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Chapter 22

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When I opened my first website discussion board in 1998 I could see that the movie connections to the Goldman-Simpson murders went far beyond those I was able to identify in my Fuhrman at the Movies chapter in Iago. A visitor named Bob suggested that Sergeant Rutledge had enough parallels to count as a movie in the same category as Othello, The Naked Gun series, Ricochet, Guilty Conscience and Double Indemnity. I thought that the parallels he saw were interesting. I even saw some he didn’t write about. But I couldn’t include Sergeant Rutledge because I could see no clear link to Mark Fuhrman or a compelling reason for him to have ever watched the movie and gotten something out of it.

Everything changed when my son Keith noticed a host of Fuhrman connections in Witness for the Prosecution (’57). Highlights include a "lie detector test" that the killer passes, a woman wearing a man’s watch (Nicole’s Swiss Army watch), misleading blood evidence and a female murder victim felled by a crushing blow to the back of her skull.

The lie detector test is a trick that an old lawyer plays with his monocle by picking up sunlight and directing it in the eyes of the people he’s testing. He believes that truth-tellers will respond one way and liars will respond another way. He’s wrong. If Fuhrman was the killer, the ability to pass a lie detector test had to be a big part of his planning and therefore a compelling reason for him to have registered the monocle lie detector test in his mind. The fact that one of Juditha Brown’s lenses came up missing was also significant if the monocle link is valid.

If a monocle can be a lie detector anything under the right circumstances can be anything else. That would have been obvious from the bicycle that becomes a witch’s broomstick in The Wizard of Oz if I had connected The Wizard of Oz to Fuhrman. I had seen the Cara-pizza-Tombstone connection to Fuhrman’s fifth note in Back to the Future III with Mary Steenburgen as Clara. Once I saw that, I could see it in Sergeant Rutledge, too when Constance Towers as Mary Beecher gets off an 1881 train car with the name "Tombstone & Gila RR" painted on the side. The number 78 is written on the car below the name. 78 is the number of a lineman in the NFL just as 32 is a running back. Woody Strode was the African-American lineman who broke the color barrier in the NFL.

Think of the many particulars that have to come together in a few particular ways to tie Mark Fuhrman to Mary Beecher and the train car in Sergeant Rutledge. Mary Beecher shares the initials of Mercedes Benz – the car that Fuhrman suggested in his letter to the city attorney that O.J. beat up as a symbolic attack on Nicole. The name Mary ties Mary Beecher to Mary Steenburgen in four Fuhrman collection movies, to Nicole’s handwritten Cara Cal Pizza Kitchen note, and to Fuhrman’s handwritten crime scene note about the note. In Back to the Future III Mary Steenburgen as Clara is aboard a train in 1884 when a man in the seat behind her, trying to think of her name, mistakenly calls her Cara.

That’s just the beginning…

Tessa Richarde, who is Billie in Cat People, is Mary the boxer’s wife in the second episode of Police Squad! During Buddy the boxer’s struggle to recover from a pounding blow to the head that sends him and his two leather gloves to the canvas, he sees and hears Mary in his mind as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. You know how close Buddy is to Bundy and recall that O.J. is Joe the boxer in Goldie and the Boxer. Leather gloves on the canvas = gloves on the ground. Buddy’s is the name of a pizza franchise that sponsored Detroit Piston basketball games in the ’90s. Fuhrman played basketball with a black LAPD sergeant name Brown, who wore the jersey of Detroit Piston superstar Isiah Thomas.

In 1994, the logo for the Detroit Pistons was a horse head. In Sergeant Rutlidge Mary Beecher is stranded at a train station when Hank Warden (the old, senile room service waiter in Twin Peaks) as Laredo with a boxcar full of horses to deliver gets the train moving prematurely. Waiting for her father to pick her up, she finds the barefoot body of the train station attendant with an arrow in his chest (Fuhrman is the only principle in the Bundy murder case to write of hunting with a bow and arrow). She loses her hat as she runs panic stricken into the night. Rutledge springs up behind her, clamps his hand over her mouth and tells her not to scream.

