Go to
Chapter 13

Table of Contents

 When a man and a woman look at each other in a way that say’s “I think you’re hot,” it is often no more than a harmless, mutual, ego massage. But when the man is a black stallion and the woman is a Southern bell in a white’s only gambling establishment, you know that the man is betting his life. Jim Brown and Stella Stevens as Ann give each other that look in Slaughter as you hear the roulette wheel in the background whirling and bouncing the money marble from slot to slot (Hitchcock could have really done something with that). The jealousy oozing through the pours of Rip Torn as Ann’s racist boyfriend Nick tells you to expect a violent showdown between the men. You knew what was coming when Nick asked Ann what she was looking at and she said, “A handsome man.” Wrong answer for a guy like Nick.

 The action in Slaughter is driven by the nature of the main characters and the car that explodes in the first scene taking pieces of Slaughter’s parents with it. Then, of course, there’s the title of the movie and the title song that shouts, “He’s big, black and bold…” We learn right away that he is a former Special Forces action hero. Shake well, and what have you got? You’ve got interracial sex and plenty of violence motivated by racism, jealousy and revenge. There’s a story in there somewhere about old and new Mafia types, covert federal operations and a computer (a huge, clumsy, rare and expensive thing in 1972) that the bad guys are using to move money around. So ambition becomes part of the mix.

Slaughter is the kind of movie that critics usually pan from force of habit but audiences often enjoy. The filmmakers used what freedom there was in the blacksploitation formula to add a real love story. You know it’s love by the first look that Ann gives Slaughter, which tells you in retrospect about her feelings toward him all along, and a look at the end of their second time in bed that tells you how surprised he is at his feelings for her. The romantic song overlaying the second sex scene is also a big hint. These are things that men or women of any color can relate to. Nevertheless, they are things I surely would have missed if the look of love on the faces of Jim Brown and Stella Stevens hadn’t reminded me of what led me to Slaughter in the first place.

I was watching Shannon Tweed and Andrew Stevens in a steamy sex scene in Night Eyes 3 when I was startled by how much Tweed looked like Stella Stevens at the same age from a certain perspective. This was an incest link that I didn’t expect. Perhaps I should have….

 Starting with Lauren Bacall’s immortal line, “You know how to whistle don’t you Steve,” in To Have and Have Not, I was looking for fellatio links to the name Steve. I was already looking for those links to actresses who played Mike Hammer’s secretary Velda. The only way you can follow fellatio links is from your memory of having seen them in another context. But the way you look for one in a movie you have yet to see is to follow the name of a performer or a character that you know is associated with the act along with a supporting theme.

 A supporting theme is a narrowly defined role or activity that you can reasonably expect to see in a series of movies if Mark Fuhrman saw them and behaved accordingly. An actress who played Mike Hammer’s secretary Velda is a good example. It gives you a short list of actresses and all the moves and TV shows they appeared in before June 12, 1994. You check out the available titles and fast-forward to the places where you see some potential. A little practice makes this a fairly easy task.

 Ann Sheridan plays Velda in a Mike Hammer movie that I hadn’t seen and couldn’t get. The only movie of hers that I could get was The Thing (51) with her as Nikki, the Antarctic secretary, and Peter Graves’ brother James Arnes as the plant monster. Antarctica gives you a location link to Jim Brown as the Marine captain Leslie Anders in Ice Station Zebra (’68). The name links to Nicole and to Tonya Roberts’ character in Night Eyes give you two “French” connections to Mark Fuhrman. You will spot another “French” connection in the scene where the human defenders douse the plant thing with kerosene and set him ablaze with a flair gun. It starts with Nikki bringing a pot of hot coffee to the airmen and the civilian reporter Scotty. You see Lt. McPhearson licking his thumb and touching it to the sights of his flair gun as Scotty asks him if he knows how to use it. He says, “I saw Gary Cooper in Sergeant York.” He then points the gun in the direction of Nikki Nichols as the monster nears.

Note # 1: Maxine Cooper is Velda in Kiss Me Deadly. She’s the one who warns Mike Hammer to stay away from the window because, “Somebody might blow you a kiss.”

 Note # 2: Margaret York was a lieutenant when Mark Fuhrman had his run-in with her on the eve of the 1986 New Year.

 Note # 3: A pistol is a common symbol for the male genitals.

