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Chapter 6

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You have seen that Swamp Thing is linked at various significant points to the Bundy killings and several movies in the network of screenplays and teleplays I call the Fuhrman collection. It has more than one link to the TV series Matlock with Andy Griffith as defense attorney Ben Matlock. There is a big formula link in an episode called "The Formula." For now, though, we want to look at the Jude link in a 1989 episode called "The Captain." Here, a killer cop with 32 years on the force wears a St. Jude’s medal almost identical to Ben Matlock’s. The operative word is "almost." His initials, B.L.M., set his apart.

Most people probably know St. Jude as the patron saint of lost causes. A St. Jude’s medal has therefore been popular through the years among Catholics and non-Catholics alike. In "The Captain," I saw for the first time that Matlock’s middle initial is L. BM is enough for the initials of Bruno Magli – something to keep in mind whenever you see Ben Matlock on the scene of a murder. The L gives you what you need for Bruno Magli Lorenzo.

Dreams are loaded with symbols that don’t make much sense until you know what the symbols stand for. If you dreamed about a murder frame-up involving a highly successful man wearing the number 32 and evidence left behind that incriminated him, Matlock’s St. Jude medal could stand for anything, including a pair of shoes.

In the opening credits of Matlock you see his face and another shot of him over his right shoulder polishing his shoes. Polishing his shoes is one of Ben Matlock’s identifying traits. He even polishes the bottoms, which is what he does each episode in the opening credits. The sameness of his shoes is as much a part of his courtroom wardrobe as his gray suit, but you’d have to watch a lot of programs to know that.

At least half of the stories in the Matlock TV series revolve around clever frame-ups. The people Matlock defends are almost always innocent although the evidence against them is usually so convincing that you wonder how anyone else could be guilty. Sound anything like the evidence against O.J.? I thought so. But until I started following "Andy" links on TV I hadn’t seen enough of the shows to make a valid judgment.

You can find key aspects of the Bundy murder case in so many Matlock episodes that the combined effect is the same as if they all came from one long movie. From time to time one episode would be crammed with enough Bundy links to supply the series for an entire season. "The Captain," with Richard Heard as Cpt. Edward Hanna, is a good example. You may have seen Heard as "John," the leader of the aliens in the ’85 TV miniseries V with Mark Singer (as in Mark Fuhrman and Lori Singer) and Faye Grant (as in Faye Resnick and Ulysses Simpson Grant). "The Captain" begins with Hanna testifying in a murder case. He had conducted an illegal search of the defendant’s car and found incriminating evidence. The evidence was therefore ruled inadmissible and the case against the defendant dismissed.

We don’t have to go into People vs. Caine again. But we do have to remember that Fuhrman said he read about the case shortly before his warrantless search of O.J.’s property, which resulted in his discovery of the bloody leather glove. That was after all of the detectives left the murder scene. We have to remember that the search that made Rockingham an extension of the Bundy crime scene began with Fuhrman leaving the other three detectives behind and checking out O.J.’s Bronco himself. Fuhrman found the spot of blood near the door handle and used it in combination with the multiple homicide scene he’d just left to argue that he feared that there were more victims inside the gates. We have to remember the drama that surrounded Fuhrman’s discovery and description of the shovel and the heavy gage plastic that he found in the rear cargo area of the Bronco, which is equivalent to the trunk of a car.

The plastic and the shovel had no more evidentiary value than the pizza menu. However, Marcia Clark ended her questioning of Fuhrman on that Friday with the sinister implications of his observations and discoveries dangling in the air over the weekend. Until the following Monday, the combined discovers of the blood drop, the blood trail, the shovel and the plastic were as convincing to most people as the discovery of a weapon.

"The Captain," found the weapon in the trunk of the suspect’s car. How he found it is what grabbed me. Note this exchange between Hanna and the defendant’s attorney – the first words to start the show:

Hanna: I wanted to talk to him. After he was fired by Mr. Mailer he was heard making threats against him and his family.