In the trial of Sgt Rutledge this is the point at which Cpt. Shattuck, the prosecutor ends the testimony of Mary Beecher. Lt. Tom Cantrell (Tom Hanks and Mary Steenburgen in Philadelphia) acting as Rutledge’s lawyer objects, "The prosecution has stolen a key defense witness and ruthlessly cut off testimony at a point highly unfavorable to the accused." Shattuck counters, "This is not the proper time for defense counsel to argue the case he should either cross-examine or dismiss." Cantrell snatching up a thick book says, "The Manual for Court Martials clearly states that the trial judge advocate shall do his utmost to present the whole truth and to oppose every attempt to suppress the facts or to distort them. Now I ask the court not to accept the half-truths that Captain Shattuck has so slickly presented by letting Ms. Beecher go on with her story."

Suppressing the facts, distorting the facts and slickly presenting half-truths are what individuals and institutions pay lawyers in the American criminal justice system big bucks to do. Shattuck’s stunt with Mary Beecher is the same trick Marcia Clark and Mark Fuhrman used with the shovel and the plastic bag in the cargo area of the Bronco that ended the Friday session of court. It didn’t matter that they clarified the issue on Monday. The first impression of O.J.’s evil intent left by Fuhrman’s description of the shovel and the plastic went unchallenged long enough to keep from ever being completely erased. That was the idea going in.

For the train car in Sergeant Rutledge to mean anything it has to carry Mary Beecher in a passenger car. It does. It also carries Jeffery Hunter (Fuhrman was an avid hunter) as a lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry. Where have we seen a U.S. Cavalry officer and a blond named Mary in a passenger car with a lieutenant? How about the final episode of Police Squad!? The onscreen name of the episode is "Testimony of Evil." As usual, Lt. Frank Drebin is driving somewhere when he gets the call of a homicide. For some unexplained reason Mary the boxer’s wife, who has nothing to do with the plot, is in the car with him. This is the episode where the 1880s U.S. Cavalry officer steps on the elevator from a mounted parade ground and gets off in the midst of a battle.

Before all is said and done Jeffrey Hunter as Lt. Cantrell in Sergeant Rutlidge is going to be involved in more than one kind of battle. As a soldier he battles hostile Apaches. As the attorney for Sgt. Rutledge he battles incriminating circumstantial evidence and racial prejudice. As a friend and admirer of Rutledge a top soldier in every sense of the name and a man of great moral character, Cantrell has to battle his own conflicting duties as a man and an Army officer to put Rutledge under arrest and to defend him. As the man who met and fell in love with Mary Beecher on the train he has to battle her hostility toward him for putting Rutledge on trial for his life.

The train where Mary and the lieutenant first meet is a freight train with two boxcars loaded with horses. The conductor is simply allowing Mary and the lieutenant to ride in the caboose as a favor to them. Mary is returning to Arizona from the East. She has been away for 12 years.

The importance of the horses in the boxcar cannot be exaggerated even though you never see them. "Boxcar" is a short hop from "boxer," especially with Mary the boxer’s wife in a car with an officer. But there is a more direct rout from the boxcars in Sergeant Rutledge to the things that we know were more important to Mark Fuhrman than to anyone else involved in the murder trial of O.J. Simpson. In one boxcar scene the name Mary and something very close of Diana Ross, Billie, and Cara all flow from one actress as big in the Fuhrman collection as Jennifer Jason Leigh and Charlotte Rampling. The scene ends with the woman finding money in her shoe.

If you recall that Barbara Hershey shares Mark Fuhrman’s birthday and the first name of his first wife, the boxcar link might have reminded you of Hershey as the title character in Boxcar Bertha (’72). In The Last Temptation of Christ (’88) she’s Mary Magdalene. In A World Apart (’88) she’s Diana Roth. In The Entity (’81) she’s Carla and in the TV miniseries Western Return to Lonesome Dove (’93) she’s Clara.

