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Chapter 19

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Making a smooth, Fuhrman collection transition from Benjamin Mouton as Blake-the-pimp and Theresa Russell as Liz-the-Whore, to the killers and victims in Innocent Blood is easy. We’re going to make it even easier by including a picture of Liz at night after she is savagely raped, beaten senseless and dumped in an empty lot by a railroad track. You see her shoeless (like Nicole), in a short dress (like Nicole’s), lying on her left side (like Nicole) with her hair covering her face (like Nicole). Jack Nance plays the Good Samaritan who finds her and takes her to a hospital. Jack Nance plays the man who finds Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks – only Laura Palmer is dead. She was stabbed to death in an abandoned railroad freight car and wrapped in a sheet of plastic.

Nicole Brown Simpson was knocked senseless before she was killed with a knife. When O.J., the man accused of killing her, played football for the Buffalo Bills he often visited a bar in Canada called The Underground Railroad. The prosecution’s ready acceptance of the plastic sheet in the Bronco as evidence against O.J. is a good example of how the police and prosecutors tried to railroad him. You can read everything about the sheet of plastic in Marcia Clark’s direct examination of Mark Fuhrman. You can see it used in more movies and TV shows than I can list on one page the way Mark and Marcia suggested O.J. intended to use it. Tony Lip as Frank, one of the killer’s henchmen in Innocent Blood, uses it that way – to wrap up the body of the movie’s first murder victim.

Fuhrman "found" the plastic in the storage area of O.J.’s Bronco. By noting his "discovery" of a shovel along with the plastic he created the impression that there was a link between them and the murder of O.J.’s ex. You could almost see O.J.’s intention of wrapping her body in the plastic, dumping it in the Bronco and using the shovel to dig her grave.

The story of the "discovery" didn’t belong in the testimony. The police and prosecutors had several months to determine with a minimum of effort that those items had no evidentiary value whatsoever. They appeared to exert no effort whatsoever to learn anything about them. Instead, they held onto them all that time for the soul purpose of punctuating a week of damaging testimony with a Friday afternoon stunner that couldn’t be rebutted until the following Monday.

On Monday, Fuhrman and Clark acted as though they were embarrassed to learn that the shovel was a pooper-scooper for the Simpson’s dogs and the plastic was standard equipment with the Bronco for clean tire changes. They couldn’t have been sorry about reinforcing the image of O.J. as a murderer for another two and a half days, of suggesting that his murder of Nicole might have been planned and plastic might have been used to limit the amount of blood in the Bronco. Once the idea of premeditated murder was injected into the case the willingness of Mark and Marcia to admit they were wrong only served to highlight their "sincere desire" to uncover the "truth." The "truth" they were trying to push all along was that O.J., driven by a sexual obsession with Nicole, killed her and Ron in a jealous rage. Their "mistake" cost them nothing.

The truth with respect to the significance of everything Fuhrman "found" on Bundy and Rockingham as well as in, on and around the Bronco, is that it came from the same place that the plastic sheet came from. It came from the movies.

Note the bubble gum link to Kim Coates as Ray in Innocent Blood. You see Ray chewing gum but you don’t know that it’s bubble gum until you see him blow a pink bubble. You don’t see that until newly transformed vampires Sal "The Shark" Macelli (Robert Loggia) and his limo driver Lenny – who’s "undead" body they had put in the trunk of a car – put "the bite" on Ray and Frank. The bite on the neck turns them into vampires. Fuhrman said the bubble gum he found had the impression of adult molars and might have matched the killer’s. Ray is a victim and a killer so the gum works both ways with him. But it doesn’t mean a thing unless he gets rid of it and it has something to do with a violent death or the place where Fuhrman said he found the bubble gum on Bundy. In his preparation for killing an undercover cop named Joe, Ray spits out the bubble gum. Joe puts a bullet through his brain.

Ray’s teeth impressions would not have given him away as a vampire. Unlike Bella Lugosi, Christopher Lee, George Hamilton and others who have played vampires, the vampires in Innocent Blood don’t have fangs. They kill their victims by ripping a chunk out of their carotid arteries with their incisors and canines. The first time you see Marie transform into her feeding mode, it’s not her teeth that change; it’s her eyes. It’s what her victims see just before she kills them.

