|
|
|
|||
Chapter 8
Anatomy of a Frame-up

|
We still have a lot of Matlock ground to cover but to see it in context we need to fill in some gaps we had to leave with the finger in "Mr. Awesome" and the Assistant DAs name in "The Foursome." I cant be 100% sure of what made me think of Lauren Richmond when
I saw Nastassia Kinski as Irena in Cat People going to a New Orleans
train station. I A train ticket north from New Orleans should have put her in Chicago. Richmond is northeast of New Orleans, but the instant Irena flashed the three bills and asked "How far " I knew what the answer was going to be. It was not a premonition and I dont think it was a discrete memory. Through a process of elimination I believe I can pinpoint what it was. I had seen the movie once in a theater when it was released in 1982 so I cant rule out the possibility that a few of my brain cells retained the connection to that unimportant detail for 18 years. But thats the problem; it was not important to me back then so there was no reason for me to have hung onto it for 18 seconds. Furthermore, twenty-two dollars for a train ticket from New Orleans to Richmond (the capital of the Confederacy) in 1982 seemed too cheap, so I doubted that the ancient memory of Richmond would have overridden a more reasonable guess of Jackson, Mississippi or Memphis, Tennessee. Another complicating factor in making one quick jump from the paper money to the name Richmond was my uncertainty about whether the twenty I thought I saw might have actually been a fifty. The singles were easy to identify but no matter how many times I ran the tape, froze the frames or enlarged the ones that seemed to give the best resolution of the bill with two digits, the best I could do was rule out a ten. When it occurred to me that anyone would have had the same problem much of the mystery went out of the fact that I knew what the train station ticket agent was going to say the instant I saw the three bills. It wasnt only because of the three bills Lauren Richmond used to frame Ellis Blake. It wasnt only because of the twenty-two cents that stood out in Blakes change or the fact that I had seen "The Foursome" a few short weeks earlier. It wasnt only because I had pictured Amy Stock less than a minute earlier when Irena was entering the station. It was because of a myriad of associated thoughts that coalesced around the idea of train stations in the Deep South and the railroading of an innocent man. This further confirmed to me that the Bundy killer made similar associations, leaving behind clues he thought looked "right" under the prevailing circumstances. Im not talking about things that had to have been planned years in advance like securing the gloves in 90 or 91 and the shoes in 91 or 92. Im talking about decisions that had to be made on the spot involving the blood evidence that was supposed to have come from O.J.s cut finger, the way O.J. really parked his Bronco and all the decisions that had to have been made with Nicoles blood and the twenty-two cents. If youre overlaying that kind of thinking onto a map of memories
and aspirations associated with Nazi ideals and the Jim Crow South to railroad an innocent
black man for murder, how can you not think of Lee and Grant? If youre a This is another movie that belongs in the Mark Fuhrman Television Guide to Assassination because TV is where he most likely saw it for the first time and where he most likely watched it again and again. Name almost any important feature of the Bundy murders and the odds are
better than even that In the Heat of the Night has it in some form. The
gloves, for Larry Gates is a doctor in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Sidney Poitier is a doctor in Guess Whos Coming to Dinner. In the
Fuhrman collection, "doc" Need more? How about the shoeprints on the steps, the Bronco parked in an odd place and the piece of wood in front of it that came from an alley? In the Heat of the Night begins with Quincy Jones
title score as a train pulls Later Tibbs finds a piece of wood on a construction site in
front of his rented car. Tibbs had already found a piece of that wood in the murder
victims scalp. Like In the Heat of the Night takes a jab at small town
Southern justice in the mid-1960s. In a not-so-subtle way, Tibbs represents a white
