas Eckhardt) iswpeAE.jpg (6983 bytes) from Britain. On pages 120-122 of Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman tells his Joseph Britton story. On pages 123 and 124 he talks about Dan and Darrell Blue from Washington State. Britton said that Fuhrman stood over him and called him a "nigger." Fuhrman said that Britton identified the man who called him that name as a redhead with a moustache. Fuhrman pointed out that he was not a redhead and that he did not have a moustache. Let me point out that anyone with a red wig can be a redhead like Ronnie Cox in Scissors. The fascinating thing to me is that something must have moved Fuhrman to mention his "redhead" defense when it was clearly no defense. I think it was a redhead, a Josie with a butcher knife and an actor from Britton.

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 hitmanwpeAF.jpg (9267 bytes) Hank Jennings to blow up his yacht. Catherine has an affair with Ben Horn and plots with him to kill Josie. Ben betrays her and hires Hank Jennings to kill Catherine in a fire that destroys the Packard sawmill to make way for his Ghostwood Estates project. Catherine survives and turns the tables on Ben and Josie by withholding testimony that will clear Ben of a murder charge and by using Josie’s fear and loathing of Eckhardt (a Brit) as a tool to control and mentally torture her. She makes Josie her maid (Ally Sheedy – birthday June 12—in Maid to Order). Josie pours wine for Catherine and Eckhardt wearing her maid’s uniform and prepares a meal for them with a butcher knife.

Every major character in Twin Peaks has his or her own story that begins to come together with Pete Martell’s discovery of Laura Palmer’s body. So do a wealth of details in the discovery of Nicole Brown Simpson’s body on Bundy and the investigation of her death by Mark Fuhrman. You know Fuhrman’s story about the butcher knife on Nicole’s 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 Butcher’s Wife (’91) is connected to a butcher knife. In Ghost Tony Goldwyn threatens to cut her throat with a butcher knife. In The Butcher’s Wife, she uses a butcher knife to slice meat in her husband’s butcher shop. George The actor playing her husband is one of Catherine Tramell’s stabbing victims in Basic Instinct. The woman truly intended to be the butcher’s 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 Martell’s relationship right away from Catherine’s icy refusal to return Pete’s 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 doesn’t see it at first because he’s looking the other way, and it’s 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 woman’s 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 awpeB0.jpg (6062 bytes) fisherman in Twin Peaks who discovers the body of a blond-haired white female wrapped in plastic by a big rock. In writing about the horse and trailer that Fuhrman bought for his wife as a Christmas present, he said that he preferred hunting and fishing to riding. He then added the story about catching a 12-pound rainbow trout that he had to throw back into the lake because it was too small. In Wild at Heart, Jack Nance is the guy in Big Tuna Texas who talks about mental pictures of his barking dog and Toto from The Wizard of OZ.

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 Clark’s 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. Valentine’s 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 Capone’s intended victim George (Bugs) Moran. Moran’s 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 Nicole’s body was photographed in on Bundy. Fuhrman said that he didn’t 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 Palmer’s hair covers her face. I’ll have more on that in Chapter 27 when I get into Charlie’s 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 Simpson’s she is the voice of Samantha (Sam in Ghost). In an ’89 episode of Married with Children (with Al Bundy the shoe salesman) she’s Molly. The Major’s 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 it’s the sheriff’s black hat.

When Pete Martell calls the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department, KimmywpeB5.jpg (4356 bytes) Robertson as Sheriff Harry S. Truman’s secretary Lucy Moran picks up the phone. Lucy is Deputy Andy Brennan’s girlfriend. Her relationship with Andy will eventually involve Ian Buchanan (the jealous husband in Double Exposure who hires a hitman to kill his wife’s lover) as Dick in a love triangle. It will also involve an eight-year-old boy name Nicky, whose parents were killed in an explosion (Hank Jennings’ specialty). Fuhrman said that Ron Goldman was the victim of a deadly love triangle after Nicole rejected O.J. Lucy Moran’s relationship with Andy Brennan is heavily laced with her rejection of him.

