Go to
Chapter 15

Table of Contents

We’re going to use "Murder – According to Maggie" as our primary television guide and In the Heat of Passion to wrap up some loose ends, from Chapter 13. We’re going to use a tiny bit from Short Cuts (’93) and Gorky Park (’83) fill some gaps here. We’re going to start with Fuhrman’s own list of the movies and characters he took lessons from:

Fuhrman named Dirty Harry as one source for the composite character he said he was playing on the tapes. He named the writers; Jack Webb (creator of Sgt. Joe Friday, badge 714) and Joe Wambaugh (author of The Choirboys). He named the movies; The Choirboys, The Rock, Ghost, In Cold Blood, Ghostbusters, Braveheart, Huckleberry Finn and Forrest Gump. He named the TV shows; Dragnet, Home Improvement, NYPD Blue and Homicide. He singled out Andy Sipowicz as a character he though the public wanted to see in a cop. We therefore know that he saw these screenplays and TV shows that he followed the work of these writers, that some of these names, characters or actors who played them were dear to him. From there, we can spin a web of name connections alone that touch every movie, TV show, actor and character in the Fuhrman collection that he couldn’t name without giving himself away.

Fuhrman did not mention Matlock but he did drop the name of the man Ben Matlock was modeled after, Gary Spence. When I first wrote about the white-haired attorney and his connection to Police Squad!, I tiptoed around the exact words he used to bring fellatio into Judge Ito’s court. I can’t do that anymore. He said, "Suck my dick." Substitute "my" for "his" and you have a fair approximation of what O.J. said on the 911 tape in ’93 to tell Nicole what he saw her doing to Keith Zlomsowitch in ’92.

In "Murder – According to Maggie," the victim is a television network executive named Keith Carmody (Gary Sandy). He has a protégé named Julie. She comes into his office while he is tape-recording a message to ax some TV shows he doesn’t like. One show he wants to kill is a popular series called Beat Cop starring a popular, demanding, egoistic, not-so-bright actor named Burt Rogers. Julie tells Keith Carmody that she doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He tells Julie that her job, among other things, is to "nod when you’re supposed to."

Does that paint a picture in your mind of Nicole and Keith Zlomsowitch? Can you see Tanya Roberts as Charlie’s Angel Julie Rogers, or as Nikki "nodding her head" in the window as Andrew Stevens watches her with her lover in Night Eyes, or as Kay doing the watching with Nick Cassivetes in Sins of Desire? Can you hear the joke about the woman "going down" to go up in the in the hospital elevator or see Julie Hagerty inflating the automatic pilot in Airplane!?

In the "Murder – According to Maggie" episode of Murder, She Wrote, Julie assumes Keith Carmody’s job when he gets shot to death with two bullets in the heart from an innocent man’s gun. The killer is Andy Butler an actor on Beat Cop, which was one of the shows that Carmody was going to do away with. The innocent man is Tim Thomerson as Burt Rogers the star of Beat Cop. Rogers’ character is Ben Hollister, the creation of Jessica Fletcher’s brightest student Mary Margaret McCauley. Angela Lansbury is Jessica Fletcher the best-selling murder mystery writer. You might notice the red dress she’s wearing and the electronic devise in her hand if you recognized Thomerson as the time traveling super cop Jack Deth in the Trancers series (’85, ’91 and ’92).

Murder, She Wrote is full of familiar names and faces. Many of them are blood links (blood relatives). The man who plays Andy Butler has a familiar name and face. He’s Bruce Kirby, the father of Bruno Kirby. Bruno is also the father’s given name. The son once dated the daughter of actor Victor Morrow, Jennifer Jason Leigh, a.k.a. Hedra who "gives great head" to her roommate Allison’s boyfriend in Single White Female and "great phone" as Lois, a phone sex girl in Short Cuts (’94). Lois says things like, "I’m going to suck your dick now," and "Your cock is getting so big in my mouth." When a woman says, "I give great phone," that’s what she means. Lois does it as she kicks back and picks between her toes or carries on her routine motherly chores like feeding the baby or changing a diaper.

Lois talks that way to her phone sex clients in front of her husband (Chris Penn) and her two young children. The man on the phone that she calls by name during the long opening credits with twenty-two stars is Andy.

