Go to
Chapter 7

Table of Contents

Andy Griffith as Matlock, is the invincible Perry Mason of the Deep South. As much as I liked Andy Griffith and the Matlock character I despised the flag of the State of George that hung with honor in the courtrooms where he practiced law. It was the St. Andrew’s Cross, the battle flag of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan. History has given the St. Andrews cross a place as inexorably tied to the institution of chattel slavery in America as the swastika is to the Jewish/Gypsy Holocaust in Europe. For most African-Americans with a sense of history it stands for centuries of social injustice and rivers of blood shed in the service of white supremacy.

No matter how much you want to dress up the causes of the Civil War or the motives of the men who fought on each side, the bottom line was race. The social and political structure of the Confederacy depended for its survival on a racial hierarchy with black people reduced to a perpetual state of servitude enforced by law. Although the South claimed to be fighting for its freedom from the North in a just cause, one of Robert E. Lee’s first official acts when he invaded Pennsylvania was to round up black people and send them South as slaves. It was this fundamental contradiction in the principles of freedom and justice articulated in the Declaration of Independence that led many Americans, including hard core racists like Abraham Lincoln to oppose slavery. It was the violent attempt by pro-slavers to extend the legal protection of slavery to the new territories west of the Mississippi that made civil war inevitable.

When all was said and done, race remained the unifying factor in the reconciliation of North and South. John Wilkes Booth did not decide to kill Lincoln over an abstract principle of States rights. He made his decision because of a portion of Lincoln’s inaugural address that contemplated giving a few exceptional black men the right to vote. That issue remained a subject of debate until it was decided by the Civil Rights act of 1964. In the early 1970s race again became the unifying factor in the reconciliation of American Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

It did not escape my notice that Andy is short for Andrew or that war and history buffs would see the connection to the St. Andrews Cross. After awhile I couldn’t sit through another Matlock episode. Looking back on the series through the prism of what I have learned about Mark Fuhrman, the "war and history buff," I saw that the St. Andrew’s cross may be yet another reason for so many Andy links in the Fuhrman collection.

For the very reason I was repelled by the Matlock series Mark Fuhrman with his affinity for racist symbols would have loved it in spite of the black men who co-starred as private investigators from 1986 to 1993.

Not once did either black PI get intimately involved with a white woman. Not one interracial kiss on the lips or the mere suggestion that there might have been an interracial sexual interlude. No playful flirtations, sexual innuendoes or sexual tension whatever between the single black male and single white female regulars. That lack of normal sexual energy between men and woman was, in a word, artificial. But it was not an artificiality you could put your finger on unless you were looking for it over the entire span of the programs that included the black PIs.

It didn’t hit me until I saw Bonnie Burroughs with real-life black cowboy Clarence Gilyard Jr. as PI Conrad McMasters after her successful ride on a mechanical bull in "Mr. Awesome"(’92). The first thing she did when she dismounted was to give a woman a big hug. Then she kissed a man on the lips and hooked her arm affectionately around Conrad’s shoulders. It was a natural gesture under the circumstances but jarring to me because I had never seen anything like it on Matlock.

Before I could regroup to question whether I had read more into Burroughs’ gesture than was actually there, she and Gilyard sat down at the bar. This time, she slid her palms slowly over his shoulder until her fingers were resting gently on his upper back in a manner suggesting the prelude to a kiss. Gilyard took over from Kene Holiday in 1989. Nothing like that ever happened to Holiday, and the only times his character ever treated white woman as sexual entities was when it would have cast doubt on his sexual orientation not to.

Since 1960 when the first black man appeared in a television commercial, black men could assume traditionally white roles on TV if they had minor parts or if they were sexless where white women were concerned. Before O.J. Simpson’s 1985 – ’91 appearance as T.D. Parker in HBO’s adult comedy series 1^st & Ten a passionate interracial kiss was a major television event. T.D. Parker exchanged French kisses with white women on a regular basis. He fondled their bare breasts and had sexual affairs with them with no consideration to the racial implications of what they did. The unstated implications were, of course, enormous, even more so because they were unstated. O.J. Simpson thus became the first African-American male to assume the role of an interracial sex symbol – not because he was black, but because he was O.J. Simpson.