Fuhrman, Phillips, Vannatter, and Lange all testified that they went to Rockingham, not because they wanted to pin the murders on O.J., but because they wanted to talk to him. According to them, they went looking for O.J. strictly to make notification. Fuhrman told them he could show them the way because he’d been there before on a domestic dispute call. He said in his January ’89 letter to the city attorney that the incident he witnessed in 1985 (it really happened in ’84) left an indelible impression on him. This was the report someone had to make to show a pattern in O.J.’s abuse of Nicole. No Fuhrman letter, no pattern. He could not say that O.J. had beaten Nicole but he could make it appear that he had threatened her with a deadly weapon as Nicole implied that he was doing when she ran for the Ashford gate crying, "He’s going to kill me! He’s going to kill me!"

The implied threat against Nicole was the common denominator, a threat with a deadly weapon. In ’85 the deadly weapon appeared to be the baseball bat with which he broke the windshield of his Mercedes Benz. In ’89 it appeared to be a gun. It ’94 it appeared that O.J. made good on his threats using a knife to slaughter Nicole and Ron like animals.

Fuhrman said he found the box that the murder weapon came out of. That is the closest that anyone came to finding the knife itself. He went further in his first book by repeating his story about the extreme parking angle of the Bronco and the stick on the parkway in front of it. He said that he traced the stick to an alley were he believed O.J. got rid of the knife. In other words, if Fuhrman had gotten his way, that alley would have been another extension of the murder scene. He already established with his bleeding killer theory, the last blood drop on the driveway near the garbage cans and rear gate, and the coins near the blood drop, that the alley behind Bundy was where the killer parked his car.

Something about the coins shows up in various ways in movies ranging from The Birds with a character called Mrs. Bundy, to The Hotel New Hampshire with a couple of high school football jerseys numbered 11 and 22. To mean something to Fuhrman, the football players wearing those jerseys would have to be closely associated with a high school cheerleader who dates a black guy. They are. Both of them have illicit sex with her. One of them rapes her. The other one is her brother. In Fuhrman’s book he went out of his way to mention a black guy he went to high school with who dated a white cheerleader. The coins had to be special to him if he saw that movie and had something to do with the placement of the coins. They appear in different police photos in different relationships to each other and in different amounts. Some photos show a dime and a penny – 11 cents. Other photos show two sets of dimes and pennies – 22 cents. When you put them together you get the number of a basketball jersey, Larry Bird’s number 33.

It may seem that we are drifting away from Capt. Hanna’s testimony in "The Captain." We are only putting it in context. Hanna wasn’t smart enough to argue People vs. Cain with a story to go with it that was remotely possible. It didn’t have to be plausible. That was not a factor in Judge Ito’s ruling to allow the Rockingham glove into evidence when he found Vannatter’s warrant to show "a reckless disregard for the truth." The judge in Hanna’s murder case disallows the evidence, so Hanna decides to kill the defendant himself when the court sets him free. As Hanna’s victim approaches his car, you might notice a Ford Bronco parked in the background.

When you see the Bronco you will certainly notice that Hanna pulls open his victim’s driver-side car door with a leather glove on his right hand. He shoots him in the head with is a small caliber revolver. In the next scene you will notice how a car in a parking space is parked as Hanna arrives on the scene to lead the murder investigation.

As he approaches the car with the body (and blood) inside, a uniformed officer named Donna tells her partner to hold onto his hat. Her partner is James Shanly. J.S. His title is Sergeant but you wouldn’t be wrong if you called him Officer James Shanly. O.J. S., as in Orenthal James Simpson. Some officers call "The Captain" the Mad Hatter because he suspended one of his men for three weeks without pay for losing his Atlanta Police Department cap (O.J. had an LAPD cap as well as a knit cap – Capt. Margaret York suspended Fuhrman for 22 days). We learn almost immediately after Hanna walks past the car parked at the extreme angle that the murder weapon is a .22. In a close-up you see how much his captain’s bars look like the number 11. He evokes his 32 years of experience to tell Shanly that the killing is obviously a Mob hit. Shanly tells him that it is not what it looks like.