 In the context of Mark Fuhrman’s history, these are all “French” connections that eventually led me to Forrest Whitaker and Sherilyn Fenn in Diary of a Hit Man.  Along the way I picked up a couple of links to Beverly D’Angilo when the Steve links and birthday links I was following brought me to Steve Martin (Martin Luther King’s birthday) in The Man With Two Brains with his finger in Kathleen Turner’s mouth. The “French” connection along with the name “Beverly” took me to Turner as Beverly Sutphin in Serial Mom on the phone calling her neighbor Dottie a “cocksucker.” Dotty is a nickname for Dorothy. Beverly and Dorothy combined with the maid link I was tracking from Police Squad! and Matlock brought me to Maid to Order (’87) with Allie Sheedy as Jessica and Beverly D’Angilo as her fairy (cocksucker) godmother Stella. Key features of the movie include a character called Nick, a limousine pickup, Isotoner gloves, distinctive shoes, a maid from El Salvador and a birthday that gets magically undone by her father’s wish that she’d never been born. Alley Sheedy’s birthday is June 12.

 It may seem to you that I am beginning to wander far afield from the gambling theme of this chapter and the incest link with Shannon Tweed and Andrew Stevens in Night Eyes 3. You will see shortly — if you haven’t, already — that a planed murder and frame-up is a game of chance. And you will see why it took all of these steps to put me in a position to see the incest connection in Night Eyes 3.

 This point is crucial to understanding what makes this book and the one that preceded it valid exercises in plotting the path of ideas from Mark Fuhrman’s brain to the crime scenes on Bundy and Rockingham. We cannot simply assume that similarities between the movies, Fuhrman’s interest in them, and the role he played in the Bundy Drive murders have a causal relationship. We have to show how one idea leads to another in a way that’s not only possible but highly probable in light of what we know about the ideas he said he took from the movies and the evidence that supports what he said. We know that he got ideas from the movies. The question is, do we know enough about him as a man, a detective and an aspiring screenwriter to figure out which ones? The answer is, yes.

 We have a good baseline of information from various sources about the way Fuhrman processed information. We have the style and the language in which he expressed his thoughts in different contexts. We know his sports heroes and the sports metaphors he liked to use. We know that he had ambitions of becoming a technical advisor on the screenplay he was working on with Laura Hart. We have all of that in his first book (’97) and his LAPD psychiatric evaluation (’82). We have more of it in his O.J. trial testimony (’94, ’95) and his multiple direct and indirect associations with the Simpsons (’84, ’86, ’89, ’92 and ’94). We have still more from the testimony of Kathleen Bell, Natalie Singer and Laura Hart McKinney. We have the tapes themselves. We have a list of movies, books he noted that were made into moves, television shows, video rental tapes in general, writers and characters from film and TV that he made explicit and implied references to in Murder in Brentwood.

 That vast database includes Fuhrman’s specific reference to a video of Ghost that was in O.J.’s VCR on the 13^th along with Fuhrman’s synopsis of Ghost that summarizes Othello, instead. Accident or not, that observation tells you what was in Fuhrman’s head when he made it. It tells you what he saw and what he wanted you to see. It tells you how he manipulated evidence with his mind (through the power of suggestion) and probably where he got the idea to do it. Vincent Schiavelli is the ghost on the train who teaches Sam how to move things with his mind so he can protect Molly from the man who shot him. In the “Next Stop Murder” episode of Moonlighting you will recognize Schiavelli as Rodney, the technical adviser on the “murder train.” Rodney is the brains behind a famous murder-mystery writer’s success.  He is also an ambitious writer who stabs the famous writer to death and frames an innocent woman.

In “The Gambler” episode of Matlock with Dick Gather as Bobby, Bruce Weitz as Jim and Marg Helgenberge as Laura, Vincent Schiavelli is a bouncer in a Los Vegas casino. He is a former boxer who was paid to take dives for big-money gambling concerns. When Dick Gather as Bobby, a famous entertainer with a reputation for beating up women, murders Laura in a jealous rage, Schiavelli’s character has to cover up for him. Jim is an Atlanta detective who fell in love with Laura and followed her to Los Vegas where he saw her “blowing” a ton of money at the roulette table. Her real name is Victoria. She launders money for the Mob. Jim isn’t supposed to be in the casino. Bobby apparently thinks that Laura/Veronica belongs to him.

