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Chapter 3

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Peter Falk

If you have wondered, as I have, why Fuhrman found an excuse to write Sgt. Rossi's name at the top of his notes instead of his own, Castle Keep could be the answer. In this movie one-eyed Peter Falk is Sgt. Rossi. Eyeglasses played a vital part in the Bundy murder investigation. Remember the fingerprint that world-renowned forensics expert Dr. Henry Lee found on one of the lenses that later vanished? Peter Falk wears a glass eye to replace the real one he lost as a toddler. Falconer/Falk. One glass eye/one missing eyeglass. Does that suggest that the killer had prior and future knowledge of the glasses?

You bet it does.

On June 12, 1994 Mark Fuhrman was nearing the end of his career. He and Peter Falk were both men of rare intelligence and wide-ranging skills. Both where artists. Falk landed the role of a professional assassin in Murder Inc. ('60) that made him a star early in his career. The movie begins with Falk and another man laying in wait for their victim at his apartment. When he arrives, Falk kills him with a pocketknife.

Peter Falk is best known as Lt. Frank Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department. Columbo is a short, rumpled LAPD homicide detective who looks more like a slow-witted vagrant than the super sleuth he is. He wears a badly wrinkled raincoat and ratty Hushpuppy shoes. He appears on the surface to be the opposite of tall, nattily attired Mark Fuhrman. But like Fuhrman, he drives an old, unpopular car that few people would be able to identify. Like Fuhrman he pays close attention to details.

Like Andy Griffith's Ben Matlock, some of Columbo's most brilliant crime-solving adventures begin with a call in the middle of the night that rouse him from sleep. Invariably the bad guy - always rich and usually famous - would measure Columbo's brainpower according to his appearance and give himself away by "helping" the detective with "little things" about the evidence that Columbo said bothered him. Fuhrman was the first or the only detective on Bundy and Rockingham who was bothered by little things Columbo would have noticed that "proved" O.J.'s guilt.

One indication that Fuhrman understood the Columbo formula well came out in O.J.'s criminal trial. Johnny Cochran made the mistake of comparing the evidence against O.J. to something more fantastic than the writers of Columbo would ever dream up. The people responsible for the Columbo series fired back a blistering letter that ridiculed the defense contention that the killer could have been anyone but O.J. That response was consistent with the dynamics of the show.

The kinds of clues Fuhrman found were just what Columbo would have found. Evidence of a drug hit that the defense tried to sell was the kind of evidence the real killers in Columbo's cases left behind to fool the police. Columbo's genius was his ability to do what Fuhrman appeared to do; to see though those false clues and to nail the rich, charming, famous, two-faced, arrogant killer every time. O.J. was rich, charming and famous. His denials of the obvious evidence against him made him appear to be two-faced and arrogant. Columbo's kind of killer.

In Diagnosis Murder, the 1968 pilot episode of the Columbo series, Gene Berry as a killer psychiatrist catches on to Columbo's act. He tells him that he pretends to be something he isn't. He calls him "a textbook case of compensation." He says, "You don't think you can get by on looks or polish so you turn a defect into a virtue. You take people by surprise. They underestimate you. And that's where you trip them up." That act was another ingredient in the Columbo formula.

Surprisingly few people ever caught on to the fact that Fuhrman did the same thing with the defects in his character and personality. He was a compulsive braggart who sometimes said more than he intended to. He compensated by being a liar who could muddy the picture in mid-sentence with a well-chosen invention or two, a trait he no doubt attributed to his absentee father Ralph. If Fuhrman was the Bundy killer and the "doc" hypothesis I stated in The Smoking Gun is correct in its application to O.J. you would expect to see in Diagnosis Murder a closer fit to O.J., Fuhrman and the doctor. You would expect to see some of what Fuhrman took from each character for composite pictures of the Bundy killer, the detective who solved the crime (himself) and the killer he described (O.J.). You would expect to see a connection of some kind to the psychiatrists Fuhrman thought he could fool in the early 1980s.

You won't be disappointed on any of those counts.