I have not forgotten Harry Belafonte, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown or Phillip Michael Thomas who preceded O.J. as male, African-American sex symbols. O.J. was different. He was a male sex symbol who happened to be black in the same way that other male sex symbols were who happened to be white. He was accepted for himself and appealed to a white audience on many levels that had nothing to do with race or sex. He erased the color line in mainstream American television on all levels including sex. For a white supremacist race has to matter. It has to come first. Therefore, there could not have been a more dangerous living symbol to them than O.J. Simpson was until June 13, 1994.

Mark Fuhrman was very big on symbols. Most people accepted his explanation for collecting Nazi paraphernalia because of its exceptional craftsmanship. That does not explain why he would wear a swastika lapel pen to work. And when you consider his explanation for putting on his desktop at work a 1989 political cartoon of a Nazi flag rising out of the rubble of the Berlin Wall, you know that he valued its symbolic importance greatly. You know that not only because he said so, but also because of everything else he said and did that was associated with that flag. On one hand, he claimed that he kept it on display as a tribute to the cartoonist who was able to say so much in that one image about the danger of a reunified Germany. On the other hand, he preached Nazi ideals and he practiced what he preached. Is it more likely that he saw the cartoon as a danger or as a hope?

If the Nazi swastika was an important symbol to him in 1989, so was the image of O.J. Simpson in 1985. I do not think that his efforts to associate himself with O.J. in ’85 and ’89 were coincidental. I don’t even think we can call coincidence a reasonable possibility.

1985 and 1989 were very big years for O.J. and Fuhrman. ’85 was the year Fuhrman met Laura Hart and began taping for their Men Against Women screenwriting project. It was the year O.J. joined the cast of 1^st & Ten and the year he married Nicole. It was the year Fuhrman hooked up with Ron Shipp. Shipp happened to be a friend of O.J. who invited his police buddies to O.J.’s house. Fuhrman said that he answered a family dispute call at 360 North Rockingham in 1985 and witnessed O.J. threatening Nicole with a baseball bat. He made this revelation for the first time in 1989, tying himself forever to O.J. and Nicole and to the charge of spouse abuse that would hang around O.J.’s neck from then on.

If Fuhrman were not a well-documented glory seeker from his first years on the job, all of those associations wouldn’t mean much. But he was. So they do. Although he said in his January, ’89 letter to the city attorney that the baseball bat incident "made an indelible impression" on his mind, it appears nowhere in his taped conversations with the single Laura Hart or the married Laura Hart McKinny. For a name-dropper like Fuhrman, that’s more than a little odd. The only mention of O.J. on the tapes comes after the murders in 1994 when he tells McKinny, "I’m the key witness in the biggest case of the century. And if I go down they lose the case. The glove is everything. Without the glove—bye-bye."

Symbols are what we think with, what we communicate with and what we respond to emotionally when we can’t deal with something directly. The same things in different contexts have different meanings. When you see Clarence Gilyard in "Mr. Awesome" riding the mechanical bull with a leather glove on his right hand, you attach nothing sinister to the glove, the bull or the rider. You know all bull riders wear a single leather glove. You know that the mechanical bull could just as easily symbolize a mechanical bronco, but you don’t feel as though you have been lied to or cheated because it’s all in fun.

You see his color but you don’t attach any special significance to it because you’ve seen black cowboys before. Clarence Gilyard Jr. is an actor but he sure looks like a cowboy, too the way he rides that bull and the way he dresses. You’ve seen him as Conrad McMasters many times in his cowboy boots and Western belt buckle. You saw him wearing a leather glove on his left hand in an episode of Matlock called "The Biker" where you also saw someone swing a baseball bat and break the windshield of a car. No big thing. When you see him loose the hat and take off the glove in "Mr. Awesome" after the ride, you don’t think much of that, either. Ditto for the single Ford truck parked at an extreme angle in the parking lot. But when you put all of that together, what do you have? No, not a black actor losing his hat and both gloves then parking his truck at an extreme angle. You have Mark Fuhrman’s story of a black actor and real-life killer doing those things after he commits a real-life double homicide.