From all indications of Nicole’s last seconds of life, she was unconscious and facing away from her killer. Yet, Fuhrman’s "hypothesis" of the killing has her looking into her killer’s eyes "in her final seconds of life."

Marie’s eyes are ultra sensitive to light, as we discover when Macelli, the crime boss of Pittsburgh, follows her into his bathroom. She is trying to recover from the garlic-laced muscles he tried to feed her. When he turns on the light she is temporarily blinded. She recovers enough to kill him but not enough to keep him from wounding her so that she leaves a trail of her own blood. Macelli’s limo driver waiting outside his gate sees her fleeing from the murder scene.

Unlike the creatures of the night in other vampire stories, Marie can see herself in a mirror. What she sees after a kill she doesn’t like. One time she rips a car mirror off of its windshield mounting. After she kills Macelli she smashes his bathroom mirror with her fist. Being a vampire she has to feed on human blood. But she has a sexual weakness for humans and a conscience, which, over the years, has made her choosy. She will not take Innocent Blood.

Fuhrman has O.J. temporarily blinded by a light in his bathroom and seeing his reflection in the mirror after the bloody double homicide of Ron and Nicole. His scenario is based on blood evidence in the bathroom that was not recovered by the LAPD lab or reported to the lead detectives Vannatter and Lange. In Fuhrman’s scenario for the aftermath of the killings, there is a dramatic moment when O.J. enters his house through his housekeeper’s quarters with the limo driver waiting outside the gate. This is where Fuhrman "imagines" that O.J. is blinded momentarily by the light before he sees himself as a killer in the mirror.

You’ve seen variations of this mirror theme in the "Number 12 Looks Just Like You," "The Hitchhiker" and the "Mirror Image" episodes of The Twilight Zone. You’ve seen some of it in many other television and movie scenes in the Fuhrman collection. Innocent Blood has it all, right down to a suggestion of where Fuhrman might have gotten the idea of blood on the light switch and his story of the killer’s bloody clothes in the washing machine.

The incandescent light bulb has probably symbolized a bright idea since its invention. Macelli’s first kill, as a vampire, rounds out Fuhrman’s story of the light that supposedly blinded O.J. before he saw himself in the mirror as a killer. Macelli’s bite through the artery in his lawyer Emmanuel "Manny" Bergman’s neck sends a spray of blood to a naked ceiling light bulb in Bergman’s basement. The light fixture has a pull-chain for a switch that lies against the bulb. Mrs. Bergman finds the bloody mess of her husband and his killer in front of her washer-dryer set. Macelli’s back, with the front of his clothes saturated in his victim’s blood, is resting against them.

To be true to Fuhrman’s account of what happened on and between Bundy and Rockingham on the 12^th of June 1994 we need more than his story of the bubble gum, the killer’s eyes, the mirror and the washing machine. We need a reference to a phone call and a pizza in association with two homicides. We need a reference to a questionable search warrant and a killer wearing bloody clothes driving recklessly to the house of a wealthy man. We need a man with a shovel and a woman with a butcher knife who holds it in a grip with the blade extending from the little-finger side of her hand.

We should begin with the fact that O.J.’s housekeeper in 1992, the year Innocent Blood was released, was Michelle.

Marie murdering Macelli in his bathroom is the first homicide of the night. Saving the blood trail, the knit cap, the barking dog, the bleeding killer, the killer’s wet shoeprints and the leather gloves for later, lets go from Macelli in the morgue to the pizza. We can do that because the sequence of events culminating in Mrs. Bergman grabbing the knife begins with a cop name Morales bringing a pizza to Joe, the undercover cop while another cop is on the phone getting word that Macelli is dead. Here we learn that Joe’s wife left him as a result of his obsession with busting Macelli (when Fuhrman’s second wife left him he was obsessed with "making the big arrest"). Meanwhile, Macelli wakes up in the plastic body bag on the autopsy table and tries to call his lawyer Manny.