 A point of interest here is the show tune that Bobby sings on tape. He sings “Luck Be a Lady.” The lines that will grab you are these: “A lady doesn’t leave her escort. It isn’t fair. It isn’t nice. A lady doesn’t wander all over the room blowing on some other guy’s dice.” Another point of interest is the Bruce Weitz link to Stella Stevens. He appeared as an LAPD detective with her in Molly and Gena (’91).  What images come to mind when you put Stella Stevens together with a man in a casino who isn’t supposed to be there and a jealous lover who is? If you pictured Stella Stevens in a yellow dress sitting with Rip Torn as Jim Brown crashes the party in Slaughter, you wouldn’t be alone.

 Notice how these connections seem to come full circle? Watching the second episode of Police Squad! through the prism of “The Gambler” allows you to see something that you couldn’t have seen before. You see Frank Drebin going undercover to break up a crooked fight operation by winning the contract of boxer Buddy Briggs and talking him into refusing to take a dive. Drebin crashes a private poker game with Cooper, Buddy’s manager, who wagers everything he has. When he holds up a pair of dice to stay in the game, naturally, Drebin says, “No dice.” He insists that Cooper put Buddy’s contract on the table. He does. Drebin wins and becomes Buddy’s new manager.

Earlier, I noted that there didn’t seem to be a “French” connection to Tessa Richarde (other than the fact that she is one) in this episode of Police Squad! That’s because my focus was on what you hear O.J. ranting about in the background of the 911 call that Nicole made in ’92 – the year Fuhrman boasted of having a sexual affair with her. I was looking for something that clearly alluded to the kind of sex that O.J. was making an issue of. Richarde had a liquor bottle in her hand just as she did in Bronco Billy. I did not see her put it to her lips, so I didn’t see it as a phallic symbol. This is what I missed: When Buddy opens the door, Marry is standing there propped against the doorjamb with the open liquor bottle in her fist. She staggers in, whirls around, dry heaves and staggers back around. She belches in Buddy’s face. He then says, “Mary, you’ve been drinking, haven’t you?” Now can you see her putting the bottle to her lips?

 In Molly and Gena, Stella Stevens’ whole aim in life is to get drunk and to stay drunk. That is not a “French” connection. But it is a link to Tessa Richarde by way of the bottle in Molly and Gena and the bottle in Police Squad! The bottle plus the roulette wheel and Stevens’ yellow outfit in Slaughter, plus Richarde’s yellow outfit and the wheel that she gets spun around on (what happens to you when you get spun around in circles?) in Bronco Billy. When you look at it that way, the first line spoken by a woman working with Slaughter’s partner after you see Stevens and Brown in bed jumps out at you. She say’s, “By going to that casino, you and Slaughter could have blown the whole operation.”

 When you put all of these links together you get a chain of addictions that includes the kind of predilection for danger that Fuhrman told Laura Hart on tape that he had. Fuhrman told her about the high he got from situations were he was the only white man in a crowd of blacks who wanted to kill him. That’s the flip side of what Brown does when he forces his way into the whites only casino in Slaughter. The short scene with his partner afterwards tells you that Slaughter got a big thrill out of doing it. His partner sees how invigorated he is after miraculously escaping with his life and says, “You’re just plain weird.”

 Mortal danger, like alcohol, sex, cocaine and gambling for money can be addictive. In the Bundy murder case all five of these forms of compulsive behavior seem to be at work. At the time of the killing, O.J. and Nicole showed signs of being sex addicts. Nicole and Ron Goldman had problems with cocaine. To pull off the double-homicide and the framing of O.J. Simpson the killer required the help of Faye Resnick, a cocaine addict and two alcoholics, Ron Shipp and Denise Brown. The killer left behind evidence that he strung out the killings much longer than necessary, which suggests to me that he was intoxicated by the action and the gamble he was taking of getting caught.

There is nothing more intoxicating than gambling with your life. Not everyone can get high that way, but certain personality types are prone to it. I know because I am one of those people. It is a trait that is sometimes mistaken for courage. Courage is an unselfish choice you don’t want to make but you make anyway because it’s a moral imperative. This is genetic. You either have it or you don’t. Most people don’t. Fuhrman does, which is one reason I began to think of him as a murder suspect.