I’ve often wondered why football fans, who were used to seeing O.J. in dark leather gloves doing color commentaries, did not have more reservations about the Bundy killer’s gloves. Why would the killer wear any gloves on that warm June night unless he planned to kill somebody and hide his identity? If O.J. planned the killings why did he leave the clear, bloody shoeprints? The color-commentator-gloves put a strain on any logical scenario of O.J. the-spontaneous-rage-killer, notwithstanding how he could have lost both of them in the most incriminating places imaginable. They make no more sense than The Naked Gun cap unless they were left behind for the purpose of creating a jigsaw puzzle of O.J. Simpson that a 6-year-old could put together in no time. What better symbol could you want for a famous runner than shoeprints described as "running away"? Even the idea of O.J.’s Bronco being involved in his mad rush and O.J. jumping over things on his way to a plane comes straight out of O.J.’s longest running Hertz Rent-a-Car commercial.

All of these things must have meant a lot to the killer. We know that they meant a lot to Mark Fuhrman. The Bronco belonged to Hertz. The story was Fuhrman’s. He said the killer ran away. He was the only person alive or dead who could be linked to both gloves. Everything about the Bronco came from him. He said that O.J. jumped over the fence. His note calling the knit cap a ski mask ended up on the news as a bloody ski mask in O.J.’s bedroom closet. A bloody ski mask was never in O.J.’s closet. Mark Fuhrman was.

That raises all sorts of questions about other false images of the crime scenes that can be traced to Fuhrman. Why, for instance, was it so important for Fuhrman to exaggerate the angle at which the Bronco was parked? Why was it so important to him to make O.J. a reckless Bronco "parker"? Could the Bronco and the way Fuhrman described O.J. parking it have stood for something else in his mind? A mythical professional football team, perhaps, and a man named Parker? How about a team that is not the Bronco’s but one that has something in common with them? Does the name Bulls strike a familiar cord?

If you know anything about rodeo cowboys you will see the connection right away in the 1992 "Mr. Awesome" episode of Matlock with Clarence Gilyard Jr. and Bonnie Burroughs. You will see it in all of the mechanical bull riding scenes. The NFL has a team called the Colts, one called the Broncos and one called the Cowboys. O.J. is linked directly to two professional football teams with Western frontier images as a player and to all of the teams in the league thorough his work as a celebrity sportscaster. The Bronco that he liked to drive more than any other vehicle was therefore a good symbol for pro football teams in general. In 1^st & Ten, remember, O.J. is TD Parker and the Los Angeles Bulls are his football team. We know that the Chicago Bulls are a professional basketball team. And we know that O.J. few to Chicago as a representative of Hertz on the night of the murders. I’d say that was a strong symbolic link between the bull and the Bronco, wouldn’t you?

If we are willing to consider for one moment that the killer was not O.J., the shoeprints, the gloves, the cap, the Bronco and the victims begin to take on the shape of a man obsessed for many years with symbols of O.J.’s success. None of these things were important symbols of success for O.J., certainly not his marriage to Nicole Brown. But look at them through the eyes of envy and a nazi’s hatred of a popular black celebrity married to a beautiful German woman and had many Jewish friends….

When you see the shoeprints through those eyes do you see O.J. as a successful athlete making historic tracks on a football field? When you see the gloves do you see O.J. closing them around a microphone as a successful color commentator getting big bucks to hold that microphone just for being O.J.? When you see the cap do you see O.J. as a successful comedic actor sneaking around the docks in The Naked Gun, getting his leg caught in the door onboard the drug ship, slamming his face in the wedding cake, stepping in the bear trap or falling overboard? When you learn that the Bronco belonged to Hertz, do you see O.J. as a successful pitchman in a Hertz commercial running and leaping over things in an airport? When you see the normal way that O.J. parked his Bronco on Rockingham, do you see him as TD Parker, a successful interracial sex symbol in 1^st & Ten? …Of course you do.

