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Chapter 11 Hot Buttons
You saw the progression of ideas from Tessa Richarde getting spun on a wheel in Bronco Billy (’81) to Shannon Tweed spinning the cylinder of her revolver in Night Eyes 3 (’93). In Bronco Billy, the act ends with Bronco Billy throwing a knife at a balloon between Richarde’s legs and drawing blood when the blade nicks her inner left thigh. The idea continues with Shannon Tweed in another movie and Mark Fuhrman on the job at Bundy and Rockingham and in his book Murder in Brentwood. Last Call (’91) with William Katt, Stella
Stevens and Shannon Tweed gets us closer to Richarde on the wheel and Fuhrman on
the job as a killer, a cop and an The real wound Richarde receives and the staged ones Tweed delivers to herself have no necessary link to the murder of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. However, Fuhrman’s drawing showing Ron’s inner left thigh wound brings them together with Nicole’s throat wound and her palm wounds. Fuhrman’s bear hunting, Nastassia Kinski’s bear costume and O.J.’s foot caught in a bear trap might spring to mind when you see the knife in the stuffed bear’s throat. Playboy’s rabbit head logo might come to mind with any association between O.J. and a former Playboy playmate. The Fuhrman collection includes four Playboy playmates: Stella Stevens, Shannon Tweed, Jessica Hahn and Anna Nicole Smith. No matter where you start in the web of screenplays or teleplays radiating from Mark Fuhrman’s personal and professional history you run into the same movies and TV shows involving incest, fellatio, a bear, a rabbit and interracial sex. Children are the products of the only kind of sex we see in the Fuhrman collection between black men and white women. Fuhrman left no doubt that he had strong feelings of some kind about Sydney Simpson. He left no doubt that he loved his own children and associated them with rabbits. In Murder in Brentwood, he wrote that his children raised chickens and rabbits. He wrote that his 3 ½ -year-old son won a blue ribbon for a rabbit named Cookie. These things — the sex links, the bear and the rabbit — go to the core of what we know about Fuhrman and the things that pushed his hot buttons. A "hot button" is an insurance and investment salesman’s term for issues that prospective buyers will get excited enough about to act on. Moviemakers understand this principle well, which is why they count on sex, violence and stereotypes as much as they do to create and market their products. It’s part of a sophisticated formula that works. The seemingly crass use of black men and white women having sex in the so-called "blacksploitation" (black exploitation) films of the ’60s and ’70s is actually more sophisticated than it seems. You get a breakdown of ticket buyers that encompasses x-number of women of all colors attracted to strong black men, x-number of man of all colors interested mainly in the violent action or the naked women. Taboo sex of any kind has a certain amount of crossover appeal just because it is taboo. Stars have their own built-in audiences just because they are stars. Jim Brown, the black running back for the Cleveland Browns, and
Stella Stevens the white Playboy Playmate of the Year, were stars. Brown is
Pvt. Jefferson in The Dirty Dozen (’65). Jefferson kills Germans and gets
killed by Judging by the Fuhrman brothers’ racial harassment of the Blue brothers when they were all teenagers, it’s safe to say that Scott and Mark had strong racial attitudes before Mark joined the Corps. Mark Fuhrman said that Dan Blue played football and dated a white cheerleader. He called Dan Blue a "star athlete." Fuhrman was in the Marines when Slaughter came out. The price of a movie ticket at any U.S. military installation was next to nothing. Given Fuhrman’s special interest in formulas for successful screenplays, it is likely that he made a point of seeing Slaughter and that he saw it at a theater on a Marine base. The Marine Corps base in North Carolina is a stone’s throw away from the Army’s Special Forces school at Fort Bragg. Fort Bragg was named after Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general who spilled a lot of American blood to keep black people in chains. Remember that the next time you see a Confederate battle flag (the St. Andrews Cross) or a video clip of O.J. Simpson in chains. I do. I’m sure that Mark Fuhrman does, too. You can see in the testimony of Kathleen Bell during the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder trial how Fuhrman did react with Bell’s mere hint of sex between Marcus Allen, the black, star running back for the Oakland Raiders, and her white, 6’ tall girlfriend Andrea Terry in 1986. He launched into a racist rant about genocide. If her name hadn’t been Kathleen Bell and they hadn’t met at a Marine Corps recruiting office, his reaction may not have been so extreme. The name he used to identify the group he wanted to exterminate was "niggers." That’s one name that Kathleen Turner calls Steve Martin as
Dr. Michael My guess is that Fuhrman was as surprised as Kathleen Bell was by what he said to her and how he said it. Just look at all the unconscious associations to her name and black football stars that must have ganged up on him the instant she compared his body type to Marcus Allen’s: O.J., Allen and Jim Brown all had similar body types. All three wore