You see the significance of the name Andy and the expression, "give great phone" in "The Cookie Monster" episode of Matlock. John Hancock, the big black man who plays Cpt. Ryerson in Collision Course, is framed for murder with killer cookies left at his home. Myerson is the character that Hedra terrorizes for her roommate Allison with a phone call in Single White Female. Stephen Tobolowski, who plays Myerson, is Ryerson in Groundhog Day. The Murder victim in "The Cookie Monster" is a woman who runs a cookie empire. Alyson Reed as Chrissie the real killer serves Andy Griffith as Ben Matlock a piece of rhubarb pie. It’s his favorite. His mother used to make it. He tells Chrissie that hers is better. Then he says the magic words, "You give great pie." She replies, "You know how to talk." Adlibs by Andy Griffith and Alyson Reed? I wouldn’t bet against it.

Speaking of Andy… The reason Gary Sandy as Keith Carmody in "Murder – According to Maggie" may look familiar to you is because of his recurring role as Andy in the popular sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati (’79-’82). Tailia Balsam who plays Julie may not look all that familiar but you know her father well. He’s Martin Balsam, one of the most prolific actors in Hollywood history.

Julie has a new program in mind that she wants to do with Dana (Leann Hunley) as "the head neurosurgeon of a major, major metropolitan hospital." You can tell by the conversation Carmody has with her the day before he’s murdered that she is not going to get her way as long as he is alive. The fact that she takes over his job in the network as though she was born to it is one of many red herrings to put you off of the track of the real killer. We learned from Pierce Bosnian as Charlie (remember Charlie Bronson in In The Heat of Passion?) in Murder 101 that a good murder mystery requires a clever frame-up and a few red herrings. The real murder mystery on Bundy Dr. in Brentwood CA was part of a frame-up with more than a few red herrings.

Some similarities you have seen and will see between Tim Thomerson as Burt Rogers the star of Beat Cop and other white-haired super cops are probably intentional. The character within Rogers’ character is Ben Hollister a compromise between Lee Marvin’s Frank Ballinger of M Squad (’57-’60) and Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin. You may get flashes of white-haired Andy Griffith as Ben Matlock and Charlie’s Angel Tanya Roberts as Julie Rogers or Cheryl Ladd as Kris Monroe as well, simply because of the context in which you see the other names.

The fact that all of us make conscious and subconscious choices in what we say and do based on triggers from our past in our immediate environment is the reason for this book and the one before it. The Bruno Magli shoes, the leather gloves, the knit cap, the blood trail, the victims, the accused, Fuhrman’s observations, his notes and his theories have Hollywood and "That reminds me of…." written all over them. The evidence left by the killer and by Fuhrman’s accounts of evidence left by the killer have fixes to problems of evidence in the movies left by writers, producers, directors, continuity editors and technical advisors.

The killings themselves fixed an otherwise insurmountable problem for Mark Fuhrman’s image as the screenplay writer, role model and technical advisor that he was trying to become through his work with Laura Hart McKinny. They started early in 1985, three years after Frank Drebin of Police Squad! made his appearance. Andy Sipowicz (and his redheaded partner John Kelly didn’t exist until 1993) as the kind of cop Fuhrman said he was trying to be in the eyes of Hollywood executives like Keith Carmody. Nobody could be as street smart as Frank Drebin was. Nobody could have as many talents or devise as many clever schemes to catch criminals. In 1988, with the release of The Naked Gun, he became a bumbling fool teamed with O.J. Simpson as Nordberg – the victim of a frame-up.

The new Frank Drebin was so much like a take-off on Mark Fuhrman that you might think that he was the model for Drebin ’88 unless you knew for a fact that he wasn’t. Jim Abrams scoffed at the idea when I first started to promote Iago in Brentwood in 1998. Mark Fuhrman could not have known that he would do that in 1988. That’s the point I made in Iago. Only Jim Abrams couldn’t have known that because he hadn’t read any part of the book. He was responding to a reporter’s misinterpretation of what I meant rather than what I wrote because the reporter hadn’t read any of the book, either and he misquoted what I told him.

