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Chapter 16

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I went into the chapter before the last one and the one before that with every intention of writing two chronological narratives about Night Eyes 3 and In the Heat of Passion. This one was supposed to focus on the bubble gum that Mark Fuhrman said he found on Bundy with clear impressions of adult molars.

I soon discovered that some things I wanted to say made sense to me only because I knew about dozens of things that weren’t in the previous chapters. Some of them weren’t in any of my previous books. I had no way to know how many were squirreled away in my subconscious mind making little suggestions to my conscious mind at seemingly random moments. In that respect, I am no different than Mark Fuhrman or any other human being. That’s how I can trace so much of what he said and did with respect to the Simpson-Goldman murders to film and TV. If you look hard enough you can usually find a logical place in what you’re trying to do for that "random" thought to fit right in. The connections may not be direct, but they exist and they tell a story of their own.

The idea of a redhead that kept intruding on my thoughts of Sally Kirkland as Lee Adams is a case in point. My mind started screaming "redhead" soon after I saw the mother/son incest connection between Sally Kirkland and Stella Stevens by way of Shannon Tweed and Andrew Stevens in Night Eyes 3; all blonds. It made no sense. Then, when I saw the end of In the Heat of Passion with Dr. Lee Adams embracing her son Leslie, the pieces started to fall into place like the bricks and mortar of a thirty-two story office building. Now Leslie Nielsen was part of the architecture.

Why that Leslie? Because Nielsen is Cpt. Adams in The Forbidden Planet and the doctor in Airplane! who sees Julie Hagerty as Elaine blowing up the automatic pilot. That’s the scene that ends with Elaine and the automatic pilot smoking a cigarette. In the Heat of Passion uses a cigarette as part of Dr. Lee Adams’ seduction of Charlie Bronson. After her accidental-on-purpose meeting with him at the service station where he works between acting gigs he officers her a cigarette.

Lee gives Charlie a good deal of information about her sex life and her availability with her answer. She says, "don’t tempt me, I haven’t had one in six months." He gives her a congratulatory, "Willpower." She replies, "No. I just found that I never really enjoyed them except after sex." Charlie is not the brightest crayon in the box but he’s bright enough to get the message when Lee asks for a cigarette before she leaves, gets a light from him and pays with a check that has her name and address on it.

Perhaps you think that we are beginning to drift far afield from why the "redhead" beacon from my subconscious is a good example of the bricks and mortar from the movies that spell M-a-r-k F-u-h-r-m-a-n. That drift may seem all the more so when we put Ann Frances and Leslie Nielsen together as John J. Adams and Altera in Forbidden Planet and Lee Remick together with Charles Bronson as CIA and KGB spies in Telefon (’77). Dr. Lee Adams’ middle name is Frances. There are direct links between Telefon, Airplane! and The Naked Gun but we’ll have to save that for later or we will be drifting far afield.

You know the redheads in Police Squad! with Leslie Nielsen. You know them in Single White Female with Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedra, and in The Dark Corner (’46) with Lucille Ball as Kathleen and Mark Stevens as Brad. But you’d never guess there was an oral sex link to Lucile Ball like the one with Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (’45). For my "Steve" hypothesis with Mark Fuhrman to be correct, there would have to be. But it doesn’t have to be intentional. In The Dark Corner Kathleen tells Brad that she can get tough guys like him "brand new for a dime a dozen." He fishes in his pocket for two dimes left over from their visit to a penny arcade and pushes them over to her on the nightclub table. She puts two fingers on the dimes – one finger per dime – and pushes them back. She says, " I’m a sucker for a bargain."

The way she says it takes the sex out of it instead of putting it in. However, two dimes and two fingers = 22. Twenty-two and a redhead equal The Hotel New Hampshire (’80) with John the Dairy High School football player, # 22, and Ronda Ray the forty-year-old waitress who gives him his first blow job. It’s John’s first sex of any kind. Ronda is old enough to be his mother and she seems to enjoy sex. She also likes to get paid for it, though it’s not clear that she always demands money.