the number 32 and all three had high-profile relationships with white women. Marcus Allen
was one of O.J.’s closest friends. Former Ms. America Kathleen Sullivan babysat
O.J.’s children Arnelle and Jason. Double Indemnity (’46) has a character
very The name Kathleen is linked to three of O.J.’s four Children. Kathy is a common nickname for Kathleen and Kathryn. Cathy Randa was O.J.’s white secretary. Allen’s girlfriend was Kathryn. If you saw Body Heat you saw Kathleen Turner as Matty and as Mary Ann Simpson. You also saw her wind chimes (bells). Kathleen Turner and Steve Martin in The Man With Two Brains gets us to Steve in one jump. Steve gets us close to Steven and Stevens gets us back to Stella Stevens and Jim Brown in Slaughter. Jim Brown had O.J.’s middle name. He had Nicole’s maiden name and he had sex scenes with Stella Stevens that were finding a wider audience in 1986 on cable TV and video. To cap it off, there was O.J. having sex with white women on HBO’s 1st & Ten as though his color meant nothing. Color was paramount to Mark Fuhrman. By the time the first article of clothing in the Bundy killer’s wardrobe was purchased (Nicole bought gloves identical to her killer’s on December 18, 1990), one of the women O.J. was having onscreen sex with included 6’ tall Shannon Tweed. Between 1989 when Nicole accused O.J. of punching and kicking her, and 1991 when her killer’s Bruno Magli Lorenzos first went on sale, Shannon Tweed was a 1st & Ten regular. In Last Call (’91), Shannon Tweed and Stella
Steven both appear with a character called Jason. Tweed has a duel
role as Audrey and Audrey’s mother. Jason kills Audrey’s mother and twenty years
later has sex with Stevens as his That’s where Mark Fuhrman’s sensitivity to his initials and the incest links to Stella and Andrew Stevens come in. These links are no indication of what exists in the real world, but they give you a good indication of how you would have seen them if you were Mark Fuhrman. People with odd names like Jasper and Orenthal or embarrassing initials like MF know better than most what a social burden they can be. I can’t count the fights I got into as a kid because of somebody making fun of my name. I have always envied my older brother George his name. I have little doubt that MF felt the same way about his younger brother Scott. By the same token, you can see why neither of O.J.’s sons is a junior. O.J. hated his first name. That’s why he used his first two initials. Mark Fuhrman didn’t have a middle initial. That’s probably why he was so sensitive to the two initials he had. It’s one of many reasons that he would prize his first name over O.J. Simpson’s and be envious of O.J.'s initials. That’s why you would expect him to be sensitive to the names of everyone else in his family; his father Ralph, his brother Scott and his mother Billie. That’s why Tessa Richarde as Mitzi Fritz (MF) in Bronco Billie (’80) and Billie in Cat People (’82) can’t be ignored. Mother/son incest links in the Fuhrman collection are almost invariably
accompanied by name links to characters played by Tessa Richarde, which in turn, are
linked to characters brought to life by Teresa Russell, Kathleen Turner, Names have power because of the images and expectations we attach to them. The name you are known by affects how people see you. How they see you affects how they treat you. Performers of all kinds frequently assume names to project a desired image or too keep an undesired image associated with their given name from being projected. Mark Fuhrman must have had a street name he liked. I’d love to know what it was, who gave it to him and why. It is inconceivable to me that a cop with initials that are used as an abbreviation for "motherfucker" wouldn’t have one. Mark Fuhrman initials gave Laura Hart a good reason for asking him on tape what he would do if someone called him a motherfucker. He answered many questions at once when he replied, "Are there any witnesses?" His previous remarks about his reasons for beating people up gave her a reasonable expectation that he would give her the kind of answer he did. Consequentially, this looks like an instance where Fuhrman was the one who got set up. What else could he have said in answer to her question to maintain his image as a tough cop who beat up people just to show his authority? Not much. Among the things I was looking for in Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood were indications that certain recurring themes in the movies had a special meaning to him. I didn’t have any of the elevator links I have now and I skipped right past it the first time through. But as soon as I expanded my search for links to movies beyond the knit cap and the other ones I wrote about in Iago, I saw so many elevators that I knew it had to have a special meaning. All I could relate it to was the size of the area where Ron and Nicole were murdered and the clues that were left there. By then, I had only the vaguest recollection of having read about an
elevator in Fuhrman’s book and some concern that I had merely imagined it because of