Things look different through the eyes of different people at different times but even racial prejudice has limits to what it can see. A man is still a man. A woman is still a woman and that distinction always comes first. In the ’40s and early ’50s it may have taken some fancy verbal steps to sell the black actress Acquanetta first as an Arapaho Indian from Wyoming and then as a Venezuelan. No one had to be sold on her beauty. Before she got in the movies she was a highly-paid model in New York. She wasn’t the best actress I’ve ever seen but when I saw her as Lea, the High Priestess in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (’46) I didn’t care whether she could act or not. I don’t think Fuhrman would have, either.

Tarzan and the Leopard Woman was released before Mark Fuhrman was born, so it’s likely that he saw it as I did on TV. Judging by the quality and quantity of Leopard Woman links to the Bundy killings, I’d say that he watched it more than once, that Acquanetta played a role in his early sexual fantasies and left an "indelible impression" on his mind. That’s not the sort of thing a growing boy has much control over. Even if his racial attitudes were hardening on cue as spontaneously as other parts of his body, a woman like Acquanetta would have had a prominent part to play. I’m thinking about the photo I saw of my grandfather’s grandmother. She looked white. Her father was white. The only thing my family knows about her mother is that she was a slave.

I wrote about Tarzan and the Leopard Woman in the first Smoking Gun. I wrote about Brenda Joyce as Jane and my sister Sara saying when she read my Fuhrman at the Movies chapter of Iago that he thought he was Tarzan. Her next comment, "I bet his wife’s name is Jane," got me started on the first Smoking Gun. She looked at Fuhrman’s primitive attitude toward women, the use of a knife and the patterns of borrowed movie ideas that saturated his O.J. and Nicole stories, and that’s what came out – Jane. Sara had never seen or heard the woman’s name, yet she was closer than I was to the fact of the matter, which suggested something significant in the name itself and not her imagination or mine. I had thought that the only important thing about Fuhrman’s second wife was him telling a psychiatrist that he would have killed her and a man she was having an affair with if he had caught them together. After I looked up her name and saw that it was Janet, it took no imagination for me to see Jane. Most people spell Sara, S-a-r-a-h.

Fuhrman could not have killed Janet and her lover no matter how much he would have wanted to because of the stories he told various people of wanting to kill them that would have implicated him. Besides, how many people did they tell? Too much substitute people symbolism is associated with the Fuhrman aspects of the Bundy murder investigation to dismiss out of hand. The Sara, Cara, Laura, Jane, Janet links in the movies, for example, don’t cross the Nick, Nichols, Nicholas, Nicole links. They have their own separate links to other movies and to the murders. It is as though the killer butchered Nicole and Ron to satisfy two or three separate substitution goals, one to kill O.J.’s image and another to serve as substitute victims for a man and woman he wanted desperately to kill but couldn’t. He couldn’t have killed O.J., either, without making him a more powerful sex symbol than he already was. In numerous movie and TV links someone like Fuhrman’s version of O.J. does get killed.

In The World, the Flesh and The Devil (’59) young, handsome, virile, Harry Belafonte is Ralph, who believes he is the last human being on earth. He’s an African-American but there is no more Africa or America so that doesn’t matter. Then he learns that a woman has also survived. Inger Stevens is Sarah, a young, healthy, beautiful, Scandinavian blond. Now you have to decide whether his color and hers matter, seeing as how they are the last man and woman on earth. This is supposed to be a tough question. Because it’s 1959, they tiptoe around the obvious. Just when you think nature is going to take its course, Mel Ferrer shows up and everything goes to hell around the issue of race.

Rae Dawn Chong, the daughter of white comedian Tommy Chong, is Sarah Jane Walker in Soul Man (’86). John Walker happens to be Orenthal James Simpson’s name in Capricorn One. Sara sits next to the actor who plays the driver in The Hitcher (’86). That’s the movie with Jennifer Jason Leigh as Nash and Rutger Hauer as John Ryder the man who kills Nash and frames the driver. In the Movie Guide you’ll see that Jennifer is interchangeable with Sydney Simpson and Mark Fuhrman. It may also have something to do with O.J.’s oldest son Jason, the cook, and his white girlfriend Jennifer.