In 1981 and '82 Mark Fuhrman was shooting for a disability discharge from the LAPD. He told police psychiatrists that he would have killed his second wife Janet Hackett and the man she was cheating with if he had caught them. In Diagnosis Murder, the psychiatrist is the one who does the cheating, but only as an expedient in his carefully thought out plan to murder his wife. Whether or not Fuhrman was lying about his affair with Nicole in '92, the fact remains that he was married to his third wife Caroline at the time and he was telling a story of cheating on her. It's the story that counts and the fact that Denise Brown could have posed as her sister Nicole with a blond wig and the suggestion that she was Nicole.

The killer in Diagnosis Murder needs the other woman to pose as his wife to help him establish an alibi. Her name his Joan Hudson. She arrives at the murder scene with the right wig, the right shoes, the right dress and the right glasses. When the doctor gives her the right leather gloves to complete the wardrobe he is sure she will pass for his wife. She is afraid that she won't because she knows that she doesn't look anything like the woman except for her general height and build. The doctor is unconcerned. He tells her, "People see what they expect to see. It's the principle of association. You're dressed like Carol, you're traveling with me. That means you are my wife."

The principle is sound. It's why most of us find it so hard to proofread or own writing. We know what's supposed to be there so we see it whether it's there or not. The same would apply to Fuhrman's pea green Scout and O.J.'s white Bronco or the killers Bruno Magli Lorenzos and the Brand X shoes that O.J. wore to the recital. This is the principle Fuhrman used when he said that O.J.'s Bronco was parked at an odd angle. That's how most people saw it although the actual angle was only 2 degrees.

Columbo cleverly gets the doctor to draw a profile of himself as the killer by seeking his help. Columbo says, "I'm not talking about your average hothead - you know, the guy who pops somebody over the noggin with a bottle. What I mean is a kind of man that figures everything out in advance, who thinks everything through step by step. What can you tell me about that kind of man, doctor?"

Gene Berry, as the doctor in Diagnosis Murder sipping from a glass of presumably expensive whisky, (as Fuhrman said he favored) replies, "We are talking about a man who commits a crime. Not the garden-variety barroom brawl; an elaborate, intellectual project." Columbo's ears perk up. The doctor continues. "What do we know about this man. Obviously he is not impulsive. He plans, he calculates. He minimizes risks. He is oriented by his mind, not by his emotions, and he is probably well-educated, too." Columbo interjects, "Like maybe a professional," The doctor replies, "Like maybe. At any rate, an orderly man with an eye for detail…."

It's hard to draw a more accurate profile of Mark Fuhrman unless you toss in the racist component of his personality and his love of danger and violence. When LAPD as well as State and Federal Justice Department investigators looked into the claims that Fuhrman made of police brutality and evidence planting they found inconsistencies that put him in the clear. They ignored missing records and gave no consideration to the possibility that he created those inconsistencies on purpose. The most distressing aspect of the investigations is the extent to which they miss the cinematic clichés and other formulaic aspects of what Fuhrman did to deceive them. It didn't take much and you'll find all of it in the movies.

In the early '90s I attended a creativity lecture by Syd Mead, the acclaimed futurist and graphics designer for Blade Runner ('83), Aliens ('86) and Time Cop ('94). Mead worked for Ford Motor Company in the 1960s as a car designer. He was well liked by the people who knew him then and well received by all of us that crowded into the Ford Design Center showroom in Dearborn to see him.

I was sitting with Cal Morrison, the African-American ex-marine who gave me the title for The Invisible Warriors. He and I had often discussed the power of images used against African-Americans since the African slave trade and against the American Armed Forces in Vietnam. This was a great opportunity for us to get an insider's view of the process.

Mead used the word "stereotype" to tell us that we see the same props, costumes, action, actors and characters again and again on film and television because the studio executives insist on them (Griffin Dunn in Short Cuts). He talked about the exploding car and a few other clichés that everyone in the audience recognized immediately. The revelation hit Calvin and me like a Hollywood sock in the jaw-sound effects and all. In real life a sock in the jaw doesn't sound like that, but if you don't hear it in a movie when you see a guy being hit in the jaw you won't feel that he was hit especially hard.