Northern attitude of Endicot is the innocent man that Tibbs wants to get but he doesnt railroad him, although he gives it his best shot. He tackles his goal in a more scientific way. His superior Northern justice approach eventually forces him to overcome his prejudice and leads him to the truth. Meanwhile Gillespie learns that Deputy Wood lied about what he did before he reported finding the body. He learns that Wood put more money in his bank account the day after the murder than he could have earned on the job. He concludes that his deputy is the killer. Mark Fuhrman was in a position to know that the way Gillespie ran his murder investigation was much closer to the way it was done North and South from the 60s through the 90s than the way Tibbs did it. You can see that most strikingly in the testimony of Det. Tom Lange when Johnnie Cochran asked him if he ever considered a suspect other than O.J. Simpson. Lange told Cochran that hed seen enough homicides to recognize the signs of one that was committed by a man who matched O.J.s profile. He never looked back on the portions of that profile that were supplied by Mark Fuhrman and he never looked twice at the evidence that didnt fit. The kinds of observations Virgil Tibbs makes and his kind of dogged pursuit of the truth does not exist on any police force to a noticeable extent anywhere in real life America. There may have been a Virgil Tibbs in Philadelphia in 1967 but the best the LAPD had to offer in 1994 looked a hell of a lot more like Gillespie and Wood. Ironically, the LAPDs closest match to Virgil Tibbs was Mark Fuhrman. In the Heat of the Night has a bird link that goes
farther than Mark Fuhrmans admiration for Larry Bird. It goes to one of the flowers
in Fuhrmans photo of his We can go two ways from here. We can go back for a moment to Alice
Cable in Mark (rhymes with lark) Fuhr-man (rhymes with spur-man as in the anthropomorphication of a larkspur) takes the window scene a step further with the story he extrapolates from Nicoles pizza menus and her handwritten note. In this June 12, 1994 twist on the 92 sex scene, Nicole is alone waiting for her lover when she looks out of her window and sees O.J. moments before O.J. kills her. According to Dolores Purdy, Sam Wood is the father of her unborn child. She tells Tibbs and Gillespie a story of seduction that seals any cracks of doubt that the sheriff might have had about Woods character. The story is a lie, but it sounds good. Under the circumstances it makes Wood appear to be capable of anything. Dolores tells them that Wood talked her into going with him to the cemetery and having sex on a tombstone. Her motive for lying is to protect the identity of the real father. His motive for the murder is to get enough money for an abortion. When her brother learns the truth, Ralph kills him in self-defense. So there you have it, one killer, two victims, one unwanted pregnancy. One reason Nicole preferred oral sex was because her religious beliefs would not let her consider an abortion if she got pregnant. The man she was waiting for on the 12th was Ron Goldman. Fuhrman speculated that Nicole was planning to order the pizza for him when she saw O.J., and went outside to confront him. That was his explanation for the pizza menu near her body. Only there was no pizza menu near her body. It was a Thai menu. Beach Girls (84) comes to mind, with a pizza delivery boy carrying a salami in his pocket. Later in the movie he sits next to Tessa Richarde at a campfire and sings, "eat my salami; it gives me joy." Dolores Purdy answers as many questions as Tessa Richarde does about Fuhrmans pizza story. Keep in mind his story of the incriminating fingerprint, his pointing finger photo and the fact that Ron Goldman was Jewish. Andy Purdy was the police officer that Mark Fuhrman harassed for marrying a Jewish woman. When Purdy found swastikas painted inside of his precinct locker, investigators subsequently discovered Mark Fuhrmans fingerprints there, too. His fingertips are directly related to the name Purdy and therefore indirectly related to what the fictional character Dolores Purdy does in the window with the bottle. Something else about the fingerprints and a scene from In the Heat of the Night tightens the connection. It leaches into other moves like The Man With Two Brains and The Naked Gun where a woman nursing a mans finger serves the same symbolic function as the profile shot of the woman sipping from a long-neck bottle. Quotes from Mark Fuhrman and Sam Wood brought them all together for me. Think about Jane Spencers act with Frank Drebins index
finger when he misses the point and says, "Ive got nine more." You might
be reminded of that, as I was when I read Fuhrmans account of his talk with Marcia