 To commit a savage act of murder knowing that you are going to be in the spotlight when the bodies are discovered requires more than a thrill-seeking gene. It requires an absence of moral inhibitions. Fuhrman talked about killing people the same way he talked about killing animals. He could have become a detective much earlier in his career but chose to remain on the street doing hazardous duty that he told his second wife involved “eliminating” gang members. He told Laura Hart that he killed dope-dealers and pimps, too. Sure enough, a lot of people in these groups died violently during his tour of duty on the streets. It was not unusual for these people to die violently at the hands of others like them, and no one who counts really cared who did it or why. Therefore, no one ever investigated the possibility that Mark Fuhrman might have told Janet Hackett Fuhrman and Laura Hart McKinny the truth about the murders that he said he committed.

 You can say that all of that was just talk. But who talks that way? It has to be somebody who thinks that way.  

 In the 1920s, Albert Fish was arrested in New York City for the murder of a beautiful six-year-old white girl. He chopped her up, cooked the meat and ate it. During questioning, police discovered that he had done the same thing to a three-year-old white boy. Fish looked like a frail, harmless old man so the people who saw him with the children assumed he was their grandfather. The parents of the girl actually handed her over to him, thinking that he was taking her to a birthday party for another little girl. He was caught only because he couldn’t resist writing letters that boasted of what he’d done and one sharp cop took the letters seriously enough to follow up on them. Albert Fish turned out to be the most prolific child killer – that we know of – in American history.

 No one knows for sure how many children Fish killed because he did it over a long period of time and lost count at a hundred or so. There was one other thing, apart from his intelligence and appearance, which aided him in his grisly hobby.  That was his first choice of victims. For most of his cannibalistic career, he chose black children in black communities because he said that he knew the authorities wouldn’t care.

 Fish was right.

 I’m not equating the murder of innocent children with the murder of, pimps, drug-pushers or members of street gangs. The essential fact is that they were people who could have been killed without creating much of an official stir, like the bar owner who gets killed in Farewell My Lovely (’75). The movie is set in 1945 LA. When the LAPD officers arrive on the scene Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, sitting on a pool table in the bar’s back room, says, “There he is fellas, big, black and dead.” He checks his watch. “Thirty five minutes. Not bad for a killing. Lucky it wasn’t something serious.” Harry Dean Stanton as a detective named Billy says, “Don’t worry about it Marlowe. It’s just another shine killing. No space in the paper, no pictures…”

 That’s the long and short of how things stood in LA with the kind of people Mark Fuhrman boasted of killing on the job in the ’70s and ’80s.  An intelligent street cop who wanted to do what Fuhrman said he did could have had his way with little fear of getting caught. The downside, for a thrill junkie like Fuhrman is that he experiences fear the way masochists experience pain. When the fear diminishes so does the high.

The killing of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson had a big emotional and professional payoff for Fuhrman. To win big you have to gamble in a high stakes game. If, however, you can manipulate the evidence and how people see it, you can hedge your bet to achieve the desired effect without being foolhardy.   As the first lead detective on the Bundy murder scene, Fuhrman had that power. Moreover, he could manipulate his own image before and after the fact by appearing to be whatever kind of person he needed to be to counter his racist record. He could even use his record to his advantage to accuse his accusers of “playing the race card” if he played his cards right. He could strike up the right friendships, start the right rumors and manufacture the right murder cases to investigate. There is enough evidence to say he did exactly that and that it worked.

 Between O.J.’s preliminary hearing in July of ’94 and his criminal trial in ’95, Fuhrman went the extra mile to clear a black man accused of killing a white man named Shawn Stewart. Afterwards he argued that a racist would never have done that. Sound convenient? Look at it this way: As it was with the hammer killing in Los Vegas during the O.J. criminal trial — the case where Fuhrman gave the dead man’s grieving black niece a “spontaneous,” compassionate hug — the Stewart case was never solved. 