The question arises in a scene from The Hotel New Hampshire where Anita Morris as Ronda is dancing with the black former Dairy High football star Junior Jones (Dosey Wright) and watching John dance with Junior’s sister. She says to Junior, "Well, I’ll be. Your sister is a slut." Junior replies, "What about you?" She slaps him – but it isn’t much of a slap by any standard and she makes no effort to break away from him. Junior holds her hand gently to his cheek and before the night is over they are in her bedroom. The audience is not privy to the details but we know enough about Ronda to make an educated guess about some things.

Ronda is old enough to be Junior’s mother as well as John’s, a fact that would stick in the craw of anyone with the initials MF and a violent hatred of sex between black men and white women. That was my biggest clue as to why I had so much trouble separating blonds that are closely associated with mother/son incest like Tessa Richarde and Sally Kirkland from the redheads in the Fuhrman collection.

Apart from playing Sally, The Fuller Brush Girl (’50), Lucille Ball is best known for her role as Lucy Ricardo in the I Love Lucy TV series (’51-’57) with her real life husband Desi Arnaz as her on-screen husband Ricky. Remember Ricky Jr. and Tessa Richarde as Billie in Cat People? Remember what Billie does to "inflate" Irana’s brother after she says, "Let Momma take care of that for you?" Nastassia Kinseki, a.k.a. Susie the bear in The Hotel New Hampshire, is Irana in Cat People. Lucile Ball makes the Ball to Bacall, Ricardo to Richarde, redhead to blond, Hotel New Hampshire to Cat People, mother/son incest circle complete.

"A sucker for a bargain" sounded so little like sex to me the way Lucille Ball said it that I missed it until I reviewed In the Heat of Passion to see exactly how Lee used the cigarette to seduce Charlie Bronson. At some level I must have connected the "sucker for a bargain" line with Lauren Bacall’s "put your lips together and blow." But even when I saw the "Steve" connection in The Dark Corner it seemed forced. Hell, it was forced. Bacall’s line was a deliberate double entendre. You have to impose one on Lucille Ball’s line. I was looking for it and didn’t see it until I noticed that she was smoking a cigarette.

I Love Lucy was sponsored by a cigarette company. So was M Squad with Lee Marvin as Lt. Frank Ballinger. That’s the link between the redheads and the cops with white hair. In Gorky Park you see Lee Marvin as the killer Jack Osborne with a woman he has a sexual obsession with. He is wearing a distinctive cap and dark leather gloves. What makes his cap distinctive is the fact that it is made of Russian Sable. One of his male victims was a redhead, a fact that helped to identify him. The cap is the key to the motive for the Gorky Park murders and the alleged killer’s identity on Bundy. It’s not so much that the hair of the women we’ve been talking about is red (Andy Sipowicz partner John Kelly is a redhead); it’s the fact that their hair sets them apart – like Sipowicz’s thinning brown hair and the hair in the cap on Bundy. The hair in the cap is what identified its owner as O.J. Simpson.

It’s impossible to be conscious of all the brain cell connections you have made in your lifetime in the right order at the same time. When you do something that involves a dense network of them, you’re going to pick up some of this, drop some of that and combine some of this and that no matter how hard you try not to. That’s why memory is so unreliable.

One thing that unites Kathryn Leigh Scott as Sally Dekker and Babs Caltrain in the Police Squad! series with K.T. O’Sullivan as Mimi de Jour and Mimi Coffee is their red wigs. Another thing they have in common is the line they say when Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin extends a pack of open cigarettes to them and asks, "Cigarette?" Both women reply, "Yes, I know." Things like that don’t seem like much until you try to recall from memory all of the things that apply to Mimi de Jour and the things that apply only to Sally Dekker. Invariably they get mixed up with things that apply to the other woman or to Bonnie Britton as Lana Cassales the jealous bomber in that episode who tried to frame her ex-husband for murder.

TV shows like the "Murder – According to Maggie" episode of Murder, She Wrote, "The Captain" episode of Matlock, and the entire Police Squad series are the bricks in the edifice of Mark Fuhrman’s culpability. Movies like Gorky Park and Short Cuts and actors like Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Leslie Nielsen, Andy Griffith and Tim Thomerson, as Burt Rogers, comprise the mortar. The pictures we have of Fuhrman from Laura Hart McKinny, Jarvis Bowers, Joseph Britton, Roderick Hodge, Kathleen Bell, Natalie Singer and Fuhrman’s police psychiatrists all agree with what we heard on the tapes.