The detectives investigating the Bundy murders evoked their many years of experience to conclude that Ron and Nicole were victims of a rage attack committed by someone just like number 32, O.J. Simpson.

The Mob is the Italian Mafia, which might bring to mind images of the Italian boot on the map of Europe as well as the ones that left the bloody Bruno Magli imprints on Bundy Drive in Brentwood California. We call the Bruno Maglis "shoes" just as we call Ben Matlock’s customary footwear "shoes" but they are technically boots. Matlock got his from England. O.J.’s were Italian. The Mad Hatter reference in "The Captain" is inexorably tied to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It is therefore interesting that a character called Malcolm (as in Malcolm MacDowell), the man who sold the 22 to Hanna, would be known as "Alice."

Talk about Alice and things Italian might evoke images of Alice Cable in Swamp Thing lying unconscious in a dark confined place near a metal door and Mark Fuhrman’s story about Nicole’s pizza menu under her left leg. Can you say "Little Caesar’s Pizza"? You can’t get any more Italian than Julius Caesar who we all know was stabbed to death. When you see Alice Cable fall to the ground after being hit with "a crushing blow" as Fuhrman said O.J. struck Nicole, you get a glimpse of a combat boot. It belongs to Nicholas Worth’s character Bruno. In some shots, Worth looks like a bloated Bruce (Bruno) Willis. Anyhow, you get a better shot of Bruno’s boots and his bayonet as well just before Swamp Thing rises from the marsh and dumps him into the water (wet boots).

If you haven’t already seen how closely Bruce Willis’ characters are tied to pizzas and violent death you will when we get to the chapters on Moonlighting. Until then, you may want more explicit references to Fuhrman’s pizza menu and the frame-up of O.J. Simpson in "The Captain" episode of Matlock. You won’t be disappointed.

"The Captain" knocks on Shanly’s door four times. He pauses and knocks three more times (the thumps on Kato’s wall that led Fuhrman to the leather glove). When Sgt. Shanly opens the door, Cpt. Hanna walks in wearing his leather gloves. He forces Shanly at gunpoint to call an officer named Jerry Reese for a meeting in an alley around the corner from a clothing shop and a pizza place. The number is 555-5813. The number in Fuhrman’s note for Cara Cal Pizza Kitchen is 575-5713. Pretty damn close, isn’t it? It gets closer later in the story when we learn that the alley is in the 700 block of Pike Street. There’s the missing seven. Now, take away the "k" in "Pike" and what does it spell? It spells pie – as in pizza pie.

The point here is to see if we can tell whether "The Captain" had anything to do with Fuhrman associating Nicole’s death to a pizza phone number (575-5713), a pizza name (Cara Cal Pizza Kitchen) or a pizza menu that didn’t exist. The only other pizza links to the Bundy murders are in movies or television shows with still more links to the Bundy murders. Most of them involve crucial elements of a frame-up. They all tell at least part of a story Fuhrman told about his involvement in the case by way of his book Murder in Brentwood or his crime scene notes.

The last straw for me in "The Captain" episode of Matlock comes when Ben and Hanna are walking down the street near the alley where Hanna killed Shanly and framed Reese. As Ben passes the pizza place he tells Hanna about the list Shanly kept on Hanna’s activities. He says that there were "a lot of crazy things on that list" including the long, unpaid suspension for the lost cap. Fuhrman was also suspended without pay for two day for applying a chokehold on a jaywalker. He shot an ATM robber five times, planted a knife next to him in full view of witnesses and harassed, arrested and humiliated a black man for bumping into him as they were rounding the same corner from opposite directions. He fabricated an illegal drug dealing charge against the man who bumped into him but couldn’t make it stick.

These were all things that Fuhrman did after his paid leave So you see, we are talking here not only about a list that resembles Fuhrman’s notes if you include the pizza that doesn’t really belong there but the basis of a "Section 8."

