Go to
Chapter 24

Table of Contents

Sheryl Lee is Laura Palmer the murder victim wrapped in plastic in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. If you didn’t know who Sheryl Lee was you would get to her eventually by following the links to or from The Wizard of Oz. She’s the Good Witch in Wild at Heart. She does not appear as the Good Witch until the end of the movie when Nicholas Cage as Sailor literally sees the light and becomes a new man. He has killed a man. He has been in prison twice and he thinks that he is no good because he is "wild at heart." The light radiates from a pink bubble in which the Good Witch floats down from the heavens and gives him encouragement to go back to Laura Dern as his girlfriend Lula and their son.

Sailor’s troubles begin with a fire in which Lula’s father was burned to death. One of her mother’s boyfriends set him on fire at her request. Dianne Ladd, Laura Dern’s real mother, is Lula’s mother Marietta. She thinks Sailor knows more about the fire than he does and is determined to rid herself of the imagined threat. When her attempt at seduction fails and he tells her that he loves her daughter she pays a young black man named Bob Ray Lemon to kill him. Bob Ray confronts him on a stairwell and pulls a knife. What happens next cannot be called a fight. Sailor takes the initiative, catching him off balance and uses the wall and the rail to pound his head against. From then on he’s no more of a threat to Sailor than a big rag doll. At the foot of the stairs where Bob Ray falls helpless, Sailor pounds his head against the marble floor leaving a huge pool of blood then hurls him against a wall. He expires on his left side.

Sailor goes to prison for 22 months. I’ll let you figure out what all of the above has to do with the Bundy murders. It shouldn’t be too hard.

When Sailor gets paroled he and Lula run away with Harry Dean Stanton as Marietta’s boyfriend Johnny, a good man and a great detective, in pursuit. In Lula’s dreams she sees herself as Dorothy on the yellow brick road. In her nightmares Marietta is the Wicked Witch of the East.

You may have gathered that Marietta is borderline crazy. She is. When Sailor kills Bob Ray you can see in her face that the only thing she feels bad about is the fact that Sailor wasn’t the one who died. Soon after he gets out of prison and runs away with Lula she loses confidence in Johnny and gets J.E. Freeman as Santos, the man who killed her husband, to kill Sailor and bring Lula back. For his price, Santos asks that he be allowed to kill Johnnie as well. She absolutely refuses and later, knowing what Santos is like, has second thoughts about the whole deal. But it’s too late. Santos has already arranged for his benefactor Mr. Reindeer to put out a contract on Johnnie and Sailor by dropping a silver dollar for each person he wants killed in his mail slot (dropped coins on Bundy) along with "all the particulars."

The people who get the contract on Johnnie are Calvin Lockhart as Reggie, Grace Zabriskie as Juana and David Patrick Kelly as Dropshadow. All three of them are certifiably nuts. If you’ve seen David Patrick Kelley in other films you know that’s a familiar place to be for him. In The Warriors (’77) he’s the gang leader who shoots the charismatic leader of the biggest gang in New York City who’s trying to bring all of the gangs together. Why? "No reason," he says. "I just like doing things like that." In Dreamscape (’84) he’s the psychic who gets into people’s dreams to kill them. In Twin Peaks he mellows out as a corrupt and incompetent lawyer. Grace Zabriskie also appears in Twin Peaks. She’s Sarah Palmer, Laura Palmer’s mother who sees her daughter’s killer in psychic visions but doesn’t know what to make of them.

Calvin Lockhart is the hitman in Wild at Heart who puts the silver dollar over his eye to signal Reindeer that he and his gang have accepted the contract on Johnnie. As an eye patch it ties him to Quincy Jones’ ex-wife Peggy Lipton in Twin Peaks and Jones’ ex-girlfriend Natasha Kinseki in The Hotel New Hampshire. As a monocle it ties him to the faulty lie detector in Witness for the Prosecution and to Juditha Brown’s missing lens on the Bundy murder scene. If he looks familiar to you it may be because you saw him as the Jamaican drug lord King (Martin Luther King) Willie (Billy) in Predator II (’91). He’s the guy who meets the alien trophy hunter in the alley with a sword and gets his head cut off. Cal is the abbreviation Fuhrman uses in his Bundy notes for California.

Sailor and Lula begin their journey west to California from Cape Fear "somewhere on the border of North and South Carolina." Like Elvira, Lula drives a black, 1965 Ford Thunderbird convertible. In another allusion to Elvira’s alter ego Cassandra Peterson, who was encouraged in her real dancing career in Los Vegas by Elvis Presley, Sailor sings Elvis songs and sounds very much like "The King".