The McKinney tapes have Fuhrman boasting of his ability to frame people and fondly recalling "all the niggers we killed" at his old 77^th Precinct. Jarvis Bowers complained of Fuhrman calling him a nigger, putting him in a chokehold and threatening to kill him. Armed robber Joseph Britton won a lawsuit based on his assertion that Fuhrman planted a knife on him after shooting him five times and saying, "Nigger, why won’t you die!" Roderick Hodge testified that Fuhrman harassed him after they bumped into each other and said, "I’m going to get you, nigger." Kathleen Bell testified that Fuhrman told her he found reasons to stop black men with white women and harass them. She said that he wished he could kill all of the "niggers" in the world. Natalie Singer testified that he said, "The only good nigger is a dead nigger."

These independent reports by people from different walks of life using the same word to quote the same man sound nothing like him according to his own words and pictures in his defense. Some of their testimony about Fuhrman is shocking. Some of it is strange, but little of it sounds as though it came from a Hollywood movie script.

When Fuhrman starts talking about what O.J. and Nicole said and did in his presence, what he saw and did on Bundy and Rockingham and what he figured the killer and victims did, it’s a new ballgame. All of a sudden we’re in Movie Land and Television Land. Fuhrman’s contacts with principles in the case like Nicole, O.J. Ron Shipp, Kato Kaelin, Marcia Clark and Margaret York, all have counterparts in the bricks and mortar of the Fuhrman collection. That is, the way he tells the stories they do.

One striking exception to the Movie Land rule is what Natalie Singer quoted Fuhrman as saying about "a good nigger." It involves Clint Eastwood as Bronco Billy in the scene with Tessa Richarde as Mitzi Fritts sitting before her dressing room mirror in her yellow outfit nervously waiting to go on. Mitzi takes a big swig out of the whisky bottle that Bronco Billy gives her to quiet her nerves when Bill McKinny as Lefty LaBow, a roustabout with a metal hook for a right hand, comes in with more unnerving news. He tells Billy that Chief Big Eagle, who does a poisonous snake dance, has been bitten and that he thought he told him to use gofer snakes. When Billy tells him that he did but the man was a proud Indian, LaBow says, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."

That variation of Fuhrman’s racist crack isn’t strictly an exception to the Movie Land rule, in that it was first attributed to U.S. cavalry Gen. Phil Sheridan of Civil War fame and Indian slaughter infamy. But that fact hardly distances it from Mark Fuhrman who called himself "something of a history and military buff" in Murder in Brentwood. In the next paragraph, he defended his collection of Nazi war paraphernalia with an analogy about his collection of "late 19^th century American cavalry items." He wrote that it was like saying his collection of those items meant that he "approved of the slaughter of Indians." Gee Mark, where would anyone get a crazy idea like that?

Are you getting flashes of the U.S. cavalry officer on the elevator in Police Squad!? I am. Depending on what line of thought you’re running on, the next thought on the line might be out of your control. The tracks have already been laid in your brain and your momentum will carry you to the next stop. Fuhrman was trying to show how silly it was to think that the mere fact that he collected these items meant that they were symbolic of his attitudes about race and genocide. It would have been silly to think that about someone who never voiced a racist thought, who never shot, threatened to kill or boasted of killing people of a certain color or ranted about killing all of them on the planet.

We’re talking about someone who did all of those things and didn’t deny telling a woman he’d just met that "the only good nigger is a dead nigger." He said he remembered only that they did not like each other and that he "tried hard to irritate and anger her." When he talked like that to Laura Hart it was because he got a kick out of shocking her with his make-believe persona of a violent, racist cop. When he talked like that to the LAPD psychiatrists it was only because he was stressed out. The shrinks said that he was a narcissist, a whiner, and a con man who had studied the symptoms to play the role, and that he was unstable enough that he should not be allowed to carry gun – but he wasn’t stressed out.