A Section 8 is a military term for a psychiatric discharge. During wartime it is common for military personnel seeking a way out of the service without loss of service-connected benefits to try for a section 8 discharge by faking a psychiatric disorder. That was Corporal Klinger’s reason for wearing women’s dresses and women’s shoes in Larry Gelbart’s antiwar TV series M*A*S*H*. That’s what police psychiatrists determined Fuhrman tried to do when he filed for a psychological discharge from the LAPD in 1981.

Klinger worked in the Army’s 4077^th M*A*S*H* unit in Korea. Fuhrman worked in the 77^th Division’s CRASH unit in the LAPD. That’s the place he referred to nostalgically on the McKinney tapes with "the smell of all the niggers we killed there." Before you blow that off as mere talk, consider the chokehold he applied to a black jaywalker and the unmistakable pleasure in his voice at recalling how many "niggers" died that way. "The Captain" uses the chokehold to subdue Reese.

Ron and Nicole both died in Nicole’s front yard. Someone had to die first. The autopsy reports leave little doubt that Nicole died last. The severity of the blow to her head suggests that she was unconscious from the moment she was hit despite the so-called defensive wounds on her hands, which could have been made just to confuse the issue. In Fuhrman’s telling of the story she was unconscious while Ron and O.J. were fighting and woke up just before O.J. killed her. Again and again the Fuhrman movie collection features a struggle where two victims of a vicious attack are on the ground near each other with one or both of them dead. Where one is dead the other is usually unconscious.

In "The Captain," a dead Shanly and an unconscious Reese are essential elements in Hanna’s plan to avoid prosecution and to continue his one-man vigilante campaign. Hanna shoots Shanly with Jerry Reese’s gun and knocks out Reese with a chokehold as soon as he arrives. Reese falls on his left side in a position similar to Nicole’s. To create the illusion that Reese did the shooting, Hanna had to make two switches. First he had to get into Reese’s locker and switch his gun for one that looked enough like it that Reese wouldn’t notice the difference. That way everyone, including Reese, would believe only one gun was involved and it would appear that it was used after he arrived on the murder scene. When Reese wakes up next to Shanly’s dead body with the murder weapon in his hand and two uniformed cops Johnny on the spot to arrest him for murder. They find five thousand dollars in cash in Shanly’s pocket and a quarter pound of cocaine in the glove compartment of Reese’s car.

One of the great mysteries of the blood in O.J.’s Bronco is why so little of his blood ended up on the steering wheel if he bled enough to leave a blood trail from Bundy to Rockingham. Another great mystery is how a mixture of his blood, Nicole’s blood and Ron’s blood got on the center console when the right glove was found to have only a small amount of O.J.’s blood on the lining and none on the outside. The mysteries go away when you see those bloodstains from the perspective of "The Captain" wearing the leather gloves that he used to kill one man and frame another. The center console of a ’94 Bronco has a lift up door that serves the same purpose as the glove compartment in Jerry Reese’s car where you see Hanna in his leather gloves planting the cocaine. You also get a good shot of the steering wheel.

Maybe this is too obvious to point out but just in case you missed it, the fact that Sgt. Jerry Reese is a police officer means that he, like Sgt. Jim Shanly could be addressed as "Officer." O.J.S. and O.J.R. What do they have in common? O.J., of course – and Mark Fuhrman.

Cpt. Ed Hanna frames both men the way Vincent Ludwig in The Naked Gun frames O.J., as Nordberg, combined with the way someone framed O.J. as O.J. on Bundy and Rockingham. In my first book about the Bundy murders, Iago in Brentwood, I give a detailed account of why I think Ron Shipp is the one who made the thumps on Kato’s wall. To be precise, it was O.J. Simpson’s wall (O.J.S). Kato was just staying there. In The Naked Gun O.J., as Nordberg wearing a dark blue knit cap, discovers heroin on a ship. He boards the ship, gets shot and someone plants heroin in his clothes. In "The Captain" episode of Matlock Officer Jim Shanly (O.J.S.) passes a model ship as he answers the "thumps" on his door to see the killer with the leather gloves.