As Boxcar Bertha Barbara Hershey loses her virginity on a boxcar floor strewn with hay. Hay means livestock. No, we didn’t see horses in the boxcar. But we didn’t see them on the boxcar in Sergeant Rutledge, either. We didn’t even see the straw. We were simply told that the horses were there. If they weren’t there Mary Beecher would not have been left alone. In Boxcar Bertha the man who deflowers Bertha is David Carradine. Like Fuhrman, he was a martial artist. In Boxcar Bertha he is a union organizer named Bill. Fuhrman was an officer in the police union. In the ’72-’75 television series Kung Fu, Carradine is Caine.

Caine, the Chinese wanderer in the Old West is the role that Chinese-American Bruce Lee thought he would get. He was devastated when he didn’t. The producers wanted a white guy. In the ’66-’67 television series The Green Hornet, Bruce Lee is Kato the chauffeur. Like most chauffeurs in the Fuhrman collection, Kato wears dark leather gloves.

In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman explains why his questioning of Kato, which led to his discovery of the second leather glove, was plain old good police work. He said that he knew his actions were legal because of a 1989 court ruling he happened to have read a few weeks earlier. He cited the California Appeals Court case known as People vs. Cain.

Knowing that David Carradine as Bill in Boxcar Bertha shares Mark Fuhrman’s union affiliation and his mother’s first name gives us a new way of looking at Fuhrman’s second alibi and the picture he had taken with the Bundy glove. Fuhrman said he was in his car. He said he could prove it because he stopped to get gas. Think about that for a minute…. While Fuhrman the union leader is putting a hose in the gas tank of his car and paying for it with his credit card, Bill the union leader is putting his "hose" where? He’s putting it in Boxcar Bertha – and paying for it with money in her shoe – a shoe that looks a hell of a lot like Fuhrman’s in the photo of him pointing at the bloody glove on Bundy.

The boxcar/union officer symbolism doesn’t get any better for Fuhrman if I say "tank of his Scout," instead of "car." As a union organizer it was Bill’s job to "scout" the territory ahead of the "main force." As a Southerner, Bill could speak to a receptive audience in the South where he meets Bertha before they hopped the train together. As a Northerner, a gambler she meets when she gets off the train can’t say two words without stirring up old resentments from the Civil War. The most famous scout for the Union Army in the Civil War was Buffalo Bill Cody.

A lot more is going on here than the fact that O.J. wore a Buffalo Bills football team uniform or that Bronco Billy with Tessa Richarde revolves around a poor man’s version of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. In one of the most moving scenes in Sergeant Rutledge, you see the sergeant standing guard as Lt. Cantrell tells Mary Beecher about the name "Captain Buffalo" that the 9^th Cavalry troopers are singing about. In your own research you will find two stories. In one story the Indians named the black soldiers of the 9^th and 10^th Cavalry buffalo soldiers because their hair reminded them of buffalo fur. The other story is the one the lieutenant tells Mary. In this version of the story the Indians first encountered the black soldiers in the dead of winter bundled up in buffalo coats and buffalo hats. They called them buffalo soldiers because that’s what they looked like. The buffalo soldiers were led by white officers.

So, any way you look at it, the freight train in Sergeant Rutledge is connected to O.J.’s first pro football team, to the freight train in Boxcar Bertha, to the Scout in Fuhrman’s gas station/credit card alibi and to Mark Fuhrman’s business that night as a union officer. The five-officer board of judges that sits on Sgt. Rutledge’s court martial have all commanded buffalo soldiers in the field. Some were former Union officers in the Civil War. None are lawyers, so there is no built in incentive to do anything but find the truth.

The Civil War is common to Sergeant Rutledge, Boxcar Bertha and David Carradine in The Long Riders (’80). As Cole Younger in The Long Riders David Carradine shares something with Braxton Rutledge and the Bundy killer. He kills a man with a knife. Cole Younger, Bob Younger, Frank and Jesse James all fought with Confederate guerrilla units during the Civil War. For their attacks on civilians and the murder of unarmed union soldiers (Jessie James fighting under a man named Bloody Bill) they could have been court-martialed and hanged by either side.