 In Fuhrman’s first book, he describes himself in his conduct of the Stewart case in ways that were subtly but unmistakably reminiscent of Popeye Doyle in The French Connection. That evocative use of the language is part of Fuhrman’s style. He uses it throughout the book to leave you with the impression of him as various film and TV heroes. He used the same technique in court to convey the false impression that Ron Phillips was his partner at Bundy and Rockingham and to give the false impression that he left the Police Protective League seminar a hundred and fifty miles away at roughly 8:00. When you go back to see what he actually said, you will not find what you thought was there because what you remember is only your impression, not his words. He does a full 180 with the evidence he says he found at Bundy and Rockingham when the photographic evidence proves otherwise. Most people who looked at the police photos recalled Fuhrman’s description. They saw what he said.

 This is an old trick. It goes back to the first act ever staged. The people staging the event give us the sight and sound clues to tell us what to expect so as to leave us with the impressions they want to leave. If we see and hear the right things in the right context we will get the desired impression without giving it an instant of thought. We know going in that our perceptions and our emotions are being manipulated because we know that we were watching actors who were putting on a show for our entertainment. That’s why we pay for cable, suffer through television commercials, rent movies or buy tickets to see them in a theater.

 Officer John Edwards did not go to Rockingham on the first day of 1989 to be entertained. He went there to rescue a woman he thought was being beaten by a black man. He told O.J.’s maid Michelle, within earshot of where Nicole was crouched in hiding, that he wasn’t leaving until he spoke to the woman who made the 911 call. He did not know that he was talking to her or that she did not tell the 911 operator a man was beating her. Edwards was, therefore, not prepared to applaud Nicole’s performance when she ran to him in apparent terror crying, “He’s going to kill me!” How was he to know it was a performance, unless he saw the 1987 episode of Hunter where a woman crouched in hiding from a man with a gun jumps up, runs into Hunter’s arms using the identical line?

 Nicole told Edwards that O.J. was going to kill her with a gun. She looked like a woman who was beaten and the angry black man she said was going to kill her was definitely behaving as though he had done no wrong. The maid was doing likewise. Nicole’s story did not match her injuries. Nevertheless, Edwards was so impresses with her act that he recalled seeing her injuries plus injuries that matched her story but not the photographs he took of her or the timing of her dramatic appearance.

 How could he have seen something in his memory that he could not have seen with his eyes? Here again Hollywood has the answer. We may recall seeing Glenne Close, Shannon Tweed, Helen Mirren and Sally Kirkland performing oral sex on a man in an elevator or a bathroom stall. That is not what happened. It is only what we “saw” when we took in the clues to what was supposed to be happening on the screen with our eyes and filled in the rest with out minds. In the Heat of Passion (’91), for instance, does not show Sally Kirkland as Dr. Lee Adams “giving head” to Nick Corri as Charlie Bronson, a young, unemployed actor in the toilet stall of a four-star restaurant. That was just the impression they wanted to leave us with.  They did that with a combination of her body language and the expression on his face.

 Speaking of expressions, please note the expression, “giving head” (that’s why I used it). In the unrated version of In the Heat of Passion, Sally Kirkland plays a risky game in a restaurant with her eyes locked on her lover’s eyes as she sits at a table with her husband and some friends. You see her hand stroking a bottle, an asparagus spear dipped in a white sauce and you see what she does with it. Then you see her make a trip to the ladies room with the man she locked eyes with. When she positions him for action with his fly open and you see her head begin to bob, any notion you might have had that her display with the bottle and the asparagus tip was not a preview of things to come (no pun intended), goes away.

 This is the scene that made me take another look at the significance of the bottle that I did not see Tessa Richarde bring to her lips in Police Squad! If you have enough circumstantial evidence, you don’t have to see it to draw a logical inference that it happened – or to draw a logical connection between characters in the movie and people in real life. 

Oral sex in public restrooms is normally associated with male homosexuals (The Choirboys, Body Heat). Some women enjoy having that kind of sex in public restrooms for the added thrill that comes with the risk of getting caught. This could remind you of something that pop psychologist Dr. Laura might have said on TV or radio. It could also remind you that Nicole did get caught on her living room couch with Zlomsowitch, the restaurant manager, because the drapes of her window were left open (on purpose?). It could remind you that Nicole was a regular visitor to Zlomsowitch’s restaurant. It could remind you that Mark Fuhrman and Laura Hart met in a restaurant, that they were lovers when they started their screenplay project and that Fuhrman asked her about the word “cocksucker” on the first tape. The fact that Kirkland’s Lee Adams character is a psychologist with a lover young enough to be her son and that her son looks enough like her lover to be mistaken for him could remind you of the word Laura Hart asked Mark Fuhrman about. The word she used was “motherfucker.”

