Police Squad! is, hands down, the TV series with the greatest density of links to Mark Fuhrman and the Bundy murders. But it consisted of only six episodes. Twin Peaks is next but it consisted of only 30 episodes. I’d bet my bones that Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer has a high link count to Fuhrman but I haven’t seen it since it was last broadcast in 1986 after its star Stacy Ketch got busted on a cocaine charge.

For the sheer number of Bundy links in a TV series I have seen since I started this book, I’d say that Matlock comes in a strong third behind Moonlighting. However, I could do justice to neither of them here without omitting Murder, She Wrote, Charlie’s Angels and Remington Steele altogether. So there is a lot in them that you haven’s seen here.

With all of that said, I called Remington Steel the "motherload" of TV series with links to the Bundy murders for a good reason. I had 19 episodes to choose from to finish off this chapter. That is, I had 19 episodes to choose from with a comparable quantity and quality of links to choose from for the final chapter of this book. I can’t even hit all of the high points of those episodes. That would require a minimum of five pages each to do in a way that would put them in context and make sense to anyone who hadn’t seen them. Therefore, I decided to concentrate on exploring a couple of themes (ghosts and the reliance on movies for the killing and framing), dissecting one episode "Altered Steele), and packing as much of them as I can into as few pages possible.

Just to give you an idea of what I had to leave out, I’m going to summarize one episode called, "Steele on the Air" giving you only one of many links to Mark Fuhrman and his role in the Bundy murder case. I chose it simply because of its connection to the movie Ghost by way of Vincent Schiavelli as Leon, the ghost on the New York City subway train in the movie. Leon is a publicity agent for a big magazine in New York who wants to do a cover story on Remington Steele. Things look good for Steele when he and Laura get two innocent men arrested for murder. When they find the right man, Leon appears with bad news. He says, "Storm clouds, baby. The cover is off. New York liked it better when the two old D.J.’s did it…Ya approached greatness – and veered left…Well, I hope this has been a lesson to you."

In at least two episodes of Remington Steele someone tells him that he knows how get to the heart of the matter. Each time Laura Holt reacts with disdain. Mildred does it in a 1983 episode we’re going to examine here called "Altered Steele." She tells Laura, "isn’t it amazing how our boss uses even old movies to get to the heart of things?" It should go without saying that Mark Fuhrman’s association with Laura Hart from 1984 to 1994 is implicit in every episode of Remington Steel just because of her name. I’m saying it anyway just to make sure we’re on the same wavelength as far as Fuhrman’s connection to the name Laura and his primary motive for the murders are concerned.

The killing of Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson certainly involved elements of envy, racism, anti-Semitism, and displaced aggression. But Fuhrman’s primary motive had to do with self-promotion centered around his obsession with O.J.’s image in the media and his own. The "great detective" status he enjoys today is a consequence of his role in the prosecution of Simpson. Working backward from there you can see how each move he made since 1984 to put himself in that position was the result of a conscious set of well-timed moves with that end in mind.

Mark Fuhrman wrote the number one best seller on the New York Times best-seller list in 1997 with his name dwarfing the tile of his book. Before he could do that he had to make his name a marketable item. Before he could do that he had to distinguish himself in the murder investigation of O.J. Simpson. Before he could do that he had to get involved in the case as the first lead detective on the bloody murder scene. Before he could do that, there had to be a bloody murder.

Going backward step by step you eventually come to the rumors that Fuhrman started of having inside knowledge about O.J.’s "escalating abuse" of Nicole because of his own intimate affair with the "victim." The notion of escalating abuse requires an established pattern. You don’t get that pattern with O.J. and Nicole without Mark Fuhrman’s rumors of inside knowledge in ’92 and his letter to the city attorney in ’89 that killed two birds, so to speak, with one stone. He did that by making his ’84 visit to Rockingham sound as though he witnessed O.J. committing an act of violence against Nicole by banging up his car.

Fuhrman had a knack for making something out of nothing and for turning a bad situation to his advantage. He turned the 2-degree parking angel of O.J.’s Bronco into "evidence" of a hastily parked vehicle that O.J. was too panic-stricken to notice or didn’t have time to correct. He turned his own racist record into a charge (which stuck) that O.J.’s defense used "the race card" to draw attention away from their client’s obvious guilt and the outstanding job he did on the case. He turned the baseball bat incident into a pattern of domestic violence and the fact that he had no reason to be there into a response to a call for help.