I could only guess that Fuhrman saw big differences in Drebin’s Naked Gun character from the original because I hadn’t seen the original since ’82. But based on the knit cap from the ’88 movie (O.J. the actor) that ended up on the ’94 Bundy killing ground next to the bloody leather glove (O.J. the sportscaster) and the distinctive heelprint (O.J. the runner), I knew of at least one big change. Drebin’s new partner was no longer Peter Lupus as Norberg; it was O.J. Simpson as Nordberg.

Nobody likes to be held up to public ridicule. Whether or not Jim Abrams and the Zucker brothers did that to Mark Fuhrman (whom they may not have even heard of by name) is beside the point. The point is, the producers he talked to could have talked to them about their meeting with him. From Fuhrman’s perspective as the "straight" version of the new, trigger-happy, super stupid Frank Drebin, it sure looks like they did. You can see why Fuhrman would see himself as a much better role model for Dennis Franz as Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue (’93).

In "Murder – According to Maggie" the real cop that Beat Cop Ben Hollister is modeled on is Dennis Arndt’s Lt. Vincent Palermo. Arndt is Jack Sollers in LA Law (’90- ’91). In the "Requiem for a Superhero" episode of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (’93) he’s Dr. Sam Lane. The only things Palermo has in common with the star Burt Rogers or his character Ben Hollister is some white hair around his temples and the fact that he and Rogers once met. Maggie is sweet on him but he calls her "kid" and treats her like his little sister. She doesn’t think the nine-year age difference between them is so great and she thought she was doing him a favor by telling the world that he was her inspiration for Beat Cop. The show is so unrealistic and the actor who portrays him is so stupid that it has been nothing but a huge embarrassment for Lt. Palermo.

When Burt Rogers is arrested for the murder of Keith Carmody, his character Ben Hollister looks like he is going to die with Burt’s new image as a murderer. That obvious fact is not lost on Palermo who couldn’t keep the grin off his face the day before the murder when Maggie told him that Carmody was going to cancel the show. Between Vincent Palermo and Burt Rogers there isn’t much left to tell about the connection between Mark Fuhrman’s writing career and the fate of Frank Drebin and Nordberg when O.J. got arrested for murder.

Burt Rogers takes the news about Carmody’s intention to cancel the show badly and personally. When Maggie reminds him that he said he wanted to quit the show he cries foul, and gives her the Mark Fuhrman/Laura Hart tape defense. He says, "You’re going to take seriously things I said on the set? My God, Maggie, I gave you more credit than that!" Then he says something that should remind you of what happened to Fuhrman, O.J., Drebin, Nordberg and The Naked Gun movie series when O.J. got arrested for murder. He says, "This is my career we’re talking about. This is the part I was born to play. Burt Rogers, Ben Hollister, Ying, Yang twins, brothers; if they kill off Ben it’s the same as killing off Burt!"

When Nicole ran to Officer Edwards’ crying "He’s going to kill me!" on the first day of January 1989, it was an act that her mother had seen before and didn’t believe. "He’s going to kill me!" is a line that Nicole’s friend Cora Fischman said she used a lot. It didn’t mean a thing until Fuhrman wrote his report to the city attorney, Nicole made a 911 call in ’93 claiming that O.J. was going to beat her and O.J. was accused of killing her in 1994. Fuhrman was working as a detective all that time in the West Los Angeles Police Station. With that in mind, consider this exchange between Det. Palermo and Maggie…. Palermo: "You said yourself he stormed out of the room threatening to kill the guy." Maggie: "That was an exit line. He doesn’t know any other way to leave a room."

These are all reasons that I think you should look with suspicion on Fuhrman’s analysis of the evidence against O.J. Simpson. Here’s another one…or two…or three…

The "exit line" conversation that Maggie has with Lt. Palermo takes place as they leave the Los Angeles Police Department West Valley Police Station and he is going to his car. Maggie has just talked to Burt in jail. She has seen that he is too much of a jellyfish under real stress to have done what he is accused of doing. Palermo says, "I’m telling you he’s guilty. It was his gun. His fingerprints were all over the handle…and finally, he has no alibi. From 10:30 to 11:00 he was alone in his trailer – he says…" Maggie says, "You know, if you keep him locked up that’s the end of Beat Cop." He says "Yeah," he snickers and adds, "I know." Then he says, as he prepares to drive off, "Maggie, forget it. This is the real world the killers are real and so are the cops. Go back to your typewriter, kid. Leave homicide to me."