Macelli totters out of the building, steals a car and drives recklessly to Manny’s home in suburban Pittsburgh where Mrs. Bergman is thoroughly traumatized by his appearance. When Manny gets home, he gives her his cap and leather gloves and tries to talk Macelli in to seeing a doctor. Macelli smells Joe outside and crashes through the kitchen window to get him. It appear that he is going to kill Joe in a rage when Manny grabs a shovel and whacks him in the head to get him to stop.

The blow with the shovel gets Macelli’s attention. While Lenny and a hood named Joco struggle with moving Joe’s unconscious body off of Manny’s front lawn, Manny brings Macelli inside to his basement. Manny explains that the coroner pronouncing him dead means that no search warrant can be issued to arrest him for anything because of the Constitution’s prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure. That’s when Macelli bites a big chunk out of Manny’s neck. Put on guard by her husband’s scream, the spectacle outside her window of Macelli’s henchmen trying to move Joe’s limp body, and what she saw of Macelli earlier, Mrs. Bergman grabs a butcher knife. She cautiously goes down the steps to the basement to see about her husband. She turns on the light – the one with the blood on it, and sees Macelli with his back against the washer-dryer set and her dead husband in his lap. The next thing Mrs. Bergman knows, her husband’s killer is standing in front of her.

Here, Innocent Blood has a continuity error that makes for an impossible foreword thrust considering the way she is holding the knife. Without turning the blade around she shoves it straight into Macelli’s abdomen all the way to the handle and runs back up the stairs. Judging by the blood on the light bulb that Mrs. Bergman reached straight up to tun on, it’s safe to say she would have had some of Manny’s blood on the bottom of her shoes. In any event, Macelli pulls the knife out, commenting only that his shirt is disgusting. He leaves with a clean shirt and tie under the same blood-soaked suit jacket and Joe in the trunk of his limousine. The scrap metal yard where Macelli takes Joe to kill him, starting by crushing his feet, is the first time you get a long look at his shoes.

Joe’s shoes are really boots that look an awful lot like Bruno Maglis.

In Murder in Brentwood, Fuhrman "imagines" Nicole looking out of the window and being alarmed enough at what she sees to arm herself with a butcher knife. The thing that supposedly alarms her is the clothes O.J. is wearing (the standard Hollywood bad guy costume). Fuhrman and Roberts are the only ones who place O.J. in the basement with "his bloody clothes" in the washer. Fuhrman is the only one with a story of what Nicole saw through her window that made her grab the knife. When Nicole descended the stairs of her condo for the last time, someone else used a knife. There were two bodies on the ground when that person left his bloody shoeprints on the stairs. One of those bodes was hers.

Perhaps I should have mentioned this before, but Joe’s last name is Gennaro. That is Bonnie Bedellia’s last name in Die Hard (’89) with Bruce Willis (a.k.a. "Bruno") as her husband John McClane. Her first name in that movie is Holly. This is not a minor point. It’s the first thing John and Holly argue about when he visits her on her job during the Christmas holiday. He was looking for her in the building directory under her married name, McClane. Gennaro is her maiden name and an irksome symbol to John of the crisis in their marriage. The shoes on Anthony LaPaglia’s feet as Joe Gennaro strongly suggest that the name meant something to the killer of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson, too – something associated with Bruno Magli shoes.

Once again, Bruno Magli was Nicole’s brand of shoes. O.J.’s only link to Bruno Magli Lorenzos like the killer wore, was in November of ’92 when he looked at a pair in Bloomingdale’s. That’s the department store in New York City where Nicole bought her Bruno Magli shoes – and the men’s XL Isotoner leather gloves on December 18, 1990. In other words, the shoes and the gloves went together long before June 12, 1994.

We slid into Innocent Blood by way of the position of Liz’s body in Whore and Fuhrman’s tacit suggestion that O.J. might have intended to wrap Nicole’s body in plastic like the body of Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks. We could also have gotten there though Whore by way of Liz’s shoe and Marie’s first encounter with Anthony LaPaglia as Joe Gennaro.

