wpeA7.jpg (2950 bytes)

 

 

Go to
Chapter 17

Table of Contents

Chapter 16

Thar She Blows

      wpeA8.jpg (23438 bytes)

 

Fans of The Naked Gun (’88) may have thought that the scene with Frank Drebin commenting on Jane Spencer’s "full set of curves" and hair "the color of gold in old paintings" was good. But they would not have gotten the most out of itwpeAB.jpg (3894 bytes) unless they saw the scene that those lines were borrowed from. It was in Farewell My Lovely (’77) with Charlotte Rampling who shares Mark Fuhrman’s birthday. The same holds true for a scene from Telefon that follows shortly thereafter when Ricardo Montalban, as Vincent Ludwig, turns David and Jerry Zucker’s mother into "the Manchurian Candidate." Charlotte Zucker is Ludwig’s secretary Dominique.

You may know Charlotte Zucker as the bank receptionist in Ghost (’90), the movie that Mark Fuhrman said he found in O.J.’s VCR, and as the sperm bank nurse in The Naked Gun 33 1/3 (’94). But you can get the most out of her scene in The Naked Gun only if you saw the scene it came from in Telefon (’77) and Angela Lansbury (a.k.a. Mrs. Fletcher) as Army Sgt. Raymond Shaw’s incestuous mother and Soviet controller in The Manchurian Candidate. Fuhrman was a sergeant in the Marines.

The Charles Bronson connection to Leslie Nielsen as Frank Drebin in Police wpeAA.jpg (5573 bytes)Squad! and to white-haired heroes and villains in general is in the Telefon scene we’re talking about. A white-haired Russian general summons Bronson as KGB Maj. Grigori Borzov to a meeting with him and a colonel at KGB headquarters. The colonel has just briefed him on a Russian agent with the cover name Mark Peters who blew himself up along with an ammunition dump near Akron Ohio. The general asks Borzov, "Tell me, Major, in all the world who is the most secret agent?" Borzov replies, "Anyone who manages to stay secret." The general says, "But there is an even more ideal agent; one who doesn’t know he is an agent."

The general buzzes in a steward named Demitri and asks him to bring a tea setting wpeAC.jpg (5050 bytes)for three. Before he can comply, the general pushes another button, utters a few strange words and Demetri turns into "the Manchurian Candidate." He goes straight to a box on the general’s desk, opens it, retrieves a revolver, points it at Borzov – who starts to climb his chair – and pulls the trigger on an empty chamber. He repeats this aiming, trigger-pulling routine with the general and the colonel then puts the barrel of the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger again. Two guards enter the room and haul him out while he is still pulling the trigger, oblivious to their presence, not to mention the bizarre nature of what he’s doing. The general then asks Borzov, "Have you ever seen drug-induced hypnosis?" The major answers, "I think I just did."

In The Naked Gun, Ludwig says to a foreign agent, "Tell me, Mr. Pahpshmir, inwpeAE.jpg (15201 bytes) all the world, who is the most effective assassin?" He replies, "Well, I imagine anyone who manages to conceal his identity as an assassin. Ludwig says, "Yes. But there is an even more ideal assassin; one who doesn’t know he’s an assassin." Ludwig asks Dominique to bring a tea setting for two" before he presses a button. She goes straight to a drawer in his desk. She pucks up a revolver, aims it at Pahpshmir – who starts to climb his chair – and says in a trace, "I must kill Pahpshmir" as she pulls the trigger on an empty chamber several times. She then points the gun at her temple and pulls the trigger again. On another signal from Ludwig she drops the gun with no idea that anything unusual has happened. When she leaves, Ludwig says, "Tell me Mr. Pahpshmir, have you ever seen sensory-induced hypnosis?" Pahpshmir replies, "I think I just have."

Although Leslie Nielsen is not in that scene and Ricardo Montalban’s hair looks more like Charles Bronson’s than the general’s, you’d have to stretch pretty far not to see the link between The Naked Gun and Telefon. When you see so many of the same elements in two screenplays, it doesn’t matter that some of them are in different places; you know where the idea in the more recent screenplay came from. To the extent that Mark Fuhrman borrowed from those screenplays in his conduct of the investigation at Bundy and Rockingham and in his accounts of what he, the killer and his victims did, you can see where he got his ideas, too.