all the elevator links I was now finding in the movies. But I was looking for murders in That wasn’t enough to make me see how much the elevator itself meant to Mark Fuhrman. But I did recall reading something in Fuhrman’s book about him in an elevator — or was I thinking of Barbara Hershey (same birthday as Fuhrman’s) as Harriet Bird on the elevator in The Natural? I went back to his first chapter and there it was, the lead sentence in the second paragraph. "As I rode the elevator up to the ninth floor…" Fuhrman was describing his humiliating experience of being charged with perjury because of the discrepancy between what he said on the witness stand about not using the n-word and his use of it on the tapes. He was lamenting the fact that he had spent twenty years as a cop working with prosecutors in the same criminal courts building where he was now being charged with a crime. He was talking about an ordeal in which he claimed he was forced by circumstances irrelevant to anything material to the case against Simpson to plead nolo contendere, just as O.J. was forced to do when he was charged with spouse abuse. Only Fuhrman didn’t mention O.J.’s nolo plea. He did mention the elevator — and the role he was playing on the tapes for a screenplay. I touched on the elevator in Police Squad! parenthetically,
but a good understanding of how it relates to the way Mark Fuhrman saw himself through the The case they’re talking about here in the final episode of the series involves drug trafficking out of a nightclub where an employee was murdered, and an attempt to nab a drug dealer known as the Frenchman. Ron Goldman worked at a nightclub before he came to work as a waiter for Keith Zlomsowitch, the restaurant manager suspected of being a drug dealer and known to be the man O.J. saw Nicole "Frenching." Mark Fuhrman was a narcotics cop before he became a detective. Frank Drebin was a super cop before he became a super buffoon. Here is one for the Monica Lewinsky DNA connection…. In the Police
Squad! show before the last one, "A Bird in the Hand/ The Butler Did
It" Frank and Would it surprise you to learn that in the pilot episode of Police
Squad! the discussion in the elevator is about Sally Dekker’s
relationship with Dr. Zubatzky The airplane had been losing altitude because the inflatable rubber pilot was deflating. To bring the plane back up, the flight attendant has to re-inflate the pilot by blowing air though a tube in his belt. You know what it looks like she’s doing from the doctor’s perspective. You can imagine the dumb look on Leslie Nielsen’s face when he sees it. What exactly did he see? You have to think twice about this one. When you see it you will. The smile that spreads across the automatic pilot’s face tells you what he’s getting out of it. Airplane! was a spoof of all the airplane disaster movies that preceded it. The elevator scene in the pilot episode of Police Squad! could have been deliberately borrowed from the "emergency inflation" scene in Airplane! The elevator appears to operate on automatic pilot because no one appears to press any buttons to make it work. But if Jim Abrams and the Zucker brothers were consciously trying to conjure up that image I don’t think that they would have been so subtle about it. Instead of the automatic pilot from Airplane! they have a woman in a swimming suit getting on the elevator when the flight attendant gets off. When the door opens again to a swimming pool she walks out onto a diving board and splashes water into the elevator with her dive. Rod Serling’s Doomsday Flight (’66), was one of the movies satarized in Airplan! With that in mind, see what you can make of the splasing watter along with the other objects that fly in through the elevator door in Police Squad! That is to say, the flowers tossed past the opera singer and a flaiming arrow shot past the Army officer. The operative word is "fly." There seems to be no end to the writers, producers and directors who borrowed something from Rod Serling’s "Twenty Two." The more I look at it the more I see myself getting on the Flying Tiger airplane to Vietnam in 1971 and the cover I designed in 1991 for The Invisible Warriors. The soldier from another time in Police Squad! getting on and off the elevator in different worlds didn’t seem so farfetched to me. The idea that an elevator could symbolize an airplane is central to
what Barbara Nichols experiences in "Twenty Two" as Liz
"Kitten" Powell an exotic dancer In the end Liz comes to understand that her airplane is not going to make it to her destination and the nurse in the elevator is actually a stewardess on the doomed flight. The glass of water she accidentally smashes beside her hospital bed stands for another woman’s flower vase that she accidentally breaks at the airport. The fire from a metal lighter she uses to light a cigarette when she tries to alter the chronology of her vision is the airplane bursting into flames in the air. The difference is in scale — as in the case of the big rag doll Liz carries with her to the basement and the tiny rag doll Mark Fuhrman left on the bloody tiles of the Bundy murder scene. Fuhrman also left flowers and a poem on a white sheet of paper with water stains in the creases that matched the blood on the tiles. The more you watch "Twenty Two" the more you see. Some elements of Liz Powell’s vision are literal. Some are symbolic with more than one meaning. The task is to figure out which is which. It takes several viewings to realize that everything Liz needed to figure out what her vision meant was present when her manager came to visit her with a "blow-up" of her picture. He sat it down on a table next to a vase of flowers and told here that he was going to have it "blown-up" much bigger when she opened her act in another town. Liz didn’t see or hear anything in the hospital that she could interpret as an exploding airplane. She might have if she had associated what her manager said about her picture being blown up with how she was going to get to the job. Rod Serling could have taken "Twenty Two" in a