Maggie knows that Burt is dumb, but she can’t believe that he would be dumb enough to kill a man with his own gun and leave it behind with his fingerprints on it. To her, Burt’s fingerprints on the gun and the place it was found means that the killer wore gloves and left the to frame him. A killer wearing gloves to frame an innocent actor? Where have you heard that before? Didn’t it have something to do with a detective at the West LA station on Butler Street who was personally involved with a woman named Margaret as well as the suspect before the murders? Didn’t that detective have something to gain by the actor’s incarceration?

We’re about to get into symbols and details of Keith Carmody’s murder that are hard to believe. They are so close to a composite picture of O.J. as Nordberg in The Naked Gun and evidence found at the foot of Ron Goldman and in the passageway beside Brian Kato Kaelin’s bungalow that you would swear I was making it up if you couldn’t see it for yourself. In the movie scene where Nordberg kicks in the door on a drug ship, notice his cap, his badge and his gun in his naked hand. Keep in mind Fuhrman’s notes written with a pen from his jacket pocket, and that an innocent man’s naked hand held the gun with his fingerprints on it in "Murder – According to Maggie."

The cap O.J. wears as Nordberg in The Naked Gun is the same as the one in the photo at Goldman’s foot with the leather glove, Fuhrman’s pointing finger and the envelope containing the glasses lined up below it. O.J. is carrying an automatic pistol like the one that Fuhrman wore in the full pointing-finger photo. Because Nordberg is an LAPD detective, his badge has to be like the one that Fuhrman wore when he flagged down the police photographer Rolf Rokahr and asked him to take the picture.

The Naked Gun scene we’re talking about ends with a bear trap snapping around Nordberg’s left ankle (blood on sock and shoe) and him falling into the water. Before then, he gets his leg caught in the door while seven men on the other side draw their guns, cock them and take aim. Nordberg eventually frees his leg and opens the door with his gun drawn. He announces himself as a police officer and orders the men to throw down their guns. One man does. His gun looks like a long-barreled version of the .38 that a uniformed cop (like Robert Riske) finds behind a curtain next to the studio movie screen in "Murder – According to Maggie." The hand we see with the gun is Palermo’s.

Missing from O.J.’s knit cap scene in The Naked Gun is Ron Goldman’s boot and Juditha Brown’s glasses. "Murder – According to Maggie" bridges those gaps with three obscure actors. Martial arts fans may have seen one of them in Out For Blood (’93). He’s Ron Steelman (honest) the cop who finds the "naked" gun and the door to a passage (second crime scene) where the killer dropped a decisively incriminating piece of evidence. He call’s Palermo with an unidentified cop in glasses standing next to him and the gun that was held in the killer’s leather glove at his feet. Lt. Palermo takes a pen from his jacket pocket and slips it in the gun barrel to pick it up. The character who discovers the gun is missing is prop man Phil Dooley (Fuhrman went to Bundy with his boss Ron Phillips). The actor is Greg Norberg.

Fuhrman took notes at Bundy (one crime scene) with the same pen he used to test Kato for intoxication (at the second crime scene) by waving it in front of his eyes and telling Kato to keep his eyes on the pen.

Maggie went looking for a yellow pencil that matched the one in Andy Butler’s jacket pocket because of a message from the Beat Cop editor that Maggie’s secretary relayed to her with a tape of the show. The message: "Keep your eyes on the pencil." The master shot that the audience sees before and after the close-up was all done before the close-up. Andy lost the pencil in the passageway between his dressing room and the studio where Carmody was shot. When he came back to do the close-up without the pencil it produced a continuity error. In the master shot it was there in the close-up it wasn’t.