Of all the people involved in the Simpson case Mark Fuhrman is the only one who can be traced to so many characters and scenarios that first appeared on screen or television. Once you have a lineup of actors, characters and scenes that appear repeatedly in connection with something he said or did you can predict with a high degree of accuracy what you’re going to see in a given context. But you have to have your information in the right order to do it.

I saw Telefon on TV before and after the Bundy murders but I saw nothing special about it until In the Heat of Passion showed me how important the name Charlie Bronson was in association with the name Lee. I had always seen Telefon strictly as a variation of The Manchurian Candidate and I frankly couldn’t recall a thing about it that made it worth looking at again. But the more I saw how important Angela Lansbury was as Jessica Fletcher, the more I realized how important she was as Sgt. Raymond Shaw’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate. That realization led me down entirely different paths, which converged in the incest component of Lee and Charlie’s relationship in In the Heat of Passion. I didn’t expect that it would take me to The Naked Gun.

Charles Bronson appears with a star named Lee in three note-worthy films as far as Fuhrman and O.J. are concerned. He is in Telefon with Lee Remick, The DirtywpeAF.jpg (6177 bytes) Dozen with Lee Marvin and Death Hunt (’81) with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, Carl Weathers and Andrew Stevens as Constable Adams of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Any Lee Marvin connection is a Fuhrman connection because of Marvin’s appearance with O.J. in The Klansman (’74) and Fuhrman’s fallout with Margaret York over the KKK incident with Martin Luther King’s birthday. You also have to remember that Lee Marvin’s Frank Ballinger in M Squad is one of the characters that make up the composite character of Frank Drebin. Carl Weathers is Sundog, a.k.a. George Washington Lincoln Brown.

Angie Dickinson appears with O.J. in her TV series Policewoman. Andrew Stevens’ mother appears with Jim Brown in Slaughter and Shannon Tweed, his leading lady in Night Eyes 3, appears with O.J. in 1st & Ten. When I saw thatwpeB0.jpg (5502 bytes) Death Hunt starred Lee Marvin, Charles Bronson, Angie Dickinson and Carl Weathers, I knew that there had to be connections to Fuhrman and the Simpson-Goldman murders. A big one involves a composite picture of Nicole, Ron, and O.J. in the character of Hasel played by Ed Lauter (Duke in Magic). He owned a white dog (Nicole’s Akita was white) that was bloodied in a dogfight when Bronson, as Albert Johnson, happened by and saved the dog over Hasel’s protest. Johnson paid him what he said the dog was worth and took him away. Hasel, who was two steps away from killing the dog for losing the fight, then decided that the dog was worth more and took his grievance to the law (Lee Marvin as Sergeant Millen).

Hasel’s case against Johnson is totally bogus but it ends up getting a lot of people killed, including Hasel. You get the idea that Hasel’s sexual proclivities might be like Nicole’s when he surprises Adams with a forced kiss on the mouth. You knewwpeB5.jpg (6742 bytes) when you saw his dark blue knit cap and his bloody white dog that the dog was going to bite him. That is, you knew what you were going to see if you knew Fuhrman’s theory about Nicole’s bloody white dog biting the man who wore the blue knit cap, and you’ve been paying attention to how the evidence on Bundy and Rockingham corresponds to scenes in the movies. The setting for Death Hunt is the Canadian Yukon in the winter of ’31 and ’32, so everyone wears gloves. Before the killing starts you see Johnson, the innocent man, using a knife to cut a link of sausage for the dog. Fuhrman said the Bundy killer cut the dog’s collar.

Believe it or not, all of this is leading to the bubble gum with adult teeth impression that Fuhrman said he found beneath some foliage in a planter near Nicole’s back gate. This is the area where the money was also found. As it was with his other discoveries that were absent from photos or appeared in a way that did not make sense, the bubble gum appears in the movies and in a way that does make sense – to Mark Fuhrman.

Once I saw what the KGB officer meant to Jim Abrams and the Zucker brothers in The Naked Gun I could see what he meant to Fuhrman. I rewound the TelefonwpeB6.jpg (4814 bytes) tape and saw something that struck me as amusing the first time I saw it, but I didn’t connect to O.J. as Nordberg in The Naked Gun. In The Naked Gun it is O.J. the LAPD officer putting his foot through the door and getting his leg caught in the opening. In Telefon it is a KGB officer. He’s searching for a madman with a codebook that could start World War III. He doesn’t get hung up as long as O.J. does, but long enough to look foolish and get shot full of holes if men with guns on the other side were so inclined. Fortunately for him, the men with the guns are with him. O.J. doesn’t have dark leather gloves in his scene and he doesn’t show the sole of his boot. The KGB agent does. For those of you who think that Lee Marvin’s cap in Gorky Park is not a close enough parallel to O.J.’s knit cap in The Naked Gun the KGB man’s cap in Telefon should change your mind.