When Cpt. Shattuck uses a fine point of law to disqualify Lt. Cantrell from defending Sergeant Rutledge, Cantrell answers with a reference to the Manual for Courts-Martial that the board has to look up. Lt. Mulqueen, the keeper of the book, has trouble reading the word "challengable" so Willis Bouchey as Col. Otis Fosgate asks for the book and reads it for himself. He notices for the first time that it is a Confederate manual. Mulqueen dryly tells him to read the flyleaf. Fosgate protests that he can see on the cover that it’s a Confederate manual. Mulqueen again directs him to read the flyleaf. He read it. It says, "This manual is adopted with no changes from the manual of the United States Army."

Most civilians would be surprised to learn that criminal trials in the military tend to be more justice oriented than civilian trials. People are still people so fairness is never assured, but the system itself makes an unjust result less likely. Only when the media, the politicians and the top brass have a stake in a specific outcome does the balance of judgment tend to fall in favor of that outcome. Mark Fuhrman spent enough time as a military policeman and as a civilian policeman to know the difference. Thus, a good reason for him to have taken an interest in Sergeant Rutledge. But what kind of reaction can a white racist have to a movie where a white star like Jeffrey Hunter portrays a military officer faced with overwhelming evidence of a black soldier’s guilt looks him in the eye and says, "tell me you didn’t do it and I’ll believe you"?

Lt. Cantrell repeats under oath what he said to Rutledge. As bad as things look for the top soldier there are some things that don’t add up worth a damn. The charges of rape and murder don’t fit the man Cantrell has served with for six years. And the circumstances surrounding the last time he was seen on post have a built-in contradiction of the evidence that said he did it. In short, the evidence doesn’t add up.

When Cpt. Shattuck calls Jano Hernadez as Sgt. Mathew Luke Skidmore to the witness stand he tries in a roundabout way to "play the race card." First he suggests by his tone that there is something wrong with the slave-born Skidmore because he doesn’t know how old he is. He then suggests that he is too old to be a reliable witness, as opposed to Mr. Fosgate. Four members of the five-officer board, including the president, jump all over him. An officer wearing a black eye-patch demands to know what Shattuck is trying to do. He calls Skidmore a good soldier. The officer to his right says, "Excellent soldier." The officer to the left of the court martial president grunts his agreement. The president calls Skidmore "first rate" and Shattuck makes a hasty retreat.

Shattuck, the only professional attorney in the courtroom, had been on thin ice with Colonel Fosgate from the opening round of testimony with his clever lawyer’s tricks that weren’t quite clever enough. After Lt. Cantrell’s cross-examination of Mary Beecher put Sgt. Rutledge’s actions at the train station in a totally different light, the colonel lays down his law. He says, "We’ve had just about enough of this legal jockeying. Now lets put first things first and clearly establish the facts and the nature of the crimes with which the accused has been charged."

This is when Cpt. Shattuck calls Col. Fosgate’s wife to the witness stand, much to the colonel’s consternation. She proves to be a legitimate witness in terms of the ground rules the colonel has just laid out. While her testimony may appear to hurt Rutledge, she does help to "put first things first" and clearly establish the facts that will ultimately put the finger of blame where it belongs, on a man name is Chandler Hubble, the owner of a suede hunting coat.

Ms. Fosgate is a bit of a bigot, which comes through when she tells of the last time that she saw Lucy Dabney alive at Hubble’s general store. Rutlidge is the only black man there and Mrs. Fosgate has already alluded to Lucy’s blooming sexuality as a young lady no older than sixteen. She tells about asking Lucy if it is wise for her to be so friendly with Rutledge. The beauty of the scene is the subtle certainty in Billy Burke’s performance that race is the issue that concerns her. Lucy is equally friendly with everyone in the store. Most of the main players in the tragedy to come are there, Mrs. Fosgate and Lucy of course, Sergeant Rutledge, Chandler Hubble and his son Chris. Missing is Lucy’s father, Maj. Dabney. He will be the male victim on the murder scene, shot once through the heart by Sgt. Rutledge.