In Iago in Brentwood you’ll see a similar continuity problem with Fuhrman’s story about the glove in the passageway and the stick on the parkway. The stick and the glove cannot exist on the same timeline and the only one who can be tied to both of them is the detective from the Butler police station, Mark Fuhrman. He didn’t say he was looking for a glove that matched the one on Bundy but that’s what he found in the dark passageway. Palermo didn’t say he was looking for the yellow pencil so Maggie didn’t know that he’d already found it with Andy Butler’s fingerprints all over it. That piece of evidence put Andy Butler in the glove he wore to frame Burt Rogers.

There is a Brian associated with that scene. He’s the studio president who walks in the screening room immediately after Palermo uses his pen to lift the gun and instructs the officer to check the passage behind the door. The biggest difference between what happens with Brian in the evidence discovery scene in "Murder – According to Maggie" and what happened behind Brian Kaelin’s bungalow on Rockingham is the order of events. Fuhrman talked to his Brian before he searched the dark passageway and found the matching piece of evidence that seemed to prove O.J.’s guilt. What Mark Fuhrman did, in effect, was to combine the role of Maggie (the writer) and Lt. Palermo (the detective) in his account of his murder investigation.

Fuhrman may have had nothing but bad things to say about Margaret York, but he used a character like her, including his references to how she advanced in her career, as the role model for his screenplay heroine. It is possible that I used her myself in 1991 as a model for my character Margaret St. Clair in my first novel The Random Factor because of something I saw or read about Cagney and Lacy years earlier. I am, therefore, the last person to say that Fuhrman is the only writer who could have associated Margaret York with a fictional character named Margaret accused of using her feminine charms to advance her career. Margaret is a common name and the things Fuhrman accused her of doing to get ahead recall a stereotype that any successful woman in a male-dominated field has to deal with on some level. None of that, however, explains all that you have seen and heard in "Murder – According to Maggie" or these three things about Andy Butler’s pencil:

1. In the scene that gives Andy away to Mary Margaret McCauley and Lt. Vincent Palermo, Andy is standing at a table in the role of Cpt. Chandler making a cup of coffee.
2. A pilot series that Brian promised Maggie she could do if she cleared Burt and saved his (Brian’s) job is call Love in Naples.
3. Burt balked at having his character call the man in the ballistics lab to have him compare the bullets from two crime scenes. The way Burt saw it, "If he finds the match he solves the crime."

We have to step out of the movies and television shows we’ve been looking at just long enough to bring another Brian into the mix. This one is Brian Dennahey, a former college football star who plays an American detective in Moscow in Gorky Park (’83). He smuggles in a gun to avenge the death of his murdered redheaded brother (yes, there was a knife involve in the killing, a female victim, leather gloves and a knit cap). The gun doesn’t look anything like a gun but William Hurt as the Russian’s super detective on the case figures it out when he finds a matching gold pen and pencil set in Dennehey’s luggage and two matching bullets inside the pen.

If you can’t see the parallel between the matching bullets and the matching pencils, let alone the bullets or the pencils and the matching gloves no one can help you. But if you do see the parallels and want to see them better, maybe a closer look at how Burt Rogers and Ben Hollister compare to Frank Drebin in Police Squad! is the way to go. Maggie’s desire to do a pilot means we should start with the Police Squad! pilot featuring Kathryn Lee Scott as Sally Dekker. The matches that Norberg hands Drebin and the coffee in the incriminating tape mean we should also look at episode four with K.T. O’Sullivan as Mimi de Jour, alias Mimi Coffee.

In "Murder – According to Maggie" Maggie’s script calls for Burt Rogers’ Beat Cop character Ben Hollister to phone ballistics to match bullets found at two crime scenes. One bullet killed a gunrunner (Sally Dekker is gunrunner Babs Caltrain in a red wig) at one crime scene against the bullet that killed a nightclub bimbo (Mimi Coffee in a red wig) at another crime scene. Burt doesn’t think it’s necessary to have someone at the lab make the comparison because his character simply knows that they came from the same gun and that his fans want to see him solve the crime his way.

Maggie is sure that Beat Cop will do fine without Burt, but in the crunch, it turns out that Burt was right. The show’s fans want to see him as the star. They will accept no one else.