With the KGB agent firmly established as the man O.J.’s actions are patterned after when he kicks through the door in The Naked Gun, all that’s missing from the items at Ron Goldman’s feet are the glasses and the blood. There are no older woman’s glasses in that scene. There is an older woman. She has hidden her son so well and lied so adroitly about not knowing where he is that the KGB give up their search convinced that he has fled. His name, by the way, is Nicolai. He wears glasses.

As the general and the colonel pull away in their chauffeur-driven limo, you see Donald Pleasence as Nicolai Dalchimsky looking at them through an upstairswpeB7.jpg (2793 bytes) window, although you don’t see him well until much lather. The Limo passes a white van and another small truck parked similar to the way O.J.’s Bronco was parked on the evening of June 12, 1994. Turning the acute angle from his driveway to the street was O.J.’s explanation for the minor deviation from perfect alignment in his parking. You can see from the diagrams in Iago in Brentwood that it is the most rational explanation. You need the diagram because the driveway was cropped out of the photographs of the Bronco, which were shot, for the most part, from viewing angles that made the parking angle appear extreme – the way Fuhrman said it was.

Fuhrman said that the rear stuck out as far as a foot from the front. If you spin an arc in an overhead view with the point of your compass on the right-center of the right front tire and the lead on the right-center of the right rear tire, you’ll find that a full circle gives you one inch per degree. O.J.’s rear tire was off line from the front by two degrees. That’s two inches, which means Fuhrman was off in his estimate by ten inches. He wore size 12 shoes (12 inches from toe to heel) so, just standing there, he had to know that the angle was nowhere near as great as that. But you need at least that much of an angle to explain the foot-long stick that was lying on the parkway toward the front of the vehicle.

Fuhrman theorized that the stick was inadvertently picked up under O.J.’s Bronco and slung forward when the truck came to a sudden stop. Based on his analysis ofwpeB8.jpg (3883 bytes) the fresh break, the lead-based white paint and the rusty nail hole that was worthy of Sherlock Holmes, Fuhrman said he traced the stick to an alley southeast of Nicole’s condo. He concluded that the kind of paint on the stick and the rust in the nail hole meant that it came from and old picket fence – like the one in The Naked Gun 2 ½. It was the only place the stick could have come from. You see the fence in the scene where O.J., lying face-up on the board with rollers, is slung from the front underside of Drebin’s car, which has stopped suddenly, to the front underside of a bus bound for Detroit. Drebin’s car is always parked at an extreme angle.

The interesting thing here is that the action takes place in Washington DC, which sits on a line about 65 degrees southeast of Detroit. The place where Fuhrman said the stick on the Rockingham parkway came from sits on a line about 65 degrees southeast of Rockingham. If you scaled down a map of the United States to superimpose Washington and Detroit over the area where Fuhrman said the stick originated and where he said it ended up you’d get an extremely close match. Allowing for a deviation of as much as five degrees (that’s plus or minus 2½ degrees), the odds against that "coincidence" alone are 70 to 1.

You can’t get a closer measurement because there is no record of precisely where Fuhrman found the match for the stick and every map is a little different. You still can’t get around the alignment of South Bundy and North Rockingham and DC and Detroit. Other major cities that fall on or near that line are Pittsburgh (Diary of a Hit Man), Akron (Telefon and Needful Things), and Cleveland (Major League). All of them play a big part in movies or TV shows linked to Fuhrman. In "Murder – According to Maggie" a scene that has to be rewritten because of Burt Rogers’ arrest involves Dana and Andy in a Cleveland sex clinic.