No record and no testimony was ever presented by anyone but Mark Fuhrman that anyone at Rockingham called 911 in 1984 or in 1985 when he claimed he went there. Fuhrman was a notorious name-dropper. He said in his ’89 letter to the city attorney that his encounter with O.J. under those circumstances, "left an "indelible impression on my mind." Yet, he made no mention of it to anyone for over four years.

If, as Fuhrman claimed, he was trying to "puff himself up" and to shock Laura Hart with his stories of abusing "niggers," how come he never told her about his encounter with the famous black man and his German wife? I can think of only one good reason; he screwed up. He had no way of explaining at the time how he came to be there if she decided to check the record of 911 calls made from O.J.’s address. In short, he didn’t talk about it because he wanted to forget that he ever did anything that stupid.

"Altered Steele" is about a man who wanted to forget, so he did. Fred McCarren is Frank Dannon, who wakes up from a disjointed nightmare about a clock, a bell, waves crashing against a shore and someone trying to kill him with a hatchet. He gets out of bed fully clothed and looks around his motel room as if nothing is familiar to him. He doesn’t know that his nightmare is only beginning until he calls the motel operator and realize he doesn’t know his name. When he bends over to look at the notepad by the phone a crossbow arrow slams into the wall over his head.

A bell? Waves crashing against a shore? A hatchet? A man suffering from amnesia? What do those things remind you of?

The bell and the man with amnesia remind me of Kathleen Bell and Mark Fuhrman’s claim that he had amnesia when F. Lee Bailey asked him if he knew her. She was the woman who testified about wanting to set him up with her friend Andrea Terry because his height and build reminded her of the kind of men Andrea Terry liked to date. Her use of O.J.’s friend Markus Allen as an example of such a man is what sent Fuhrman into his genocidal rant about "niggers."

The waves crashing against the shore remind me of Mark Fuhrman’s home near the ocean in Redondo Beach where he met Kathleen Bell at a Marine recruiting station. You will be seeing another reference to marines later on in connection with a killer’s dark brown leather gloves. You will also see a reference to the South China Sea where Fuhrman served aboard ship as a Marine MP.

The Hatchet reminds me of Fuhrman’s second wife Janet Hackett, the woman he said he would have killed if he had caught her with another man. Apart from Fuhrman’s dream of committing acts of extreme violence that he told his psychiatrists about in 1981 and ’82 we can only speculate about what he dreamed. But we have plenty to work with. What do you do when you strike something repeatedly with a hatchet? You hack it. Fuhrman didn’t say how he would have killed his second wife, but her name suggests what he might have dreamed.

There is something else about a hatchet as a murder weapon that has something in common with the gruesome murder scene on Bundy. Lots of blood. We’ll get to that before we’re done. First the psychiatrist….

Frank Dannon goes to the Remington Steele Detective agency. In a scene that substitutes an amnesiac for a walking dead man in D.O.A., Frank tells Steele and Laura, "I need you to find someone." Steele says, "Excellent. Who?" Frank replies with a little hesitation, "Me."

Steele takes this opportunity to put on a dazzling display. He says, "It’s absolutely clear that we are dealing with a classic case of amnesia, of which there are two characteristic types; traumatic and hysterical." He examines Frank’s head. "In the absence of any bumps, bruises or obvious injuries to the skull, I think we’re safe in assuming that this man is suffering from the hysterical form of the condition."

Frank wants to know what that means. Steele tells him, "Someone or something recently scared the living daylights out of you."

Frank hadn’t recalled anything before he woke up in the motel room and someone shot an arrow at him. He can’t even recall his name. He knows his name only because he heard the motel operator say it. But Steele’s brilliant analysis triggers another memory. Frank can’t put the pieces of his nightmare together but he does remember that someone was trying to kill him with a hatchet.

Laura calls Steele into her office. It’s clear to her from the bizarre story about the hatchet and the arrow that the man needs a psychiatrist, not a private eye. Steele agrees. As an afterthought she asks him were he got all of that stuff about amnesia. He says, "Spellbound." Laura replies, "I was, actually." Then Steele completes the thought, "Spellbound, Gregory Peck, Ingrid Bergman, Selsnick International 1945." Laura rolls her eyes, "I should known not to ask."