The key issue with Fuhrman’s racist musings, dialogues and rants is not why he talked that way to one person or another, but the fact that he did so with so many people. If he was just adopting the role of a character he invented from the likes of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry and Dennis Franz as Andy Sipowicz with an extra ration of mad-dog racist killer thrown in, why did he choose to play the same character? Why did he choose to play that character when he wasn’t recording with Laura Hart? Why did he do it when he was choking Jarvis Bowers and harassing Roderick Hodge and haranguing Kathleen Bell and needling Natalie Singer and trying to con his way into an early retirement and when he was pumping Joseph Britton full of 9mm bullet holes?

In the "Night Fear" episode of Murder, She Wrote (’91) Fuhrman’s shooting of Britton fuses with his notes and observations about Ron Goldman’s death. It unites three key points: 1) The idea that Goldman was killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. 2) Fuhrman’s note about a possible gunshot wound and 3) His bleeding killer theory. Wings Hauser as college professor Wallace Evans is a trigger-happy former cop who wounds a mugger and accidentally kills the mugger’s victim with the same bullet. To cover his reckless shooting of the man, who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time when he fired at the armed robber, he manipulates the evidence to tell a different story. His evidence tells the detectives that there was an attempted mugging, a struggle in which the victim, a college basketball player, got hold of the mugger’s knife, cut him with it and the mugger shot him.

Note how little it takes to turn "mugger" into "nigger" (n igger) with a little White Out. Small adjustments like these make a big difference. Keep your eyes open for victim/killer role reversals between "Night Fear" and the Bundy murders. Note that Fuhrman’s list of crucial evidence included an inexplicable lie that two pizza menus were on Nicole’s coffee table before one of them ended up under her body. He guessed that she was planning to order a meal for the restaurant waiter victim Ron Goldman. Remember that Fuhrman was a gifted basketball player and that Bill Hall, a detective from the Officer-Involved Shootings Section of the Robbery/Homicide Division told white-haired detective Philip Vannatter that he wanted to recruit him for his team. Two of Fuhrman’s three favorite athletes where basketball players who played on the 1992 Winter Olympics basketball team with number 32, Magic Johnson. Because Johnson was diagnosed as having the virus that causes AIDS, his blood was a controversial issue in his selection to the team.

Mrs. Jessica Fletcher learns the truth about the basketball player’s death in "Night Fear" when she sits with Bobby Hosea as a, black cop named Kevin Bryce over a coffee table and goes over the autopsy report. The mugger wore gloves but she notices that the victim’s fingerprints that should be on the knife aren’t there and follows the blood trail of the mugger to a student working his way through school as a cafeteria busboy. He claimed he was shot across town in a drive-by on the same night the basketball player was shot to death. The police found blood in his car. Bryce learned that his blood sample taken from the hospital matched the blood in the car and on the murder scene. Jessica deduces that Dr. Evans stumbled upon the mugging in progress and shot the mugger, but the bullet went straight though him and killed the basketball player. She and Kevin confront the student who has his left arm in a sling and swears he didn’t commit the murder. Mrs. Fletcher (MF) tells him that she believes him but she doubts that a jury will unless he identifies the man who shot him.

Perhaps you saw that "Night Fear" has a tiny reasoning flaw. Evans is no fool. He had the presence of mind to use the mugger’s dropped knife to create a false blood trail to an imaginary killer with the illusion that he had been cut. The fact that the mugger wore gloves and the basketball player didn’t was tailor-made for the story he wanted the blood on the knife to tell. Yet it did not occur to him to put the knife in the hand of the victim who was supposed to have used it against his attacker. Not likely.

Evens had to know that the surest way to give detectives the impression that the victim used the knife was to put it in his hand. Assuming he dropped it, it still would have had his fingerprints on it. It is unlikely that a telltale clue like that would have escaped the attention of a professor of criminology – especially in a crisis situation – anymore than it escaped the attention of Mrs. Fletcher. All he had to do was dispose of the gun and he was in the clear.