Sailor and Lula have a satisfying sex life. After one session in bed she tells him, "Sometimes when we’re making love you send me right over the rainbow." For a solid Fuhrman link, however, you would expect to see her performing oral sex. You don’t see it, but in a scene that shows how much she and Sailor trust each other you are left with no doubt that she does. They are sitting at a table in a bar and he is telling her about a sexual encounter he had with another woman. You can’t tell whether it really happened but you can tell that it doesn’t matter. It’s a form of foreplay that she encourages with enthusiasm. When he gets to the part of the story where the woman says, "I won’t suck you. Don’t ask me to suck you." Lula squirms like a contented cat and says, "Poor baby she doesn’t know what she’s missing."

One thing to look for in a David Lynch film is a cast of strange characters. Wild at Heart is no exception. Almost everyone in the movie is a little off plumb. When Sailor makes a comment to Lula about bad ideas, she tells him about her Cousin Dell who is way off plumb. He loved Christmas so much that he never wanted it to end. He lived in constant fear of aliens with rubber gloves who where controlling his mind. Shortly after his mother caught him putting cockroaches in his shorts he disappeared never to be seen again. Sailor tells Lula, "It’s too bad he couldn’t visit that old Wizard of Oz, get some good advice." She replies, "Too bad we all can’t, baby."

Meanwhile Marietta is frantic over what might happen to Johnnie. Santos has assured her that he won’t kill him but she knows in her heart of hearts that he will. In a frenzy of guilt at the monster she has unleashed she paints her wrists and her entire face red with lipstick and heaves her guts out. With her face still painted red, she calls Johnnie in New Orleans and tells him to stop what he’s doing and that she will fly out to meet him the next day. She doesn’t tell him that there is a contract out on him. Santos didn’t tell her that there was and she pretends to believe him. When she gets to New Orleans and Johnnie asks her straight out if her desperate call and sudden trip had anything to do with Santos she denies it, leaving him totally unprepared to defend himself.

Johnnie and Marietta retire to separate rooms in his hotel. She doesn’t tell him why but she promises to make it up to him. When he enters his room Dropshadow snatches him and someone else knocks him out. They leave a note in his name with the message, "Gone fishing with a friend – maybe buffalo hunting, too."

Buffalo hunting? Who do we know in the Goldman-Simpson murder case that is associated with a team and a buffalo, or should I say a team in Buffalo? Who do we know that’s associated with fishing and hunting?

In Texas, Sailor and Lula see a trail of clothing on the road (the knit cap and the glove on Bundy and the second glove and the two socks on Rockingham). The trail ends with the aftermath of a terrible car accident (yes, the windshield is broken). They see the bodies of two men in the wreckage. The full horror of the accident comes home to them when they see Sherilyn Fenn as the third accident victim wondering around in obvious shock with blood streaming down her body from multiple wounds. She is babbling about a hairpin, her lost pocket, her lost cards and her lost purse. She says that her mother is going to kill her for losing her cards and her purse. Sailor and Lula try to help her but she won’t let them and there is nothing they can do but watch her collapse and die.

This scene is meaningful for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it features Sherilyn Fenn who occupies a considerable amount of space in the Fuhrman collection with her role as Jain in Diary of a Hitman and as Audrey Horn, David Patrick Kelly’s niece in Twin Peaks. Her birthday is February 1, just four days removed from Fuhrman’s and the uppercase D that seems to be synonymous in the Fuhrman collection with Detroit (To Protect and Serve) and fellatio (The Hotel New Hampshire, Elvira) applies double with her. She was born in Detroit and her roles in Diary of a Hitman and Twin Peaks involve references to her performing fellatio. Another special thing about her from Mark Fuhrman’s point of view is the list of characters she played from 1984, when Fuhrman first met O.J. and Nicole, to 1993 when Nicole and O.J. were arguing about you-know-what on the 911 tape. Some of the titles are also very interesting.

Sherilyn Fenn is Monica in Silence of the Heart (’84) and Katie (remember Liz’s friend Katie in Whore?) in Out of Control (’86). In True Blood (’89) She’s Jennifer. She’s Catherine in Meridian (’90), Lucy in Backstreet Dreams (’90) and Billie in Dillinger (’91). In Fatal Instinct (’93) Sherilyn Fenn is Laura and In Three of Hearts (’93) she’s Ellen.