The reference to "International" wouldn’t mean anything special to you or me but it would to Mark Fuhrman. The SUV he drove when he met Kathleen Bell at the Marine recruiting station and later when he met Angela Terry in a Redondo Beach tavern was a 1980 International Harvester Scout. It’s the vehicle he drove the night of the Bundy murders. It fits the description of the SUV that Robert Heidstra saw going south on Bundy after the murders better than it fits O.J.’s Bronco.

Laura and Steele are all set to refer Frank to a psychiatrist when they come out of the office and see him holding the shaft of the arrow. The markings on the shaft lead them to a survivalist weapons store. While they’re talking to the clerk a woman with a gold bell charm on her bracelet slips on a pair of tight, dark brown leather gloves. She puts a magazine into a quad-50 (four 50-caliber machine guns on a rotating mount) and presses a button. The guns spry the store with bullets. Laura, Steele and Frank hit the floor.

O.J. and Fuhrman both had a large collection of guns in their homes. O.J.’s collection included at least one illegal automatic weapon. Fuhrman told his police psychiatrist that his job as a sergeant in the Marine Corps when he was in Vietnam was not an MP but a machine gunner….

While everyone else is cowering in fear Steele takes action by grabbing a hand grenade from a barrel full of them. Laura can’t believe what she’s seeing. When she asks him franticly amid the noise and destruction of the guns what he’s doing he say’s, "The Sands of Iwo Jima, John Wayne, Republic 1949." With this battle cry he stands up and lobs the grenade at the guns. He takes out the guns. But it looks like the guns have taken out their new client Frank Dannon.

In The Sands of Iwo Jima John Wayne is a Word War Two sergeant in the Marine Corps on the bloody battlefields of Iwo Jima. One of the most powerful icons in American history is the American flag raising by marines on Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima. It is as closely associated with the Marine Corps itself as its official eagle globe and anchor insignia and it has a direct link to Amy Stock as Assistant DA Lauren Richmond in "The Foursome" episode of Matlock (see Chapter 7: Code Breakers).

In "The Foursome" an innocent man with striking similarities to O.J. is framed for murder with the help of evidence planted by Richmond who has striking similarities to Assistant DA Marcia Clark. It was first broadcast a week before Christmas, 1991. That happens to be one year to the day after Nicole purchased the men’s extra large leather gloves with the same lot number as the bloody, dark brown leather glove found by Officer Riske on Bundy that matched the one that Fuhrman found on Rockingham. That happens to be a good reason for the Bundy killer to have done a number of things that were closely associated with "The Foursome" episode of Matlock if he took his inspiration from movies and TV, especially if he was an aspiring screenwriter and an ex-marine.

Another important thing about the Marines in World War Two from Mark Fuhrman’s point of view is that they did not fight against the Nazis in Europe. In explaining his collection of Nazi paraphernalia Fuhrman called himself "something of a history and military buff." He said that the only "memorabilia" he collected from World Wars One and Two where "Decorations, daggers and sabers. He said, "British and German war decorations are recognized for their superb craftsmanship."

Remington Steele is British. One of his defining characteristics is his expert appreciation for fine art and superb craftsmanship.

The gloves that Nicole purchased came in two colors, dark brown and black. Both of her gloves were accounted for. Neither of them could be traced to O.J. Simpson. However, O.J. was photographed wearing a pair of dark brown leather gloves that were very similar to the killer’s gloves. One of O.J.’s black leather gloves was missing after Fuhrman and Roberts searched O.J.’s bedroom on the 13^th. So, one way or another, brown leather gloves and black ones were associated with Det. Fuhrman’s investigation of the murders. And don’t forget the gardener’s gloves that Fuhrman said he thought the Rockingham glove might have been when he fist saw it. You will be seeing it here in "Altered Steele."