Clark about the fingerprint The only person who can be traced to the wood on Rockingham is Mark Fuhrman. The only people who can be traced to the glove on Bundy and the one on Rockingham are Nicole, who bought similar gloves on December 18, 1990 and Fuhrman who found one and had his picture taken pointing to the other on June 13, 1994. Two gloves. All ten fingers. Nicoles Christmas week 1990 purchase of the Aris Light gloves and the 91-92 availability dates for sale of the Bruno Magli Lorenzos make them stable time marker for the plot to kill Nicole and Frame O.J. These two items tell us that the decision had to have been made before they were bought or stolen for the job. I believe it happened somewhere between the New Years 89 incident and Mark Fuhrmans January 18, 1989 letter to the city attorney. The incident, as told by Nicole and Officer Edwards, did not match the evidence. It did not match the photographs of Nicoles face or body. It did not match the time sequence measured by the 911 call, the arrival of the police and Nicoles dash from the bushes. The incident as told by Simpson matched everything. Yet, he couldnt get anyone in authority to listen to what he had to say, to look at his hands, or to talk to his housekeeper. No one cared what the housekeeper had to say. Few people ever care about minor details that contradict major, obvious facts. That was the key to Nicoles success in convincing everyone that she called 911, that O.J. had beaten her, and that she feared he would kill her the obvious and immediate indications of what happened were all on her side. She looked like a woman who had been beaten. She said that O.J. had beaten her. When he said he hadnt his story sounded absurd, so that was the end of the investigation. The only thing the investigators wanted to know then was whether or not they could show a pattern of abuse. Mark Fuhrmans January 18 letter gave them that pattern. It gave O.J. and Nicole things to do and words to speak that sound more like Morgan Freeman, Jr. and Kathy Baker in Street Smart than anything anyone had seen or head about the Simpsons before. The vast difference between Fuhrmans O.J. and O.J.s O.J. served only to reinforce the image of O.J. as a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Fuhrmans script-like letter did not become a public issue until
Nicoles death. As near as I can tell, that was part of the deal that O.J.s
attorneys struck with the DA I dont know enough about Fuhrmans interest in Nastassia and Quincy to make an educated guess. On the other hand, I know enough about Nastassias movies and Mark Fuhrmans love of blood sports to see a scary pattern. No one else in the case alludes to killing bears and big cats. Fuhrman does it in the same sentence. He writes about hunting bears, deer and mountain lions in Idaho. Between O.J.s trials Fuhrman left a message on his telephone answering machine saying that he was going bear hunting. An acquaintance of mine who killed and skinned a bear told me that he would never do it again because under the fur a bear looked too much like a man. In The Hotel New Hampshire Nastassia Kinski has a neurotic compulsion to dress like a bear. If you saw the movie you know that a real bear gets killed by a boy with a .22. The Cat People link to Fuhrman is not as direct but its just as strong. Start with Fuhrmans twenty-two day suspension by Peggy York over
a racist incident involving the birthday of assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther
King, Jr. One of the stories that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover leaked about King When I started following leopard links I found strong connections to Fuhrman and the Bundy killings in every one of them. Only when I started working on this book did I find the link to Nastassia Kinski but I didnt find it through any of the cat links. I was running into Sydney and Sidney so much that it eventually dawned on me to look at Sidney Poitier movies. I think that dawning had something to do with Poitiers appearance with Jennifer Jasons Leighs dad Vic Morrow in Blackboard Jungle (55) and both of Jamie Lee Curtis parents Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis. Thats because Fuhrman and Jennifer Jason Leigh share the same birthday and because of the way Sydney Simpsons birthday seemed to set him off in Murder in Brentwood. I think it had to do with many of Poitiers other roles as well. Tony Curtis as a bigot who uses the n-word a lot and Sidney Poitier who drives him nuts with his singing are literally linked to each other as chain gang convicts in The Defiant Ones (58). Poitier is a rich, jealous Moore with a white wife (like Othello) in The Long Ships (63) and, of course, the doctor in Guess Whos Coming to Dinner (67). He is the narrator for the documentary King: A Filmed Record Montgomery to Memphis. Memphis, Tennessee is where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. Patoski, Tennessee is where the KKK was born. The incident that got Fuhrman suspended for twenty-two days had to do with a poster about Kings birthday that was defaced with the letters KKK. I know this is a roundabout way to get to Nastassia Kinski in Cat
People, but this is how it happened with me. I didnt make any of those
connections until I saw one too many trains in the Fuhrman collection that I couldnt
associate directly with a man being railroaded for a murder he didnt commit. One