Stereotypes and clichés are proven ways of getting long, complex messages across quickly and uncritically. That's one reason most winning screenplay formulas include them. One look and you are already primed for what comes next. You see the punch being thrown; you know how it's going to sound when it lands. You know how it's "supposed to" sound. If you don't get what you expect under the "appropriate" circumstances what you do get will impress you as being "wrong." Sure, a winning script has to have some new twists. Hollywood producers routinely reject pitches with key elements they recognize as being overused or out of date along with the ones that have too many elements they don't recognize. But what, exactly, is the formula for selling a winner? We know one thing for sure; first you have to sell yourself.

When Mark Fuhrman defended his use of the n-word by saying that he was playing the role of a composite character he added that he knew "enough about Hollywood to understand that producers didn't want a nice, warm and fuzzy movie about good cops…." He ran off a long list of movies and characters that he said he was trying to emulate and blend into one. He singled out Jack Webb's famous character Joe Friday as the kind of character the producers didn't want to see, and therefore, the kind of character he did not want to emulate. Yet, he wrote his own 21464 badge number at the top of his super-neat Bundy crime scene notes in such a way that it is easy to read the first three numbers as Joe Friday's famous 714.

In Fuhrman's book Murder in Brentwood, his name and the last two digits of his badge number at the top of his notes look like different people wrote them. He did not, in fact, include his name in the original and it appears to have been written in haste as though he made a split second decision before his deadline to add it. "H" in "Fuhrman" looks like his "A" in the rest of the two-page document. You have to ignore part of it to see what's supposed to be there the way you ignore part of his 2 to see a 7. The "A" in "Fuhrman" is unique. His 6 looks as though it was written twice in the same space. His 4 appears to have a loop in it. If you read the loops in the last two digits you can see three numbers, 666. You can't do anything of the sort with any of the numbers in the notes themselves because they are all written so neatly. Therefore, 666 had to mean something as special to him as Joe Friday's badge 714. Could it have had to do with the elusive formula for Hollywood success?

Let's start with the name Andy, as in the NYPD Blue character Andy Sipowicz that Mark Fuhrman said he was pretending to act like, and Fuhrman's initials MF. Star of TV soap opera Payton Place ('64-'69) Mia Farrow (MF) is Rosemary in Rosemary's Baby (1967). She names her baby Andy. Peter Falk's good friend John Cassiveties is her husband Guy, an actor who struggles in his career until he throws in with a bunch of Satan-worshiping witches. With the help of a deal he makes with the Devil, a necktie he cons from a rival and a leather glove he steals from a friend, he gets everything he desires. Rosemary's baby is the son of Satan. 6 is the number of the Devil. 666 is the number of the anti-Christ as well as the unholy trinity that includes the Devil and the false prophet. The witches name Rosemary's baby Adrian.

Some of that information is in the Bible's book of Revelation, Chapter 13, which has much to say about the power of images and the power of the anti-Christ to create them. Could Fuhrman have seen himself as the anti-Christ as he was preparing his notes? I think so. Fuhrman wrote his 17 notes on the 13th of June. The murders occurred on the 12th. No month has 66 days so the best you can do to get two more sixes out of June is June 12, which is to say, 6 + 6 + 6. If you put them in line they say 666. If you add them up they make 18. The Book of Revelation has 22 chapters. Chapter 13 has 18 verses.

If Fuhrman did see himself as the anti-Christ while he was writing and editing his notes, he had good reasons to see his badge number as his 18th verse. He could not have written it as number 18 and he did not leave enough room on his last page to enter it discretely on the bottom. The perfect spacing of the notes on both pages is disrupted only by the badge number crammed on the top, right edge of page one. Those two things, together with the scrawled last two digits, suggests that he dashed it off in a last minute decision on the murder scene the way he added his name to his notes in his book. Baseless speculation? I think not…. Revelation, Chapter 13, Verse 18: "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six." 666.

The number 666 is the lynchpin for everything bad that happens in The Omen ('76), starring Gregory Peck as Robert Thorn, Lee Remick as Kathy Thorn and David Warner as Keith Jennings. Billie Whitelaw is the anti-Christ's nanny Mrs. Baylock. In The Omen, his name is Damien. His true mother was a jackal. His true father is the Devil. He is born on the 6th day of the 6th month at 6:a.m. A birthmark in his scalp forms the numbers 666. Robert Thorn's discovery of that birthmark leads him to a life and death struggle with the nanny. Mrs. Baylock had murdered his wife Kathy by tossing her from the window of her hospital room through the roof of an ambulance several stories below. Her lifeless body lay face up in the back of the vehicle.