O.J. as an undercover cop in The Naked Gun being framed with heroin planted in his clothes is much closer than you may think to Ed Hanna and the two police officers he frames with cocaine in "The Captain." In The Naked Gun George Kennedy is Captain Ed Hocken. It starts when he and Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin arrive on Pier 32 to investigate Nordberg’s shooting. Drebin brings their car to a sudden stop when he runs into a wooden pylon on the dock. A fisherman sitting on the pylon gets propelled forward into the water. The car comes to rest at an extreme angel in and out of the parking space.

So far this is just a minor variation of Fuhrman’s story about the extreme angle at which he said the Bronco was parked and the piece of wood that was found on the parkway in front of it. Fuhrman says O.J. picked up the stick inadvertently when he crashed into some wood in an alley. Fuhrman says he carried the stick under the Bronco and sent it flying forward to the Rockingham parkway when he made a sudden stop. In The Naked Gun, O.J. is the shooting victim and the framing victim just as the two "O.J.s" in "The Captain" are. To remove all doubt about the connection between the two officers in "The Captain" and the one played by O.J. Simpson, check out the scene between Drebin and the guy in the Pier 32 guard shack where Drebin shows the man a picture of O.J. in a police uniform. The guy in the guard shack is the first to call Nordberg a drug dealer.

Did you notice the "Pike" street connection to "The Captain"? You could count the fisherman on the pier, since a pike is a fish. But I was thinking more along the lines of what pike has in common with "pier" if you remove one letter. Perhaps you flashed on the East German secret police agent in Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain with his "idol" chatter about pizzas as a clever way of checking Dr. Armstrong’s reaction to the code word for a secret organization. It’s a mathematical symbol that sounds like pie. The agent is the one who gets choked, stabbed, beaten and gassed to death.

The desperate struggle in Torn Curtain is closer to what most of the evidence says happened on Bundy than anything you will see in "The Captain" or The Naked Gun. A closer look at the evidence tells you that it was planted. A closer look at the evidence also tells you that what really happened was much closer to what happed in "The Captain" than the evidence on Bundy appears to show.

Ron Goldman did not put up a protracted struggle and Nicole did not put up a struggle at all. The killer attacked both of them from behind, disorienting and incapacitating Ron first with a stunning blow to the back of his head then landing a crushing blow to Nicole’s head that would have left her with permanent brain damage if she had survived. The so-called defensive wounds were put there by the killer before he cut her throat. Meanwhile, he kept Ron on his feet, taunting and stabbing him at will for five minutes or more to give his autopsy report the appearance of corroborating the evidence on the scene of a violent struggle.

If you’re wondering where Ron Shipp’s relationship to Fuhrman is in all of this apart from the call that Shipp made to Fuhrman on Rockingham after Fuhrman questioned Kato and found the glove, the answer is in The Naked Gun. The character of Frank Drebin and his partner Norberg underwent a drastic change between the short-lived Police Squad! television series in 1982 and the three Naked Gun movies in ’88, ’91 and ’94. In The Naked Gun Leslie Nielsen is still Drebin, but Drebin is now a right-wing bigot and a bubbling, trigger-happy buffoon as opposed to the ridiculously exaggerated super-cop he was in Police Squad! He became a laughable caricature of the man Mark Fuhrman tried to sell as himself to movie producers through his association with Laura Hart McKinney. Norbeg, a big white man, became Nordberg, a black one much closer to Drebin’s size. O.J. was Nordberg. Fuhrman’s relationship with Ron Shipp started in 1985, the same year he began working with Laura Hart.

When Shipp, a so-called friend of O.J. called Rockingham on the 13^th and spoke to Fuhrman, he was talking to a black man he’d known for nine years. Fuhrman called him "an old friend."