Frank Dannon’s untimely demise and the mystery surrounding his identity make front-page news. Only he isn’t dead. Remington Steele had the story planted to draw out the killer. With Steele and Laura looking on at the cemetery beside Frank who is hidden behind the low-hanging branch of a tree they watch the graveside ceremony to see who shows up. Steele tells Frank, "There is no doubt in my mind that whoever’s trying to kill you will appear here out of some perverse sense of symmetry; a certain psychopathic compunction to confirm the ultimate resolution of the crime." Mildred is hidden behind a tree taking pictures of women getting out of limousines. Here, you will note that the photo in Fuhrman’s Murder in Brentwood of the poem about mothers, children and hearts is propped up in the corner of the murder scene like a tombstone. The knee of an unidentified person in blue jeans intrudes into the photo.

Five women in black come to the burial. None of them look familiar to Frank. He guesses they may be is sisters. When the minister asks for the widow to step forward, all five women take the step. Frank Dannon faints dead away.

Back at the office Mildred puts the pictures she took of the five "widows" onto a projection screen one at a time while Steele gives their names and asks Frank if he recalls any of them. Frank’s head is in a spin from the knowledge that he is a five-time bigamist but all of the women, two blondes, two brunettes and a redhead look like strangers to him.

The first Mrs. Dannon they look at is Carole Ita White as Terry (as in Andrea Terry). She’s a meek, blonde, college professor who is the last person in the world you would pick as a murder suspect. That’s why Steele suspects her. The Frank Dannon she married was a history professor.

The second Mrs. Dannon is Jane Kazmarek (the cheating wife in the 1989 version of D.O.A. that Dennis Quaid is framed for murdering) as Barbara. She’s a classy brunette in sunglasses who knew Frank as an antique dealer.

Mrs. Dannon number three is Delta Burke as Nancy, a sultry brunette who drips sex with every tip of her head, the intonation of her every word and every move of her voluptuous body. She knew Frank as a neurosurgeon.

Frank can’t imagine marrying Clara (Cara?) Perryman as Stella, a down-to-earth redhead who is a little on the plump side. He thinks that she isn’t his type. Then again, how would he know? Her husband was a truck driver

The beautiful, blonde Dutch actress Monique Van De Ven is Mary, wife number five. She thought that her husband was an aerospace engineer. She’s the one Frank responds to most favorably. She is also the woman who caused him to lose his memory by trying to kill him.

If you look at the succession of cars with the funeral director’s gloved hand opening the doors for each woman you get the illusion of a line of cars. But if you look at the trees in the background you can see that the women are exiting the same car because the camera hasn’t moved.

Mark Fuhrman called himself a history buff and a collector of military artifacts going back at least as far as the late 19^th century (antiques). Barbara was the name of his first wife. Janet was his second wife and Caroline was his third. His father was a truck driver and Nicole was hit in the head hard enough to cause brain damage if she had survived.

Fuhrman is the only one who thought it was important to write down the name Cara on the note about the pizza and the phone number 575-5713. He was the only one to use the note and the number to suggest that Nicole might have been calling to order a meal for a friend.

After you’ve seen a few episodes of Remington Steele you will know that the frequently shown suite number of the agency on the glass door is 1157. Looking at it from the inside of the office the E on the end of "SUITE" looks exactly like the number 3, giving you all four of the numbers used in the pizza note phone number. We established a Clara/Cara pizza connection to a tombstone with Mary Steenburgen as Clara in Back to the Future III. We have that with Clara and Mary at Frank’s gravesite. At a wake given by Laura posing as Frank’s bereaved fiancée, guess which widow pigs out on the food. Right, Clara Perryman as Stella. At the end of the show you see her and the remaining three wives bursting through the door of suite 1157.

Only after viewing the slides of the widows does Frank remember a crucial point about the flashes from his traumatic experience that he keeps seeing in his mind as something out of a nightmare. He remembers that a woman is trying to kill him. Nothing else makes sense. Steele says, "I’ve got it! Mirage, Gregory Peck, Walter Mathau, Universal 1965…Peck plays a man with amnesia, who’s in great danger. He has these recurring flashbacks that unravels the entire mystery." This is the insight that so impresses Mildred with Steele’s ability to get to the heart of things "even" with old movies. As usual, he doesn’t know where to go from there. This is when Laura comes up with the idea of having the wake.