Kathy, face up in the back of an ambulance…. Wasn't that Fuhrman's first clue that the Bronco he said was parked so oddly belonged to O.J., the package with the label face up in the back that said, "Orenthal Enterprises, Attention Cathy"? Cathy certainly got Mark Fuhrman's attention. What else do you suppose was going on in his mind when he "discovered" the shovel and the thick-gage plastic sheeting in the Bronco as well as the package and, of course, the blood? When we get to Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks you'll see.

Here you're going to see so many similarities between scenes from TV and the movies and the evidence associated with Fuhrman in the Bundy killings that a real connection between them is the only plausible explanation. You can see hundreds of them in Iago and The Smoking Gun…Movie Guide alone. You can see the formula Mark Fuhrman used to write his first best selling book in the names, sets, props, costumes, characters and scenarios from film and television that found their way into the Bundy murders and Fuhrman's part in the investigation. A short list of ingredients in the Fuhrman formula includes:
· A car or truck parked at an extreme angle to the curb.
· A killer in leather gloves, rubber gloves or bloody gloves.
· An incriminating personal item left behind by a killer.
· A man wearing women's shoes or a woman wearing men's shoes.
· A clear foot impression, shoe impression or imprint linked to blood.
· A life or death struggle involving two men and a woman.
· A bleeding killer.
· A brilliant detective who finds the crucial clues and cracks the case.
· A frame-up by a brilliant killer.
· Pizza

Some of the Fuhrman-TV-movie connections might seem weak to you at first or you may not see where they connect at all. The reason lies less in the solidity of the connections than in how I presented them to you or in how well prepared you are to see them. For instance, the Bruno Magli brand name has the number of links it does to the movies because of how it sounds, not how it is spelled. In Italian, the "g" preceding the "l" is silent. The "a" and the "i" in Magli have the same sound as the "o" and the "y" in Molly. Therefore Magli has the same sound as "Molly."

In the Fuhrman movie collection a woman named Molly or the actress playing her is invariably linked to Fuhrman, the bloody shoeprints or other major elements of the murder scene where the shoeprints were found. I thought I'd found an exception with Blythe Danner as the title character in Loving Molly until I saw her naked breasts in an outdoor scene with Anthony Perkins, a.k.a. Norman Bates, the man who wore the woman's shoes in Psycho. This was in 1972, before breast implant surgery gave women like Nicole Simpson breasts like Blythe Danner. Not only did Fuhrman boast at cop bars of his intimate affair with Nicole and his "up close and personal" knowledge of her "boob job." He made the same boasts using the same words at police picnics. When I saw Perkins and Danner in that outside setting I didn't know I was going to see her bare breasts. I did think it was an ideal place for a picnic. Anybody would.

We're No Angels ('89) features Jennifer Jason Lee's former boyfriend Bruno Kirby as a deputy sheriff. It has Bruce (Bruno) Willis' former wife Demi Moore as Molly. Demi Moore is Molly in Ghost ('90). We're No Angels has Robert DeNiro, a.k.a. Max Cady and Lou Cypher, a.k.a. Lucifer, who wore the women's shoes in Cape Fear and Angel Heart. In We're No Angels he is an escaped convict posing as a priest. His State Penitentiary shoes play a major role in the movie.

Leslie Ann Warren is Molly the bag lady in Life Stinks ('91) who gives Mel Brooks a pair of men's shoes when his are stolen by a couple of thieves. She is a divorced mother in a TV movie call A Fight for Jenny, whose daughter gets taken away from her after she becomes involved in a romance with a black carpenter named David. Jenny's favorite food is pizza. A Fight for Jenny also features a birthday, another ingredient in the Fuhrman formula often linked to the name Jennifer, as in Jennifer Jason Leigh who has the same birthday as Mark Fuhrman. Phillip Michael Thomas of Miami Vice - in which Bruce (Bruno) Willis, a.k.a. David Addison of Moonlighting made his first television appearance - is David. Phillip Michael Thomas is a ghost in an episode of the TV series Swamp Thing.