different direction with the doctor, who knew that room 22 was in the basement and that it
was the morgue. We all relate to symbols and probabilities in different ways depending on what we’ve experienced and what we believe. Most people are beyond inept when it comes to recognizing meaningful patterns in symbols that they don’t see every day. They are even worse in figuring probabilities. Liz Powell was like most people in those respects. All the clues she had — the flight number she received at the airport, the ticking clock, her sudden thirst, the broken vase, the cold bite of the winter air — all of those things served only to heighten her fear. It took the sight of the woman she saw as the morgue nurse in the uniform of the flight 22 stewardess standing in the door of the plane plus the sound of her exact words to tell her what was going on. In The Twilight Zone you can expect that the explanation for Liz Powell’s experience will be supernatural. In the rest of the known universe where future events don’t normally reveal themselves in that way, the only other explanation is cause-and-effect. Don’t get me wrong here; I’m not ruling out coincidence or the supernatural as explanations for some of the things that happened with Mark Fuhrman and the Simpson’s. My contention is that neither coincidence nor the supernatural can explain all of them but film and TV can. Even if you get a coincidental or a supernatural film or TV link here and there, along with it you get a powerful reason for him to have recalled it in his book. Nobody is suggesting that the movies caused Mark Fuhrman to plan and execute a double homicide to frame O.J. Simpson or to inject himself into the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But there has to be real connections between those events and Mark Fuhrman’s hot buttons that were pushed in the movies that preceded them like footprints in the sands of time. You simply cannot backtrack that way by chance from two major historical events so close in time to a single, ambitious, violent, racist, sexist, middle-grade detective at the ragged end of his undistinguished career. You may not have been able to see ahead of time what he was going to
do, but in retrospect you can see what he did and where particular ideas came from to do
it in a particular way. That’s why these books on Fuhrman and the moves are called The odds against several matching sets of symbols and the things they correspond to will occur independently of each other in the same juxtaposition to the second victims shoes and in the same spatial relationship to each other are astronomical. Just as an elevator is not an airplane, a drinking glass is not a flower vase, a nurse is not a flight attendant and water is not blood, the items at the feet of Chapman were not the items at the feet of Goldman. But they were perfect symbolic representations of them, they were all in the same relative positions, and Mark Fuhrman was the only one who could have put them there. Fuhrman alone knows what went on in his mind during his elevator rides in the criminal courts building. It’s a well-established fact that most men spend a major part of their time thinking about sex, so it’s a safe guess that some of his time there was spent thinking about sex. A tremendous amount of sexual energy can form between some men and women on elevators for reasons that require little imagination. Only Fuhrman knows the women he was alone with in the elevator that he was moved to write about, the women he flirted with and the ones who flirted with him. Only God knows whether he actually got physical with any of them. I’m not sure it matters considering everything else we know about Fuhrman’s imagination, his hot buttons, his attraction to risky situations and the practical advantages and limitations of particular sex acts on an elevator. The image that popped into my mind just then was Michael Douglas
as Dan When Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson were killed, Forrest Whitaker lived on South Bundy, a few blocks south of the murder scene. That becomes more than an interesting tidbit when you factor the Whitaker links into the history of Nicole and O.J., the clues left by the killer, and the aspirations of Mark Fuhrman. Fuhrman moonlighted as a security guard and wrote about pursuing that field as a career after retiring from the LAPD. In Diary of a Hit Man, Whitaker’s character worked part time as a security guard. Remind you of a character played by anyone else you know? How about Andrew Stevens as Will Griffith?
Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
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artist. Tweed as Audrey was an eight-year-old witness to her
mother’s murder by a man named Jason. A stage act featuring Audrey and a giant spider
web gives us an object that has already been spun. Part of Audrey’s act includes
stabbing herself in the hand and dropping an article of clothing in front of the web.
Seeing her sprawled on the web gets you that much closer to Tessa Richarde on the wheel.
When she calls for her "mommy" in a little girl’s voice, draws a knife
blade across her own throat then draws blood from the throat of a stuffed bear, you know
you’re into some heavy symbolism. When she backs off and throws the knife through the
web you know that it’s going to draw blood again. This time it penetrates the human
heart of a medical diagram on a wall. The paper heart bleeds. 
Germans in the end. Brown is a Marine Corps captain in Ice Station Zebra (’68)
who is framed for murder. He gets killed in Ice Station Zebra, too. In
the TV sitcom The Jeffersons (’75-’85), "Zebra" is the
name that George Jefferson uses for children of black and white parents. When you
see Jim Brown flesh to flesh with Stella Stevens in Slaughter (’72) as
a former Green Beret captain, you can guess how Fuhrman would have reacted to it in
’72 and how he would have recalled it when he met Kathleen Bell in ’86. Stevens
and Brown have the kind of sex that could require a rabbit test. 
Hfuhruhurr in A Man With Two Brains
(’83) after she attacks him in her kitchen with a butcher knife. In Crimes
of Passion (’84), Kathleen Turner is Joanna Crain who moonlights as a cheap whore
called China Blue. She gives a client a symbolic description of herself performing
fellatio to climax as she sinks to the task. She gives an explicit demonstration of her
oral talents on another client’s big toe. In A Breed Apart (’84) Kathleen
Turner is Stella. 
much like Arnelle and Friday the 13th Part 3 (’82)
has a character named Jason who kills a character played by Tracie Savage. Jason
kills a number of people in a variety of hideous ways. Savage’s character is the only
one he kills with a knife… But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We’re
talking about Mark Fuhrman’s hot buttons relative to O.J. and other black running
backs like him. We’re talking about the ones that moved Ron and Nicole’s killer
to do many specific things as a killer, a cop and a writer, and the ones Kathleen Bell
most likely pushed without either of them being consciously aware of what happened. 
girlfriend’s mother Betty. Even with the age difference between
Tweed and Stevens, there is enough of a resemblance that you can’t tell them apart
until the camera zooms in close. By all accounts, Jason Simpson had a good relationship
with his father’s second wife Nicole. By some accounts he was as obsessed with her in
a sexual way as his father was supposed to have been. But the primary source of those
accounts is difficult to pin down. If the source of other inflammatory rumors about Nicole
and the men in her life are any indication of where they might have originated, you have
to consider Mark Fuhrman. 
Shannon Tweed and Stella
Stevens. The only exceptions appear to be Angela Lansbury as the domineering mother
of a mind-controlled assassin in The Manchurian Candidate (62) and
Alice Krige as a shape-shifting cat woman in Sleepwalkers (’92).