While the women are together comparing notes on their mutual late husband and Laura and Steele are taking notes on them, Mildred is supposed to be keeping an eye on Frank at her place. She tells him, "You’re dead, mister. And as far as I’m concerned you’re going to stay dead." Frank has the stupendously dumb idea of slipping away and going to the wake. When he comes through the door holding a bouquet of flowers the women, understandably, react as though they’d seen a ghost. Mary thinks that she is the one who killed him when she put on the brown leather gloves, inserted the magazine into the machine guns and pushed the button. Stella is the first to recover enough to do more than gasp in shock. She pounces on him and proceeds to slam his head against the floor.

On the street Laura and Steele berate Frank for spoiling their plans and letting his would-be killer know that he is alive. Frank can’t believe that any of the women at the wake would want him dead. Steel reminds him, "One of your spouses tried to use your head for a basketball (Mark Fuhrman’s favorite sport). Steele has learned only that Nancy is money-hungry and Laura has learned that Barbara keeps a 22-calaber pistol in her purse. Someone in a car shoots at them and speeds away. No one is hit. Steel finds a gold bell from a charm bracelet next to the curb. Laura decides to see if Barbara still has her pistol. She doesn’t.

Steele takes Frank to his apartment where they talk about what just happened. In the course of the conversation Frank finds himself remembering everything about his life – except who tried to kill him. He remembers that in college he was always shifting majors (in the police force Fuhrman was always shifting jobs). In the Navy he was on the South China Sea when the ship took on casualties. A man was dying and there were no doctors available to help him. Frank says, "The blood was everywhere" Just from watching doctors perform operations, Frank was able to save the man’s life. He realized that he had a special gift for assuming different identities and carried it into the arena of matrimony.

At this point in the show I began to anticipate what I was going to see. I had a lot to go on. I had the South China Sea (Fuhrman in the Marines). I had "blood everywhere (the Bundy murder scene). I had two men inside of a room talking quietly (Fuhrman and Roberts in O.J.’s bedroom where they "found" the socks that later tested positive for O.J.’s and Nicole’s blood). When I heard Frank say something about Nancy on a bear skin (O.J.’s ankle in the bear trap in the Naked Gun) rug by a fireplace (the rug by the fireplace in O.J.’s bedroom) I would have been surprised not to see the black socks. I did not get surprised.

Do you think we need a bed as well as the fireplace and the rug to make the connection to the socks? …Steele and Frank decide to retire for the night. Steele tells Frank to take the bed while he takes the couch. Frank goes to the bedroom. Steele, who we now see has taken off his shoes, props his feet up on the coffee table. He is wearing black socks.

Nancy is hiding in Steele’s bedroom. When Frank lies down on the bed she creeps out of the shadows and crawls into the bed with him. While she is using her seductive charms to get him to forget about the other women and give her money for an overdrawn account, Steele opens the door, switches on the light and says, "Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly." Glaring at Frank he says, "What’s to stop her from taking you to some nice secluded spot and slitting your throat?"

I’m not saying that the idea to plant the socks came from this scene in this show or from any single scene in any TV show or movie. I’m saying that the idea started with one of these scenes. I’m saying that it was reinforced so often with similar scenes in other TV shows and movies that the first sight of O.J.’s bedroom with the bed, the rug and the fireplace made the idea of planting the socks just seem like a good idea. I’m saying that the same kind of thinking applied to Fuhrman’s bleeding killer theory, his explanation for the butcher knife on Nicole’s kitchen counter, his story about the parking angle of O.J.’s Bronco, the stick, the package, the plastic sheet the shovel and the glove.

I do, however, believe that a portion of the story Fuhrman wrote in Murder in Brentwood about finding the glove did come from the "Altered Steele" episode of Remington Steele.

Steele and Laura narrow down the suspects to the two blondes, Terry the college professor and Mary, Frank’s favorite wife. Laura leans toward Mary because she speaks with an accent. Steele thinks that’s absurd. His money is on Terry because she appears to be the least likely suspect. He says, "The only one I’d suspect more would be the butler, if there was one." In one episode of Remington Steele with a comparable number of links to the Bundy murders as "Altered Steele" the butler did do it.

Finally, after Steele and Laura learn that Frank gave bell charms to each of his wives, they agree that the way to catch the one who is trying to kill him is to find the one without the charm.