John Ford counted Sergeant Rutledge as one of his proudest cinematic achievements. I’ve seen it about nine times so far and each time I have spotted more of the director’s hand that makes it a great flick. The scene in Chan Hubble’s store, for instance, gives you all the clues you need to narrow down the identity of the killer to Chris or Chan. You don’t see it until you look at Lucy from her killer’s point of view as she strides in and idly fondles a man’s sued hunting jacket. She talks like a child but she is beginning to look like a woman. Watching her through the eyes of her killer, you notice for the first time that her cross draws attention from her face to her chest – and her budding breasts – like Nicole Brown Simpson’s gold cross did with her new breast implants.

Like all of John Ford’s Westerns Sergeant Rutledge has the rich, noble look and feel of a Fredric Remington painting. In this case we know that the proud image of Woody Strode as the title character does, in fact, come from a Fredric Remington painting of a real Buffalo Soldier. That doesn’t mean the movie is flawless. To get that look, some of the actors playing 9^th Cavalry troopers were clearly chosen for how much they looked the part (they looked great) rather than how well they could act. Not so with the white actors, all of whom ranged from good to outstanding even in minor roles.

Race, that’s the rub.

The biggest booger in Sergeant Rutledge is in the credits. The reason actors in important roles like Fred Libby as Chandler Hubble, Rafer Johnson as Cpl. Krump, Charles Steel as Dr. Eckner and Toby Michaels as Lucy Dabney went uncredited appears to be an exercise in plausible deniability. How do you measure second billing next to no billing at all? By any standard, other than race, you would expect Woody Strode to share top billing with Jeffrey Hunter, Constance Towers and Billie Burke. Hollywood being Hollywood in 1960, that wasn’t in the cards. Even in a movie about racial prejudice, someone decided that the leading black actor should not share top billing with the top three white stars. It was like giving second billing to Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz to save room at the top for Billie Burke, Ray Bolger and Frank Morgan. Would that have made sense to anyone? I think not.

Only when I realized who the star witness was in the trial of Sergeant Rutledge did the idea of a Wizard of Oz link to Mark Fuhrman so much as tiptoe across my mind. You’ll notice it right away when Lucy Dabney curtseys to Billie Burke as Mrs. Fosgate (MF) the way Dorothy curtseys to her as Glinda the Good Witch of the North. You’ll remember Lucile Ball as Kathy in The Dark Corner. You’ll remember what Fuhrman said about the package in O.J.’s Bronco and what he wrote in Murder in Brentwood about the motive for the killings being jealousy rather than domestic abuse when you see Chris Hubble give Lucy two packages. Chris says, "When are you going to knit me a pair of socks?" Lucy replies, "What about Elle Jorgenson. I don’t want that redhead putting burrs under my saddle." Chris assures her that "she won’t get jealous over a pair of socks."

Then there is Mrs. Fosgate’s testimony about the last time that she saw Braxton Rutledge. Here we have another variation of what Fuhrman said Nicole was doing when she looked out of her window and saw O.J. dressed in his murder clothes (he said she was talking on the telephone and writing a note). We also get an inside-out version of Fuhrman’s story about O.J. wounded in the double homicide dripping his own blood as he dashes for his east gate in his Ford Bronco….

Mrs. Fosgate says, "I was in my bedroom writing a letter to my daughter Barbara in Fort Wala Wala Washington…" She digresses quite a bit. When the colonel puts her back on track she says that she heard two shots in rapid succession. We see Cordelia Fosgate looking out of her window and hearing a third shot just before Sergeant Rutledge stumbles out of the Dabney house with his gun in his hand and falls to the ground clutching his side. She comes out of her house and watches Rutledge ride away on his horse at full gallop toward the east gate.