These points could not have escaped Mark Fuhrman’s attention, either. He shot Britton, the mugger, and planted his knife near his hand in 1987. Within a few months of the shooting Fuhrman got caught with his fingerprints all over the locker of Off. Andy Purdy (Fuhrman called him James Purdy) after someone painted a swastika there. The "Night Fears" episode of Murder, She Wrote aired on 9/22/1991 with Fuhrman as sensitive as anyone could be to the opportunities and pitfalls associated with guns, knives, fingerprints and planted evidence on a crime scene.

You see some of these lessons reflected in what does and doesn’t appear in the Simpson-Goldman murders, a textbook profile of the killer being one of the lessons learned. Jessica Fletcher finds the book on abnormal psychology in Dr. Evans’ desk drawer that some of the clues in the basketball player’s death came from. Dr. Evans says that he used the book to work up a profile of the killer based on the clues he left. Jessica knows better and tells him that he could have used it to do just the opposite – "To create a series of clues that would seem to lead to a criminal personality."

The killer in "Night Fears" leaves behind so many clues that the police are incapable of putting together the ones that matter. As it was with Joseph Britton, the planted knife did, indeed, belong to the mugger, but it had nothing to do with the reason for the shooting. Wallace dipped it in the mugger’s blood, knowing that the different blood types on the murder scene were a problem for him, and turned that problem to his advantage by giving the detectives a false impression that the mugger had been cut in a struggle with his victim.

When Joseph Britton saw that he was busted, he dropped his knife and ran. After Fuhrman and his partners caught up with him in a parking lot and shot him six times in the chest and shoulder (Fuhrman hit him five times), Fuhrman recovered the knife and put it next to his hand to make it appear that they shot him in self-defense. Witnesses told the whole story and Britton, an armed robber sitting in jail where he belonged, got a hundred thousand dollars from the County of Los Angeles to settle out of court a few weeks before O.J. was scheduled to go on trial for murder.

I promised that I would get back to Charles Bronson and Lee Remick in Telefon…and I will…in the next chapter….as soon as I finish up with Lucile Ball and Mark Stevens in The Dark Corner. But before I do that, one big point from Iago in Brentwood and a few more points from In the Heat of Passion and "Night Fears" have to be made.

In Iago I said that publicity for Mark Fuhrman was the overriding reason that Nicole and Ron were picked as victims and why they died the way they did. In the Heat of Passion has Charlie Bronson trying to get recognized as a serious actor. After appearing in the role of the serial rapist in the crime reenactment show Crime Busters, some patrons of a bar recognize him and are about to attack him when the one-eyed bartender steps in and saves him. Charlie tells the bartender about another actor on a similar show who was chased and beaten by an angry mob who had the same trouble his patrons had in separating what they saw on TV from reality. The bartender asks why his does it. Charlie says, "Exposure."

When Lee frames Charlie with his general description his DNA, and his "Indiana" (Larry Bird) cigarette lighter before she shoots him in the head, everything about him gets a guilty interpretation. When police find that he got a parking ticket outside of the office where Lee worked, they add "stalker" to the list of characteristics he was supposed to have had. The next time you see In the Heat of Passion the thing that will grab you about Bronson’s trip to Dr. Lee Adams’ office is the white truck parked like O.J. parked his Bronco on Rockingham. You will remember the gloves and the knit cap. Why is it so easy for people to picture O.J. wearing them? Because they saw him wearing them as Nordberg in The Naked Gun and as a football color commentator on TV.

If you have read Iago in Brentwood: How Mark Fuhrman Got Away With Murder, this In the Heat of Passion exchange with the producer of Crime Busters and the lead homicide detective will ring some chimes…

Producer: "Something changed."

Detective: "Sure, he killed somebody."

Producer: "Boy, I never would have guessed it. But you know, it makes perfectly good sense to me now. It’s like one of those crackpots that try to shoot a President just to get on TV. Some people will do anything for fame."