It was a highly unlikely friendship given Fuhrman’s racist attitudes and Shipp’s open predilection for white women, including but not limited to his white wife. But, for a patsy in case the frame-up against O.J. didn’t work Shipp was hard to beat. He was roughly O.J.’s height and build, which meant that he might have passed for O.J. if he had been seen in a minimal disguise at Bundy or Rockingham at critical times.

Ron Shipp had access to O.J. and Nicole’s homes. He knew them well and he knew the lay of the land at both addresses. He had most of the wherewithal to pull off a frame-up that fit much of the evidence. One writer, J. Neil Schulman, made the case that Shipp was the lone killer in his book entitled Frame of the Century. But when you see Frank Drebin in The Naked Gun defending Nordberg’s integrity after he has seen the planted evidence of his guilt it’s hard not to see him as Fuhrman and Shipp as Nordberg. Drebin calls Nordberg his "best friend. He tells Cpt. Ed Hocken that they were partners for nine years. Fuhrman and Shipp may not have been "best friends" but if the McKinney tapes are any guide to Fuhrman’s ambitions they were, indeed, partners for nine years.

It seem to me that the McKinney tapes are a damn good guide to Fuhrman’s ambitions as well as the screenplays and teleplays he most likely borrowed his ideas from. "The Captain" brings those ambitions and ideas together in too many ways to be coincidental. Maybe you don’t see what the tapes have to do with anything in this chapter. What if you saw David Farman as Det. Bob Barns with a tape recorder in his hand discussing a ballistics report with Cpt. Ed Hanna? Would that make a difference? Remember, we’re talking about composite characters. In "The Captain" we’re talking specifically about two men representing one man. A ballistics test matches the lands and grooves in the barrel of a gun against a bullet. If the rifling matches the bullet you know that the gun fired the bullet. The box that Fuhrman said he found on O.J. bathtub with an indention that matched a Swiss Army knife, is the same idea.

Maybe you don’t think Farman or Herd have enough in common with Fuhrman to make a valid connection. You can always go to the police locker room where Fuhrman had a history of breaking into a fellow officer’s locker. In one locker room scene you see an officer working out with weights. Mark Fuhrman was a bodybuilder. He worked out with weights religiously. Another locker room scene in "The Captain" with the two officers Hanna plans to frame gives you another identifying characteristic of Fuhrman in the form of a poster in the background. The poster urges men to sign up for precinct basketball.

Then there’s the trial of Officer Jerry Reese and the St. Jude medal we started the chapter with. Fuhrman’s scenario for the Bundy killing has Goldman pulling off O.J.’s cap (as in captain) and one of his gloves during their struggle. Nicole purchased similar gloves for Christmas. After the murders, Fuhrman has O.J. cutting himself while scrambling to find the damning clues to his identity, then running away when he can’t find them in the dark. In "The Captain," Officer Jim Shanly in the Pike Street alley tell Hanna, "I wrote everything down. Something happens to me, they’ll know you did it." Shanly snatches the medal from Hanna’s neck as he is shot. Hanna scrambles around in the dark trying to find it. When he can’t come up with it, he runs away. Ben Matlock figures out what happened and sets Hanna up by planting his own St. Jude’s medal where Hanna can find it and springs it on him in court. Matlock’s medal has his B.L.M. initials engraved on the back. Hanna’s wife gave it to him as a Christmas present – before she was murdered.

That brings us back to Swamp Thing with Ray Wise as Alec Holland and Adrienne Barbeau as Alice Cable. It brings us back to the murder scene at Bundy, the real attack on Ron and Nicole and the flowers Mark Fuhrman put on the outside corner of the killing cage. The real killer attacked Ron and Nicole from behind by jumping out from behind a tree. He was wearing expensive new Bruno Magli Lorenzo boots. In Swamp Thing, Cable, trudging behind Alec in the swamp complains about getting her new boots wet. She says, "I paid a fortune for these boots." He warns her about quicksand and tells her to keep her eyes open. Cable asks, "Or what?" as he reaches behind a tree and grabs a bunch of purple flowers. He lunges at her with the flowers from behind and says, "Or one of these might just jump out and do you in."

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