The driver in The Hitcher is Jim. In Soul Man he’s Mark Watson. He drives a SUV and plays basketball. You see him briefly in a black beret and glasses. In another scene you see him in gloves and a ski mask to hide his altered hair texture and skin color. He’s C. Thomas Howell, Rae Dawn Chong’s real life husband-to-be and a real life cowboy like Matlock’s Clarence Gilyard Jr. As Mark, he poses as a black man to get a scholarship to Boston’s Harvard Law School– Ben Matlock’s alma mater – when his wealthy dad transfers the money for his law school education to a time share in a condominium.

Mark Watson, the make-believe Soul Man, has dinner with the parents of a white girl named Whitney Dunbar. Mrs. Dunbar sees him as a savage with a knife in his teeth who can think of nothing but raping white women (O.J.’s alleged motive for killing Nicole and Ron). Mr. Dunbar (Leslie Nielsen) sees him as an abusive, controlling pimp and his daughter as the pimp’s pregnant, emotional punching bag fetching watermelon and heroin for him like a slave.

Nicole was in the late stages of pregnancy when Fuhrman claims he saw her behaving like an emotional punching bag and O.J. talking the way Mr. Dunbar imagines Mark Watson talking to his daughter. At the time Fuhrman claimed to have witnessed the incident he was a narcotics cop.

Soul Man was directed by Steven Miner, who also directed the slasher flick Friday the 13^th Part 3 (’82) with Tracie Savage. Savage got her start in broadcasting at WJBK-TV in Detroit. She was the reporter for KNBC News in Los Angeles who gave the test results on the socks that Fuhrman said he found on O.J.’s bedroom rug before the test was made.

Remember Blythe (Loving Molly) Danner as a TV reporter named Tracy in Future World? Remember Bridget (Single White Female) Fonda’s father Peter nicknaming her Socks? What do you make of "Mark’s" socks on the rug in Soul Man where he plants his feet—feet that point straight ahead like O.J. Simpson’s, Leslie Nielsen’s and Mark Fuhrman’s? Are these names, roles and situations starting to run together in your head? At some point they have to. At some time and place they must have run together in Fuhrman’s head, too, if he made the same connections to frame O.J. Simpson.

"Mr. Awesome" tells us what some of the things were that had to show up when and where they meant the most. The format of this Matlock episode lays out each scene like pages and panels of a comic book. If you just flashed on Swamp Thing or the Paul Conrad swastika cartoon on Mark Fuhrman’s desk you have gotten a firsthand glimpse of what I’m talking about. Now consider the power of his pointing finger photos.

"Mr. Awesome" is a comic book character created by Jimmy Johnson, the 11-year-old son of a single mother named Ann Johnson who gets framed for the murder of her boyfriend. Ann Johnson is a friend of Conrad McMasters, which is how Matlock gets involved in the case. Like Mark Fuhrman, her son has genuine artistic talent. As Matlock noted, he is "some kind of genius" with "an eye for detail." His hero is modeled after Walt Thomas, another friend of his mother. He has Mark Fuhrman’s height and build. He pumps iron. He protects characters, who happen to look like Ann and Jimmy Johnson. Like the man who killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown, he has the power to swiftly immobilize his opponents. The Bundy killer did it with the heel of a knife. Mr. Awesome does it with an electronic discharge from his fingertip.

Electricity, as in juice? Or is that Juice, as in O.J.? Maybe both. Electricity doesn’t always have to mean The Juice. Between jobs as a homicide detective for the LAPD and a best selling author for Regnery Press, Mark Fuhrman worked as an electrician’s apprentice.

And what about the one fingerprint that Fuhrman said he found on Nicole’s gate? This "juice"-on-the-fingertip link is not the only gate link in "Mr. Awesome" to the Bundy crime scene. In the show, Bonnie Burroughs, the mechanical bull rider, comes in the back door. The lock is broken so all she has to do to get in is give it a good push. She’s wearing leather gloves. She immobilizes her victim with an electric stun gun before she kills him by bashing him in the head. On Bundy, the killer left evidence that he got in and out through the back gate because he had a key. However, Nicole had to come out to open the front gate for Ron because the lock was broken and the buzzer didn’t always open it. O.J. and his son Jason said that it wasn’t a problem because all they had to do was apply a little force.