movie I could make that association with was D.O.A.(88) with Meg Ryan as
Sydney and Dennis Quaid as I knew that Quincy Jones had been married to Peggy Lipton and the couple had two daughters. Lipton appears in the TV series Twin Peaks (90) as the rival of the one-eyed wife of Everett McGill. Hes the one-eyed minister/ werewolf in Silver Bullet. Flip back to the last page of the last chapter where Nastassia Kinski takes off her bear head in The Hotel New Hampshire. Her hair covers one of her eyes in a way that makes it look like she has a patch over the eye. This, in turn, might remind you of Castle Keep with Al Freeman (sounds like Fuhrman) Jr. as the writer, Burt Lancaster as Maj. Falconer (MF) and Peter Falk as Sgt. Rossi (the name Fuhrman put on his notes instead of his own). You might also recall that one of Juditha (Judy) Browns lenses came up missing from the police lab. In the TV series The Mod Squad (68-73), Peggy Lipton is Julie. She is teamed with two young men as police undercover agents. One of those men is black. Nastassia Kinski is buried so deep in that tangle of
"blind eye" associations that you may wonder how she could come front and center
in the mind of a man planning to kill Nicole Simpson. If the killer was Mark Fuhrman it
could signify his A common thread in the Jones, Twin Peaks, Silver Bullet, Cat People, Castle Keep, Judy/Julie tangle of associations from which the killer had to extract Nastassia Kinski is the black man/white woman relationship. You might not see it at first in Castle Keep but its there. The only survivors of an all out German attack on the castle are Al Freeman, Jr. and a pregnant white woman. In My Sweet Charlie (70), Patty Duke as a pregnant runaway and Al Freeman, Jr. as a wounded fugitive from a racist mob in the Jim Crow South find refuge in the same abandoned house and slowly fall in love. At the time Fuhrman claimed he was at Rockingham, Nicole Simpson was actually pregnant with Sydney. Mind you, these connections can be made only if youre looking at the people involved and the corresponding movies through the eyes of Mark Fuhrman and the Bundy killer as though they were the same person. Otherwise you wouldnt notice things like the black leopards taste for pizza as well as people. The fact that Nastassia Kinski was a beautiful, white, German mother of a girl whose father was a famous black man would be irrelevant. The brother/sister incest link could not have been made without Fuhrman as the killer and it wouldnt matter unless the killer had a personal interest in that brand of incest or he was a racist. The problem with any kind of "pure blood" advocacy is inbreeding. The closer a man and woman are in their genetic make-up the more likely they are to have children with genetic defects. Incest themes are therefore inherently more evocative of racist ideology to a racist than they are to most people. Its a fundamental contradiction that an otherwise intelligent person who accepts the validity of racism has to appreciate on some level, if only subconsciously. The incestuous relationship that Rob Lowe as John has
with Jodie Foster as his sister Frannie in The Hotel New Hampshire
sums up the situation in one shot of him as a football player and her as a cheerleader
for Dairy High. In the Although borrowed ideas from a wide variety of sources do not travel in straight lines, the lines between them are clear when you know enough about them. Considering the fact that the name of Laura Hart McKinnys husband was Dan, how hard could it have been for Fuhrman to see Frannie Blue in that picture? How hard could it have been to see Frannie blew Dan? If you saw The Hotel New Hampshire recently you
wouldnt have to ask why that means something in this context. If you havent,
this should help: Frannie fights with one of her other brothers and gets a cut on her
upper lip that requires stitches. The Central Division of the old NFL was called the Black and Blue Division. It had four teams: The Green Bay Packers in the Dairy State, the Detroit Lions in Michigans Lower Peninsula, the Chicago Bears, and the Buckeye States Cleveland Browns. Mark Fuhrman wrote about hunting bear (as in Chicago), mountain lion (as in Detroit) and deer (as in bucks). He played football at Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor, Washington. If a harbor reminds you of a dock and a dock reminds you of O.J. on the dock in The Naked Gun, you are not alone. Why do you suppose so much of the stuff linked to Nastassia Kinski
looks so Freudian? In The Hotel New Hampshire Suzy the bear replaces a real
one that Wallace Shawn as a man named Freud sells to Frannies father.
The father loses the bear to the boy who shoots him with his .22. Freud loses his eyes to
the Nazis
Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
|