Sherilyn Fenn is Julie Day in Wild at Heart (Mark Day was a Westec security guard on the scene when O.J. banged up the Mercies in the 1984 baseball bat incident that Fuhrman wrote about in his ’89 letter to the city attorney). Notice the Laura in Fatal Instinct and all the Hearts? You would if you were Mark Fuhrman having a sexual affair and writing a screenplay with Laura Hart. You would associate Sherilyn Fenn with Julie Hagerty "blowing" the automatic pilot in Airplane! and with Beverly D’Angilo as Ellen Griswold in Vacation caught by her children in a similar situation. The common denominator is that things are not what they appear to be. That’s what all screenplays have in common with each other and one thing that Fuhrman’s interpretation of evidence against O.J. has in common with the movies.

When Beverly D’Angilo as Allie Sheedy’s fairy godmother in Maid to Order drives away in a car that appears to get enveloped in a flying bubble like Glinda’s in the Wizard of Oz we know that we are seeing an illusion. But what we couldn’t know unless we were looking through the eyes of Mark Fuhrman are the connections that Beverly D’Angilo has to Sherilyn Fenn in the car-wreck scene in Wild at Heart. Michael Ontkean, who stars with Sherilyn Fenn in Twin Peaks and appears in the Maid to Order bubble scene is one connection. Julie Days’ cards is another.

I saw those connections only when I started looking for Sheryl Lee as the Good Witch in the car wreck scene with Sherilyn Fenn, then tried to figure out why I remembered it being there when it wasn’t. What I saw in my false memory of Sheryl Lee and the car wreck turned out to be a composite of the two scenes and the one name shared by the two actresses. Sherilyn Fenn’s real name is Sheryl Ann Fenn. That had to be a part of my false memory but the impression of the Good Witch’s bubble in the car wreck scene was so strong I knew that there had to be more to it than that.

All of the answers started to fall into place when I realized why the ramblings of Sherilyn Fenn as Julie Day kept banging at the corners of my mind – like a baseball bat on the windshield of a Mercedes Benz.

I understood the significance of the part about "my mother is going to kill me," as the figure of speech Nicole used that sounded so prophetic when she ended up a murder victim. I could see that the blood running down her jeans resembled the blood from Ron Goldman’s neck wounds that ran down his jeans and helped Dr. Michael Baden determine that he was on his feet for at least five minutes after his throat was cut. But the reason I kept seeing Sheryl Lee and Beverly D’Angilo had to do with Julie’s lost cards. I saw it when I went back to the car-in-the-bubble scene on the driveway in Maid to Order. Just before Allie Sheedy as Jessica says to Beverly D’Angilo as Stella, "I sort of thought you were going to go off in a bubble or something," she asks, "Will I ever see you again?" Stella replies, "Not if you play your cards right."

Looking again at the car wreck scene with all three victims ending up on their backs and Sailor standing over them in his snakeskin jacket I could see where more confusion leaked in. The actual Good Witch scene involved Sailor on his back with several young men looking down on him. There is a car wreck in that scene, too and a deserted stretch of road as well as clothes left behind by the victim. You see those things when Sailor rushes off yelling "Lula!" leaving his suitcase behind on a deserted stretch of road and climbs over the tops of cars stopped in a traffic jam to get to Lula. Off to the side you see the wreckage of a car.

Fuhrman wrote his letter to the city attorney a year before the release of Wild at Heart so the idea of using the incident with the "battered car" to portray O.J. as a symbolic wife batterer could not have come from that movie. The idea of using the incident to help explain the killing of Ron and Nicole is another matter. Sherilyn Fenn’s clothing and the condition of her body as Julie in Wild at Heart look like a composite of Ron and Nicole’s clothes and the condition of their bodies. Add to that Mark Fuhrman’s revised account of the "battered car" incident for his ’97 book and you get a startling tie-in to the ’89 New Years Day incident with Nicole crying, "He’s going to kill me," and her eventual murder.

According to Fuhrman, the incident he wrote about in his letter to the city attorney was far more sinister than anything he wrote about or talked about before. He said in his book that he wanted to testify to doing his best to get Nicole to recognize what a desperate situation she was in (the way Sailor tried to do with the car crash victim Julie). He said that Marcia Clark vetoed what he wanted to say because she thought it sounded too harsh. In light of the fact that she did get murdered and O.J. was accused of being the killer, it sounds like a dramatic exit line – like something you would expect to hear Sgt. Joe Friday say. He claimed that he asked if she wanted to make an abuse complaint against O.J. and that she refused. His dramatic, Joe Friday exit line? "It’s your life."