Nicole must have known that. She must have told Ron, a frequent visitor to the house. Why then did she come outside, unless something about the mechanics or the electronics of the security system made it necessary? No problem for a former robbery detective like Mark Fuhrman, or anyone interested enough in wiring buildings and security systems to become an electrician’s apprentice. All former soldiers and marines know something about channeling the enemy’s movements to a place of their choosing to kill them. These places are called "kill zones" because anyone who enters one is supposed to die there. When I was in Vietnam I went on many five or ten man ambush patrols. On a slightly larger ambush patrol, we were the ones who got ambushed. The enemy had little time to prepare so half of us escaped unharmed. It’s not that hard to see when you are about to go into a place like that but sometimes natural or man-made circumstances give you no practical alternative.

When you plan an ambush you scout the area carefully to take advantage of the natural terrain. If there is an alternate route to the enemy’s anticipated line of travel, you close it. You fell trees, mine roads – whatever gets the job done. You make sure that you can see the enemy long before they can see you and all avenues of entrance and escape are covered by fire. When you corral your quarry in the tightest possible space to minimize his maneuverability, you take aim and fire. In a knife attack the same principles apply. Only you lay in wait inside the kill zone or where you can leap into it and attack without warning.

Any way you look at it, you have to watch and wait to make an ambush work. Soldiers can sometimes afford to wait for hours. The man who killed Ron and Nicole didn’t have that luxury. He had to come prepared to do the job in the front yard of Nicole’s condo within sever time limits. He had to be either very lucky or very good at that kind of work.

Looking at O.J.’s luck and Fuhrman’s is like watching the two men on a teeter-totter. Every time Fuhrman got lucky O.J. got unlucky. It always started with Fuhrman making a lucky contact or playing a lucky hunch. It always proceeded with Fuhrman having one lucky accident after another. It always ended with Fuhrman being in the right place at the right time to show the world how very good he was at doing his kind of work.

Mark Fuhrman told many people about his affair with a married woman (Nicole Simpson) while he was married to his third wife Caroline. He told police psychiatrists how much he loved beating up people and breaking bones. Most American’s were surprised to hear him say things like that on the McKinny tapes. Would it surprise you to learn that Walt "Mr. Awesome" Thomas isn’t the good guy that 11-year-old Jimmy and his mother think he is? Would it surprise you to learn that he works part time as an enforcer for a loan shark to work off an organized crime gambling debt? Matlock learns the truth when he figures out Thomas was lying about his alibi and was not with a married woman at the time of the murder. His real alibi was that he was beating up a man who was behind on his loan shark payments.

When I was researching Iago I learned that Mark Fuhrman gave different alibis to different people. It seemed to me that he could easily talk his Union brothers into backing him by telling them that he was cheating on his wife. He could tell his wife that he was at a racist meeting of some kind and he could tell the press and the prosecutors whatever worked best under the prevailing circumstances. When I started work on The Smoking Gun I ran across lines that give the name, the nickname, and the number the Detroit Piston’s team captain Isiah Thomas. Previous research had led me to think that Fuhrman was a gambler who won on a playoff game between the Pistons and the Celtics. The game featured Larry Bird’s stolen inbound pass from Thomas to Laimbeer. Bird passed to Dennis Johnson for an easy lay-up.

How can you prove that a connection to Thomas existed in Fuhrman’s mind when all you have is Fuhrman’s statement that Larry Bird was one of his three favorite athletes?

Try this…The two basketball players in this picture taken from a Los Angeles TV Channel 7 News report in 1995 are not Larry Bird and Isiah Thomas. The man in the white T-shirt is Mark Fuhrman. LAPD Sgt. Ed Palmer is wearing the Detroit Piston basketball jersey with Isiah Thomas’ number 11 on the front. He has the name Thomas’ on the back. In 1990 Detroit’s news media tried to connect Thomas to organized crime figures involved in illegal betting. It proved in the end to be a groundless smear campaign…but it worked.

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