The prosecutor wants to know what time it was when she saw the events she described. She says, "It was exactly eight o’clock." The colonel interrupts. "Oh, nonsense Cordelia. You haven’t known what time it was since the day we were married." She tells him that she knew what time it was, "because the clock was striking eight – the little China clock with the painted flowers that you stole while your men were burning Atlanta."

I’m sure you noticed the China connection to Fuhrman who served aboard ship in the South China Sea. But do you recall the painted flower link in Murder in Brentwood? Do you recall the photo of the flower that Fuhrman painted on a sheet of white paper by the east gate of the bloody Bundy killing cage with a creepy handwritten poem about mothers, children and time? I don’t have to ask if you recall Fuhrman’s bleeding killer theory. Without it O.J.’s cut finger would have been meaningless.

The prosecutor’s next witness is Dr. Eckner, the post surgeon. He testifies in a Swiss or German accent that because Maj. Dabney, the male victim, was also the post commander he left the murder scene the way he found it until Lt. Cantrell arrived. Cantrell was next in command.

Doctor Eckner shows Cantrell the bodies and a small caliber pistol with two missing rounds. The doctor tells him that the bullet in the man’s heart came from another gun. From Lucy’s nude body the doctor determined that she had been raped and strangled. A thin red mark on her neck leads him and the lieutenant to the discovery that Lucy’s crucifix is missing and the inference that the killer took it. Eckner assumes that Lucy’s killer took the crucifix and covered the body in a serape. He is only half right.

Cantrell says, "I suppose the major surprised him while he was still…"

"Ya, Ya, Ya," says the doctor, "The major shoots and wounds him; you can see the blood here. Then he kills the major and runs. You can see the blood drops from here to the door." Sound like Fuhrman’s story of Goldman surprising O.J. in the act of attacking Nicole followed by, "Hey, Hey, Hey"? Maybe you think a valid link should include something about the suspect’s hat, boots, socks, his missing gloves and his wound. How about this…

Cantrell and his troopers stumble upon Sergeant Rutledge in the train station and take him prisoner. Keep in mind the fact that Rutledge is the only cavalryman in the movie without gloves and that the movie offers no explanation as to what happened to them. As Cantrell strips off his own leather gloves he says to his men, "Search him. I mean hat, boots, socks, and bring me every single thing you find on him. And do what you can to fix up that wound."

Some people thought that O.J.’s flight when he was about to be arrested amounted to an admission of guilt. Although the law in California instructs jurors to equate flight with guilt, our own self-preservation instinct tells us that fear of not being believed could have more to do with it than guilt. When the wounded Sergeant Rutledge insisted that Mary Beecher not be in the same room with him after they saved each other’s lives, she couldn’t understand it. The way she saw things, they were in deep doo-doo – "two people just trying to stay alive." All he can say is, "Lady, you don’t know how hard I’m trying to stay alive."

It did not escape Mary’s attention that Rutledge put his own life at risk to protect her, or that his solder’s instincts where sound when he gave her his pistol and she shot one attacking Apache while he stabbed another in hand-to-hand combat. If all he wanted to do was to stay alive he could have done it much easier without bothering with her. By the same token, his fellow noncommissioned officers, Cpl. Moffet, Sgt. Skidmore and Cpl. Krump were looking for Apache warriors on a killing spree when they spotted Mary Beecher’s hat outside the station and found him inside. Skidmore told him that he wouldn’t believe him if he confessed but he had to ask, "Why did you run away?"

Sergeant Rutledge answers Skidmore the same way he answers Lt. Cantrell in private after Cantrell slams down his leather gloves and his Army hat (a knit cap was worn in the field by Army Special Forces in 1994) at his feet in frustration at Rutledge’s refusal to defend himself. Cantrell senses that Rutledge is trying to protect him from a nasty fight and he wants to decide for himself. He suggests that the Maj. shot him first. But Rutledge isn’t concerned about that. "There’s still that dead white girl," he says. "Nobody’ll believe I never touched her."

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