Judging by Fuhrman’s adoption of Andy Sipowicz as a character he saw himself as
being most akin to and the sheer tonnage of enviable Andrews in the Fuhrman collection,
it’s safe to say that he was not conscious of the incest connection to that name.
Nevertheless, they exist. Without them I would never have found the links to Stella and
Andrew Stevens.
confined spaces and finding
as many small bathrooms, showers, and other tight places as elevators. So the elevator
itself didn’t seem to be that significant. Then, when I was looking for wet shoes, I
happened on an A&E replay of the Moonlighting TV series
(’85-’89) with Cybill Shepherd as Maddie Hays and Bruce Willis
as David Addison. I knew that Bruce Willis’ nickname was Bruno and the Bruno Magli
brand name could be linked only to the shoes that Nicole bought for herself. That led me
to take note of Maddie’s shoes on the elevator. A shot of her feet in similar shoes
getting off the elevator opened nearly every show. 
original
Frank Drebin requires more. Drebin lives in a universe where the normal laws of
time and space do not apply. Of the six Police Squad! episodes, three involve a
sight gag scene on an elevator with Frank and his boss Ed. You can’t
tell which way the elevator is moving, not that it matters with a door that can open on
one floor to admit an 1880’s cavalry officer leaving a parade ground and let
him off in the middle of a pitched battle. Frank and Ed take visual non-sequiturs like
this in stride as they discuss the case they’re working on. 
Ed are discussing clues in the kidnapping of
Terry Burton, the young woman who blew her birthday cake off the table when she bent down
to blow out the candles. As in Lt. Dolenz’s elevator joke, a man dressed like a
police officer is getting off (slang for having an orgasm) and a stout woman dressed like
an ancient Greek or Roman aristocrat is getting on. When the door opens to the stage of an
opera house you know that the woman in the unusual dress is an opera singer. The applause
and the flowers thrown from the audience tell you that she is a Prima DONNA.
Frank tells Ed that clues to the missing girl’s whereabouts were found in the lab. If
you’re thinking "Monica Lewinsky," how much imagination do you need to make
the connection? 
and the double murders? If you saw
Abrams, Zucker and Zucker’s Airplane! (’80) you know where the
"French" connection to Sally Dekker originated when you see the stewardess in Police
Squad! enter the elevator with Leslie Nielsen. He is the doctor in Airplane!
who stumbles on Julie Hagerty as the stewardess with her head in the automatic
pilot’s lap. 
hospitalized for exhaustion. She
awakens to a powerful thirst and the sound of a clock ticking loudly. She reaches for a
glass of water and it crashes to the floor. She follows the sound of footsteps outside her
door to the hallway where she sees a nurse going down in an elevator. Liz takes the same
elevator to the basement She’s cold. She nervously approaches room 22. It’s the
morgue. Suddenly the door opens and the nurse pops out to say, "Room for one more,
honey." 
Serling could have had him picking up on the
airplane clues and doing some investigating. As a doctor he could appreciate the
significance of some things that Liz Powell may not have — like the fact that
blood is mostly water and the fact that cold and thirst are symptomatic of massive blood
loss. What would he have thought if he had learned that her flight number was 22? What
would he have done if he believe in premonitions? What would he have done if he
didn’t?
The
Smoking Gun. I didn’t think of that title until I saw the British television
movie Jack the Ripper (’88) with Michael Caine as a great detective
crouched at the feet of the Ripper’s second victim Annie Chapman. The only
brown leather glove on that murder scene belongs to the first homicide detective to get
there. But a brown leather handbag makes a good symbolic representation of the glove. 
Gallager and Glenn Close as Alex
Forrest, an assistant editor for a publisher called Robbins and Hart, in the movie Fatal
Attraction (’87). You might have thought of Tessa Richarde as Roberta de Vries in
the 1987 episode of Night Court, the one called "Earthquake" about Dan
and the others stuck in the courthouse elevator. On the other hand, Alex Forrest having
sex with a married man on an elevator could just as easily remind you of Forrest
Whitaker in Diary of a Hit Man on the elevator with the husband of the
woman that he is having sex with. You can’t always help what you think, which is the
whole point of tracking Fuhrman’s hot buttons on film and television.