Steele, Laura and Frank make their first stop at Mary’s home. She is digging in her rose garden with a hand spade. She is wearing gardening gloves. What nobody knows at this point is that Mary is a serial killer like Theresa Russell in Black Widow (’86) who marries wealthy men and kills them for the money. She has seven bodies planted in her rose garden. Mary takes off her right glove to put her hand in Steele’s. He "incidentally" notices the bell charm and leaves Frank with her, confident that the killer must be Terry.

When Steele and Laura see Terry they find out that she has a real gift charm because it is inscribed with the date that Frank gave it to her. They now know that Mary got a replacement for her lost charm and rush back to save Frank in the nick of time.

We have to take a time out here to remember what Fuhrman told Laura Hart about the glove that he said O.J. lost and he found on Rockingham. He said, "The glove is everything. Without the glove, bye-bye. Now here’s the kicker:

Sitting on her living room couch with Frank – without her gloves – Mary tells Frank that she thought she’d "lost" him. She says, "Now that I’ve found you, you’ll never leave my sight again." He tells her that he feels the same way. She excuses herself to freshen up. When she leaves Frank hears a bell that sounds more like a gong. It’s the clock he saw in his disjointed flashbacks of the attempted murder with a mechanical man striking the bell on the clock with a hammer. Then he notices a decoration on the coffee table, a long, clear, rectangular box with blue liquid that roles slowly like waves on a shore as it rocks back and forth on a fulcrum. Mary steps out of the room with a crossbow aimed at Frank’s chest. She says, "You’ve been a tough man to kill; not like the others. A real challenge. But now it’s bye-bye."

"Steele Crazy After All These Years" is an earlier 1983 episode of Remington Steele with a ghost theme. It stars James Read as Murphy, Annie Potts as Annie, and Allyce Beasley as Lynette. Sharon Stone is listed in the end credits as the homecoming queen. She has less than two minutes on screen and exactly ten lines of dialogue. But you see a larger-than-life cardboard cutout of her from time to time and her picture in the background of a scene in a women’s dormitory.

Two people have been murdered on the campus of an unnamed university, their bodies hung by the neck from the lamppost of the R.O.T.C. building. All evidence points to the ghost of a self-styled revolutionary named Tom Donavan who died in 1973.

Laura’s colleague Murphy, who was with Laura before the man posing as Remington Steele came along, is an alumnus of the university attending the ten-year homecoming. Before the first body is discovered, Annie comes to him to help her find her missing boyfriend Dan. She remembers Murphy as a basketball player. Murphy doesn’t remember Annie and he didn’t know the girl Annie said he dated. She replies, "I always suspected that she was lying about your relationship." Think Fuhrman and Nicole with a reversal of roles.

When Annie and Murphy discover Dan’s body Murphy calls Laura for help. Steele comes along and makes a wager that he can find the killer first. They go their separate ways.

Annie shows Murphy and Laura a photo album with a picture of Tom Donavan with his little sister and a group photo of Donavan’s fellow campus revolutionaries. Dan was one of them. So was Annie. The others were Hector Sanchez, Nat Shavers and Lynette Mercer. When Annie says something about Tom Donavan being killed by a bomb Murphy tells her that he thought he died in a lab accident. Annie sets the record straight, "Lies for the media." Think Fuhrman’s 17^th note and the bogus media report about the police finding a bloody black ski mask in O.J.’s bedroom closet.

While searching in the dead man’s living room Steele finds a book called Poltergeist Fact and Fiction. Doors begin to slam shut by themselves. A light bulb pops. He hurries to the bathroom. He sees is something that looks like blood pouring from the sink and bathtub faucets. Then Steele sees the apparition of a man in the medicine chest mirror. The door of the chest flies open in an explosion. Steele exits in a hurry.

Annie, Murphy and Laura meet Hector Sanchez in a library. Hector says that he saw Donavan’s ghost. The ghost appears in the library to all four of them. Hector disappears, leaving one shoe behind. Steele find him hanging by his neck from a flagpole. He finds Tom Donavan’s nametag and tells Murphy and Laura that he has solved the crime and he has solid evidence. He tells them that he will leave notes for them to study. When Murphy and Laura are gone, Steele shows Annie the nametag. Only then does he learn that Tom Donavan has been dead for ten years.

Laura catches Nat Shavers breaking into her car. He is a fugitive from the law who pulled a publicity stunt on the White House lawn and wrote a book that made him a living legend. He tells Laura, Steele, Murphy and Annie, "I liked being a legend but you can’t eat press clippings, ya know." Think Bundy Murders, which made Fuhrman money on a book and a legend in some circles.