Remember all the phones in use around the time of Nicole’s murder? Lucy is holding a pencil (for making hand-written notes) when she relays Pete’s message. wpeB6.jpg (3445 bytes)"Sheriff,’ she says, "…I’m going to transfer you to the phone on the table by the red chair…the red chair against the wall." Michael Ontkean (Bill Hart in Clara’s Heart, Nick in Maid to Order with Allie Sheedy) as Sheriff Harry S. Truman, who was pouring a cup of coffee, looks blankly to his left as Lucy tries to clarify her message. She says, "The little table with the lamp on it, the lamp that we moved from the corner – the black phone, not the brown one."

A lawman drinking an early morning cup of coffee or getting a call that wakes him from sleep shouldn’t mean a thing. It simply isn’t 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 Nicole’s 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 Nicole’s 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. It’s his story of her coming down the stairs to the kitchen, picking up a butcher knife (like Joseph Britton’s) to defend herself if he got in the house, and then putting it down to go outside. Fuhrman’s 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, let’s return to where we were with Harry and Lucy in the Sheriff’s office…

Harry Truman picks up the correct phone and gets the essential information fromwpeB7.jpg (5241 bytes) Pete Martell. He grabs his coat and hat and tells Lucy, "You’d better get Dr. Hayward, tell him to meet me at the Packard Mill – the dock right below the dam. Roust that Andy out of bed and tell him to get his butt up there now." The next thing you see is the outside of the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department with Harry walking to his official Twin Peaks motor vehicle, a late model Ford Bronco.

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 I’d 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 Nicole’s body, the evidence below Goldman’s feet and the coins by Nicole’s dark green Jeep had a photographer’s eye for composition and Fuhrman’s eye for detail. You see it most starkly when you compare the elegant position of Nicole body to the awkward position of Ron’s. 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 Nicole’s body could have been positioned better for the camera if it has been deliberately posed, and I couldn’t 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 Fuhrman’s pointing finger (various items in different places), I knew that Nicole’s body and the items by her head and Goldman’s 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 didn’t 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 Fuhrman’s 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 Purdy’s 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 Fuhrman’s 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 ofwpeB8.jpg (3107 bytes) photographing the body that Pete Martell found on the beach. The sheriff is there along with Warren Frost as Dr. William Hayward (in Matlock Warren Frost is Ben’s neighbor Billy). Doctor Hayward’s stepdaughter is the dead girl’s best friend Donna. Donna is a redhead. Andy is not wearing gloves when he takes his pictures.

Andy Brennan is an artist and therefore a good choice to take the pictures,wpeB9.jpg (3978 bytes) except for one thing. He gets so involved with the victim that when he squats down to take a close up picture of the body, he begins to weep uncontrollably. Harry reminds Andy that he has done this before. "Give me the camera," he says testily as he and Doc Hayward roll their eyes in dismay…It’s about here that the Twin Peaks continuity editor makes a colossal mistake — which is why we’re looking at Andy and Harry in the context of Fuhrman’s pointing finger photo. A black leather glove was missing from O.J.’s bedroom after Fuhrman and Roberts searched it. The LAPD lab found several hand hairs from a black person and one hair from a Caucasian in the brown leather glove that Fuhrman found. Andy was not wearing gloves when he squatted down to take the close-up picture. But when he stands to give the sheriff the camera he is wearing black leather gloves.

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 Andy’s hands are there because of a continuity error in the production. Somebody screwed up. That’s 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 Leigh’s 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 coroner’s van whilewpeBD.jpg (4741 bytes) he and Dr. Hayward crouch down to turn over the body. After the continuity error with Andy’s gloves you will note that Harry was wearing his hat when he was standing and once he goes down to one knee he is no longer wearing it. This is not a continuity error. You will see him take it off of his head and put it on the ground near the victim’s head. Need more? Coming right up….

 

 

 

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