Akron, Ohio is where Mark Peters, the third "Manchurian Candidate" in Telefon, gets activated. The American that he has been conditioned to think he is was bornwpeB9.jpg (4129 bytes) in Canton, Ohio, a half-hour drive from Akron, and he died twenty-two years earlier. The agent’s Russian name is Nicolas. You first see him as a mechanic (another name for a hitman) in Denver talking to a guy who might remind you of Kato Kaelin. He is lying on a wooden board under a red car, the same kind of board with rollers that O.J. was on under the red van in The Naked Gun 2 ½. When Nicolas rolls out from under the car to answer the telephone, he pushes the board to one side.

In CIA: Code Name Alexa, O.J. is an LAPD detective named Nick. That’s worth noting here for two reasons: First, because Nordberg is an LAPD detective in The Naked Gun series and Peter Lupus is Norberg who found the matches in the fourth episode of Police Squad! Secondly, in Kiss Me Deadly a mechanic named Nick dies under a car on the same kind of board as the one Nicolas lies on in Telefon – which is like the one that takes Nordberg from DC to Detroit in The Naked Gun 2 ½.

You see variations on the wood-caught-under-the-fleeing-vehicle theme in too many films and TV shows to count. But some of them have too many other things in common with Fuhrman’s story of the stick not to count. In addition to the three I just mentioned you have to count the pilot episode of Moonlighting and In the Heat of Passion. In all but one of these cases the driver or the man under the vehicle is a murderer, a murder victim, or both. The exception is O.J. He was framed. Charlie Bronson in In The Heat of Passion, is framed and murdered.

You may be able to think of something to justify accepting Fuhrman’s story of the traveling sick and the traveling O.J. without respect to when, where, and how often that theme appears in the real world vs. the movies. I can’t, not when its appearance in the movies includes murder, a lost glove, a dark blue knit cap and a line of flight on a Naked Gun 2½ compass heading of 65 degrees north by northwest.

North by Northwest (’59) has more links to the Bundy murders than you’d think unless you saw Kiss Me Deadly, Telefon and The Naked Gun 2 ½ first. Leo G. Carroll heads an intelligence agency headquartered in Washington D.C. He and hiswpeBC.jpg (3843 bytes) inner circle invent an agent named George Kaplan to deflect an international villain’s attention away from the real agent with whom he shares his bed and his trust. They establish Kaplan’s identity with clothing, phone calls and fake hotel reservations in cities that include Pittsburgh and Detroit (North by Northwest from DC). The deception works well until Cary Grant as a New York City advertising executive named Roger Thornhill is mistaken for Kaplan. One thing leads to another and Thornhill is framed for murder with obvious and overwhelming evidence of his guilt. The victim is killed with a knife. The real killer wears leather gloves.

Anticipating his getaway plans aboard a train to Chicago, James Mason, the brains wpeC1.jpg (13072 bytes)behind the frame-up, is there ahead of him with his trusted concubine Eva Marie Saint as Eve Kendall to keep an eye on him. She arranges an "accidental" meeting with Thornhill and shares a drink and a promise of sex in the dining car (Mark Fuhrman met Laura Hart "accidentally" in a restaurant). This is one of those "You know how to whistle" sort of promises. Only it’s done with symbols and gestures alone. After Thornhill lights Eve’s cigarette and draws back the match, she reaches for his hand, draws the fire to her lips and slowly blows it out. The look he gives her tells you what message he thinks he just got. The look she gives him tells you that he wasn’t imagining things.

"Anybody got a match?" is a Lauren Bacall line in To Have and Have Not almost as famous as "You know how to whistle…" It is her first line. Bogart tosses her a box of stick matches. Later that evening Bacall as Marie Browning uses her cigarette and a French navel officer’s match to seduce him. When he strikes a match at a barroom table, unaware of her presence, she catches his hand and pulls the match to the end of her cigarette. You can almost see a fishing pole in Marie’s hand and a hook in the sailor’s mouth as she walks away and he leaps out of his seat to follow her. You’d have to have a mind as agile as a block of cheese not to see the connection between Lauren Bacall’s Marie Browning and Alfred Hitchcock’s direction of Eva Marie Saint in the dining car with Cary Grant. Sure, sometimes "a cigar is just a cigar," a cigarette is just a cigarette and a match is just a match…. Sometimes they aren’t.