Pretty good, huh?

It gets better when you combine the crash scene in Wild at Heart with the Sailor/Bob Ray confrontation on the steps with the knife and the swift knockout blows to the head. The name of the driver, by the way, is Robert (Bob). Shortly you are going to meet another Robert. He calls himself Bobby Peru. He was a marine – like Mark Fuhrman. Bobby Peru is a hitman., Calvin Lockhart as Reggie the hitman in the murder scene that follows the car crash scene uses a "Marine issue" pistol. Grace Zabriskie as Juana is his lover. Johnnie the detective is their victim. They appear to be high on drugs of some kind and they put on a performance that demonstrates they are sexually aroused by the act of killing. Before Reggie shoots a hole in the back of Johnnie’s head Juana tells him to show Johnnie the ring that Santos told them to show him at that time. As soon as Johnnie sees it he knows the whole story. Marietta has betrayed him.

Johnnie isn’t the only one who gets betrayed. Isabella Rosselini as Perdita Durango is the one person in the world besides Lula that Sailor believes he can trust. He drives far off the highway to a miserable little town in Texas called Big Tuna to meet her and to ask her if there is a contract out on him. She tells him there isn’t. The man who introduces William (Billy?) Dafoe as Bobby Peru to Sailor and Lula calls him the "The biggest thing to hit Big Tuna since the cyclone blew the roof off the high school in ’86." Bobbie Peru is an ex-marine. Perdita Durango is his girlfriend and his partner.

Note what happens when you combine the name of Grace Zabriskie’s character Juana with Isabella Rosselini’s character Perdita. All you need is an "h" to get Juditha, Nicole Brown Simpson’s German mother. Juditha’s name is often pronounced Judita. So, using the Zardoz rule of composite name making, the first part of Juana and the last part of Perdita work fine without the h. Most people knew Juditha as Judy.

Again, this name game business is meaningless to all but Mark Fuhrman the German-American who could identify with Nicole’s mother because of his own mother Billie. Thus, the added significance of all the Wizard of Oz (with Billie Burke) references in Wild at Heart to Mark Fuhrman. Not the least of these associations is a scene when William (Billy) Dafoe as Bobby Pure intimidates Laura Dern as Lula into saying she wants to have sex with him. You see her sobbing in humiliation when he leaves with her eyes tightly shut and clicking the heels of her red shoes together like Judy Garland as Dorothy Gail. When Nicholas Cage as Sailor drove to Big Tuna Lula wanted to know why he came so far out of their way to get there. Sailor couldn’t tell her about Perdita. All he could say was, "It ain’t exactly Emerald City."

In Iago I argued that five people had to be directly involved in the Bundy murders: two white men (Mark Fuhrman and Brad Roberts), one black man roughly O.J.’s height and build with a weakness for white women (Ron Shipp) and two white women (Faye Resnick and Denise Brown). I didn’t get this from the five assassins in Wild at Heart. I didn’t see the movie until Iago was in print. I hadn’t even heard of it till then.

My position was simply that it took five people, each with a unique set of qualifications to account for all of the evidence against O.J. on Bundy and Rockingham. The active killer had to match dozens of those characteristics. Mark Fuhrman matched every one of them. His partner on the scene had to match six. Brad Roberts matched all six. The black man had to match five qualifying characteristics. Ron Shipp matched all five. One of the women had to match five. Denise Brown matches all five. The other woman had to match at least three. Faye Resnick matches them perfectly. In fact, all of the qualifications for all of the conspirators had to match perfectly and all of them did.

I’m sure you noticed the many references in my summery of Wild at Heart to David Lynch’s TV miniseries Twin Peaks. That’s because Twin Peaks stars so many of the actors who appear in Wild at Heart or other films in the Fuhrman Collection related to Wild at Heart. In Twin Peak:

Grace Zabriskie (Juana) is Laura Palmer’s mother Sara

Sherilyn Fenn (Julie Day) is Audrey Horne.

David Patrick Kelley (Dropshadow) is Audrey’s Uncle Jerry Horn.

Jack Nance (00 Spool) is Pete Martell.

Sheryl Lee (the Good Witch) is Laura Palmer.

David Lynch (the director of Wild at Heart) is FBI regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole.

Peggy Lipton (the eye patch link) is Norma Jennings.