Twelve names in the Fuhrman collection, some with variations in spelling, have a special affinity for the words “cocksucker,” “blow,” and “giving head.” One of those names is Laura. The others are: Sally, Kathy, Steve, Nick, Billie, Leigh, Velda, Forrest, Fenn, Dan and Blue. What I said about the phrase “things to come” not being a pun when I used it in association with Sally Kirkland eating an asparagus tip with white sauce on it, is true. I did not use that phrase as an intentional play on words. It just came to me… That wasn’t a deliberate play on words, either. But you see the problem. Once an association is made it is very difficult to unmake it. Just try saying, “E-nee,” “Me-nee” and “My-nee” in order without thinking “Mo.” You won’t succeed.

 That is one reason I’m sure that Fuhrman watched Diary of a Hit Man with Forrest Whitaker as Dekker and Sherilyn Fenn as Jain. With all the works of fiction in history to choose from, it jumps out at you in the two he picked to show the legitimate use of the n-word in fiction other than his or Joe Wambaugh’s. He picked Forrest Gump and Huckleberry Fenn. He had to be thinking nigger, Forrest and Fenn. He had to be thinking about people in those terms and in that order. The only movie where “Forrest and Fenn” are together is Diary of a Hit Man. Other important names and deeds converge in the screenplay In the Heat of Passion when you think: “Diary of a Hit Man,” “Fatal Attraction” “Forrest,” “Dan” and “Lee.” I don’t think that Fuhrman forgot them when he wrote about Dan McKinny warning him that his affair with Laura before she became Mrs. McKinny could come out in court.

 The idea that Fuhrman or Laura Hart had a reason to hide a sexual affair they had ten years earlier when they were both single, never rang true to me. Unless there was something embarrassing or incriminating about it that was relevant to Fuhrman’s relationship to O.J. and Nicole, I just couldn’t see the problem.  They had an affair or they didn’t. So what either way? But Fuhrman made an issue out of “confessing” to the affair. He called Dan McKinny’s warning a “heads-up.” Mind you, this is a “heads up” about Mark and Laura having sex at the start of their screenplay project. Superimposed on the toilet stall scene of the screenplay In the Heat of Passion with Sally Kirkland and Nick Corri, you see something embarrassing and incriminating. And it rings true to what we know about Mark Fuhrman.

I saw In the Heat of Passion only because of the incest links and fellatio links I was following and the loose ends I was trying to tie up. Every time I found a rich network of associations between Fuhrman and the movies, the references became increasing specific to the point where I could reasonably expect to hit the nail on the head in my next search. I expected to find a sexually desirable older woman and a patsy for a murder setup in a guy young enough to be her son. I expected to see a long-necked bottle as a clear-cut phallic symbol directly related to a woman named Sally, Donna or Dana performing oral sex in an elevator and something that could symbolize seaman in her mouth or spilling onto her blue dress.

 A composite character would do as long as the women who made up the composite had enough in common. Matty, for instance, in Body Heat doesn’t fit the bill even though she spills a drink on her dress and sets up a guy to be a patsy in a murder. Matty isn’t old enough. Her patsy isn’t young enough. Her dress isn’t blue and she doesn’t have the right name as an actor or a character. Unless I could find an older woman and a younger man who had what she didn’t, I couldn’t use her. These were the logical destinations of the links I was following. My only surprises were in the number of direct hits and specific references I wasn’t looking for.

 I had just seen Night Eyes 3 where I noticed the similarity between Shannon Tweed and Stella Stevens in a sex scene with Tweed and Andrew Stevens. They were making love in a bathtub surrounding by candles like the scene Fuhrman said was awaiting Ron Goldman in Nicole’s bathtub when they were murdered. If my idea about Fuhrman, Sally Dekker and mother/son incest was on track, I expected to see more than that. There had to be another movie with Shannon Tweed and a woman named Sally performing oral sex in an elevator. I could not find one. I found two. The fact that Tweed was in the elevator and Kirkland was in the toilet stall means you have to look at them together to see the whole story. And what a story it is….

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
Send comments/suggestions
to Webmaster, Charles R. Alexander
Copyright © 1999 Smartfellows Press