Marie has decided to feed on Italian mobsters and accidentally-on-purpose runs into Joe, thinking that he is one of them. He knocks her shoe off and bends down to help her put it back on. It’s winter in Pittsburgh so there is nothing odd about him wearing leather gloves. It is interesting to note, however, that when he is not playing the role of a mobster, he wears fingerless wool gloves.

Could this be the "pizza menu" that Fuhrman said was under Nicole’s leg? Pardon the digression but Anthony LaPaglia is not a tall man and Little Caesar is not only the name of a pizza; it’s the name of a classic movie about an Italian mobster. The movie stars Emanuel Goldenberg (as in Emmanuel Bergman). You know him as Edward G. Robinson.

Edward G. Robinson is the mob boss Rico in Little Caesar (’30). In Key Largo (’48) with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart he is Rocco, a.k.a. Howard Brown. I could say a few words here about Candice Bergman as Murphy Brown but I don’t think that’s necessary. If you can’t see Brown (as in Nicole Brown Simpson) and Goldman (as in Ron Goldman) in Howard Brown, Emanuel Goldenberg and Emmanuel Bergman nothing else is going to make the point.

Emanuel Goldenberg’s Rocco is another mob boss in Key Largo. In Innocent Blood, the first man Sal "The Shark" Macelli kills is played by Rocco Sisto. First Macellie gives him a speech about a toaster oven then bashes him in the head with it. And what does he say about the toaster oven? He says, "You can put anything in here, a slice of pizza…"

Back to Anthony LaPaglia and the Bruno Maglis – and don’t forget Holly Gennaro in the movie starring "Bruno" with a bloody foot…

The first thing you have to know here is that the letter "g" in Italian, when preceded by the letter "l," is silent. The second "a" in LaPaglia would then sound the same as the letter "o." That is to say, LaPaglia is pronounced with the same rules that apply to Bruno Magli (Molly). If you drop the first two letters and the last letter of LaPaglia, what you have left sounds like Polly (La-Polly-a). Thus, a woman’s shoes and Joe Gennaro’s shoes become symbolically entwined.

If you begin with Mark Fuhrman’s boast of murdering pimps and his claim of writing a screenplay with a strong female lead you can’t do much better than Marie in Innocent Blood telling Macelli that he dresses like a pimp. Marie is literally one of the strongest leading female characters you are likely to see anywhere, though you are not likely to tell by looking at her. She is petite, lithe and lovely. You see her for the first time completely nude in a room full of lit candles, which takes on a grim meaning when you think of the candles that Nicole lit in preparation for an erotic bath before she was killed. It gets creepier when you know that Marie is French, that she "performs French" and that she lives for only two things, sex and food (Fuhrman speculated that Nicole was going to order food for her lover). Being a vampire, there is also a question of whether Marie might have died and returned from the grave.

We don’t want to get too far away from the Bruno Magli shoes and the bloody shoeprints that Fuhrman called "footprints" in his notes. But we have to note that Nicole was Catholic and lit candles and resurrection are essential parts of Catholicism. Furthermore, we have to note that Catholics eat wafers and drink red wine in communion ceremonies as symbols of eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus Christ so that they may have eternal life when they die. Other Christians have similar communion ceremonies but one of the things that sets Catholics apart is the visible symbols of their faith in the simple gesture of making the sign of the cross. Another thing that sets them apart from other Christians is their statues of martyred saints like the statue of the decapitated Saint Luke that Joe Gennaro shined his flashlight on in Innocent Blood when he was following Marie’s blood trail.

The problem with killing Martin Luther King, from a white supremacist point of view, was that it made him a modern day martyr to the cause of racial desegregation. The same thing could have happened for "the cause" of interracial sex if O.J. and Nicole had been killed. Nicole’s murder apparently at the hands of O.J. Simpson made her a martyr to the cause of white supremacy.