Michael Ontkean (Nick in Maid to Order) is Sheriff Harry S. Truman.

Speaking of Harry S. Truman, you should note that the list of Presidents in the Fuhrman collection is extensive in reference frame-ups, duplicity and murder. The two silver dollars dropped in Mr. Reindeer’s mail slot picture Dwight D. Eisenhower. You see him clearly on the "head" side of the dollar in Bobby Peru’s palm in Wild at Heart. It’s possible that this has nothing to do with the coins Nicole’s killer dropped on her driveway (Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln) and the fact that George Bush’s birthday is June the 12^th, but I doubt it.

Long before I found out Bush senior’s birthday, I had seen an unmistakable correlation in the Fuhrman collection between birthdays and death days. I saw it first with Fuhrman and the ’86 KKK incident involving Peggy York and Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Then, in Fuhrman’s O.J. book, he made an issue out of Nicole’s murder and her birthday by criticizing Vannatter and Lange for asking O.J. what Nicole’s birthday was. He did it again with respect to his criticism of O.J. for playing golf on his daughter Sydney’s birthday.

The problem with the KKK incident is that a white racist murdered Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers on June 12. Some of Fuhrman’s most violently racist comments on the Laura Hart McKinny tapes involved LA civil rights leaders and the use of the deadly choke hold on black people. This was shortly after he lost two days pay for using the outlawed hold on a young black man outside a movie theater for jaywalking and threatening to kill him. So, the June 12 death day relative to Fuhrman’s racist language and potentially deadly racist behavior was established in his record years before the Bundy murders.

The problem with Fuhrman’s remarks about O.J.’s golfing and Sydney’s birthday is that he managed to work himself into the picture he painted of O.J. with a comparison of himself and his daughter. He was referring to Sydney Simpson’s 9^th birthday. In the pilot episode of Moonlighting we see a young girl celebrating her birthday with nine candles on her cake. Her name is Jennifer. The Fuhrman links to the Bundy murders in that show fill up an entire chapter in The Smoking Gun and the combined Jennifer links in other Fuhrman collection movies take up two or three more.

On the strength of Moonlighting’s Jennifer sequence alone I visited my favorite video rental store, as Mark Fuhrman advised everyone to do to see how cops talked and behaved in cop movies, and rented a copy of Jennifer Eight. This is going to get us to Mark Fuhrman’s own birthday starting with the movie’s female lead Uma Thurman (similar name) and the severed hand of "Jennifer 8" found in a garbage bag. At a Christmas party Uma Thurman’s character asks a friend of the cop who’s protecting her from a killer (Andy Garcia as John Berlin) if she thinks he’s still in love with his ex-wife. The friend (Kathy Baker) tells her that he still thinks about her but he used to be "obsessed." The obsession line fit my thesis but the Christmas party seemed to fall short of the birthday link I expected to see until I thought about Nicole’s crucifix and realized Christmas was a birthday that she and Fuhrman celebrated. You can read all about Jennifer Eight in The Smoking Gun.

Christians are taught that Jesus Christ is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, the Holy Ghost being Christ resurrected from the grave. Christmas and resurrection themes are big in the Fuhrman collection. In Murder in Brentwood Fuhrman said that he gave his third wife a horse and trailer for Christmas. He told his police psychiatrist that he would have killed his second wife and her lover if he’d caught them cheating. He said that he found the videotape Ghost in O.J.’s VCR when he searched his home on the 13^th. He wrote, "Although it had no evidentiary value, the tape’s being left in the VCR indicated that Simpson had probably just watched this story about love, jealousy and murder." Jealousy? Where did that come from? It did not come from Ghost.

So, now that we’ve got Fuhrman suggesting that O.J. got his ideas for murder from the movie Ghosts lets recap some things we already know about Fuhrman’s interest in the movies. We’ll tidy up the Jennifer birthday links to Fuhrman at the same time by way of Jason Robards Jr., Vic Morrow and Morrow’s daughter Jennifer Jason Leigh. Vic Morrow’s birthday is St. Valentine’s Day. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s birthday is the same as Fuhrman’s. "Jason" comes from her father’s close friend Jason Robards Jr. In the made for television movie The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre you see Jason Robards Jr. as Al Capone putting golf balls. In The Hitcher, Jennifer Jason Leigh is a murder victim named Nash. In RoboCop Ray Wise is a killer named Nash. In Twin Peaks you see Ray Wise as Laura Palmer’s father Leland putting the hand of his murdered daughter’s lookalike in his golf bag.

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