Mark Fuhrman’s discovery of the glove on Rockingham that matched the one he was photographed with on Bundy is what made Rockingham a crime scene. It’s what made Fuhrman the "star" of the investigation and the star witness in the trial because of all the things he did to get him to that point, including his questioning of Brian Kato Kaelin. Here again you may be ahead of me if you recall Fuhrman’s note about the pizza menu on the coffee table in Nicole’s condo. Perhaps you noticed the nine-year age difference between Maggie and Palermo and the seven-year difference between Nicole and Fuhrman. Perhaps you noticed why Maggie wanted to name her new show Love in Naples, in which case no more has to be said about Fuhrman’s fixation on the pizza menus. Or should I say Pizza, as in Palermo and Naples – or as in Rossi, the name at the top of Mark Fuhrman’s notes?

So, how does any of this tie into In the Heat of Passion and the story of Dr. Lee Adams and her young lover Charlie Bronson?

I was looking for an oral sex/DNA link between Sally Kirkland’s Lee Adams and Leann Hunley’s Lee Wilson on "The Talk Show" episode of Matlock. I didn’t know who Leann Hunley was so I couldn’t match the name with the face. I thought she was Alyson Reed who plays Chrissie in "The Cookie Monster" but when I checked the credits and matched Reed’s name to the killer in that show I knew I had to keep looking.

To find the name of the woman that plays Lee Wilson in "The Talk Show" episode of Matlock, I had to look it up in the Internet Movie Database. TV shows like Matlock and Murder, She Wrote list the actors with substantial roles without matching them to their characters. Usually they appeared in enough popular shows of the time for most people to have recognized them. If I’d been a fan of Dynasty between 1986 and 1988 I would have recognized Leann Hunley as Adam’s wife Dana.

That was as close to a DNA link to Lee Adams as I could reasonably expect to see. When I saw Hunley in the IMD credits as Dana in "Murder – According to Maggie" right above her role as Leanne Wilson in "The Talk Show" I expected to see much more. When I saw "Murder – According to Maggie" scheduled for broadcast on A&E a week or so later I taped it. If I was right about the significance of the name Dana (DaNA) in Night Eyes 3 with Tracie Tweed portraying an actress named Dana "with her mouth full" what was missing from "The Talk Show" had to be in "Murder – According to Maggie."

It was there, all right, in spades.

To see the whole picture you have to remember that Margaret York was also called Peggy and Peggy Lipton starred in the pilot episode of The Mod Squad as Julie. The names Dana, Maggie, Julie, and Keith all have movie and television links to something Mark Fuhrman said about Nicole Simpson, Margaret York or the Presidential DNA sample on Monica Lewinsky’s dress. Therefore, when you find all four names crowed into ten seconds of space in one "Murder – According to Maggie" segment, you know that it would have packed a big punch with Fuhrman. Add to that Leann Hunley as Dana applying lipstick while Maggie questions her about Julie giving her the starring role as the head surgeon in a "major, major hospital" and you’ve got "Sal" going up in the hospital elevator with her cheeks full of you-know-what.

That’s a lot, but it’s not the clincher. The clincher is when Maggie thinks she can get someone to replace Burt Rogers in Beat Cop. She’s sitting in her office with her agent Leo (Ron Shipp’s pseudonym in Sheila Weller’s Raging Heart) when someone from casting calls and tells her that they think they can get a big movie star. Maggie told Leo it was Charles Bronson but she didn’t. She called him Charlie Bronson.

In the Heat of Passion has a DNA connection to Charlie Bronson and Sally Kirkland as Lee Adams that can be matched only by "O.J.’s" blood on Bundy and Bill Clinton’s seaman on Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress. When Lee arranged for her husband Sanford Adams to catch Charlie having sex with her she had more in mind than what she could get out of the compromising situation. After Charlie killed Sanford, he told Lee to tell the police that her husband interrupted the rapist before he penetrated her. Lee knew that the police had screwed up the seaman sample from the Montclair Hills rapist’s first victim. So, when she "accidentally" told them that the rapist killed her husband after the rapist attacked her she knew that the only DNA match for the rapist would be Charlie Bronson’s. The thing that grabs you when you see her tearfully confessing her "mistake" to Charlie is her blue dress.

Contact the author: Jasper Garrison
Send comments/suggestions
to Webmaster, Charles R. Alexander
Copyright © 1999 Smartfellows Press