In the preceding paragraph you can see how several elements in Mark Fuhrman's association with the Bundy murders are associated to each other. You can see why the mind of a white supremacist and aspiring screenwriter loaded with these associated ideas would make a big deal out of Bruno Magli shoes, a pizza menu and everything associated with them. You don't see those kinds of associations in the books by anyone connected to the Bundy murders except Mark Fuhrman.

When I was working on Iago I discovered several features of the autopsy report and the Bundy crime scene photographs which led me to conclude that the killer leaped from behind a tree and attacked Ron and Nicole from behind. Part of that analysis came from the colored ink drawings in Mark Fuhrman's book Murder in Brentwood. The colors he used for two of the flowers were the same as the colors he used for the skin in his cutout drawing of Ron Goldman's body, which, for reasons unknown showed the ribcage and the femoral arteries. Ron's bones were not touched and the femoral artery was not cut. However a deep stab wound in his upper left thigh combined with other indications of a military-style assault told me that the killer had military training. It told me that he went for a kill with that thrust before catching himself and pulling the blade straight out instead of finishing it off the way a soldier would have.

In the hand-to-hand combat phase of my Army basic training I was taught to hold a knife blade up the way the killer held the knife that made the wound in Ron's thigh. The Army also taught me something about the femoral artery that most people don't know and would never think of in the heat mortal combat. An attack to the upper inside of the thigh where the artery lies closest to the skin can be as deadly as an attack to the throat because of the pump and flow of blood is the same. Sever an artery anywhere in the body and your victim will bleed to death without immediate medical attention.

A sure tip-off that the killer had the kind of training I had would have been if he had twisted the blade and pulled it out with a slashing motion to maximize the chance of cutting the artery. The fact that the sharp edge of the blade was properly oriented for the finishing slash is what convinced me that the killer went for the kill automatically as the opportunity presented itself. It is what you would do if you had been drilling in the technique. All such techniques are taught in the American Armed Forces strictly for familiarization. Only when a mission has been assigned that calls for it does the drilling begin so that the soldier - or marine - will act appropriately without having to think about it. That is what it appeared to me that the Bundy killer did with Ron Goldman.

It bears repeating that Mark Fuhrman's descriptions of the victims' and the killer's actions before, during and after the attack showed no imagination. Just about everything he said could be linked to a movie or a television show. By the same token, just about everything the evidence shows that the victims and the killer must have actually done can also be traced to a movie or television show linked to Fuhrman.

Before Ray Wise as Dr. Alec Holland turns into Swamp Thing ('80), he takes Adrienne Barbeau as Alice Cable on a "cook's tour" of the swamp and picks a bunch of purple flowers. I first saw the scene with an accidental color shift on my TV screen that gave the flowers the same hues as two flowers in Fuhrman's book. Those colors match Goldman's skin in Fuhrman's ribcage/artery cutaway drawing. They're in a photo featuring a corner of Nicole's bloody walkway, a sprawling green plant, a bunch of purple flowers, a tiny rag doll and a poem on a white sheet of paper propped up like a tombstone between the fence and the short edge of a rectangular tile. The poem appears to be signed by an adult who is writing for two children, "Adam & Ali__" The last letters of the last name are unreadable. Now check out what Alec says to Alice Cable after picking the flowers. He says, "Take a look into your own body, one of God's most magnificent creations and what do you see: straight lines, and deodorant and chrome and Formica? No, no, no. You see blood and bone, pump and flow and a million messy miracles."

Nicole was knocked unconscious. According to Mark Fuhrman she came to before she was killed. Her body was positioned on her left side with her knees drawn up. Remember Fuhrman's story about the pizza menu under her left leg? In the Swamp Thing scene where Dr. Holland is transformed into a green man/plant creature, Alice Cable gets knocked to the ground and lays unconscious on her left side. When she comes to, she notices that a notebooks containing a valuable formula somehow ends up under her left leg. Its notebook number 7. Fuhrman's note number seven matches the "tombstone" poem in his creepy death scene photo. It's the note about the two children sleeping upstairs. When you think about it, the recipe for a pizza like Tombstone is a valuable formula. If you're not thinking about it now, you will be before we're done. We're a long way from being done with Swamp Thing.

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