From the instant I saw Peter Lupus as Norberg with the matchbook he found at the sight of the exploded car, I had a nagging feeling that it was connected in morewpeC3.jpg (4059 bytes) ways than I could see to Mark Fuhrman. Hitchcock was very big on sexual symbolism. But you don’t need a Ph.D in the subject to see what anything with a shaft and a head can stand for in the context of a seductive woman drawing on a filter tip cigarette and blowing out a match. Furthermore, this match has a name. The way Eva Marie Saint blows out the match in North by Northwest you don’t even need much imagination. This time the match belongs to Cary Grant’s character Richard O. Thornhill. He takes it from a book of matches with his initials on the cover. These initials prove to be crucial in that they identify the only person who could have dropped them.

Now whom else can you think of off the top of your head with initials as distinctive as Richard O. Thornhill (ROT)? I can think of two: O.J. and M.F. Matches mean nothing to O.J. They mean everything that matters to Fuhrman’s case against O.J. and to his reputation as a great detective.

According to M.F., O.J. lost a glove on South Bundy during a life/death struggle and M.F. found the match for the glove on North Rockingham. He found the fence that matched the stick and the socks with the blood that matched Nicole’s. His story of his affair with Nicole and what she told him about O.J.’s "escalating violence" toward her matched the profile of men who had gone on to commit murder. Look at the film and TV matches in this book, the first Smoking Gun and Iago to various aspects of Fuhrman’s stories and to photos of him shooting hoops, testifying in court or posing on Bundy and Rockingham. How many matches do we have there? Too many. And we have a long way to go before we’re finished.

Consider the name "North," as in Alan North, the original Ed Hocking, in Police Squad! or in the title of the movie North by Northwest. You know Fuhrman’s story of the pizza menu on Nicole’s coffee table and you may recall the real pizza connection between South Bundy and North Rockingham (where she gave a pizzawpeC4.jpg (3315 bytes) party). But the only real connection to Fuhrman’s theory of Nicole with a telephone to her ear when something happens that cause her to go outside and die is in the movies. Telefon with Sheree North as Marie Wills, a mother of two in New Mexico, is one of those movies. Marie is about to make pancakes when she answers the phone and hears something that causes her to go outside and die.

One of the weapons rumored to have been used to kill Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman and found near the O’Hare Plaza Hotel where O.J. was staying in Chicago was an Army entrenching tool. Marie uses an entrenching tool to dig up a detonator like the one Lana Cassales uses in the "Revenge and Remorse/The Guilty Alibi" episode of Police Squad! You could say that her job was to blow something up. But when you put the words "blow" and "job" that close together with a character who bears any resemblance to Eva Mari Saint in North by Northwest (blond, female secret agent named Marie) you get something else. You get the same thing that Bonnie Britton gives you as Lana Cassales threatening to "blow the whole neighborhood…." Lana is the assassin in Police Squad! who plants the matchbook on the curb by the car she blew up to frame her ex-husband. Eva Marie Saint is on the dining car of a Chicago-bound train with frame-up victim Cary Grant when she blows out the match.

I’ve said enough about Ulysses Simpson Grant in previous chapters for you to see O.J. or Nicole in the name Grant without me having to draw the connections every time it comes up. On the other hand, Eva Marie Saint’s match-blowing scene with Cary Grant in North by Northwest always reminds me of Nicole’s relationship with actor Grant Cramer and Fuhrman’s misidentification of the blue knit cap as a ski mask. Nicole began an affair with Grant Cramer when she and Faye Resnick met him and Kato Kaelin on a 1992 Christmas skiing trip in Colorado. In January of that year she met Keith Zlomsowitch in his Colorado restaurant. So, clearly, there is a connection between Fuhrman’s "ski" mask, Nicole’s trips to Colorado and a "dining car." Goldman worked as a waiter for the bar that Keith Zlomsowitch managed in Brentwood. Nicole was a smoker so there were undoubtedly some matches involved, too.

If there is something else about Cary Grant’s matchbook and Nicole’s skiing trips to Colorado at the beginning and end of ’92 that makes you think of O.J. it could be a couple of things. Fuhrman’s story of finding the second glove begins with his questioning of Kato Kaelin (think, blond guy with Nicolas the Colorado assassin in Telefon). When he learns about the thumps on the wall near a window-mounted air conditioner, he goes out to investigate. In Iago, I argue that the thumps were made by Ron Shipp partly as an excuse for Fuhrman to go to the spot where his partner Brad Roberts dropped it for him to find. Cary Grant as Roger O. Thornhill tried to get Eve Kendall’s attention in North by Northwest by throwing coins at her window. He finally succeeded by getting into the house and dropping his (ROT) matchbook (the matching glove) where she would find it.