Lee was able to frame Charlie by taking the reputation of a criminal that everyone knew and giving it a name and face. She took a violent criminal and created the illusion that he hand escalated from rape to murder. Fuhrman got exposure for himself by going Lee one better. He matched a famous name and face with the profile of a well-known kind of criminal, a spouse abuser whose abuse eventually escalated to murder. Killing a famous person is a guarantee of putting yourself in the media spotlight. But it’s like putting dynamite in your pants to blow off the foot of somebody who’s kicking you in the ass. The only way to profit from an assassination is to do it to a famous person’s image rather than the person himself. In the final analysis it’s the "marquee value" of the name you associate your name with that’s going to make you a celebrity.

Jessica Fletcher’s marquee value in "Night Fear" is why her friend Dr. Raymond Auerback invited her to teach criminology at his college in New York. She doesn’t know this but Dr. Wallace Evans, who taught the previous class, does know. He feels that he is Jessica’s superior in the real world of criminology and offers to use a recent rash of campus muggings as a test case for their respective talents. Mrs. Fletcher declines, even when the mugger puts one of Jessica’s students in the hospital. The student is Julie St. Claire who played the waitress in Prey of the Chameleon. She begs Jessica to take that case but she still refuses and soon regrets her decision when it appears that the mugger has taken the next escalation step by killing the basketball player.

The illusion of escalating violence is a common thread running through In the Heat of Passion, "Night Fears," The Dark Corner and the Simpson-Goldman murders. In each instance we see it in the invention of a personality that one of the victims helps the killer to create.

In The Heat of Passion, gives us a killer who plays the part of a victim and an actor as a murder victim who is made to look like a rapist and a killer. Lee pretended that she had never seen Charlie Bronson in his role as the rapist and knew nothing about his acting career. He realizes in the last two minutes of his life that she studied him closely and chose him partly because of his appearance on Crime Busters when he plays a videotape in her VCR and sees himself as the rapist on the show holding a knife to a woman’s throat.

Dr. Evans in "Night Fears" lets the evidence he planted tell its own story as far as it can and fills in the gaps with his theories. For everyone else the evidence is confusing. In the wake of the killing, a strange poem about a "Sword of Justice" appears on a campus wall at the murder scene and in a folded letter sent to Dr. Evans and Mrs. Fletcher. Students begin to receive threatening phone calls. While the blood Evans planted on the knife has the police looking for someone who was cut around the time of the murders, in a struggle with his victim, he creates the profile of a serial killer who will vanish within seventy-two hours. He knows, of course, that the killer will disappear because he never existed. The spouse-abuser that Fuhrman descried as O.J. Simpson when he was boasting about his affair with Nicole in 1992 didn’t exist, either.

Some of the greatest lines from The Dark Corner with Mark Stevens as Brad and Lucille Ball as Kathleen come when she discovers a dead man in his room. Kathleen looks to Brad who says, "Don’t crowd me. I haven’t got the answers but they are laid out like road markers running right up my alley…Don’t give me that law and justice routine. The cops operate on facts and the facts are phony from here to the death cell."

The dead man is Tony Jardine, Brad’s former partner in O.J.’s birthplace, San Francisco. Jardine set Brad up to look like a drunk driver who killed a man in a car accident (the baseball bat incident with O.J. banging up his car when he and Nicole had been drinking). A jealous older man creates the illusion that Jardine is trying to kill Brad so that Brad will lose his temper and kill Jardine. Brad only beats him up, but someone calls the police (the ’89 incident). A pattern of escalating violence is thus established when Jardine is lured to Brad’s apartment, Brad is knocked cold (as Nicole was before she was killed) and Jardine is killed by a crushing blow to the head (the kind of blow that knocked Nicole out) with a bronze fireplace poker.

Fuhrman said he found a fingerprint on the "brass" (bronze) lock of Nicole’s rear gate. The killer wrapped Brad’s hands around the bronze poker while he was unconscious. Fuhrman said the fingerprint disappeared. Kathleen cleaned the poker off. Remember Fuhrman noting the package with O.J.’s name on it and the name of his secretary "Cathy" (Kathy). It will all come back to you when you see Lucille Ball as Brad’s secretary Kathleen opening a package of nylons from Brad. Having seen the significance of the distinctive hair on her head you will see much more when she tells Brad, "You forgot your hat."

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