Murphy finds the wiring in Dan’s bathroom that created the ghostly phenomena. Steele finds a delta-shaped crystal earring.

In Annie’s apartment, Laura hears a noise in the bedroom. She opens the door and a tall figure in black clothes, black leather gloves and a black ski mask nearly runs her over. The figure in black dashes from the building. Laura gives chase. Steele and Murphy join her. The person in the ski mask disappears. Laura finds a secret opening to a network of tunnels. Steele finds it, too. Laura asks him how he found it. He says, "The Third Man, London Films 1944."

Laura and Steele don’t find the killer in the tunnels. They do find Allyce Beasley (Agnes DiPesto in Moonlighting) as Lynette Mercer, the last member of Donavan’s campus revolutionaries. She tells them and Annie the inside story of what happened to Tom Donavan in 1973. You can’t have a real revolution without martyrs to the cause. Ron and Nicole were martyrs to the cause of racism.

Donavan told the other members of his group that they were going to break into the R.O.T.C. building to find incriminating documents, leave revolutionary slogans and set off fireworks. Lynette discovered at the last minute that he actually planned to blow up the building and kill Annie, Hector, Nat and Dan to make them martyrs. Lynette sees in that moment that none of the others would believe her if she told them the truth about their leader Tom Donavan. "Another building, another set of victims to his personal cause." Lynette hits him over the head, resets the timer for the bomb and runs to tell the others that security is in the building and Donavan told them to get out fast." Annie never made it inside the building. The others get out just before it explodes.

Pursuing their separate tracks of investigation, Laura and Murphy pour over the pictures in Annie’s album. She says, "It must be here. We just can’t see it. Someone with a motive and access to everything... Zeroing in on the picture of Tom Donavan and his sister, she searches the homecoming queen’s room and finds in her bedroom closet the same picture and a mask of Tom Donavan.

Meanwhile, Steele notices the resemblance of the earring he found to the one on the ear of the homecoming queen in the cardboard cutout. He compares the earring he has to the one on the cutout and he, too, knows who the killer is. He runs to the open-air stage where the queen and her court are rehearsing for the homecoming ceremony. He meets Laura on the way running in the same direction. Laura gets to the homecoming queen first and tackles her – the way a defensive football player would tackle a running back like O.J. Simpson.

In a quit moment with Steele the bet is called a wash. Laura comments on the killer’s elaborate maneuvering and ten year wait for the right moment to exact her revenge against the people she blamed for her brother’s death. Paraphrasing Shakespeare’s line about "a woman scorned." Laura says, "You know what they say about a woman obsessed."

What about a man obsessed? In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman uses one word again and again to describe the driving force behind the behavior of various people other than himself with respect to the Bundy murders. That word is "obsession."

I wanted to end this book with a fairly equal sampling of links from four episodes of Remington Steele. They are: "Steele Crazy After All These Years" (ghost theme), "Beg Borrow or Steele" (ghost theme, double homicide, Catholic woman), "Cast in Steele (link to O.J. in The Naked Gun) and "Have I got a Steele for You." Obviously I couldn’t carry out that plan without going into a slew of extra innings. We’re into extra innings now, so I’ll wrap things up right here….

George E. Mulch in a late 1985 and a mid-1986 episode of Remington Steele is a freelance idea man. Steele and Laura first encounter him in "Cast in Steel" when they track down letters he sent to movie stars as the buildup to an innocent publicity stunt. They look like death threats when the stars find themselves ducking bullets. The real target is Steele, who walked in the wrong door at an awards ceremony and saw a man he describes as, "Tall, good looking…like one of your American football players" holding a none-too-lively woman. He realizes what he actually saw when her picture accompanies a TV news story about her. According to the news, she died at home at the same time Steele saw her backstage with the football player.

Michael Constantine (the principle in Room 222 with Denise Nicholson and Karen Valentine) is George E. Mulch. He signs his name with his initials. In "Have I Got a Steele for You" Laura learns with dismay that he is another movie buff. "Yeah," he explains, "in my business it pays to see a lot of movies, because you never know when an idea will leap off the screen at you."

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