Remember that Roger O. Thornhill was mistaken for the fictitious George Kaplan and that Mark Fuhrman named the boxer (bloody leather gloves) George Foreman as his number one athlete. All of which lends itself to the discovery of the killer’swpeC5.jpg (4900 bytes) wallet in The Naked Gun 2 ½ (it is a matchbook in Police Squad!). Frank Drebin and Ed Hoken identify the killer as a boxer named Joey Chicago from Detroit (real boxer Tex Cobb from Detroit was beaten bloody by Larry Holmes in Los Vegas). This is the conversation that goes from George Kennedy as Ed recalling Tex Colorado the Arizona Assassin, to O.J. Simpson as Nordberg trying to recall whether he was from North or South Dakota. Frank Drebin remembers that it was North Dakota. South Dakota was his brother.

Remember the four coins on South Bundy (two Lincolns and two Roosevelts)?wpeC6.jpg (6392 bytes) The climactic scene in North by Northwest is on Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. Adam Williams as Valerian, dies there after attacking Thornhill (Grant) with a knife. He’s the guy who kills the UN diplomat in New York City with a knife in a way that makes Thornhill look like the killer. He simply throws the knife when no one is looking into his victim’s back. To keep his fingerprints from appearing on the knife, he wears leather gloves. He runs away leaving Thornhill holding the body and the knife.

According to Fuhrman, O.J. threw the knife he used to kill Ron and Nicole out of a window in the same alley where he said he found the wood that matched the stick. This is all very interesting considering the stylized woman’s torso on a pedestal next to Valerian as he stands there in his leather gloves reaching for his knife. A week before Christmas in 1990 Nicole purchased leather gloves in a New York City department store that matched the one on Bundy and the one that Fuhrman found the match for on Rockingham.

Watch closely as characters in Death Hunt, Telefon, The Naked Gun series, North by Northwest, Murder, She Wrote and The Twilight Zone converge. This, I promise, will finally bring us to Fuhrman’s discovery of the bubble gum. It will take us there by way of Nicole’s preference for performing oral sex and Fuhrman’s choice of the word "cocksucker" as his flagship of dirty words on the Laura Hart McKinney tapes.

Remember Andrew Stevens as Constable Adams in Death Hunt? Adam Williams is the sailor that Inger Stevens as Nan Adams the buyer for awpeD6.jpg (2929 bytes) Manhattan department store picks up in "The Hitch-hiker" episode of The Twilight Zone (aired on 1, 22, 1960). They meet after a hitchhiker who always seems to be ahead of her nearly causes her to be hit by a passenger train and she flees wildly until she runs out of gas. The car stops near an out-of-the-way gas station. But it’s late at night and the propitiator won’t open to sell her the gas until the sailor happens along and bangs on his door. Nan offers him a ride, which seems to him like a good deal until she starts swerving all over the road in Arizona trying to kill a man who isn’t there. He gets out of her car and leaves despite her desperate pleas that she will do anything if he will stay. She drives to a telephone booth outside of a diner and calls home only to discover that she died six days earlier in Pennsylvania when her car had a blow out.

Rod Serling adapted his teleplay from a radioplay by Lucille Fletcher. A sailor in Blow Out (’81) unknowingly sets up a prostitute to be murdered in a Philadelphia train station’s bathroom stall (remember Lee Adams and Charlie Bronson in In the Heat of Passion.

Tim Choate as Luke Phillips is Jessica Fletcher’s scary-looking fan in thewpeD8.jpg (8168 bytes) "Night Fear" episode of Murder, She Wrote (’91) where she goes to New York to teach. He’s the Manhattan University student who read all of her books and feels that she owns him something because of it. For a while it seems that he might fit the profile of the killer but that impression is just a red herring to throw you off the track of the real killer. He is a sailor in Blow Out (’81). You see him with costume designer Deborah Everling as a hooker (her only acting credit) in a Philadelphia train station haggling over the price of her services. They settle on thirty dollars and he meets her on her knees in a phone booth. In the upper part of the booth, which you can see into, the sailor is so animated that you know what’s going on. It’s over in seconds and the sailor angrily blames the woman for "blowing his wad" so quickly. John Lithgow as a cold-blooded assassin in another booth lures her outside of her booth with a fifty-dollar bill – the bill with a picture of Ulysses Simpson Grant – and makes her murder look like a crime of passion.