If you know anything about vampire movies you know that Catholic symbolism has a lot to do with them. Vampires are typically "allergic" to water blessed by a Catholic priest and crosses like the crucifix Nicole wore around her neck as a symbol of her Catholic faith. You can usually immobilize a vampire with crucifix and kill him or her with a sharpened stick through the heart. But to make sure they stay dead you have to decapitate them. The sharpened stick that Fuhrman said O.J. picked up in an alley near the Bundy murder scene would have made a perfect stake.

The last place you would expect to see a vampire is in a Catholic Church. Innocent Blood breaks all of the rules in a chase scene that takes Joe Gennaro from the murder scene, through an alley, to the top of a building where he picks up Marie’s blood trail and finds one of her shoes with blood on the heel. When he shines his small flashlight (like Fuhrman’s) on the heel you can see that he recognizes it from his previous encounter with the woman whose shoe he knocked off when she bumped into him.

Suddenly Marie leaps from behind a chimney with the roar of a big cat, her eyes blazing. She dashes past him in her bare feet and leaps to the ground. He deduces that the only place she could have gone was inside St. Luke’s Church. So he enters the church and finds the statue of the martyred saint and a sea of burning candles. He then receives another shock to the system when she buzzes him, swooping over his head and flies out of an open door.

Mari’s flying powers are apparently limited because to reach the upper window of tall a building next to the church, she has to clime hand over hand up the downspout. She does so with alacrity.

Let me back up a minute to the prelude to the chase so you can get the full effect of the blood trail and the killer’s lost shoe. Joe the cop gets into a pushing, shouting match with Lenny the limo driver and Manny the lawyer. In the process he loses his ID card with his name and picture on it. He steps on it without realizing he dropped it and leaves the distinctive imprint of his shoe in the snow.

I hope you recall the bloody Bruno Magli heel print in the police photo of Fuhrman pointing to the bloody glove – the photo that Fuhrman told the photographer to take. In his book he asks his readers to note the knit cap and the distinctive heel print of the Bruno Magli Lorenzo. With that in mind, I want you to note the composite picture of the killer’s bloody heel and the shoeprint in the snow. Remember that Innocent Blood gets its name from Anthony LaPaglia’s character Joe Gennaro and that his shoes match the general description of Bruno Magli Lorenzos.

Again, this is just the prelude to the chase. Not only do we have a distinctive shoeprint, we have a name and a picture of its owner to go with it. A HUGE problem with "O.J.’s" Bruno Maglis, "his" cap, "his gloves" and "his" blood drops is that they all had "his" name and "his" picture on them. They were just too damn specific to him to have been dropped accidentally within two inches or less from each other in a long, vicious fight to the death. You couldn’t call Joe’s fight with Lenny and Manny a long, vicious fight to the death, but considering the fact that they both end up dead it’s close enough to make the connection.

If you want more, you’ve got it…

With Marie’s lost shoe in hand, Joe comes across a dog barking frantically along her probable path of flight. He lets the dog smell the shoe and unties it. Off goes the dog with Joe in hot pursuit. When the dog reaches the downspout that Marie used to scale the building, jumping and barking at it, a man in a Carnage Mellon University sweatsuit surprises him from behind. Again, it’s winter in Pittsburgh so there is nothing odd about the fact that he is wearing gloves and a knit cap. It’s not a dark blue knit cap and his gloves are not leather – but lets get real. He is wearing a knit cap, gloves and a sweatsuit. What’s more, Carnage Mellon is to Pittsburgh as U.S.C. (where O.J. played college football) is to Los Angeles. How can you not make the connection?

Maybe this will help:

You know Fuhrman’s story of O.J. sneaking into his house and leaving his victims’ blood in the drain of his shower. And, of course, there were the bloody shoeprints that Fuhrman repeatedly called footprints. How, you wonder, could an experienced homicide investigator have made a mistake like that again and again? You see the killer’s footprints again and again in the Fuhrman movie collection. In Innocent Blood the blood in the drain is combined with the killer’s footprints. You see Marie in the shower and the blood mixing with the water as it runs down the drain. You don’t see her walking away but you see her footprints from the shower as clearly as you would if they had been stamped in blood.

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