On top of all the movie links to Fuhrman that brought us to this point, the money is what makes Fuhrman’s discovery of the large wad of bubble gum on BundywpeD9.jpg (5445 bytes) suspect. In Blow Out the sailor reneges on the thirty-dollar deal and throws a ten-dollar bill on the floor of the booth. In Crimes of Passion, Kathleen Turner as China Blue, sells her panties to a John for ten dollars. The John gives her a ten-dollar bill. That’s the bill the bears the picture of Alexander Hamilton. I’m going to remind you of that when we get to John Candy as a man with his name on a matchbook near a murdered woman George Hamilton as Alfonso in Once Upon a Crime (’91). For now, just remember that when the John leaves, China Blue puts a wad of bubble gum in the bill, wads it up and throws it over her shoulder.

You’ll never guess where the wad of bubble gum in the ten-dollar wad of money hits before it hits the floor. Then again, maybe you will because Alexander Hamilton was the first Treasury Secretary of the United States and all paper money printed by the U.S. government is green. Every denomination bears the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury, so the ten is uniquely suited to represent every American bill in circulation.

In the movies incriminating items left by the killer or made to look that way include: $50 bills, a wallet, a piece of cloth folded to look like an envelope, a matchbook, a cigarette lighter, and a bronze fireplace poker. You can see at once how the bills, the wallet and the cloth folded to look like an envelope relate to money. But when you think about symbols or expressions of large sums of money you can also see where fire come in. Having "honey to burn" is an old expression that means so much of it that a large amount by normal standards could go up in flames without being noticed.

The classic expression of having that kind of money is the guy who lights cigars with $50 or $100 bills. The bigger the bill the greater the wealth. China Blue using the ten to dispose of her bubble gum tells you that she’s better off financially than most people are (like Nicole after her divorce from O.J.). What she did with the ten could have been the same as taking a match to it depending on whether on not someone could extract the gum without damaging the bill. The Treasury Department incinerates millions of dollars in damaged bills every day.

And don’t forget the other evidence in the Fuhrman collection: a gun (Fuhrman’s third Bundy note – possible gunshot wound), a knife (Fuhrman says he found the box that the knife came out of) a golf ball marker (O.J. flew to Chicago to play golf). There are lots of gloves, some bloody (Fuhrman posed for a picture with one and found the other). There are blood trails. There is a sliver of wood, a comb, and a hat.

The forensic significance of the cap on Bundy is the same as the comb in the movies. It’s the hair that comes out. It’s the reason Ed Lauter’s loss hair iswpeDB.jpg (2401 bytes) significant from the time he wore the blue cap in Death Hunt (’81) to his role a brutal, rule bending police detective in Death Wish 4 (’93) with Charles Bronson. Death Hunt gives you a role reversal with Bronson as a hunted man as opposed to the man hunter in Telefon. It gives you a large, white, bloody dog (Kato), mountains and snow. Because of the winter gloves and the winter cap that Fuhrman called a ski mask many screenplays in the Fuhrman collection are set in winter. It should also come as no surprise that many of Fuhrman’s notes (see Chapter 1) correspond to key numbers in key movie scenes. The number 17, for example, in Fuhrman’s note about the glove and "ski mask" happens to match the day in January that Nicolas, the brainwashed Colorado assassin in Telefon gets activated.

The first five suicide assassins in Telefon have something about them that can be used to create a composite picture of Nicole Brown Simpson. The mechanic gives us a Nicolas in Colorado in January with a blond-haired guy like Kato Kaelin. The second assassin is a pilot in need of a lot of money for his business (Nicole was looking for a lot of money to go into business with Faye and Ron). His helicopter is blown out of the sky by a Navy petty officer played by an actor named Lou Brown (Nicole’s father was Lou Brown). The third has the name of the only person who could have killed Nicole Simpson if it wasn’t O.J. (Mark) as well as the name of the actor playing Norberg who finds the book of matches in Police Squad! (Peter), a role later assumed by O.J. The fourth is a Catholic priest in West LA. Nicole was a Catholic parishioner in West LA. Marie Wills, the middle-aged mother of two was number five.

And what about Fuhrman’s ’89 letter that describes O.J. like a pimp and Nicole like a whore? Have we seen the last of that? …Not by a long shot.

 

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